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• The Windows Browser Ballot Screen Offers Web Browser Choice to European Users

  - by Matthew Guay

  Since March, our friends across the pond in Europe get to decide which browser they want to install with their Windows OS. Today we thought we would take a look at the ballot choices, some are well known, and others you may not have heard of. Windows users in European countries should start seeing the so called “Browser Ballot Screen” after installing the Windows Update KB976002 (link below). The browser ballot offers a dozen different browsers, including some you’ve likely never heard of.  They each have some unique features, and are all free, and here we take a quick look at each of them. Internet Explorer 8 Internet Explorer is the world’s most used web browser, as it’s bundled with Windows. It also includes several unique features, including Accelerators that make it easy to search or find a map of a location, and InPrivate filtering to directly control what sites can get personal information.  Additionally, it offers great integration with Windows Touch and the new taskbar in Windows 7. IE 8 runs on Windows XP and newer, and is bundled with Windows 7. Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Firefox is the most popular browser other than Internet Explorer.  It is the modern descendant of Netscape, and is loved by web developers for its adherence to web standards, openness, and expandability.  It offers thousands of Add-ons and themes to let you customize it to fit your preferences. The most recent version has added Personas, which are quick, lightweight themes to let you personalize the look your browser. It’s open source, and runs on all modern versions of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Of course thanks to Asian Angel, our resident browser expert, you can check out several articles regarding this popular IE alternative. Google Chrome 4 Google Chrome has gained an impressive amount of market share during its short time in the market. It offers a minimalistic interface and fast speeds with intensive web applications. The address bar is also a search bar, so you can enter a search query or web address and quickly get the information you need. With version 4 you can add a growing number of extensions, personalize it with a variety of stylish themes, and automatically translate foreign websites into your own language. Opera 10.50 Although Opera has been around for over a decade, relatively few users have used it. With the new 10.50 release, Opera has many unique features packed in a sleek UI. It integrates great with Aero and the Windows 7 taskbar, and lets you preview the contents of your websites in the tab bar. It also includes Opera Unite, a small personal web server to make file sharing easy, Opera Turbo to speed up your internet when the connection is slow, and Opera Link to keep all your copies of Opera in sync. It’s a popular browser on many mobile devices, and version 10.50 has a lot of enhancements. Apple Safari 4 Safari is the default browser in Mac OS X, and starting with version 3 it has been available for Windows as well. It’s based on Webkit, the popular new rendering engine that provides great speed and standards compatibility.  Safari 4 lets you browse your browsing history in a unique Coverflow interface, and shows your Top Sites in a fancy, 3D interface.  It’s also great for viewing mobile websites for the iPhone and other mobile devices through Developer Tools. Flock 2.5 Based on the popular Firefox core, Flock brings a multitude of social features to your browsing experience. You can view the latest YouTube videos, Flickr pictures, update your favorite social network, and keep up with your webmail thanks to It’s integration with a wide variety of services. You can even post to your blog through the integrated blog editor. If your time online is mostly spent in social services, this may be a browser you want to check out. Maxthon 2.5 Maxthon is a unique browser that builds on Internet Explorer to bring more features with IE’s rendering. Formerly known as MyIE2, Maxthon was popular for bringing tabbed browsing with IE rendering during the days of IE 6.  Today Maxthon supports a wide range of plugins and skins, so you can customize it however you want. It includes mouse gestures, a web accelerator to speed up pokey internet connections, a content blocker to remove unwanted content from sites, an online account to backup your favorites, and a nice download manager. Avant Browser Another nice browser based on Internet Explorer, Avant brings a wide variety of features in a nice brushed-metal interface. It includes an integrated AutoFill for forms, mouse gestures, customizable skins, and privacy protection features. It also includes a Flash blocker that will only load flash in webpages when you select them. You can also integrate Avant with an online account to store your bookmarks, feeds, settings and passwords online. Sleipnir Sleipnir is a customizable browser meant for advance users that is quite popular in Japan. It’s built on the Trident engine and virtually every aspect of is customizable unlike Internet Explorer.   FlashPeak SlimBrowser SlimBrowser from FlashPeak incorporates a lot of features like Popup Killer, Auto Login, site filtering and more. It’s based on Internet Explorer but offers a lot more customizable options out of the box.   K-meleon This basic browser is light on system resources and based on the Gecko engine. It’s been in development for years on SourceForge, and if you like to tweak virtually any aspect of your browser, this might be a good choice for you.   GreenBrowser GreenBrowser is based on Internet Explorer and is available in several languages. It has a large amount of features out of the box and is light on system resources.   Conclusion The European Union asked for more choices in the web browser they could choose from when installing Windows, and with the Browser Ballot Screen, they certainly get a variety to choose from.  If you’ve tried out some of the lesser known browsers, or think some important ones have been left out, leave a comment and tell us about it. Learn More About the Browser Ballot Screen and Download Alternatives to IE Windows Update KB976002 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Set the Default Browser on Ubuntu From the Command LineQuick Tip: Empty Internet Explorer 7 Cache when Browser is ClosedView Hidden Files and Folders in Ubuntu File BrowserSet the Default Browser and Email Client in UbuntuAccess Multiple Browsers from Firefox with Browser View Plus TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more

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• Creating packages in code – Execute SQL Task

  The Execute SQL Task is for obvious reasons very well used, so I thought if you are building packages in code the chances are you will be using it. Using the task basic features of the task are quite straightforward, add the task and set some properties, just like any other. When you start interacting with variables though it can be a little harder to grasp so these samples should see you through. Some of these more advanced features are explained in much more detail in our ever popular post The Execute SQL Task, here I’ll just be showing you how to implement them in code. The abbreviated code blocks below demonstrate the different features of the task. The complete code has been encapsulated into a sample class which you can download (ExecSqlPackage.cs). Each feature described has its own method in the sample class which is mentioned after the code block. This first sample just shows adding the task, setting the basic properties for a connection and of course an SQL statement. Package package = new Package(); // Add the SQL OLE-DB connection ConnectionManager sqlConnection = AddSqlConnection(package, "localhost", "master"); // Add the SQL Task package.Executables.Add("STOCK:SQLTask"); // Get the task host wrapper TaskHost taskHost = package.Executables[0] as TaskHost; // Set required properties taskHost.Properties["Connection"].SetValue(taskHost, sqlConnection.ID); taskHost.Properties["SqlStatementSource"].SetValue(taskHost, "SELECT * FROM sysobjects"); For the full version of this code, see the CreatePackage method in the sample class. The AddSqlConnection method is a helper method that adds an OLE-DB connection to the package, it is of course in the sample class file too. Returning a single value with a Result Set The following sample takes a different approach, getting a reference to the ExecuteSQLTask object task itself, rather than just using the non-specific TaskHost as above. Whilst it means we need to add an extra reference to our project (Microsoft.SqlServer.SQLTask) it makes coding much easier as we have compile time validation of any property and types we use. For the more complex properties that is very valuable and saves a lot of time during development. The query has also been changed to return a single value, one row and one column. The sample shows how we can return that value into a variable, which we also add to our package in the code. To do this manually you would set the Result Set property on the General page to Single Row and map the variable on the Result Set page in the editor. Package package = new Package(); // Add the SQL OLE-DB connection ConnectionManager sqlConnection = AddSqlConnection(package, "localhost", "master"); // Add the SQL Task package.Executables.Add("STOCK:SQLTask"); // Get the task host wrapper TaskHost taskHost = package.Executables[0] as TaskHost; // Add variable to hold result value package.Variables.Add("Variable", false, "User", 0); // Get the task object ExecuteSQLTask task = taskHost.InnerObject as ExecuteSQLTask; // Set core properties task.Connection = sqlConnection.Name; task.SqlStatementSource = "SELECT id FROM sysobjects WHERE name = 'sysrowsets'"; // Set single row result set task.ResultSetType = ResultSetType.ResultSetType_SingleRow; // Add result set binding, map the id column to variable task.ResultSetBindings.Add(); IDTSResultBinding resultBinding = task.ResultSetBindings.GetBinding(0); resultBinding.ResultName = "id"; resultBinding.DtsVariableName = "User::Variable"; For the full version of this code, see the CreatePackageResultVariable method in the sample class. The other types of Result Set behaviour are just a variation on this theme, set the property and map the result binding as required. Parameter Mapping for SQL Statements This final example uses a parameterised SQL statement, with the coming from a variable. The syntax varies slightly between connection types, as explained in the Working with Parameters and Return Codes in the Execute SQL Taskhelp topic, but OLE-DB is the most commonly used, for which a question mark is the parameter value placeholder. Package package = new Package(); // Add the SQL OLE-DB connection ConnectionManager sqlConnection = AddSqlConnection(package, ".", "master"); // Add the SQL Task package.Executables.Add("STOCK:SQLTask"); // Get the task host wrapper TaskHost taskHost = package.Executables[0] as TaskHost; // Get the task object ExecuteSQLTask task = taskHost.InnerObject as ExecuteSQLTask; // Set core properties task.Connection = sqlConnection.Name; task.SqlStatementSource = "SELECT id FROM sysobjects WHERE name = ?"; // Add variable to hold parameter value package.Variables.Add("Variable", false, "User", "sysrowsets"); // Add input parameter binding task.ParameterBindings.Add(); IDTSParameterBinding parameterBinding = task.ParameterBindings.GetBinding(0); parameterBinding.DtsVariableName = "User::Variable"; parameterBinding.ParameterDirection = ParameterDirections.Input; parameterBinding.DataType = (int)OleDBDataTypes.VARCHAR; parameterBinding.ParameterName = "0"; parameterBinding.ParameterSize = 255; For the full version of this code, see the CreatePackageParameterVariable method in the sample class. You’ll notice the data type has to be specified for the parameter IDTSParameterBinding .DataType Property, and these type codes are connection specific too. My enumeration I wrote several years ago is shown below was probably done by reverse engineering a package and also the API header file, but I recently found a very handy post that covers more connections as well for exactly this, Setting the DataType of IDTSParameterBinding objects (Execute SQL Task). /// <summary> /// Enumeration of OLE-DB types, used when mapping OLE-DB parameters. /// </summary> private enum OleDBDataTypes { BYTE = 0x11, CURRENCY = 6, DATE = 7, DB_VARNUMERIC = 0x8b, DBDATE = 0x85, DBTIME = 0x86, DBTIMESTAMP = 0x87, DECIMAL = 14, DOUBLE = 5, FILETIME = 0x40, FLOAT = 4, GUID = 0x48, LARGE_INTEGER = 20, LONG = 3, NULL = 1, NUMERIC = 0x83, NVARCHAR = 130, SHORT = 2, SIGNEDCHAR = 0x10, ULARGE_INTEGER = 0x15, ULONG = 0x13, USHORT = 0x12, VARCHAR = 0x81, VARIANT_BOOL = 11 } Download Sample code ExecSqlPackage.cs (10KB)

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• SQL SERVER – Simple Example of Snapshot Isolation – Reduce the Blocking Transactions

  - by pinaldave

  To learn any technology and move to a more advanced level, it is very important to understand the fundamentals of the subject first. Today, we will be talking about something which has been quite introduced a long time ago but not properly explored when it comes to the isolation level. Snapshot Isolation was introduced in SQL Server in 2005. However, the reality is that there are still many software shops which are using the SQL Server 2000, and therefore cannot be able to maintain the Snapshot Isolation. Many software shops have upgraded to the later version of the SQL Server, but their respective developers have not spend enough time to upgrade themselves with the latest technology. “It works!” is a very common answer of many when they are asked about utilizing the new technology, instead of backward compatibility commands. In one of the recent consultation project, I had same experience when developers have “heard about it” but have no idea about snapshot isolation. They were thinking it is the same as Snapshot Replication – which is plain wrong. This is the same demo I am including here which I have created for them. In Snapshot Isolation, the updated row versions for each transaction are maintained in TempDB. Once a transaction has begun, it ignores all the newer rows inserted or updated in the table. Let us examine this example which shows the simple demonstration. This transaction works on optimistic concurrency model. Since reading a certain transaction does not block writing transaction, it also does not block the reading transaction, which reduced the blocking. First, enable database to work with Snapshot Isolation. Additionally, check the existing values in the table from HumanResources.Shift. ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON GO SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO Now, we will need two different sessions to prove this example. First Session: Set Transaction level isolation to snapshot and begin the transaction. Update the column “ModifiedDate” to today’s date. -- Session 1 SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SNAPSHOT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE HumanResources.Shift SET ModifiedDate = GETDATE() GO Please note that we have not yet been committed to the transaction. Now, open the second session and run the following “SELECT” statement. Then, check the values of the table. Please pay attention on setting the Isolation level for the second one as “Snapshot” at the same time when we already start the transaction using BEGIN TRAN. -- Session 2 SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SNAPSHOT BEGIN TRAN SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO You will notice that the values in the table are still original values. They have not been modified yet. Once again, go back to session 1 and begin the transaction. -- Session 1 COMMIT After that, go back to Session 2 and see the values of the table. -- Session 2 SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO You will notice that the values are yet not changed and they are still the same old values which were there right in the beginning of the session. Now, let us commit the transaction in the session 2. Once committed, run the same SELECT statement once more and see what the result is. -- Session 2 COMMIT SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO You will notice that it now reflects the new updated value. I hope that this example is clear enough as it would give you good idea how the Snapshot Isolation level works. There is much more to write about an extra level, READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT, which we will be discussing in another post soon. If you wish to use this transaction’s Isolation level in your production database, I would appreciate your comments about their performance on your servers. I have included here the complete script used in this example for your quick reference. ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON GO SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO -- Session 1 SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SNAPSHOT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE HumanResources.Shift SET ModifiedDate = GETDATE() GO -- Session 2 SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SNAPSHOT BEGIN TRAN SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO -- Session 1 COMMIT -- Session 2 SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO -- Session 2 COMMIT SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Transaction Isolation

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• Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 1

  - by rajbk

  The Open Data Protocol, referred to as OData, is a new data-sharing standard that breaks down silos and fosters an interoperative ecosystem for data consumers (clients) and producers (services) that is far more powerful than currently possible. It enables more applications to make sense of a broader set of data, and helps every data service and client add value to the whole ecosystem. WCF Data Services (previously known as ADO.NET Data Services), then, was the first Microsoft technology to support the Open Data Protocol in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. It provides developers with client libraries for .NET, Silverlight, AJAX, PHP and Java. Microsoft now also supports OData in SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Azure Storage, Excel 2010 (through PowerPivot), and SharePoint 2010. Many other other applications in the works. * This post walks you through how to create an OData feed, define a shape for the data and pre-filter the data using Visual Studio 2010, WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework. A sample project is attached at the bottom of Part 2 of this post. Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 2 Create the Web Application File –› New –› Project, Select “ASP.NET Empty Web Application” Add the Entity Data Model Right click on the Web Application in the Solution Explorer and select “Add New Item..” Select “ADO.NET Entity Data Model” under "Data”. Name the Model “Northwind” and click “Add”.   In the “Choose Model Contents”, select “Generate Model From Database” and click “Next”   Define a connection to your database containing the Northwind database in the next screen. We are going to expose the Products table through our OData feed. Select “Products” in the “Choose your Database Object” screen.   Click “Finish”. We are done creating our Entity Data Model. Save the Northwind.edmx file created. Add the WCF Data Service Right click on the Web Application in the Solution Explorer and select “Add New Item..” Select “WCF Data Service” from the list and call the service “DataService” (creative, huh?). Click “Add”.   Enable Access to the Data Service Open the DataService.svc.cs class. The class is well commented and instructs us on the next steps. public class DataService : DataService< /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ > { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { // TODO: set rules to indicate which entity sets and service operations are visible, updatable, etc. // Examples: // config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("MyEntityset", EntitySetRights.AllRead); // config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("MyServiceOperation", ServiceOperationRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } Replace the comment that starts with “/* TODO:” with “NorthwindEntities” (the entity container name of the Model we created earlier).  WCF Data Services is initially locked down by default, FTW! No data is exposed without you explicitly setting it. You have explicitly specify which Entity sets you wish to expose and what rights are allowed by using the SetEntitySetAccessRule. The SetServiceOperationAccessRule on the other hand sets rules for a specified operation. Let us define an access rule to expose the Products Entity we created earlier. We use the EnititySetRights.AllRead since we want to give read only access. Our modified code is shown below. public class DataService : DataService<NorthwindEntities> { public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("Products", EntitySetRights.AllRead); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } We are done setting up our ODataFeed! Compile your project. Right click on DataService.svc and select “View in Browser” to see the OData feed. To view the feed in IE, you must make sure that "Feed Reading View" is turned off. You set this under Tools -› Internet Options -› Content tab.   If you navigate to “Products”, you should see the Products feed. Note also that URIs are case sensitive. ie. Products work but products doesn’t.   Filtering our data OData has a set of system query operations you can use to perform common operations against data exposed by the model. For example, to see only Products in CategoryID 2, we can use the following request: /DataService.svc/Products?$filter=CategoryID eq 2 At the time of this writing, supported operations are $orderby, $top, $skip, $filter, $expand, $format†, $select, $inlinecount. Pre-filtering our data using Query Interceptors The Product feed currently returns all Products. We want to change that so that it contains only Products that have not been discontinued. WCF introduces the concept of interceptors which allows us to inject custom validation/policy logic into the request/response pipeline of a WCF data service. We will use a QueryInterceptor to pre-filter the data so that it returns only Products that are not discontinued. To create a QueryInterceptor, write a method that returns an Expression<Func<T, bool>> and mark it with the QueryInterceptor attribute as shown below. [QueryInterceptor("Products")] public Expression<Func<Product, bool>> OnReadProducts() { return o => o.Discontinued == false; } Viewing the feed after compilation will only show products that have not been discontinued. We also confirm this by looking at the WHERE clause in the SQL generated by the entity framework. SELECT [Extent1].[ProductID] AS [ProductID], ... ... [Extent1].[Discontinued] AS [Discontinued] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [Extent1] WHERE 0 = [Extent1].[Discontinued] Other examples of Query/Change interceptors can be seen here including an example to filter data based on the identity of the authenticated user. We are done pre-filtering our data. In the next part of this post, we will see how to shape our data. Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 2 Foot Notes * http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/aa937697.aspx † $format did not work for me. The way to get a Json response is to include the following in the  request header “Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*” when making the request. This is easily done with most JavaScript libraries.

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• WPF ListView as a DataGrid – Part 3

  - by psheriff

  I have had a lot of great feedback on the blog post about turning the ListView into a DataGrid by creating GridViewColumn objects on the fly. So, in the last 2 parts, I showed a couple of different methods for accomplishing this. Let’s now look at one more and that is use Reflection to extract the properties from a Product, Customer, or Employee object to create the columns. Yes, Reflection is a slower approach, but you could create the columns one time then cache the View object for re-use. Another potential drawback is you may have columns in your object that you do not wish to display on your ListView. But, just because so many people asked, here is how to accomplish this using Reflection.   Figure 1: Use Reflection to create GridViewColumns. Using Reflection to gather property names is actually quite simple. First you need to pass any type (Product, Customer, Employee, etc.) to a method like I did in my last two blog posts on this subject. Below is the method that I created in the WPFListViewCommon class that now uses reflection. C#public static GridView CreateGridViewColumns(Type anyType){  // Create the GridView  GridView gv = new GridView();  GridViewColumn gvc;   // Get the public properties.  PropertyInfo[] propInfo =          anyType.GetProperties(BindingFlags.Public |                                BindingFlags.Instance);   foreach (PropertyInfo item in propInfo)  {    gvc = new GridViewColumn();    gvc.DisplayMemberBinding = new Binding(item.Name);    gvc.Header = item.Name;    gvc.Width = Double.NaN;    gv.Columns.Add(gvc);  }   return gv;} VB.NETPublic Shared Function CreateGridViewColumns( _  ByVal anyType As Type) As GridView  ' Create the GridView   Dim gv As New GridView()  Dim gvc As GridViewColumn   ' Get the public properties.   Dim propInfo As PropertyInfo() = _    anyType.GetProperties(BindingFlags.Public Or _                          BindingFlags.Instance)   For Each item As PropertyInfo In propInfo    gvc = New GridViewColumn()    gvc.DisplayMemberBinding = New Binding(item.Name)    gvc.Header = item.Name    gvc.Width = [Double].NaN    gv.Columns.Add(gvc)  Next   Return gvEnd Function The key to using Relection is using the GetProperties method on the type you pass in. When you pass in a Product object as Type, you can now use the GetProperties method and specify, via flags, which properties you wish to return. In the code that I wrote, I am just retrieving the Public properties and only those that are Instance properties. I do not want any static/Shared properties or private properties. GetProperties returns an array of PropertyInfo objects. You can loop through this array and build your GridViewColumn objects by reading the Name property from the PropertyInfo object. Build the Product Screen To populate the ListView shown in Figure 1, you might write code like the following: C#private void CollectionSample(){  Product prod = new Product();   // Setup the GridView Columns  lstData.View =      WPFListViewCommon.CreateGridViewColumns(typeOf(Product));  lstData.DataContext = prod.GetProducts();} VB.NETPrivate Sub CollectionSample()  Dim prod As New Product()   ' Setup the GridView Columns  lstData.View = WPFListViewCommon.CreateGridViewColumns( _       GetType(Product))  lstData.DataContext = prod.GetProducts()End Sub All you need to do now is to pass in a Type object from your Product class that you can get by using the typeOf() function in C# or the GetType() function in VB. That’s all there is to it! Summary There are so many different ways to approach the same problem in programming. That is what makes programming so much fun! In this blog post I showed you how to create ListView columns on the fly using Reflection. This gives you a lot of flexibility without having to write extra code as was done previously. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code (in both VB and C#) at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "WPF ListView as a DataGrid – Part 3" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free eBook on "Fundamentals of N-Tier".  

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• Linux-Containers — Part 1: Overview

  - by Lenz Grimmer

  "Containers" by Jean-Pierre Martineau (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). Linux Containers (LXC) provide a means to isolate individual services or applications as well as of a complete Linux operating system from other services running on the same host. To accomplish this, each container gets its own directory structure, network devices, IP addresses and process table. The processes running in other containers or the host system are not visible from inside a container. Additionally, Linux Containers allow for fine granular control of resources like RAM, CPU or disk I/O. Generally speaking, Linux Containers use a completely different approach than "classicial" virtualization technologies like KVM or Xen (on which Oracle VM Server for x86 is based on). An application running inside a container will be executed directly on the operating system kernel of the host system, shielded from all other running processes in a sandbox-like environment. This allows a very direct and fair distribution of CPU and I/O-resources. Linux containers can offer the best possible performance and several possibilities for managing and sharing the resources available. Similar to Containers (or Zones) on Oracle Solaris or FreeBSD jails, the same kernel version runs on the host as well as in the containers; it is not possible to run different Linux kernel versions or other operating systems like Microsoft Windows or Oracle Solaris for x86 inside a container. However, it is possible to run different Linux distribution versions (e.g. Fedora Linux in a container on top of an Oracle Linux host), provided it supports the version of the Linux kernel that runs on the host. This approach has one caveat, though - if any of the containers causes a kernel crash, it will bring down all other containers (and the host system) as well. For example, Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (2.6.39) is supported for both Oracle Linux 5 and 6. This makes it possible to run Oracle Linux 5 and 6 container instances on top of an Oracle Linux 6 system. Since Linux Containers are fully implemented on the OS level (the Linux kernel), they can be easily combined with other virtualization technologies. It's certainly possible to set up Linux containers within a virtualized Linux instance that runs inside Oracle VM Server for Oracle VM Virtualbox. Some use cases for Linux Containers include: Consolidation of multiple separate Linux systems on one server: instances of Linux systems that are not performance-critical or only see sporadic use (e.g. a fax or print server or intranet services) do not necessarily need a dedicated server for their operations. These can easily be consolidated to run inside containers on a single server, to preserve energy and rack space. Running multiple instances of an application in parallel, e.g. for different users or customers. Each user receives his "own" application instance, with a defined level of service/performance. This prevents that one user's application could hog the entire system and ensures, that each user only has access to his own data set. It also helps to save main memory — if multiple instances of a same process are running, the Linux kernel can share memory pages that are identical and unchanged across all application instances. This also applies to shared libraries that applications may use, they are generally held in memory once and mapped to multiple processes. Quickly creating sandbox environments for development and testing purposes: containers that have been created and configured once can be archived as templates and can be duplicated (cloned) instantly on demand. After finishing the activity, the clone can safely be discarded. This allows to provide repeatable software builds and test environments, because the system will always be reset to its initial state for each run. Linux Containers also boot significantly faster than "classic" virtual machines, which can save a lot of time when running frequent build or test runs on applications. Safe execution of an individual application: if an application running inside a container has been compromised because of a security vulnerability, the host system and other containers remain unaffected. The potential damage can be minimized, analyzed and resolved directly from the host system. Note: Linux Containers on Oracle Linux 6 with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (2.6.39) are still marked as Technology Preview - their use is only recommended for testing and evaluation purposes. The Open-Source project "Linux Containers" (LXC) is driving the development of the technology behind this, which is based on the "Control Groups" (CGroups) and "Name Spaces" functionality of the Linux kernel. Oracle is actively involved in the Linux Containers development and contributes patches to the upstream LXC code base. Control Groups provide means to manage and monitor the allocation of resources for individual processes or process groups. Among other things, you can restrict the maximum amount of memory, CPU cycles as well as the disk and network throughput (in MB/s or IOP/s) that are available for an application. Name Spaces help to isolate process groups from each other, e.g. the visibility of other running processes or the exclusive access to a network device. It's also possible to restrict a process group's access and visibility of the entire file system hierarchy (similar to a classic "chroot" environment). CGroups and Name Spaces provide the foundation on which Linux containers are based on, but they can actually be used independently as well. A more detailed description of how Linux Containers can be created and managed on Oracle Linux will be explained in the second part of this article. Additional links related to Linux Containers: OTN Article: The Role of Oracle Solaris Zones and Linux Containers in a Virtualization Strategy Linux Containers on Wikipedia - Lenz Grimmer Follow me on: Personal Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Linux Blog |

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• Convert Video and Remove Commercials in Windows 7 Media Center with MCEBuddy 1.1

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Today look at MCEBuddy for Windows 7 Media Center. This handy app automatically takes your recorded TV files and converts them to MP4, AVI, WMV, or MPEG format. It even has the option to cut out those annoying commercials during the conversion process. Installation and Configuration Download and extract MCE Buddy. (Download link below) Run the setup.exe file and take all the default settings.   Open MCEBuddy Configuration by going to Start > All Programs > MCEBuddy > MCEBuddy Configuration.   Video Paths The MCEBuddy application is comprised of a single window. The first step you’ll want to take is to define your Source and Destination paths. The “Source” will most likely be your Recorded TV directory. The Destination should NOT be the same as the Source folder. Note: The Recorded TV directory in Windows 7 Media Center will only display and play WTV & DVR-MS files. To watch the converted MP4, AVI, WMV, or MPEG files in Windows Media Center you’ll need to add them to your Video Library or Movie Library. Video Conversion Next, choose your preferred format for conversion from the “Convert to” drop down list. The default is MP4 with the H.264 codec. You’ll find a wide variety of formats. The first set of conversion options in the drop down list will resize the video to 720 pixels wide. The next two sections maintain the original size, and the final section is for a variety of portable devices.   Next, you’ll see a group of check boxes below the “Convert to” drop down list. The Commercial Skipping option will cut the commercials while converting the file. Sort By Series will create a sub-folder in your Destination folder for each TV show. Delete Original will delete the WTV file after conversion is complete. (This option is not recommended unless you are sure your files are converting properly and you no longer need the WTV file.) Start Minimized is ideal if you want to run MCEBuddy on Windows startup. Note: MCEBuddy installs and uses Comskip for commercial cutting by default. However, if you have ShowAnalyzer installed, it will use that application instead. Advanced Options To choose a specific time of day to perform the conversions, click the checkbox under the “Advanced Options,” and select the starting and ending times for conversion. For example, convert between 2 hours and 5 hours would be between 2 am and 5am. If you want MCEBuddy to constantly look for and immediately convert new recordings, leave the box unchecked.   The “Video age” option lets you choose a specific number of days to wait before performing the conversion. This can be useful if you want to watch the recordings first and delete those you don’t wish to convert. You can also choose the “Sub Directories” if you’d like MCEBuddy to convert files that are in a sub-folder in your “Source” directory. Second Conversion As you might expect, this option allows MCEBuddy to perform a second conversion of your file. This can be useful if you want to use your first conversion to create a higher quality MP4 or AVI file for playback on a larger screen, and a second one for a portable device such as Zune or iPhone. The same options from the first conversion are also available for the second. You’ll want to choose a separate Destination folder for the second conversion.   Start and Monitor Progress To start converting your video files, simply press the “Start” button at the bottom. You’ll be able to follow the progress in the “Current Activity” section. When all the video files have finished converting, or there are no current files to convert, MCEBuddy will display a “Started – Idle” status. Click “Stop” if you don’t want MCEBuddy to continue scanning for new files.   Conclusion MCEBuddy 1.1 will convert all WTV files in it’s source folder. If you want to pick and choose which recordings to convert, you may want to define a source folder different than the Recorded TV folder and then just copy or move the files you wish to convert into the new source folder. The conversion process does take a good bit of time. If you choose the commercial skipping and second conversion options it can take several hours to fully convert one TV recording. Overall, MCEBuddy makes a nice Media Center addition for those that want to save some space with smaller size files, convert Recorded TV files for their portable device, or automatically remove commercials. If you’re looking for a different method to skip commercials check out our post on how to skip commercials in Windows 7 Media Center. Download MCEBuddy 1.1 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)How To Skip Commercials in Windows 7 Media CenterHow To Convert Video Files to MP3 with VLCStartup Customizations for Media Center in Windows 7Add Folders to the Movie Library in Windows 7 Media Center TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher Automate Tasks in Linux with Crontab Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam

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• SQL SERVER – How to Recover SQL Database Data Deleted by Accident

  - by Pinal Dave

  In Repair a SQL Server database using a transaction log explorer, I showed how to use ApexSQL Log, a SQL Server transaction log viewer, to recover a SQL Server database after a disaster. In this blog, I’ll show you how to use another SQL Server disaster recovery tool from ApexSQL in a situation when data is accidentally deleted. You can download ApexSQL Recover here, install, and play along. With a good SQL Server disaster recovery strategy, data recovery is not a problem. You have a reliable full database backup with valid data, a full database backup and subsequent differential database backups, or a full database backup and a chain of transaction log backups. But not all situations are ideal. Here we’ll address some sub-optimal scenarios, where you can still successfully recover data. If you have only a full database backup This is the least optimal SQL Server disaster recovery strategy, as it doesn’t ensure minimal data loss. For example, data was deleted on Wednesday. Your last full database backup was created on Sunday, three days before the records were deleted. By using the full database backup created on Sunday, you will be able to recover SQL database records that existed in the table on Sunday. If there were any records inserted into the table on Monday or Tuesday, they will be lost forever. The same goes for records modified in this period. This method will not bring back modified records, only the old records that existed on Sunday. If you restore this full database backup, all your changes (intentional and accidental) will be lost and the database will be reverted to the state it had on Sunday. What you have to do is compare the records that were in the table on Sunday to the records on Wednesday, create a synchronization script, and execute it against the Wednesday database. If you have a full database backup followed by differential database backups Let’s say the situation is the same as in the example above, only you create a differential database backup every night. Use the full database backup created on Sunday, and the last differential database backup (created on Tuesday). In this scenario, you will lose only the data inserted and updated after the differential backup created on Tuesday. If you have a full database backup and a chain of transaction log backups This is the SQL Server disaster recovery strategy that provides minimal data loss. With a full chain of transaction logs, you can recover the SQL database to an exact point in time. To provide optimal results, you have to know exactly when the records were deleted, because restoring to a later point will not bring back the records. This method requires restoring the full database backup first. If you have any differential log backup created after the last full database backup, restore the most recent one. Then, restore transaction log backups, one by one, it the order they were created starting with the first created after the restored differential database backup. Now, the table will be in the state before the records were deleted. You have to identify the deleted records, script them and run the script against the original database. Although this method is reliable, it is time-consuming and requires a lot of space on disk. How to easily recover deleted records? The following solution enables you to recover SQL database records even if you have no full or differential database backups and no transaction log backups. To understand how ApexSQL Recover works, I’ll explain what happens when table data is deleted. Table data is stored in data pages. When you delete table records, they are not immediately deleted from the data pages, but marked to be overwritten by new records. Such records are not shown as existing anymore, but ApexSQL Recover can read them and create undo script for them. How long will deleted records stay in the MDF file? It depends on many factors, as time passes it’s less likely that the records will not be overwritten. The more transactions occur after the deletion, the more chances the records will be overwritten and permanently lost. Therefore, it’s recommended to create a copy of the database MDF and LDF files immediately (if you cannot take your database offline until the issue is solved) and run ApexSQL Recover on them. Note that a full database backup will not help here, as the records marked for overwriting are not included in the backup. First, I’ll delete some records from the Person.EmailAddress table in the AdventureWorks database.   I can delete these records in SQL Server Management Studio, or execute a script such as DELETE FROM Person.EmailAddress WHERE BusinessEntityID BETWEEN 70 AND 80 Then, I’ll start ApexSQL Recover and select From DELETE operation in the Recovery tab.   In the Select the database to recover step, first select the SQL Server instance. If it’s not shown in the drop-down list, click the Server icon right to the Server drop-down list and browse for the SQL Server instance, or type the instance name manually. Specify the authentication type and select the database in the Database drop-down list.   In the next step, you’re prompted to add additional data sources. As this can be a tricky step, especially for new users, ApexSQL Recover offers help via the Help me decide option.   The Help me decide option guides you through a series of questions about the database transaction log and advises what files to add. If you know that you have no transaction log backups or detached transaction logs, or the online transaction log file has been truncated after the data was deleted, select No additional transaction logs are available. If you know that you have transaction log backups that contain the delete transactions you want to recover, click Add transaction logs. The online transaction log is listed and selected automatically.   Click Add if to add transaction log backups. It would be best if you have a full transaction log chain, as explained above. The next step for this option is to specify the time range.   Selecting a small time range for the time of deletion will create the recovery script just for the accidentally deleted records. A wide time range might script the records deleted on purpose, and you don’t want that. If needed, you can check the script generated and manually remove such records. After that, for all data sources options, the next step is to select the tables. Be careful here, if you deleted some data from other tables on purpose, and don’t want to recover them, don’t select all tables, as ApexSQL Recover will create the INSERT script for them too.   The next step offers two options: to create a recovery script that will insert the deleted records back into the Person.EmailAddress table, or to create a new database, create the Person.EmailAddress table in it, and insert the deleted records. I’ll select the first one.   The recovery process is completed and 11 records are found and scripted, as expected.   To see the script, click View script. ApexSQL Recover has its own script editor, where you can review, modify, and execute the recovery script. The insert into statements look like: INSERT INTO Person.EmailAddress( BusinessEntityID, EmailAddressID, EmailAddress, rowguid, ModifiedDate) VALUES( 70, 70, N'[email protected]' COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS, 'd62c5b4e-c91f-403f-b630-7b7e0fda70ce', '20030109 00:00:00.000' ); To execute the script, click Execute in the menu.   If you want to check whether the records are really back, execute SELECT * FROM Person.EmailAddress WHERE BusinessEntityID BETWEEN 70 AND 80 As shown, ApexSQL Recover recovers SQL database data after accidental deletes even without the database backup that contains the deleted data and relevant transaction log backups. ApexSQL Recover reads the deleted data from the database data file, so this method can be used even for databases in the Simple recovery model. Besides recovering SQL database records from a DELETE statement, ApexSQL Recover can help when the records are lost due to a DROP TABLE, or TRUNCATE statement, as well as repair a corrupted MDF file that cannot be attached to as SQL Server instance. You can find more information about how to recover SQL database lost data and repair a SQL Server database on ApexSQL Solution center. There are solutions for various situations when data needs to be recovered. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Diagnose PC Hardware Problems with an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  So your PC randomly shuts down or gives you the blue screen of death, but you can’t figure out what’s wrong. The problem could be bad memory or hardware related, and thankfully the Ubuntu Live CD has some tools to help you figure it out. Test your RAM with memtest86+ RAM problems are difficult to diagnose—they can range from annoying program crashes, or crippling reboot loops. Even if you’re not having problems, when you install new RAM it’s a good idea to thoroughly test it. The Ubuntu Live CD includes a tool called Memtest86+ that will do just that—test your computer’s RAM! Unlike many of the Live CD tools that we’ve looked at so far, Memtest86+ has to be run outside of a graphical Ubuntu session. Fortunately, it only takes a few keystrokes. Note: If you used UNetbootin to create an Ubuntu flash drive, then memtest86+ will not be available. We recommend using the Universal USB Installer from Pendrivelinux instead (persistence is possible with Universal USB Installer, but not mandatory). Boot up your computer with a Ubuntu Live CD or USB drive. You will be greeted with this screen: Use the down arrow key to select the Test memory option and hit Enter. Memtest86+ will immediately start testing your RAM. If you suspect that a certain part of memory is the problem, you can select certain portions of memory by pressing “c” and changing that option. You can also select specific tests to run. However, the default settings of Memtest86+ will exhaustively test your memory, so we recommend leaving the settings alone. Memtest86+ will run a variety of tests that can take some time to complete, so start it running before you go to bed to give it adequate time. Test your CPU with cpuburn Random shutdowns – especially when doing computationally intensive tasks – can be a sign of a faulty CPU, power supply, or cooling system. A utility called cpuburn can help you determine if one of these pieces of hardware is the problem. Note: cpuburn is designed to stress test your computer – it will run it fast and cause the CPU to heat up, which may exacerbate small problems that otherwise would be minor. It is a powerful diagnostic tool, but should be used with caution. Boot up your computer with a Ubuntu Live CD or USB drive, and choose to run Ubuntu from the CD or USB drive. When the desktop environment loads up, open the Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on the System menu in the top-left of the screen, then selecting Administration, and then Synaptic Package Manager. Cpuburn is in the universe repository. To enable the universe repository, click on Settings in the menu at the top, and then Repositories. Add a checkmark in the box labeled “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click close. In the main Synaptic window, click the Reload button. After the package list has reloaded and the search index has been rebuilt, enter “cpuburn” in the Quick search text box. Click the checkbox in the left column, and select Mark for Installation. Click the Apply button near the top of the window. As cpuburn installs, it will caution you about the possible dangers of its use. Assuming you wish to take the risk (and if your computer is randomly restarting constantly, it’s probably worth it), open a terminal window by clicking on the Applications menu in the top-left of the screen and then selection Applications > Terminal. Cpuburn includes a number of tools to test different types of CPUs. If your CPU is more than six years old, see the full list; for modern AMD CPUs, use the terminal command burnK7 and for modern Intel processors, use the terminal command burnP6 Our processor is an Intel, so we ran burnP6. Once it started up, it immediately pushed the CPU up to 99.7% total usage, according to the Linux utility “top”. If your computer is having a CPU, power supply, or cooling problem, then your computer is likely to shutdown within ten or fifteen minutes. Because of the strain this program puts on your computer, we don’t recommend leaving it running overnight – if there’s a problem, it should crop up relatively quickly. Cpuburn’s tools, including burnP6, have no interface; once they start running, they will start driving your CPU until you stop them. To stop a program like burnP6, press Ctrl+C in the terminal window that is running the program. Conclusion The Ubuntu Live CD provides two great testing tools to diagnose a tricky computer problem, or to stress test a new computer. While they are advanced tools that should be used with caution, they’re extremely useful and easy enough that anyone can use them. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDCreate a Persistent Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash DriveAdding extra Repositories on UbuntuHow to Share folders with your Ubuntu Virtual Machine (guest)Building a New Computer – Part 3: Setting it Up TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause

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• Create an iTunes Account without a credit card

  - by Matthew Guay

  iTunes Store offers a large variety of free content, but to download it you have to have an account. Usually you have to enter your credit card information to sign up, but here’s an easy way to get an iTunes account for free downloads without entering any payment info. Although iTunes Store is known for paid downloads of movies, music, and more, it also has a treasure trove of free media.  Some of it, including Podcasts and iTunes U educational content do not require an account to download.  However, any other free content, including free iPhone/iPod Touch apps and free or promotional music, videos, and TV Shows all require an account to download.  If you try to download a free movie or music download, you will be required to enter payment information. Even though your card will not be charged, it will be kept on file so you can be charged if you download a for-pay item.  However, if you only plan to download free items, it may be preferable to not have your account linked to a credit card. The following steps will get you an account without entering your credit card info. Getting Started First, make sure you have iTunes installed.  If you don’t already have it, download and install it (link below) with the default settings. Now open iTunes, and click the iTunes Store link on the left. Click the App Store link on the top of this page. Select a free app to download.  A simple way to do this is to scroll down to the Top Free Apps box on the right side, hover your mouse over the first item, and click on the Free button that appears when you hover over it. A popup will open asking you to sign in with your Apple ID.  Click “Create New Account”. Click Continue to create your account. Check the box to accept the Store Terms and Conditions, and click Continue.   Enter your email address, password, security question, and date of birth, and uncheck the boxes to get email if you don’t want it…then click Continue. Now, you will be asked to provide a payment method.  Notice now that the last option says None!  Click that bullet option… Then enter your billing address.  Simply enter your normal billing address, even though you are not entering a payment method.  Click Continue and your account will be created! If you get the Address Verification screen just verify your county and click Done. An email will be sent to you to verify your account… Click on the link in your email to verify your account, iTunes will launch and you’re prompted to enter in the Apple ID and Password you just created. Your account is successfully created! Now you can easily download any free media from iTunes.  Keep an eye on the Free on iTunes box on the bottom of the iTunes Store page for interesting downloads, or if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, watch the popular Free downloads on the Apps page. And of course there is always great content on iTunes U to grab free as well. Purchasing for-pay media If you want to purchase an item on the iTunes store later, simply click on the item to download as normal.  Click Buy to proceed with the purchase. iTunes will prompt you that you need to enter payment information to complete the purchase.  Enter your Apple ID email and password, and then add the payment information as prompted.   Remove Payment Information from an iTunes Account If you’ve already entered payment information into your iTunes account, and would like to remove it, click Store in the top iTunes menu, and select View My Account. Enter your Apple ID email and password, and click View Account.   This will open your account information.  Click the Edit Payment Information button.   Now, click the None button to remove your payment information.  Click Done to save the changes. Your account will now prompt you to enter payment information if you try to make a purchase.  You could repeat these steps after making a purchase if you do not want iTunes to keep your payment info on file. Conclusion This is a great way to make an iTunes account without entering your credit card, or to remove your credit card info from your account.  Parents may especially enjoy this tip, as they can have an iTunes account on their kids computer or iPod Touch without worrying about them spending money with it. Links Download iTunes Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Switch Between Signatures in Outlook 2007 the Easy WayRedeem Pre-paid Zune Card Points for Zune Marketplace MediaCreate An Electronic Business Card In Outlook 2007Understanding Windows Vista Aero Glass RequirementsSpeed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoost TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Draw Online using Harmony How to Browse Privately in Firefox Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually

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• Searching for tasks with code – Executables and Event Handlers

  Searching packages or just enumerating through all tasks is not quite as straightforward as it may first appear, mainly because of the way you can nest tasks within other containers. You can see this illustrated in the sample package below where I have used several sequence containers and loops. To complicate this further all containers types, including packages and tasks, can have event handlers which can then support the full range of nested containers again. Towards the lower right, the task called SQL In FEL also has an event handler not shown, within which is another Execute SQL Task, so that makes a total of 6 Execute SQL Tasks 6 tasks spread across the package. In my previous post about such as adding a property expressionI kept it simple and just looked at tasks at the package level, but what if you wanted to find any or all tasks in a package? For this post I've written a console program that will search a package looking at all tasks no matter how deeply nested, and check to see if the name starts with "SQL". When it finds a matching task it writes out the hierarchy by name for that task, starting with the package and working down to the task itself. The output for our sample package is shown below, note it has found all 6 tasks, including the one on the OnPreExecute event of the SQL In FEL task TaskSearch v1.0.0.0 (1.0.0.0) Copyright (C) 2009 Konesans Ltd Processing File - C:\Projects\Alpha\Packages\MyPackage.dtsx MyPackage\FOR Counter Loop\SQL In Counter Loop MyPackage\SEQ For Each Loop Wrapper\FEL Simple Loop\SQL In FEL MyPackage\SEQ For Each Loop Wrapper\FEL Simple Loop\SQL In FEL\OnPreExecute\SQL On Pre Execute for FEL SQL Task MyPackage\SEQ Top Level\SEQ Nested Lvl 1\SEQ Nested Lvl 2\SQL In Nested Lvl 2 MyPackage\SEQ Top Level\SEQ Nested Lvl 1\SQL In Nested Lvl 1 #1 MyPackage\SEQ Top Level\SEQ Nested Lvl 1\SQL In Nested Lvl 1 #2 6 matching tasks found in package. The full project and code is available for download below, but first we can walk through the project to highlight the most important sections of code. This code has been abbreviated for this description, but is complete in the download. First of all we load the package, and then start by looking at the Executables for the package. // Load the package file Application application = new Application(); using (Package package = application.LoadPackage(filename, null)) { int matchCount = 0; // Look in the package's executables ProcessExecutables(package.Executables, ref matchCount); ... // // ... // Write out final count Console.WriteLine("{0} matching tasks found in package.", matchCount); } The ProcessExecutables method is a key method, as an executable could be described as the the highest level of a working functionality or container. There are several of types of executables, such as tasks, or sequence containers and loops. To know what to do next we need to work out what type of executable we are dealing with as the abbreviated version of method shows below. private static void ProcessExecutables(Executables executables, ref int matchCount) { foreach (Executable executable in executables) { TaskHost taskHost = executable as TaskHost; if (taskHost != null) { ProcessTaskHost(taskHost, ref matchCount); ProcessEventHandlers(taskHost.EventHandlers, ref matchCount); continue; } ... // // ... ForEachLoop forEachLoop = executable as ForEachLoop; if (forEachLoop != null) { ProcessExecutables(forEachLoop.Executables, ref matchCount); ProcessEventHandlers(forEachLoop.EventHandlers, ref matchCount); continue; } } } As you can see if the executable we find is a task we then call out to our ProcessTaskHost method. As with all of our executables a task can have event handlers which themselves contain more executables such as task and loops, so we also make a call out our ProcessEventHandlers method. The other types of executables such as loops can also have event handlers as well as executables. As shown with the example for the ForEachLoop we call the same ProcessExecutables and ProcessEventHandlers methods again to drill down into the hierarchy of objects that the package may contain. This code needs to explicitly check for each type of executable (TaskHost, Sequence, ForLoop and ForEachLoop) because whilst they all have an Executables property this is not from a common base class or interface. This example was just a simple find a task by its name, so ProcessTaskHost really just does that. We also get the hierarchy of objects so we can write out for information, obviously you can adapt this method to do something more interesting such as adding a property expression. private static void ProcessTaskHost(TaskHost taskHost, ref int matchCount) { if (taskHost == null) { return; } // Check if the task matches our match name if (taskHost.Name.StartsWith(TaskNameFilter, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { // Build up the full object hierarchy of the task // so we can write it out for information StringBuilder path = new StringBuilder(); DtsContainer container = taskHost; while (container != null) { path.Insert(0, container.Name); container = container.Parent; if (container != null) { path.Insert(0, "\\"); } } // Write the task path // e.g. Package\Container\Event\Task Console.WriteLine(path); Console.WriteLine(); // Increment match counter for info matchCount++; } } Just for completeness, the other processing method we covered above is for event handlers, but really that just calls back to the executables. This same method is called in our main package method, but it was omitted for brevity here. private static void ProcessEventHandlers(DtsEventHandlers eventHandlers, ref int matchCount) { foreach (DtsEventHandler eventHandler in eventHandlers) { ProcessExecutables(eventHandler.Executables, ref matchCount); } } As hopefully the code demonstrates, executables (Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Executable) are the workers, but within them you can nest more executables (except for task tasks).Executables themselves can have event handlers which can in turn hold more executables. I have tried to illustrate this highlight the relationships in the following diagram. Download Sample code project TaskSearch.zip (11KB)

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• Non-Dom Element Event Binding with jQuery

  - by Rick Strahl

  Yesterday I had a short discussion with Dave Reed on Twitter regarding setting up fake ‘events’ on objects that are hookable. jQuery makes it real easy to bind events on DOM elements and with a little bit of extra work (that I didn’t know about) you can also set up binding to non-DOM element ‘event’ bindings. Assume for a second that you have a simple JavaScript object like this: var item = { sku: "wwhelp" , foo: function() { alert('orginal foo function'); } }; and you want to be notified when the foo function is called. You can use jQuery to bind the handler like this: $(item).bind("foo", function () { alert('foo Hook called'); } ); Binding alone won’t actually cause the handler to be triggered so when you call: item.foo(); you only get the ‘original’ message. In order to fire both the original handler and the bound event hook you have to use the .trigger() function: $(item).trigger("foo"); Now if you do the following complete sequence: var item = { sku: "wwhelp" , foo: function() { alert('orginal foo function'); } }; $(item).bind("foo", function () { alert('foo hook called'); } ); $(item).trigger("foo"); You’ll see the ‘hook’ message first followed by the ‘original’ message fired in succession. In other words, using this mechanism you can hook standard object functions and chain events to them in a way similar to the way you can do with DOM elements. The main difference is that the ‘event’ has to be explicitly triggered in order for this to happen rather than just calling the method directly. .trigger() relies on some internal logic that checks for event bindings on the object (attached via an expando property) which .trigger() searches for in its bound event list. Once the ‘event’ is found it’s called prior to execution of the original function. This is pretty useful as it allows you to create standard JavaScript objects that can act as event handlers and are effectively hookable without having to explicitly override event definitions with JavaScript function handlers. You get all the benefits of jQuery’s event methods including the ability to hook up multiple events to the same handler function and the ability to uniquely identify each specific event instance with post fix string names (ie. .bind("MyEvent.MyName") and .unbind("MyEvent.MyName") to bind MyEvent). Watch out for an .unbind() Bug Note that there appears to be a bug with .unbind() in jQuery that doesn’t reliably unbind an event and results in a elem.removeEventListener is not a function error. The following code demonstrates: var item = { sku: "wwhelp", foo: function () { alert('orginal foo function'); } }; $(item).bind("foo.first", function () { alert('foo hook called'); }); $(item).bind("foo.second", function () { alert('foo hook2 called'); }); $(item).trigger("foo"); setTimeout(function () { $(item).unbind("foo"); // $(item).unbind("foo.first"); // $(item).unbind("foo.second"); $(item).trigger("foo"); }, 3000); The setTimeout call delays the unbinding and is supposed to remove the event binding on the foo function. It fails both with the foo only value (both if assigned only as “foo” or “foo.first/second” as well as when removing both of the postfixed event handlers explicitly. Oddly the following that removes only one of the two handlers works: setTimeout(function () { //$(item).unbind("foo"); $(item).unbind("foo.first"); // $(item).unbind("foo.second"); $(item).trigger("foo"); }, 3000); this actually works which is weird as the code in unbind tries to unbind using a DOM method that doesn’t exist. <shrug> A partial workaround for unbinding all ‘foo’ events is the following: setTimeout(function () { $.event.special.foo = { teardown: function () { alert('teardown'); return true; } }; $(item).unbind("foo"); $(item).trigger("foo"); }, 3000); which is a bit cryptic to say the least but it seems to work more reliably. I can’t take credit for any of this – thanks to Dave Reed and Damien Edwards who pointed out some of these behaviors. I didn’t find any good descriptions of the process so thought it’d be good to write it down here. Hope some of you find this helpful.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery  

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• SQL SERVER – Disabled Index and Update Statistics

  - by pinaldave

  When we try to update the statistics, it throws an error as if the clustered index is disabled. Now let us enable the clustered index only and attempt to update the statistics of the table right after that. Have you ever come across the situation where a conversation never gets over and it continues even though original point of discussion has passed. I am facing the same situation in the case of Disabled Index. Here is the link to original conversations. SQL SERVER – Disable Clustered Index and Data Insert – Reader had a issue here with Disabled Index SQL SERVER – Understanding ALTER INDEX ALL REBUILD with Disabled Clustered Index – Reader asked the effect of Rebuilding Indexes The same reader asked me today – “I understood what the disabled indexes do; what is their effect on statistics. Is it true that even though indexes are disabled, they continue updating the statistics?“ The answer is very interesting: If you have disabled clustered index, you will be not able to update the statistics at all for any index. If you have enabled clustered index and disabled non clustered index when you update the statistics of the table, it automatically updates the statistics of the ALL (disabled and enabled – both) the indexes on the table. If you are not satisfied with the answer, let us go over a simple example. I have written necessary comments in the code itself to have a clear idea. USE tempdb GO -- Drop Table if Exists IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.objects WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID(N'[dbo].[TableName]') AND type IN (N'U')) DROP TABLE [dbo].[TableName] GO -- Create Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TableName]( [ID] [int] NOT NULL, [FirstCol] [varchar](50) NULL ) GO -- Insert Some data INSERT INTO TableName SELECT 1, 'First' UNION ALL SELECT 2, 'Second' UNION ALL SELECT 3, 'Third' UNION ALL SELECT 4, 'Fourth' UNION ALL SELECT 5, 'Five' GO -- Create Clustered Index ALTER TABLE [TableName] ADD CONSTRAINT [PK_TableName] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([ID] ASC) GO -- Create Nonclustered Index CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_NonClustered_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] ([FirstCol] ASC) GO -- Check that all the indexes are enabled SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), Name, type_desc, is_disabled FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'TableName' GO Now let us update the statistics of the table and check the statistics update date. -- Update the stats of table UPDATE STATISTICS TableName WITH FULLSCAN GO -- Check Statistics Last Updated Datetime SELECT name AS index_name, STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('TableName') GO Now let us disable the indexes and check if they are disabled using sys.indexes. -- Disable Indexes -- Disable Nonclustered Index ALTER INDEX [IX_NonClustered_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] DISABLE GO -- Disable Clustered Index ALTER INDEX [PK_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] DISABLE GO -- Check that all the indexes are disabled SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), Name, type_desc, is_disabled FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'TableName' GO Let us try to update the statistics of the table. -- Update the stats of table UPDATE STATISTICS TableName WITH FULLSCAN GO /* -- Above operation should thrown following error Msg 1974, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Cannot perform the specified operation on table 'TableName' because its clustered index 'PK_TableName' is disabled. */ When we try to update the statistics it throws an error as it clustered index is disabled. Now let us enable the clustered index only and attempt to update the statistics of the table right after that. -- Now let us rebuild clustered index only ALTER INDEX [PK_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] REBUILD GO -- Check that all the indexes status SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), Name, type_desc, is_disabled FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'TableName' GO -- Check Statistics Last Updated Datetime SELECT name AS index_name, STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('TableName') GO -- Update the stats of table UPDATE STATISTICS TableName WITH FULLSCAN GO -- Check Statistics Last Updated Datetime SELECT name AS index_name, STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('TableName') GO We can clearly see that even though the nonclustered index is disabled it is also updated. If you do not need a nonclustered index, I suggest you to drop it as keeping them disabled is an overhead on your system. This is because every time the statistics are updated for system all the statistics for disabled indexesare also updated. -- Clean up DROP TABLE [TableName] GO The complete script is given below for easy reference. USE tempdb GO -- Drop Table if Exists IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.objects WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID(N'[dbo].[TableName]') AND type IN (N'U')) DROP TABLE [dbo].[TableName] GO -- Create Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TableName]( [ID] [int] NOT NULL, [FirstCol] [varchar](50) NULL ) GO -- Insert Some data INSERT INTO TableName SELECT 1, 'First' UNION ALL SELECT 2, 'Second' UNION ALL SELECT 3, 'Third' UNION ALL SELECT 4, 'Fourth' UNION ALL SELECT 5, 'Five' GO -- Create Clustered Index ALTER TABLE [TableName] ADD CONSTRAINT [PK_TableName] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([ID] ASC) GO -- Create Nonclustered Index CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_NonClustered_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] ([FirstCol] ASC) GO -- Check that all the indexes are enabled SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), Name, type_desc, is_disabled FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'TableName' GO -- Update the stats of table UPDATE STATISTICS TableName WITH FULLSCAN GO -- Check Statistics Last Updated Datetime SELECT name AS index_name, STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('TableName') GO -- Disable Indexes -- Disable Nonclustered Index ALTER INDEX [IX_NonClustered_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] DISABLE GO -- Disable Clustered Index ALTER INDEX [PK_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] DISABLE GO -- Check that all the indexes are disabled SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), Name, type_desc, is_disabled FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'TableName' GO -- Update the stats of table UPDATE STATISTICS TableName WITH FULLSCAN GO /* -- Above operation should thrown following error Msg 1974, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Cannot perform the specified operation on table 'TableName' because its clustered index 'PK_TableName' is disabled. */ -- Now let us rebuild clustered index only ALTER INDEX [PK_TableName] ON [dbo].[TableName] REBUILD GO -- Check that all the indexes status SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), Name, type_desc, is_disabled FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'TableName' GO -- Check Statistics Last Updated Datetime SELECT name AS index_name, STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('TableName') GO -- Update the stats of table UPDATE STATISTICS TableName WITH FULLSCAN GO -- Check Statistics Last Updated Datetime SELECT name AS index_name, STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('TableName') GO -- Clean up DROP TABLE [TableName] GO Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Optimization, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Statistics

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• 8 Things You Can Do In Android’s Developer Options

  - by Chris Hoffman

  The Developer Options menu in Android is a hidden menu with a variety of advanced options. These options are intended for developers, but many of them will be interesting to geeks. You’ll have to perform a secret handshake to enable the Developer Options menu in the Settings screen, as it’s hidden from Android users by default. Follow the simple steps to quickly enable Developer Options. Enable USB Debugging “USB debugging” sounds like an option only an Android developer would need, but it’s probably the most widely used hidden option in Android. USB debugging allows applications on your computer to interface with your Android phone over the USB connection. This is required for a variety of advanced tricks, including rooting an Android phone, unlocking it, installing a custom ROM, or even using a desktop program that captures screenshots of your Android device’s screen. You can also use ADB commands to push and pull files between your device and your computer or create and restore complete local backups of your Android device without rooting. USB debugging can be a security concern, as it gives computers you plug your device into access to your phone. You could plug your device into a malicious USB charging port, which would try to compromise you. That’s why Android forces you to agree to a prompt every time you plug your device into a new computer with USB debugging enabled. Set a Desktop Backup Password If you use the above ADB trick to create local backups of your Android device over USB, you can protect them with a password with the Set a desktop backup password option here. This password encrypts your backups to secure them, so you won’t be able to access them if you forget the password. Disable or Speed Up Animations When you move between apps and screens in Android, you’re spending some of that time looking at animations and waiting for them to go away. You can disable these animations entirely by changing the Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale options here. If you like animations but just wish they were faster, you can speed them up. On a fast phone or tablet, this can make switching between apps nearly instant. If you thought your Android phone was speedy before, just try disabling animations and you’ll be surprised how much faster it can seem. Force-Enable FXAA For OpenGL Games If you have a high-end phone or tablet with great graphics performance and you play 3D games on it, there’s a way to make those games look even better. Just go to the Developer Options screen and enable the Force 4x MSAA option. This will force Android to use 4x multisample anti-aliasing in OpenGL ES 2.0 games and other apps. This requires more graphics power and will probably drain your battery a bit faster, but it will improve image quality in some games. This is a bit like force-enabling antialiasing using the NVIDIA Control Panel on a Windows gaming PC. See How Bad Task Killers Are We’ve written before about how task killers are worse than useless on Android. If you use a task killer, you’re just slowing down your system by throwing out cached data and forcing Android to load apps from system storage whenever you open them again. Don’t believe us? Enable the Don’t keep activities option on the Developer options screen and Android will force-close every app you use as soon as you exit it. Enable this app and use your phone normally for a few minutes — you’ll see just how harmful throwing out all that cached data is and how much it will slow down your phone. Don’t actually use this option unless you want to see how bad it is! It will make your phone perform much more slowly — there’s a reason Google has hidden these options away from average users who might accidentally change them. Fake Your GPS Location The Allow mock locations option allows you to set fake GPS locations, tricking Android into thinking you’re at a location where you actually aren’t. Use this option along with an app like Fake GPS location and you can trick your Android device and the apps running on it into thinking you’re at locations where you actually aren’t. How would this be useful? Well, you could fake a GPS check-in at a location without actually going there or confuse your friends in a location-tracking app by seemingly teleporting around the world. Stay Awake While Charging You can use Android’s Daydream Mode to display certain apps while charging your device. If you want to force Android to display a standard Android app that hasn’t been designed for Daydream Mode, you can enable the Stay awake option here. Android will keep your device’s screen on while charging and won’t turn it off. It’s like Daydream Mode, but can support any app and allows users to interact with them. Show Always-On-Top CPU Usage You can view CPU usage data by toggling the Show CPU usage option to On. This information will appear on top of whatever app you’re using. If you’re a Linux user, the three numbers on top probably look familiar — they represent the system load average. From left to right, the numbers represent your system load over the last one, five, and fifteen minutes. This isn’t the kind of thing you’d want enabled most of the time, but it can save you from having to install third-party floating CPU apps if you want to see CPU usage information for some reason. Most of the other options here will only be useful to developers debugging their Android apps. You shouldn’t start changing options you don’t understand. If you want to undo any of these changes, you can quickly erase all your custom options by sliding the switch at the top of the screen to Off.     

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• Turn A Flash Drive Into a Portable Web Server

  - by Matthew Guay

  Portable applications are very useful for getting work done on the go, but how about portable servers?  Here’s how you can turn your flash drive into a portable web server. Getting Started To put a full web server on our flash drive, we’re going to use XAMPP Lite.  This lightweight, preconfigured server includes recent versions of Apache, MySQL, and PHP so you can run most websites and webapps directly from it.  You could use the full XAMPP, which includes more features such as a FileZilla FTP server and OpenSSL, but for most purposes, the light version is plenty for a portable server. Download the latest version of XAMPP Lite (link below).  In this tutorial, we used the self-extracting EXE version; you could choose the ZIP file and extract the files yourself, but we found it easier to use the executable. Run the installer, and click Browse choose where to install your server. Select your flash drive, or a folder in it, and click Ok.  Make sure your flash drive has at least 250MB of available storage space.  XAMPP will create an xampplite folder and store all the files in it during the installation.   Click Install, and all of the files will be extracted to your flash drive.  This may take a few moments depending on your flash drive’s speed. When the extraction process is finished, a Command Prompt window will open to finish the installation.  The first prompt will ask if you want to add shortcuts to the start menu and desktop; enter “n” since we don’t want to create start menu links to our portable server. Now enter “y” to configure XAMPP’s directories automatically. Finally, enter “y” to make XAMPP fully portable.  It will set up the servers to run without specific drive letters so your server will run from any computer. XAMPP will finalize your changes; press Enter when everything is completed. Setup will automatically launch the command line version of XAMPP.  On first run, confirm that your time zone is correct. And that’s it!  You can now run XAMPP’s control panel by entering 1, or you can exit and run XAMPP from any other computer with your flash drive. To complete your portable webserver kit, you may want to install Portable Firefox or Iron Browser on your flash drive so you always have your favorite browser ready to use. Running your portable server Using your portable server is very simple.  Open the xampplite folder on your flash drive and launch xampp-control.exe. Click Start beside Apache and MySql to get your webserver running. Please note: Do not check the Svc box, as this will run the server as a Windows service.  To keep XAMPP portable, you do not want it running as a service! Windows Firewall may prompt you that it blocked the server; click Allow access to let your server run. Once they’re running, you can click Admin to open the default XAMPP admin page running from your local webserver.  Or, you can view it by browsing to http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1/ in your browser. If everything is working correctly, you should see this page in your browser.  Choose your default language… And then you’ll see the default XAMPP admin page.   Click the Status link on the left sidebar to make sure everything is running correctly. If you click the Admin button for MySql in the XAMPP Control Panel, it will open phpMyAdmin in your default browser.  Alternately, you can open the MySql admin page by entering http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ or http://127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin/ in your favorite browser. Now you can add your own webpages to your webserver.  Save all of your web files in the \xampplight\htdocs\ folder on your flash drive. Install WordPress in your portable server Since XAMPP Lite includes MySql and PHP, you can even run webapps such as WordPress, the popular CMS and blogging platform.  Download WordPress (link below), and extract the files to the \xampplite\htdocs folder on your flash drive. Now all of the WordPress files are stored in \xampplite\htdocs\wordpress on your flash drive. We still need to setup WordPress on our portable server.  Open your MySql admin page http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ to create a new database for WordPress.  Enter a name for your database in the “Create new database” box, and click Create. Click the Privileges tab on the top, and the select “Add a new User”.   Enter a username and password for the database, and then click the Go button on the bottom of the page. Using WordPress Now, in your browser, enter http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php.  Click Create a Configuration File to continue. Make sure you have your Database name, username, and password we created previously, and click “Let’s Go!” Enter your WordPress database name, username, and password, leave the other two entries as default, and click Submit. You should now have the database all ready to go.  Click “Run the install” to finish installing WordPress. Enter a title, username, and password for your test blog, as well as your email address, and then click “Install WordPress”. You now have a portable install of WordPress.  Click “Log In” to  access your WordPress admin page. Enter your username and password, and click Log In. Here you can add pages, posts, themes, extensions, and anything else just like you would on a normal WordPress site.  This is a great way to experiment with WordPress without messing up your real website. You can view your portable WordPress site by entering http://localhost/wordpress/ in your address bar. Closing your server When you’re done running your test server, click the Stop button on each of the services and then click the Exit button in the XAMPP control panel.  If you press the exit button on the top of the window, it will just minimize the control panel to the tray.   Alternately, you can shutdown your server by running xampp_stop.exe from your xampplite folder. Conclusion XAMPP Lite gives you a great way to run a full webserver directly from your flash drive.  Now, anywhere you go, you can test and tweak your webpages and webapps from any Windows computer.  Links Download XAMPP Lite Download WordPress Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips BitLocker To Go Encrypts Portable Flash Drives in Windows 7How To Use BitLocker on Drives without TPMSpeed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoostView and Manage Flash Cookies the Easy WayInstall and Run Applications from Your iPod, Flash Drive or Mp3 Player TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error

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• How to Collect Debug Info for Oracle SQL Developer

  - by thatjeffsmith

  In a perfect world, there would be no software bugs. Developers would always test their code. QA would find any scenarios and bugs the developers hadn’t already thought of. Regression tests would be complete and flawless. But alas, we can only afford to pay mere humans here, so we will have bugs from time to time. Or sometimes you are trying to do something the software wasn’t designed for, or perhaps your machine has exhausted it’s resources trying to build the un-buildable. When you run into problems, you will need help. Developers need your help so they can help you. Surprisingly enough, feedback like this isn’t very helpful: Your program isn’t working. How can I make it work? When you are ready to work with us on the SQL Developer OTN forum, you will most likely be asked to run SQL Developer and capture the output from the command console. In case you need help with this, ere’s a step-by-step process you can follow in Windows 7 (should work in XP too.) Open a windows command window Start – Run – CMD Once it’s open, click on the window icon and select ‘Defaults.’ Change the default buffer size to be something bigger, much bigger. Set the CMD window default buffer size HIGHER Note: you only need to do this once. Navigate to your SQL Developer Installation Folder Instead of running the ‘sqldeveloper.exe’ file in the root directory, we are going to go several sub-directories down. Find the ‘bin’ sub-directory and run the ‘sqldeveloper.exe’ there. When you do this, a CMD window will open, and then you’ll see the SQL Developer application load. The SQL Developer bin directory - run the tool from here and get a logging window Use SQL Developer as normal, until it ‘breaks’ or ‘hangs’ Now, you are ready to grab the nitty-gritty information that MIGHT tell the developer what is going wrong or happening in your scenario. Click back into the CMD window Send a Ctrl+Break or a Ctrl+Pause. If you on a newer laptop that doesn’t have this key, be sure to check the ‘Fn’ subset of keys. If you need to map the BREAK or PAUSE buttons, this article might help. You can also try the on-screen keyboard in windows – just type ‘OSK’ in your START – RUN prompt. Copy the logging information from the command window – all of it We need this information, help us get it! Open a case with Oracle Support or Start a Thread on the Forums Or email me. If you’re on my blog reading this, it’s the least I can do to help Now, before you hit ‘Send’ or ‘Post’ or ‘Submit’ – be sure to add a brief description of what you were doing in the application when you ran into the problem. Even if you were doing ‘nothing,’ let us know how many connections you had open, what windows were active, etc. The more you can tell us, the higher your odds go up to getting a quick fix or at least an answer as to what is happening. Also include the following information: The version of SQL Developer you are running The version of the JDK you are using The OS you are using The version of Oracle you are connected to Now, don’t be surprised if you get asked to upgrade to a supported configuration, say ‘version 3.1 and the 1.6 JDK.’ Supporting older versions of software is fun, and while we enjoy a challenge, it may be easier for you to upgrade your way out of the problem at hand.

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• SQL Azure Reporting Limited CTP Arrived

  - by Shaun

  It’s about 3 months later when I registered the SQL Azure Reporting CTP on the Microsoft Connect after TechED 2010 China. Today when I checked my mailbox I found that the SQL Azure team had just accepted my request and sent the activation code over to me. So let’s have a look on the new SQL Azure Reporting.   Concept The SQL Azure Reporting provides cloud-based reporting as a service, built on SQL Server Reporting Services and SQL Azure technologies. Cloud-based reporting solutions such as SQL Azure Reporting provide many benefits, including rapid provisioning, cost-effective scalability, high availability, and reduced management overhead for report servers; and secure access, viewing, and management of reports. By using the SQL Azure Reporting service, we can do: Embed the Visual Studio Report Viewer ADO.NET Ajax control or Windows Form control to view the reports deployed on SQL Azure Reporting Service in our web or desktop application. Leverage the SQL Azure Reporting SOAP API to manage and retrieve the report content from any kinds of application. Use the SQL Azure Reporting Service Portal to navigate and view the reports deployed on the cloud. Since the SQL Azure Reporting was built based on the SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Service, we can use any tools we are familiar with, such as the SQL Server Integration Studio, Visual Studio Report Viewer. The SQL Azure Reporting Service runs as a remote SQL Server Reporting Service just on the cloud rather than on a server besides us.   Establish a New SQL Azure Reporting Let’s move to the windows azure deveploer portal and click the Reporting item from the left side navigation bar. If you don’t have the activation code you can click the Sign Up button to send a requirement to the Microsoft Connect. Since I already recieved the received code mail I clicked the Provision button. Then after agree the terms of the service I will select the subscription for where my SQL Azure Reporting CTP should be provisioned. In this case I selected my free Windows Azure Pass subscription. Then the final step, paste the activation code and enter the password of our SQL Azure Reporting Service. The user name of the SQL Azure Reporting will be generated by SQL Azure automatically. After a while the new SQL Azure Reporting Server will be shown on our developer portal. The Reporting Service URL and the user name will be shown as well. We can reset the password from the toolbar button.   Deploy Report to SQL Azure Reporting If you are familiar with SQL Server Reporting Service you will find this part will be very similar with what you know and what you did before. Firstly we open the SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio and create a new Report Server Project. Then we will create a shared data source where the report data will be retrieved from. This data source can be SQL Azure but we can use local SQL Server or other database if it opens the port up. In this case we use a SQL Azure database located in the same data center of our reporting service. In the Credentials tab page we entered the user name and password to this SQL Azure database. The SQL Azure Reporting CTP only available at the North US Data Center now so that the related SQL Server and hosted service might be better to select the same data center to avoid the external data transfer fee. Then we create a very simple report, just retrieve all records from a table named Members and have a table in the report to list them. In the data source selection step we choose the shared data source we created before, then enter the T-SQL to select all records from the Member table, then put all fields into the table columns. The report will be like this as following In order to deploy the report onto the SQL Azure Reporting Service we need to update the project property. Right click the project node from the solution explorer and select the property item. In the Target Server URL item we will specify the reporting server URL of our SQL Azure Reporting. We can go back to the developer portal and select the reporting node from the left side, then copy the Web Service URL and paste here. But notice that we need to append “/reportserver” after pasted. Then just click the Deploy menu item in the context menu of the project, the Visual Studio will compile the report and then upload to the reporting service accordingly. In this step we will be prompted to input the user name and password of our SQL Azure Reporting Service. We can get the user name from the developer portal, just next to the Web Service URL in the SQL Azure Reporting page. And the password is the one we specified when created the reporting service. After about one minute the report will be deployed succeed.   View the Report in Browser SQL Azure Reporting allows us to view the reports which deployed on the cloud from a standard browser. We copied the Web Service URL from the reporting service main page and appended “/reportserver” in HTTPS protocol then we will have the SQL Azure Reporting Service login page. After entered the user name and password of the SQL Azure Reporting Service we can see the directories and reports listed. Click the report will launch the Report Viewer to render the report.   View Report in a Web Role with the Report Viewer The ASP.NET and Windows Form Report Viewer works well with the SQL Azure Reporting Service as well. We can create a ASP.NET Web Role and added the Report Viewer control in the default page. What we need to change to the report viewer are Change the Processing Mode to Remote. Specify the Report Server URL under the Server Remote category to the URL of the SQL Azure Reporting Web Service URL with “/reportserver” appended. Specify the Report Path to the report which we want to display. The report name should NOT include the extension name. For example my report was in the SqlAzureReportingTest project and named MemberList.rdl then the report path should be /SqlAzureReportingTest/MemberList. And the next one is to specify the SQL Azure Reporting Credentials. We can use the following class to wrap the report server credential. 1: private class ReportServerCredentials : IReportServerCredentials 2: { 3: private string _userName; 4: private string _password; 5: private string _domain; 6:  7: public ReportServerCredentials(string userName, string password, string domain) 8: { 9: _userName = userName; 10: _password = password; 11: _domain = domain; 12: } 13:  14: public WindowsIdentity ImpersonationUser 15: { 16: get 17: { 18: return null; 19: } 20: } 21:  22: public ICredentials NetworkCredentials 23: { 24: get 25: { 26: return null; 27: } 28: } 29:  30: public bool GetFormsCredentials(out Cookie authCookie, out string user, out string password, out string authority) 31: { 32: authCookie = null; 33: user = _userName; 34: password = _password; 35: authority = _domain; 36: return true; 37: } 38: } And then in the Page_Load method, pass it to the report viewer. 1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: ReportViewer1.ServerReport.ReportServerCredentials = new ReportServerCredentials( 4: "<user name>", 5: "<password>", 6: "<sql azure reporting web service url>"); 7: } Finally deploy it to Windows Azure and enjoy the report.   Summary In this post I introduced the SQL Azure Reporting CTP which had just available. Likes other features in Windows Azure, the SQL Azure Reporting is very similar with the SQL Server Reporting. As you can see in this post we can use the existing and familiar tools to build and deploy the reports and display them on a website. But the SQL Azure Reporting is just in the CTP stage which means It is free. There’s no support for it. Only available at the North US Data Center. You can get more information about the SQL Azure Reporting CTP from the links following SQL Azure Reporting Limited CTP at MSDN SQL Azure Reporting Samples at TechNet Wiki You can download the solutions and the projects used in this post here.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Compress Large Video Files with DivX / Xvid and AutoGK

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Have you ever recorded home video on a camcorder only to find the video size is enormous? What if you wanted to share a video clip on YouTube or another video sharing site, but the file size was bigger than the maximum upload size? Today we’ll look at a way to compress certain video files, such as MPEG and AVI, with Auto Gordian Knot (AutoGK). AutoGK is a free application that runs on Windows. It supports Mpeg1, Mpeg2, Transport Streams, Vobs, and virtually any codec used for an .AVI file. AutoGK will accept as input the following file types: MPG, MPEG, VOB, VRO, M2V, DAT, IFO, TS, TP, TRP, M2T, and AVI. Files are output as .AVI files and are converted using the DivX or XviD codecs. Installing and Using AutoGK Download and install AutoGK (link below) Open the AutoGK. You’ll need to navigate a few wizard screens, but you can just accept the defaults.   Choose your video file by clicking on the folder to the right of the Input file text box.   Browse for and select your video file and click “Open.”   For this example, we’ll be working with an .AVI file that’s 167MB in size.   The output file is copied into the same directory as the input file by default, but you can change this if you choose. If the input file is also .AVI, AutoGK will append an _agk to the output file so that the original is not overwritten. Next, you’ll see any audio tracks listed. You can unselect the check box if you’d like to remove the audio track. You can choose one of the Predefined size options… Or, select a Custom size in MB or Target Quality in percentage. For our example, we’ll be compressing our 167MB file to 35MB. Click on Advanced Settings. Here you can choose your codec, if you have a preference, as well as output resolution and output audio. If you’d like to use the DivX codec, you’ll need to download and install it separately. (See link below) Typically you’ll want to keep the defaults. Click “OK.” Now you’re ready to add your file conversion job to the Job queue. Click Add Job to add it to the queue. You can add multiple files conversions to the job queue and  convert them in one batch. Click Start to begin the conversion process. The process will begin. You’ll be able to see the progress in the Log window on the bottom left. When the conversion is complete you’ll see a “Job finished” and the total time in the log window.   Check your output file to see it’s compressed size. Test your video just to make sure the output quality is satisfactory.   Note:  Conversion times can vary greatly depending on the size of the file and your computer hardware. Files that are several GBs in size may take several hours to compress. AutoGK is no longer being actively developed but is still a wonderful DivX/XviD conversion tool. It can also be used to compress and convert non-copy protected DVDs. Downloads AutoGordianKnot DivX (optional) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Use Your Mac Mini as a Media Server Part 2Make Disk Cleanup Compress Older(or Newer) Files on XPMysticgeek Blog: Exclusive Look Inside Vreel – Including Interview With Vreel Founder!Friday Fun: Watch HD Video Content with MeevidConvert a DVD Movie Directly to AVI with FairUse Wizard 2.9 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Penolo Lets You Share Sketches On Twitter Visit Woolyss.com for Old School Games, Music and Videos Add a Custom Title in IE using Spybot or Spyware Blaster When You Need to Hail a Taxi in NYC Live Map of Marine Traffic NoSquint Remembers Site Specific Zoom Levels (Firefox)

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• SmtpClient and Locked File Attachments

  - by Rick Strahl

  Got a note a couple of days ago from a client using one of my generic routines that wraps SmtpClient. Apparently whenever a file has been attached to a message and emailed with SmtpClient the file remains locked after the message has been sent. Oddly this particular issue hasn’t cropped up before for me although these routines are in use in a number of applications I’ve built. The wrapper I use was built mainly to backfit an old pre-.NET 2.0 email client I built using Sockets to avoid the CDO nightmares of the .NET 1.x mail client. The current class retained the same class interface but now internally uses SmtpClient which holds a flat property interface that makes it less verbose to send off email messages. File attachments in this interface are handled by providing a comma delimited list for files in an Attachments string property which is then collected along with the other flat property settings and eventually passed on to SmtpClient in the form of a MailMessage structure. The jist of the code is something like this: /// <summary> /// Fully self contained mail sending method. Sends an email message by connecting /// and disconnecting from the email server. /// </summary> /// <returns>true or false</returns> public bool SendMail() { if (!this.Connect()) return false; try { // Create and configure the message MailMessage msg = this.GetMessage(); smtp.Send(msg); this.OnSendComplete(this); } catch (Exception ex) { string msg = ex.Message; if (ex.InnerException != null) msg = ex.InnerException.Message; this.SetError(msg); this.OnSendError(this); return false; } finally { // close connection and clear out headers // SmtpClient instance nulled out this.Close(); } return true; } /// <summary> /// Configures the message interface /// </summary> /// <param name="msg"></param> protected virtual MailMessage GetMessage() { MailMessage msg = new MailMessage(); msg.Body = this.Message; msg.Subject = this.Subject; msg.From = new MailAddress(this.SenderEmail, this.SenderName); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.ReplyTo)) msg.ReplyTo = new MailAddress(this.ReplyTo); // Send all the different recipients this.AssignMailAddresses(msg.To, this.Recipient); this.AssignMailAddresses(msg.CC, this.CC); this.AssignMailAddresses(msg.Bcc, this.BCC); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.Attachments)) { string[] files = this.Attachments.Split(new char[2] { ',', ';' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); foreach (string file in files) { msg.Attachments.Add(new Attachment(file)); } } if (this.ContentType.StartsWith("text/html")) msg.IsBodyHtml = true; else msg.IsBodyHtml = false; msg.BodyEncoding = this.Encoding; … additional code omitted return msg; } Basically this code collects all the property settings of the wrapper object and applies them to the SmtpClient and in GetMessage() to an individual MailMessage properties. Specifically notice that attachment filenames are converted from a comma-delimited string to filenames from which new attachments are created. The code as it’s written however, will cause the problem with file attachments not being released properly. Internally .NET opens up stream handles and reads the files from disk to dump them into the email send stream. The attachments are always sent correctly but the local files are not immediately closed. As you probably guessed the issue is simply that some resources are not automatcially disposed when sending is complete and sure enough the following code change fixes the problem: // Create and configure the message using (MailMessage msg = this.GetMessage()) { smtp.Send(msg); if (this.SendComplete != null) this.OnSendComplete(this); // or use an explicit msg.Dispose() here } The Message object requires an explicit call to Dispose() (or a using() block as I have here) to force the attachment files to get closed. I think this is rather odd behavior for this scenario however. The code I use passes in filenames and my expectation of an API that accepts file names is that it uses the files by opening and streaming them and then closing them when done. Why keep the streams open and require an explicit .Dispose() by the calling code which is bound to lead to unexpected behavior just as my customer ran into? Any API level code should clean up as much as possible and this is clearly not happening here resulting in unexpected behavior. Apparently lots of other folks have run into this before as I found based on a few Twitter comments on this topic. Odd to me too is that SmtpClient() doesn’t implement IDisposable – it’s only the MailMessage (and Attachments) that implement it and require it to clean up for left over resources like open file handles. This means that you couldn’t even use a using() statement around the SmtpClient code to resolve this – instead you’d have to wrap it around the message object which again is rather unexpected. Well, chalk that one up to another small unexpected behavior that wasted a half an hour of my time – hopefully this post will help someone avoid this same half an hour of hunting and searching. Resources: Full code to SmptClientNative (West Wind Web Toolkit Repository) SmtpClient Documentation MSDN © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in .NET  

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• My Interview with Microsoft

  - by Victor Hurdugaci

  This post is for those who want to apply or have already applied (but not finished the interview) for a Microsoft Job. The recruitment process is quite similar for everyone and consists of a few steps. Application E-Mail Interview Phone Interview On Site Interview I will tell you my story and how I went through the four phases. 1. Application My blog's title (Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit) means "Nothing Comes Out of Nothing". You can't get a job at Microsoft by not doing anything - this is true for anything else. The first step you need to complete is the application process. For this, many options are available. You can... ... apply online on Microsoft's Careers website as I did ... send your CV to different e-mail addresses (there are some dedicated e-mails for different positions) ... apply through some 3rd party organization (job shop, campus recruitment, job agency, etc) On MS Careers you just have to post your CV and choose the job you want. That's all! No recommendation letter, no cover letter, no nothing. Of course, not every CV passes the selection process. Here are some tips for improving your resume (worked for me): Don't write it just before applying! Write a draft version, wait a few days and then review it. This way you will find a lot of mistakes and stupid things you wrote initially. If you review it immediately after writing, your mind will not be criticism oriented and will just ignore mistakes. Repeat the write-wait-review process as many times as necessary, until you find that the review revealed no mistakes. After you did the final review and the CV is bullet-proof, ask others to review it. They will definitely find inconsistencies and mistakes and this will make you feel stupid. This is good because will open your eyes will make you go into an 'I want to improve' mode. You'll try to correct everything. After you come up with a modified version go again through steps 1 and 2. Repeat this as many times as necessary. [Special thanks to Lucian Sasu, Nadia Comanici, Andrei Ciobanu, Monica Balan and Lavinia Tanase for reviewing my CV!] Make it short and give only relevant facts. Initially, I come up with a 5 pages CV because I wrote every single technology with which I worked. There were a lot irrelevant things, I wrote Windows Workflow Foundation just because I played with it for a few days. I added extensive descriptions for every project, made a personal details section (name, birth date, address, etc) of 1/2 page. Others suggested to cut everything that was not necessary. You don't need to give extensive descriptions, just add a few words. For example, I wrote "VS Image Visualizer - Visual Studio 2008 debug visualizer for images" and added a link to the project's page - you submit formatted andcan embed links. Add something that makes it different. I don't know if this makes a difference, but I added some lines to separate items just like in the picture below. Definitely Microsoft gets thousands of CVs per day. You need something special. Don't lie! Tell exactly what you did and what is the proficiency level of your skills. For example, don't write "Advanced" for UML if you don't know the difference between composition and aggregation. Be realistic and don't under/over estimate yourself. Use the spell chick. Make sure everything is written in correct English and there are no grammar/spelling mistakes. Noddy likes a WC with grammar mi takes. You mght fail just because of that. Once you completed your CV, choose the job that suits best your needs, apply and wait... The waiting is a problem because all these big companies like Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple, etc. will contact you only if they find something interesting in your application. If you're not suitable, then no rejection is sent. I applied for an Intern Software Development Engineer position at Microsoft Redmond. I cannot apply for a full time position because I want to finish the master program on time, in the next summer - an internship is just what I need. 2. E-Mail Interview January 20, 2010. Two months since I submitted the CV. I wasn't hoping anymore that MS will contact me, when I got an e-mail titled: "Victor Hurdugaci ES DK" from Holly Peterson saying: Read more >>

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• SQL SERVER – Simple Example of Snapshot Isolation – Reduce the Blocking Transactions

  - by pinaldave

  To learn any technology and move to a more advanced level, it is very important to understand the fundamentals of the subject first. Today, we will be talking about something which has been quite introduced a long time ago but not properly explored when it comes to the isolation level. Snapshot Isolation was introduced in SQL Server in 2005. However, the reality is that there are still many software shops which are using the SQL Server 2000, and therefore cannot be able to maintain the Snapshot Isolation. Many software shops have upgraded to the later version of the SQL Server, but their respective developers have not spend enough time to upgrade themselves with the latest technology. “It works!” is a very common answer of many when they are asked about utilizing the new technology, instead of backward compatibility commands. In one of the recent consultation project, I had same experience when developers have “heard about it” but have no idea about snapshot isolation. They were thinking it is the same as Snapshot Replication – which is plain wrong. This is the same demo I am including here which I have created for them. In Snapshot Isolation, the updated row versions for each transaction are maintained in TempDB. Once a transaction has begun, it ignores all the newer rows inserted or updated in the table. Let us examine this example which shows the simple demonstration. This transaction works on optimistic concurrency model. Since reading a certain transaction does not block writing transaction, it also does not block the reading transaction, which reduced the blocking. First, enable database to work with Snapshot Isolation. Additionally, check the existing values in the table from HumanResources.Shift. ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON GO SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO Now, we will need two different sessions to prove this example. First Session: Set Transaction level isolation to snapshot and begin the transaction. Update the column “ModifiedDate” to today’s date. -- Session 1 SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SNAPSHOT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE HumanResources.Shift SET ModifiedDate = GETDATE() GO Please note that we have not yet been committed to the transaction. Now, open the second session and run the following “SELECT” statement. Then, check the values of the table. Please pay attention on setting the Isolation level for the second one as “Snapshot” at the same time when we already start the transaction using BEGIN TRAN. -- Session 2 SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SNAPSHOT BEGIN TRAN SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO You will notice that the values in the table are still original values. They have not been modified yet. Once again, go back to session 1 and begin the transaction. -- Session 1 COMMIT After that, go back to Session 2 and see the values of the table. -- Session 2 SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO You will notice that the values are yet not changed and they are still the same old values which were there right in the beginning of the session. Now, let us commit the transaction in the session 2. Once committed, run the same SELECT statement once more and see what the result is. -- Session 2 COMMIT SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO You will notice that it now reflects the new updated value. I hope that this example is clear enough as it would give you good idea how the Snapshot Isolation level works. There is much more to write about an extra level, READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT, which we will be discussing in another post soon. If you wish to use this transaction’s Isolation level in your production database, I would appreciate your comments about their performance on your servers. I have included here the complete script used in this example for your quick reference. ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON GO SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO -- Session 1 SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SNAPSHOT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE HumanResources.Shift SET ModifiedDate = GETDATE() GO -- Session 2 SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SNAPSHOT BEGIN TRAN SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO -- Session 1 COMMIT -- Session 2 SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO -- Session 2 COMMIT SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Transaction Isolation

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• Three Steps to Becoming an Expert Oracle Linux System Administrator

  - by Antoinette O'Sullivan

  Oracle provides a complete system administration curriculum to take you from your initial experience of Unix to being an expert Oracle Linux system administrator. You can take these live instructor-led courses from your own desk through live-virtual events or by traveling to an education center through in-class events. Step 1: Unix and Linux Essentials This 3-day course is designed for users and administrators who are new to Oracle Linux. It will help you develop the basic UNIX skills needed to interact comfortably and confidently with the operating system. Below is a sample of the in-class events already on the schedule.  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Vivoorde, Belgium  28 October 2013  English  Berlin, Germany  15 July 2013  German  Utrecht, Netherlands  19 August 2013  Dutch  Bucarest, Romania  12 August 2013  Romanian  Ankara, Turkey  6 January 2013  Turkish  Nairobi, Kenya  5 August 2013  English  Kaduna, Nigeria  15 July 2013  English   Woodmead, South Africa  15 July 2013  English   Jakarta, Indonesia  23 September 2013  English  Petaling Jaya, Malaysia  22 July 2013  English  Makati City, Philippines  3 July 2013  English  Bangkok, Thailand  20 November 2013  English  Auckland, New Zealand  5 August 2013  English  Melbourne, Australia  12 August 2013  English  Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Canada  3 September 2013  English  San Francisco and San Jose, CA, United States  15 July 2013  English  Reston, VA, United States  7 August 2013  English  Edison, NJ, and King of Prussia, PA, United States  3 September 2013  English  Denver, CO, United States  25 September 2013  English  Cambridge, MA, and Roseville MN, United States  6 November 2013  English  Phoenix, AZ, and Sacramento, CA, United States  25 November 2013  English Step 2: Oracle Linux System Administration Through this 5-day course, become a knowledgeable Oracle Linux system administrator, learning how to install Oracle Linux and the benefits of Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and Ksplice. Below is a sample of in-class events already on the schedule.  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Vienna, Austria  1 July 2013  German  Vivoorde, Belgium  18 November 2013  English  Zagreb, Croatia  16 September 2013  Croatian  London, England  3 September 2013  English  Manchester, England  9 September 2013  English  Paris, France  29 July 2013  French  Budapest, Hungary  8 July 2013  Hungarian  Utrecht, Netherland  2 September 2013  Dutch  Warsaw, Poland  15 July 2013  Polish  Bucharest, Romania  2 December 2013  Romanian  Ankara, Turkey  7 October 2013  Turkish  Istanbul, Turkey  9 September 2013  Turkish  Nairobi, Kenya  12 August 2013  English  Petaling Jaya, Malaysia  29 July 2013  English  Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia  21 October 2013  English  Makati City, Philippines  8 July 2013  English  Singapore  24 July 2013  English  Bangkok, Thailand  26 July 2013  English  Canberra, Australia  19 August 2013  English  Melbourne, Australia  16 September 2013  English   Sydney, Australia 19 August 2013   English   Mississauga, Canada  26 August 2013  English  Ottawa, Canada  4 November 2013  English  Phoenix, AZ, United States  7 October 2013  English  Belmont, CA, United States  23 September 2013  English  Irvine, CA, United States  18 November 2013  English  Sacramento, CA, United States  19 August 2013  English  San Francisco, CA, United States  15 July 2013  English  Denver, CO, United States  19 August 2013  English  Schaumburg, IL, United States  26 August 2013  English  Indianapolis, IN, United States  14 October 2013  English  Columbia, MD, United States  30 September 2013  English  Roseville, MN, United States  19 August 2013  English  St Louis, MO, United States  7 October 2013  English  Edison, NJ, United States  28 October 2013  English  Beaverton, OR, United States  12 August 2013  English  Pittsburg, PA, United States 9 December 2013   English  Reston, VA, United States 12 August 2013   English  Brookfield, WI, United States 30 September 2013   English  Sao Paolo, Brazil 15 July 2013   Brazilian Portugese Step 3: Oracle Linux Advanced System Administration This new 3-day course is ideal for administrators who want to learn about managing resources and file systems while developing troubleshooting and advanced storage administration skills. You will learn about Linux Containers, Cgroups, btrfs, DTrace and more. Below is a sample of in-class events already on the schedule.  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Melbourne, Australia  9 October 2013  English  Roseville, MN, United States  3 September 2013  English To register for or learn more about these courses, go to http://oracle.com/education/linux. Watch this video to learn more about Oracle's operating system training.

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• Easily use google maps, openstreet maps etc offline.

  - by samkea

  I did it and i am going to explain step by step. The explanatination may appear long but its simple if you follow. Note: All the softwares i have used are the latest and i have packaged them and provided them in the link below. I use Nokia N96 1) RootSign smartComGPS and install it on your phone(i havent provided the signer so that u wuld do some little work. i used Secman' rootsign). 2) Install Universal Maps Downloader, SmartCom OGF2 converter and OziExplorer 3.95.4s on my PC. a) UMD is used to download map tiles from any map source like googlemaps,opensourcemaps etc... and also combine the tiles into an image file like png,jpg,bmp etc... b) SmartCom OGF2 converter is used to convert the image file into a format usable on your mobile phone. c) OziExplorer will help you to calibrate the usable map file so that it can be used with GPS on your mobile phone without the use of internet. 3) Go to google maps or where u pick your maps and pan to the area of your interest. Zoom the map to at least 15 or 16 zoom level where you can see your area clearly and the streets. 4) copy this script in a notepad file and save it on your desktop: javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().ge tCenter())); 5) Open the universal maps downloader. You will notice that you are required to add the: left longitude, right longitude,top latitude, bottom latitude. 6) On your map in google maps, doubleclick on the your prefered to most middle point. you will notice that the map will center in that area. 7) copy the script and paste it in the address bar then press enter. You will notice that a dialog with your (top latitude) and longitude respectively pops up. 8) copy the top latitude ONLY and paste it in the corresponding textbox in the UMD. 9) repeat steps 6-7 for the botton latitude. 10)repeat steps 6-7 for left longitude and right longitude too, but u have to copy the longitudes here. (***BTW record these points in the text file as they may be needed later in calibration) 11) Give the zoom level to the same zoom level that you prefered in google maps. 12) Dont forget to choose a path to save your files and under options set the proxy connection settings in UMD if you are using so. 13) Click on start and bingo! there you have your image tiles and a file with an extension .umd will be saved in the same folder. 14) On the UMD, go to tools, click on MapViewer and choose the .umd file. you will now see your map in one piece....and you will smile! 15) Still go to tools and click on map combiner. A dialog will popup for you to choose the .umd file and to enter the IMAGE file name. u can use another extension for the image file like png, jpg etc...i usually use png. 16) Combine.....bingo! there u go! u have an IMAGE file for your map. *I SUGGEST THAT CREATE A .BMP FILE and A .PNG file* 17) Close UMD and open SmartCom OGF2 converter. 18) Choose your .png image and create an ogf2 file. 19) Connect your phone to your PC in Mass Memory mode and transfer the file to the smartComGPS\Maps folder. 20) Now disconnect your phone and load smartComGPS. it will load the map and propt you to add a calibration point. Go ahead and add one calibration point with dummy coordinates. You will notice that it will add another file with extension .map in the smartComGPS\Maps folder. 21) Connect yiur ohone and copy that file and paste it in your working folder on your PC. Delete that .map file from the phone too because you are going to edit it from your PC and put it back. 22) Now Open the OziExplorer, go to file-->Load and Calibrate Map Image. 23) Choose the .bmp image and bingo! it will load with your map in the same zoom level. 24) Now you are going to calibrate. Use the MapView window and take the small box locater to all the 4 cornners of the map. You will notice that the map in the back ground moves to that area too. 25)On the right side, select the Point1 tab. Now you are in calibration mode. Now move the red box in mapview in the left upper corner to calibrate point1. 26) out of mapview go to the the left upper corner of the background map and choose poit (0,0) and your 1st calibration point. You will notice that these X,Y cordinated will be reflected in the Point1 image cordinates. 27) now go back to the text file where you saved your coordibates and enter the top latitude and the left longitude in the corresponding places. 28) Repeat steps 25-27 for point2,point3,point4 and click on save. Thats it, you have calibrated your image and you are about to finish. 29) Go to save and a dilaog which prompts you to save a .map file will poop up. Do save the map file in your working folder. 30) Right click that .map file and edit the filename in the .map file to remove the pc's directory structure. Eg. Change C\OziExplorer\data\Kampala.bmp to Kampala.ogf2. 31) Save the .map file in the smartComGPS\Maps folder on your phone. 32) now open smartComGPS on your phone and bingo! there is your map with GPS capability and in the same zoom level. 33) In smartComGPS options, choose connect and simulate. By now you should be smiling. Whoa! Hope i was of help. i case you get a problem, please inform me Below is the link to the software. regards. http://rapidshare.com/files/230296037/Utilities_Used.rar.html Ok, the Rapidshare files i posted are gone, so you will have to download as described in the solution. If you need more help, go here: http://www.dotsis.com/mobile_phone/sitemap/t-160491.html Some months later, someone else gave almost the same kind of solution here. http://www.dotsis.com/mobile_phone/sitemap/t-180123.html Note: the solutions were mean't to help view maps on Symbian phones, but i think now they ca even do for Windows Phones, iphones and others so read, extract what you want and use it. Hope it helps. Sam Kea

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, September 30, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, September 30, 2012Popular ReleasesCAPTCHA Solver: Initial Release: This is the initial Release :) Still very much a WIP.MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.17: Reccomended update to 2.2.16 Changelog for 2.2.17 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Fixed bugs around thread synchronization with new remote model (fixes cause the app to crash or hang) 2. Updated UPnP code base, faster and more reliable now 3. Now you can get audio/video properties for multiple files on main page. Selected multiple files and right click, all selected files properties will be shown. 4. Fix a bug, not able to enter a conversion task name in the GUIAggravation: Version 1.0: This version 1.0 release is pretty stable. You need the Silverlight 4 runtime, developer tools, and Experssion Blend 4 installed.Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.1: See the KeePass Plugin Step By Step Guide for instructions on how to install the plugin. Changes Built against KeePass 2.20Windows 8 Toolkit - Charts and More: Beta 1.0: The First Compiled Version of my LibraryPDF.NET: PDF.NET.Ver4.5-OpenSourceCode: PDF.NET Ver4.5 ????，????Web??????。 PDF.NET Ver4.5 Open Source Code,include a sample Web application project.D3 Loot Tracker: 1.4: Session name is displayed in the UI. Changes data directory for clickonce deployment so that sessions files are persisted between versions. Added a delete button in the sessions list window. Allow opening of the sessions local folder from the session list widow. Display the session name in the main window Ability to select which diablo process to hook up to when pressing new () function BUT only if multi-process support is selected in the generals settings tab menu. Session picker...CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta What's New: Fixed scrolling issue in UnHide dialog Added support for connecting via ADFS / IFD Added support for more than one action for a button Added support for empty StringParameter for Javascript functions Fixed bug in rule CrmClientTypeRule when selecting Outlook option Extended Prefix field in New Button dialogVisual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.2: This version contains no new images from v1.5.1 Contains the following improvements: Better support for detecting the installed languages The extract & inject commands won’t run if Visual Studio is running You may now run in extract or inject mode The p/invoke code was cleaned up based on Code Analysis recommendations When a p/invoke method fails the Win32 error message is now displayed Error messages use red text Status messages use green textZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.9.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved api better Unity support Windows RT binaries Windows CE binaries new Windows Service demo new WPF demo WindowsCE Hotfix: Fixes an error with ISO8859-1 encoding and scannning of QR-Codes. The hotfix is only needed for the WindowsCE platform.C.B.R. : Comic Book Reader: CBR 0.7: Synthesis since 0.6 : ePUB : Complete refactoring Add a new dedicated feed viewer for opds stream PDF conversion : improved with image merge Make all backstage panel scrollable Integrate the new AvalonDock 2 library. Support multi-document. Library explorer and Table of content are now toolboxes Designer for dynamic books is now mvvm and much better New BrowserForControl Customized xps viewer to suppress toolbars and bind it to cbr commands Add quick start manual and button ...menu4web: menu4web 1.0 - free javascript menu for web sites: menu4web 1.0 has been tested with all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. Minified m4w.js library is less than 9K. Includes 21 menu examples of different styles. Can be freely distributed under The MIT License (MIT).Rawr: Rawr 5.0.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.26: The zh-CN issue has been solved. We also add a project management module.VidCoder: 1.4.1 Beta: Updated to HandBrake 4971. This should fix some issues with stuck PGS subtitles. Fixed build break which prevented pre-compiled XML serializers from showing up. Fixed problem where a preset would get errantly marked as modified when re-opening the encode settings window or importing a new preset.Snake!: Snake 1.0: Version 1 StablePaging SharePoint ListItems using listitems position: Paginglistitems V1.0: This is a console application which has two methods both on CSOM and SOM to display the listitems in a paged manner.SharePoint Move Discussion Threads: SharePoint Move Discussion Threads ver 0.1: ver 0.1NTCPMSG: V1.1.1.0: increase the performance. Support .net framework 4.0.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.2: 2012.09.23 Ver5.7.2 (1)InetTest?? (2)HTTP?????????????????100???????????New Projects2D Sprite Editor: This is a 2d sprite editor. Import your sprite sheet, trace your animations frame and export the coordinates points in a simple txt file, ready to import.caifenweb1: test project.CatchThatException: This is a small logging library We created at developerpath.com to help us log exceptions. It write it to a text file and you can easilay open that txt.FsxWs - WebServices for Microsoft FSX: WebServices for MS Flight Simulator. Get flights data as JSON, KML. !! Still in SetUp phase - be patient !!GetTPB: Some training in downloading and parsing web pages, with multithreading too.JSON-RPC Client Generator (for XBMC): The goal of this project is to provide a .Net client for the XBMC JSONRPC API. The main part is not XBMC dependent and may be used for any JSON-RPC client.matlab-silhouette-pose-wtf: Whatevermfp: this is random codeMVC Grid: MVC Grid ExampleMyWebSocketTry: sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssNetduino Console: Netduino Console is an interface with built in messaging layers that allows you as a developer to dynamically create plugins following a provided interface to iSharePoint ASP.NET Verifier: Project will allow to verify SharePoint 2010 components using ASP.NET web applicationSharepoint Custom Upload: This is a SharePoint solution that allows an administrator to customize the upload page individually for each document library in a site.. It allows you to makeWinWeb Browser Deluxe: WinWeb Browser Deluxe es un navegador web de código abierto basado en Internet Explorer hecho en Visual Basic .NET. Descargalo ya!writethatoutput: This is the official release page for WriteThatOutPut from developerpath.com

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• Adopting DBVCS

  - by Wes McClure

  Identify early adopters Pick a small project with a small(ish) team.  This can be a legacy application or a green-field application. Strive to find a team of early adopters that will be eager to try something new. Get the team on board! Research Research the tool(s) that you want to use.  Some tools provide all of the features you would need while some only provide a slice of the pie.  DBVCS requires the ability to manage a set of change scripts that update a database from one version to the next.  Ideally a tool can track database versions and automatically apply updates.  The change script generation process can be manual, but having diff tools available to automatically generate it can really reduce the overhead to adoption.  Finally, an automated tool to generate a script file per database object is an added bonus as your version control system can quickly identify what was changed in a commit (add/del/modify), just like with code changes. Don’t settle on just one tool, identify several.  Then work with the team to evaluate the tools.  Have the team do some tests of the following scenarios with each tool: Baseline an existing database: can the migration tool work with legacy databases?  Caution: most migration platforms do not support baselines or have poor support, especially the fad of fluent APIs. Add/drop tables Add/drop procedures/functions/views Alter tables (rename columns, add columns, remove columns) Massage data – migrations sometimes involve changing data types that cannot be implicitly casted and require you to decide how the data is explicitly cast to the new type.  This is a requirement for a migrations platform.  Think about a case where you might want to combine fields, or move a field from one table to another, you wouldn’t want to lose the data. Run the tool via the command line.  If you cannot automate the tool in Continuous Integration what is the point? Create a copy of a database on demand. Backup/restore databases locally. Let the team give feedback and decide together, what tool they would like to try out. My recommendation at this point would be to include TSqlMigrations and RoundHouse as SQL based migration platforms.  In general I would recommend staying away from the fluent platforms as they often lack baseline capabilities and add overhead to learn a new API when SQL is already a very well known DSL.  Code migrations often get messy with procedures/views/functions as these have to be created with SQL and aren’t cross platform anyways.  IMO stick to SQL based migrations. Reconciling Production If your project is a legacy application, you will need to reconcile the current state of production with your development databases.  Find changes in production and bring them down to development, even if they are old and need to be removed.  Once complete, produce a baseline of either dev or prod as they are now in sync.  Commit this to your VCS of choice. Add whatever schema changes tracking mechanism your tool requires to your development database.  This often requires adding a table to track the schema version of that database.  Your tool should support doing this for you.  You can add this table to production when you do your next release. Script out any changes currently in dev.  Remove production artifacts that you brought down during reconciliation.  Add change scripts for any outstanding changes in dev since the last production release.  Commit these to your repository.   Say No to Shared Dev DBs Simply put, you wouldn’t dream of sharing a code checkout, why would you share a development database?  If you have a shared dev database, back it up, distribute the backups and take the shared version offline (including the dev db server once all projects are using DB VCS).  Doing DB VCS with a shared database is bound to cause problems as people won’t be able to easily script out their own changes from those that others are working on.   First prod release Copy prod to your beta/testing environment.  Add the schema changes table (or mechanism) and do a test run of your changes.  If successful you can schedule this to be run on production.   Evaluation After your first release, evaluate the pain points of the process.  Try to find tools or modifications to existing tools to help fix them.  Don’t leave stones unturned, iteratively evolve your tools and practices to make the process as seamless as possible.  This is why I suggest open source alternatives.  Nothing is set in stone, a good example was adding transactional support to TSqlMigrations.  We ran into situations where an update would break a database, so I added a feature to do transactional updates and rollback on errors!  Another good example is generating change scripts.  We have been manually making these for months now.  I found an open source project called Open DB Diff and integrated this with TSqlMigrations.  These were things we just accepted at the time when we began adopting our tool set.  Once we became comfortable with the base functionality, it was time to start automating more of the process.  Just like anything else with development, never be afraid to try to find tools to make your job easier!   Enjoy -Wes

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