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• SQL SERVER – SQL Server Misconceptions and Resolution – A Practical Perspective – TechEd 2012 India

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India 2012 is just around the corner and I will be presenting there in two different sessions. On the very first day of this event, my presentation will be all about SQL Server Misconceptions and Resolution – A Practical Perspective. The dictionary tells us that a “misconception” means a view or opinion that is incorrect and is based on faulty thinking or understanding. In SQL Server, there are so many misconceptions. In fact, when I hear some of these misconceptions, I feel like fainting at that very moment! Seriously, at one time, I came across the scenario where instead of using INSERT INTO…SELECT, the developer used CURSOR believing that cursor is faster (duh!). Here is the link the blog post related to this. Pinal and Vinod in 2009 I have been presenting in TechEd India for last three years. This is my fourth opportunity to present a technical session on SQL Server. Just like the previous years, I decided to present something different. Here is a novelty of this year: I will be presenting this session with Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar and I have a great synergy when we work together. So far, we have written one SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers book and 2 video courses: (1) SQL Server Questions and Answers (2) SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics. Pinal and Vinod in 2011 When we sat together and started building an outline for this course, we had many options in mind for this tango session. However, we have decided that we will make this session as lively as possible while keeping it natural at the same time. We know our flow and we know our conversation highlight, but we do not know what exactly each of us is going to present. We have decided to challenge each other on stage and push each other’s knowledge to the verge. We promise that the session will be entertaining with lots of SQL Server trivia, tips and tricks. Here are the challenges that I’ll take on: I will puzzle Vinod with my difficult questions I will present such misconception that Vinod will have no resolution for it. I need your help.  Will you help me stump Vinod? If yes, come and attend our session and join me to prove that together we are superior (a friendly brain clash, but we must win!). SQL Server enthusiasts and SQL Server fans are going to have gala time at #TechEdIn as we have a very solid lineup of the speaker and extremely interesting sessions at TechEdIn. Read the complete blog post of Vinod. Session Details Title: SQL Server Misconceptions and Resolution – A Practical Perspective (Add to Calendar) Abstract: “Earth is flat”! – An ancient common misconception, which has been proven incorrect as we progressed in modern times. In this session we will see various database misconceptions prevailing and their resolution with the aid of the demos. In this unique session audience will be part of the conversation and resolution. Date and Time: March 21, 2012, 15:15 to 16:15 Location: Hotel Lalit Ashok - Kumara Krupa High Grounds, Bengaluru – 560001, Karnataka, India. Add to Calendar Please submit your questions in the comments area and I will be for sure discussing them during my session. If I pick your question to discuss during my session, here is your gift I commit right now – SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers Book. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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• Getting Started with Chart control in ASP.Net 4.0

  - by sreejukg

  In this article I am going to demonstrate the Chart control available in ASP.Net 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Most of the web applications need to generate reports for business users. The business users are happy to view the results in a graphical format more that seeing it in numbers. For the purpose of this demonstration, I have created a sales table. I am going to create charts from this sale data. The sale table looks as follows I have created an ASP.Net web application project in Visual Studio 2010. I have a default.aspx page that I am going to use for the demonstration. First I am going to add a chart control to the page. Visual Studio 2010 has a chart control. The Chart Control comes under the Data Tab in the toolbox. Drag and drop the Chart control to the default.aspx page. Visual Studio adds the below markup to the page. <asp:Chart ID="Chart1" runat="server"></asp:Chart> In the designer view, the Chart controls gives the following output. As you can see this is exactly similar to other server controls in ASP.Net, and similar to other controls under the data tab, Chart control is also a data bound control. So I am going to bind this with my sales data. From the design view, right click the chart control and select “show smart tag” Here you need so choose the Data source property and the chart type. From the choose data source drop down, select new data source. In the data source configuration wizard, select the SQL data base and write the query to retrieve the data. At first I am going to show the chart for amount of sales done by each sales person. I am going to use the following query inside sqldatasource select command. “SELECT SUM(SaleAmount) AS Expr1, salesperson FROM SalesData GROUP BY SalesPerson” This query will give me the amount of sales achieved by each sales person. The mark up of SQLDataSource is as follows. <asp:SqlDataSource ID="SqlDataSource1" runat="server" ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:SampleConnectionString %>" SelectCommand="SELECT SUM(SaleAmount) as amount, SalesPerson FROM SalesData GROUP BY SalesPerson"></asp:SqlDataSource> Once you selected the data source for the chart control, you need to select the X and Y values for the columns. I have entered salesperson in the X Value member and amount in the Y value member. After modifications, the Chart control looks as follows Click F5 to run the application. The output of the page is as follows. Using ASP.Net it is much easier to represent your data in graphical format. To show this chart, I didn’t even write any single line of code. The chart control is a great tool that helps the developer to show the business intelligence in their applications without using third party products. I will write another blog that explore further possibilities that shows more reports by using the same sales data. If you want to get the Project in zipped format, post your email below.

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• Extracting the Date from a DateTime in Entity Framework 4 and LINQ

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  In my current ASP.NET 4 project, I’m displaying dates in a GridDateTimeColumn of Telerik’s ASP.NET Radgrid control. I don’t care about the time stuff, so my DataFormatString shows only the date bits: <telerik:GridDateTimeColumn FilterControlWidth="100px"   DataField="DateCreated" HeaderText="Created"    SortExpression="DateCreated" ReadOnly="True"    UniqueName="DateCreated" PickerType="DatePicker"    DataFormatString="{0:dd MMM yy}"> My problem was that I couldn’t get the built-in column filtering (it uses Telerik’s DatePicker control) to behave.  The DatePicker assumes that the time is 00:00:00 but the data would have times like 09:22:21. So, when you select a date and apply the EqualTo filter, you get no results. You would get results if all the time portions were 00:00:00. In essence, I wanted my Entity Framework query to give the DatePicker what it wanted… a Date without the Time portion. Fortunately, EF4 provides the TruncateTime  function. After you include Imports System.Data.Objects.EntityFunctions You’ll find that your EF queries will accept the TruncateTime function. Here’s my routine: Protected Sub RadGrid1_NeedDataSource _     (ByVal source As Object, _      ByVal e As Telerik.Web.UI.GridNeedDataSourceEventArgs) _     Handles RadGrid1.NeedDataSource     Dim ent As New OfficeBookDBEntities1     Dim TopBOMs = From t In ent.TopBom, i In ent.Items _                   Where t.BusActivityID = busActivityID _       And i.BusActivityID And t.ItemID = i.RecordID _       Order By t.DateUpdated Descending _       Select New With {.TopBomID = t.TopBomID, .ItemID = t.ItemID, _                        .PartNumber = i.PartNumber, _                        .Description = i.Description, .Notes = t.Notes, _                        .DateCreated = TruncateTime(t.DateCreated), _                        .DateUpdated = TruncateTime(t.DateUpdated)}     RadGrid1.DataSource = TopBOMs End Sub Now when I select March 14, 2011 on the DatePicker, the filter doesn’t stumble on time values that don’t make sense. Full Disclosure: Telerik gives me (and other developer MVPs) free copies of their suite.

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• Fünf Jahre Bonn-to-Code.Net – das muss gefeiert werden!

  - by WeigeltRo

  Als ich am 1. Januar 2006 die .NET User Group “Bonn-to-Code.Net” gründete (den genialen Namen ließ sich mein Kollege Jens Schaller in Anlehnung an das Motto meines Blogs einfallen), ahnte ich nicht, wie schnell sich alles entwickeln würde. So konnte, nach ein wenig Werbung über diverse Kanäle, bereits am 14. Februar 2006 das erste Treffen stattfinden und wenige Tage später wurde Bonn-to-Code.Net offiziell in den Kreis der INETA User Groups aufgenommen. Das ist nun etwas über fünf Jahre her und soll am 22. März 2011 um 19:00 (Einlass ab 18:30) gebührend gefeiert werden, und zwar im Rahmen unseres März-Treffens. Der Abend bietet Vorträge zu “Flow Design und seine Umsetzung mit Event Based Components” sowie “WCF Services mal anders” (ausführlichere Infos zu den Vortragsinhalten gibt es hier). Anschließend gibt es bei einer großen Verlosung neben Büchern auch hochkarätige Software-Preise zu gewinnen. Zusätzlich zu Lizenzen für JetBrains ReSharper und Telerik Ultimate Collection warten dieses Mal (mit freundlicher Unterstützung durch Microsoft Deutschland) je ein Windows 7 Ultimate und ein Office 2010 Professional Plus auf ihre glücklichen Gewinner. Und wer nicht zu spät kommt, kann auch ganz ohne Losglück eines von vielen kleinen Goodies abgreifen. Eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich, eine Anfahrtsbeschreibung gibt es auf der Bonn-to-Code.Net Website. Es freut mich dabei besonders, dass wir zu diesem Termin u.a. einen Sprecher an Bord haben, der bereits beim Gründungstreffen dabei war: Stefan Lieser. Mittlerweile z.B. durch die Clean Code Developer Initiative bekannt, ist Stefan nur ein Beispiel für eine ganze Reihe von Sprechern auf den diversen Entwicklerkonferenzen, die ihre ersten Erfahrungen u.a. bei Bonn-to-Code.Net gemacht haben. …und was ist in den fünf Jahren so passiert? Einiges! Ein Community Launch Event in 2007, zwei Microsoft TechTalks (2007,2008), Gastsprecher aus ganz Deutschland und dem Ausland (JP Boodhoo, Harry Pierson). Doch nichts hat die fünf Jahre so geprägt wie die Zusammenarbeit mit “den Nachbarn aus Köln”. Zum Zeitpunkt der Gründung von Bonn-to-Code.Net gab es im gesamten Köln/Bonner Raum keine .NET User Group. Und so war es nicht ungewöhnlich, dass der erste Interessent, der sich auf meinen Blog-Eintrag vom 4. Januar 2006 hin meldete, aus Köln stammte: Albert Weinert. Kurze Zeit nach der Bonner Gruppe wurde dann – initiiert durch Angelika Wöpking und Stefan Lange – schließlich die .NET User Group Köln gegründet. Wobei Stefan wiederum vor dem Kölner Gründungstreffen Ende April bereits Bonner Treffen besucht hatte; insgesamt also eine Menge personeller Überlapp zwischen Köln und Bonn. Als nach einem etwas holprigen Start der Kölner Gruppe schließlich Albert und Stefan die Leitung übernahmen, war klar dass Köln und Bonn in vielerlei Hinsicht eng zusammenarbeiten würden. Sei es durch die Koordination von Themen und Terminen oder auch durch Werbung für die Treffen der jeweils anderen Gruppe. Der nächste Schritt kam dann mit der Beteiligung der Kölner und Bonner Gruppen an der Organisation des “AfterLaunch” im April 2008. Der große Erfolg dieser Veranstaltung war der Ansporn, in Bezug auf die Zusammenarbeit ein neues Kapitel aufzuschlagen. Anfang 2009 wurde zunächst der dotnet Köln/Bonn e.V. gegründet, um für eigene Großveranstaltungen ein solides Fundament zu schaffen. Im Mai 2009 folgte dann die erste “dotnet Cologne” – ein voller Erfolg. Und mit der “dotnet Cologne 2010” etablierte sich diese Konferenz als das große .NET Community Event in Deutschland. Am 6. Mai 2011 findet nun die “dotnet Cologne 2011” statt; hinter den Kulissen laufen die Vorbereitungen dazu bereits seit Monaten auf Hochtouren. Alles in allem sehr aufregende fünf Jahre, in denen viel passiert ist. Mal schauen, wie die nächsten fünf Jahre werden…

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• Time to stop using &ldquo;Execute Package Task&rdquo;&ndash; a way to execute package in SSIS catalog taking advantage of the new project deployment model ,and the logging and reporting feature

  - by Kevin Shyr

  I set out to find a way to dynamically call package in SSIS 2012.  The following are 2 excellent blogs I found; I used them heavily.  The code below has some addition to parameter types and message types, but was made essentially derived entirely from the blogs. http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/2011/07/16/ssis-logging-in-denali.aspx http://www.ssistalk.com/2012/07/24/quick-tip-run-ssis-2012-packages-synchronously-and-other-execution-options/   The code: Every package will be called by a PackageController package.  The packageController is initialized with some information on which package to run and what information to pass in.   The following is the stored procedure called from the “Execute SQL Task”.  Here is the highlight of the stored procedure It takes in packageName, project name, and folder name (folder in SSIS project deployment to SSIS catalog) The stored procedure sets the package variables of the upcoming package execution Execute package in SSIS Catalog Get the status of the execution.  Also, if exists, get the error message’s message_id and store them in the management database. Return value to “Execute SQL Task” to manage failure properly CREATE PROCEDURE [AUDIT].[LaunchPackageExecutionInSSISCatalog]        @PackageName NVARCHAR(255)        , @ProjectFolder NVARCHAR(255)        , @ProjectName NVARCHAR(255)        , @AuditKey INT        , @DisableNotification BIT        , @PackageExecutionLogID INT AS BEGIN TRY        DECLARE @execution_id BIGINT = 0;        -- Create a package execution        EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[create_execution]                     @package_name=@PackageName,                     @execution_id=@execution_id OUTPUT,                     @folder_name=@ProjectFolder,                     @project_name=@ProjectName,                     @use32bitruntime=False;          UPDATE [AUDIT].[PackageInstanceExecutionLog] WITH(ROWLOCK)        SET [SSISCatalogExecutionID] = @execution_id        WHERE [PackageInstanceExecutionLogID] = @PackageExecutionLogID          -- this is to set the execution synchronized so that I can check the result in the end        EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=50,                     @parameter_name=N'SYNCHRONIZED',                     @parameter_value=1; -- true          /********************************************************         ********************************************************              Section: setting parameters                     Source table:  SSISDB.internal.object_parameters              object_type list:                     20: project level variables                     30: package level variables                     50: execution parameter         ********************************************************         ********************************************************/        EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=30,                     @parameter_name=N'FromParent_AuditKey',                     @parameter_value=@AuditKey; -- true          EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=30,                     @parameter_name=N'FromParent_DisableNotification',                     @parameter_value=@DisableNotification; -- true          EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=30,                     @parameter_name=N'FromParent_PackageInstanceExecutionID',                     @parameter_value=@PackageExecutionLogID; -- true        /********************************************************         ********************************************************              Section: setting variables END         ********************************************************         ********************************************************/            /* This section is carried over from example code           I don't see a reason to change them yet        */        -- Set our package parameters        EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=50,                     @parameter_name=N'DUMP_ON_EVENT',                     @parameter_value=1; -- true          EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=50,                     @parameter_name=N'DUMP_EVENT_CODE',                     @parameter_value=N'0x80040E4D;0x80004005';          EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=50,                     @parameter_name=N'LOGGING_LEVEL',                     @parameter_value= 1; -- Basic          EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=50,                     @parameter_name=N'DUMP_ON_ERROR',                     @parameter_value=1; -- true                              /********************************************************         ********************************************************              Section: EXECUTING         ********************************************************         ********************************************************/        EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[start_execution]                     @execution_id;        /********************************************************         ********************************************************              Section: EXECUTING END         ********************************************************         ********************************************************/            /********************************************************         ********************************************************              Section: checking execution result                     Source table:  [SSISDB].[catalog].[executions]              status:                     1: created                     2: running                     3: cancelled                     4: failed                     5: pending                     6: ended unexpectedly                     7: succeeded                     8: stopping                     9: completed         ********************************************************         ********************************************************/        if EXISTS(SELECT TOP 1 1                            FROM [SSISDB].[catalog].[executions] WITH(NOLOCK)                            WHERE [execution_id] = @execution_id                                  AND [status] NOT IN (2, 7, 9)) BEGIN                /********************************************************               ********************************************************                     Section: logging error messages                            Source table:  [SSISDB].[internal].[operation_messages]                     message type:                            10:  OnPreValidate                             20:  OnPostValidate                             30:  OnPreExecute                             40:  OnPostExecute                             60:  OnProgress                             70:  OnInformation                             90:  Diagnostic                             110:  OnWarning                            120:  OnError                            130:  Failure                            140:  DiagnosticEx                             200:  Custom events                             400:  OnPipeline                     message source type:                            10:  Messages logged by the entry APIs (e.g. T-SQL, CLR Stored procedures)                             20:  Messages logged by the external process used to run package (ISServerExec)                             30:  Messages logged by the package-level objects                             40:  Messages logged by tasks in the control flow                             50:  Messages logged by containers (For, ForEach, Sequence) in the control flow                             60:  Messages logged by the Data Flow Task                                    ********************************************************               ********************************************************/                INSERT INTO AUDIT.PackageInstanceExecutionOperationErrorLink                     SELECT @PackageExecutionLogID                                  ,[operation_message_id]                            FROM [SSISDB].[internal].[operation_messages] WITH(NOLOCK)                            WHERE operation_id = @execution_id                                  AND message_type IN (120, 130)                           EXEC [AUDIT].[FailPackageInstanceExecution] @PackageExecutionLogID, 'SSISDB Internal operation_messages found'                GOTO ReturnTrueAsErrorFlag                /********************************************************               ********************************************************                     Section: checking messages END               ********************************************************               ********************************************************/                /* This part is not really working, so now using rowcount to pass status              --DECLARE @PackageErrorMessage NVARCHAR(4000)              --SET @PackageErrorMessage = @PackageName + 'failed with executionID: ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(20), @execution_id)                --RAISERROR (@PackageErrorMessage -- Message text.              --     , 18 -- Severity,              --     , 1 -- State,              --     , N'check table AUDIT.PackageInstanceExecutionErrorMessages' -- First argument.              --     );              */        END        ELSE BEGIN              GOTO ReturnFalseAsErrorFlagToSignalSuccess        END        /********************************************************         ********************************************************              Section: checking execution result END         ********************************************************         ********************************************************/ END TRY BEGIN CATCH        DECLARE @SSISCatalogCallError NVARCHAR(MAX)        SELECT @SSISCatalogCallError = ERROR_MESSAGE()          EXEC [AUDIT].[FailPackageInstanceExecution] @PackageExecutionLogID, @SSISCatalogCallError          GOTO ReturnTrueAsErrorFlag END CATCH;     /********************************************************  ********************************************************    Section: end result  ********************************************************  ********************************************************/ ReturnTrueAsErrorFlag:        SELECT CONVERT(BIT, 1) AS PackageExecutionErrorExists ReturnFalseAsErrorFlagToSignalSuccess:        SELECT CONVERT(BIT, 0) AS PackageExecutionErrorExists   GO

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• Oracle Forms Migration to ADF - Webinar vom ORACLE Partner PITSS

  - by Thomas Leopold

    Tuesday, February 22, 2011 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM CET Free Webinar Re-Engineering Legacy Oracle Forms Migration from Forms to ADF - A Case Study Join Oracle's Grant Ronald and PITSS to see a software architecture comparison of Oracle Forms and ADF and a live step-by-step presentation on how to achieve a successful migration. Learn about various migration options, challenges and best practices to protect your current investment in Oracle Forms. PL/SQL is without match for what it does: manipulating data in the database. If you blindly migrate all your PL/SQL to Java you will, in all probability, end up with less maintainable and less efficient code. Instead you should consider which code it best left as PL/SQL..." Grant Ronald - "Migrating Oracle Forms to Fusion: Myth or Magic Bullet?" Re-Engineering existing business logic is mandatory for your legacy Forms application to take advantage of the new Software architectures like ADF. The PITSS.CON solution combines the deep understanding of Oracle Forms and Reports applications architecture with powerful re-engineering capabilities that allows the developer community to protect the investment in the existing Forms applications and to concentrate on fine-tuning and customization of the modernized functionality rather than manually recreating every module and business logic from bottom up. Registration: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/971702250   PITSS GmbHKönigsdorferstrasse 25D-82515 WolfratshausenDo not forget to check out these Free Webinars in March! Thursday, March 3, 2011 Upgrade and Modernize Your Application to Forms 11g Registration/Information Tuesday, March 15, 2011 Shaping the Future for your Oracle Forms Application:Forms 11g, ADF, APEX Registration/Information Tuesday, March 29, 2011 Oracle Forms Modernization to APEX Registration/Information Registration is limited, so sign up  today!Presented By:        Grant Ronald, Senior Group Product Manager,Oracle       Magdalena Serban, Product Manager,PITSS   Contact Us:            PITSS in Americas +1 248.740.0935 [email protected] www.pitssamerica.com       PITSS in Europe +49 (0) 717287 5200 [email protected] www.pitss.com   White Paper:      From Oracle Forms to Oracle ADF and JEE     © Copyright 2010 PITSS GmbH, Wolfratshausen, Stuttgart, München; Managing Directors: Dipl.-Ing. Andreas Gaede, Michael Kilimann, Dipl.-Ing. Dirk Fleischmann Commercial Register: HRB 125471 at District Court Munich. All rights reserved. Any duplication or further treatment in any medium, in parts or as a whole, requires a written agreement. If you do not want to receive invitations for events, meetings and seminars from us, then please click here.

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

  - by Jakob Ehn

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

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• Changing the action of a hyperlink in a Silverlight RichTextArea

  - by Marc Schluper

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

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• What’s New from the Oracle Marketing Cloud at Oracle OpenWorld 2014

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A Guest Post by Laura Vogel, Director, Oracle Marketing Cloud Events (pictured left) Marketing—CX Central is your hub for all things Marketing related at OpenWorld in San Francisco, September 28-October 2, 2014. Learn how to personalize the modern marketing journey to improve customer loyalty. We’re hosting more than 60 breakout sessions, half of which will highlight customer success stories from marquee brands including Bizo, Comcast, Dell, Epson, John Deere, Lane Bryant, ReadyTalk and Shutterfly. Moscone West, Levels 2 and 3To learn more about how modern marketing works, visit Moscone West, levels 2 and 3, for exciting demos of each of the Oracle Marketing Cloud solutions (BlueKai, Compendium, Eloqua, Push I/O, and Responsys). You also can check out our stations for Vertical Marketing Best Practices, the Markie Awards, and more! CX Spotlight Sessions “Accelerating Big Profits in Big Data,” Jeff Tanner, Baylor University “Using Content Marketing to Impact Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey,” Jennifer Agustin, Bizo “Expanding Your Marketing with Proven Testing and Optimization,” Brian Border, Shutterfly and Matthew Balthazor, Epson “Modern Marketing: The New Digital Dialogue,” Cory Treffiletti, Oracle A Special Marquee SessionDell’s Hayden Mugford will speak on "The Digital Ecosystem: Driving Experience Through Contact Engagement.” She will highlight how the organization built a digital ecosystem that supports a behaviorally driven, multivehicle nurturing campaign. The Dell 1:1 Global Marketing team worked with multiple partners to innovate integrations with Oracle Eloqua, Oracle Real-Time Decisions for real-time decision logic, and a content management system (CMS) that enables 100 percent customized e-mails. The program doubled average order values for nurtured contacts versus non-nurtured and tripled open and click-through rates versus push e-mail. It Wouldn’t Be an Oracle Marketing Cloud Event Without a Party!We’re hosting CX Central Fest: a unique customer experience specifically designed for attendees of CX Central. It will include a chance to rock out at a private concert featuring Los Angeles indie electronic pop group, Capital Cities! Join us Tuesday, September 30 from 7-9 p.m. Other Oracle Marketing Cloud Session Highlights Thought leadership by role Exploring the benefits of moving to the Cloud Product line roadmaps and innovations in Marketing Technical deep dives for product lines within Marketing Best practices and impactful business measurements Solutions that are integrated across CX Target AudienceSession content is geared toward professionals in Marketing, Marketing Operations, Marketing Demand Generation, Social: Chief Marketing Officers, Vice Presidents, Directors and Managers. OutcomesCustomers attending Marketing—CX Central @ OpenWorld will be able to: Gain insight into delivering consistent cross-channel marketing Discover how to provide the right information to the right customer at the right time and with the right channel Get answers to burning questions and advice on business challenges Hear from other Oracle customers about recommended best practices to help their organization move forward Network and share ideas to help create a strategy for connecting with customers in better ways Resources At a Glance Register Now Track Site—View Marketing Sessions 72 1024x768 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Focus on Session Doc Downloadable Justification Email OpenWorld is a fabulous way for you to see all that Oracle Marketing Cloud has to offer. Register today.

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• Visual Studio 2010 SP1

  - by ScottGu

  Last week we shipped Service Pack 1 of Visual Studio 2010 and the Visual Studio Express Tools.  In addition to bug fixes and performance improvements, SP1 includes a number of feature enhancements.  This includes improved local help support, IntelliTrace support for 64-bit applications and SharePoint, built-in Silverlight 4 Tooling support in the box, unit testing support when targeting .NET 3.5, a new performance wizard for Silverlight, IIS Express and SQL CE Tooling support for web projects, HTML5 Intellisense for ASP.NET, and more.  TFS 2010 SP1 was also released last week, together with a new TFS Project Server Integration Pack and Load Test Feature Pack.  Brian Harry has a good blog post about the TFS updates here. VS 2010 SP1 Download Click here to download and install SP1 for all versions of Visual Studio (including express).  This installer examines what you have installed on your machine, and only downloads the servicing downloads necessary to update them to SP1.  The time it takes to download and update will consequently depend on what all you have installed.  Jon Galloway has a good blog post on tips to speed up the SP1 install by uninstalling unused components. Web Platform Installer Bundles In addition to the core VS 2010 SP1 installer, we have also put together two Web Platform Installer (WebPI) bundles that automate installing SP1 together with additional web-specific components: VS 2010 SP1 WebPI Bundle Visual Web Developer 2010 SP1 WebPI Bundle The above WebPI bundles automate installing: VS 2010/VWD 2010 SP1 ASP.NET MVC 3 (runtime + tools support) IIS 7.5 Express SQL Server Compact Edition 4.0 (runtime + tools support) Web Deployment 2.0 Only the components that are not already installed on your machine will be downloaded when you use the above WebPI bundles.  This means that you can run the WebPI bundle at any time (even if you have already installed SP1 or ASP.NET MVC 3) and not have to worry about wasting time downloading/installing these components again. Earlier this year I did two posts that discussed how to use IIS Express and SQL CE with ASP.NET projects in SP1.  Read the below posts to learn more about how to use them after you run the above bundles: Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and IIS Express Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and SQL CE for ASP.NET The above feature additions work with any web project type – including both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Additional SP1 Notes Two additional notes about VS 2010 SP1: 1) One change we made between RTM and SP1 is that by default Visual Studio now uses software rendering instead of hardware acceleration when running on Windows XP.  We made this change because we’ve seen reports of (often inconsistent) performance issues caused by older video drivers.  Running in software mode eliminates these and delivers consistent speeds.  You can optionally re-enable hardware acceleration with SP1 using Visual Studio’s Tools->Options menu command – we did not remove support for HW acceleration on XP, we simply changed the default setting for it.  Jason Zander has written more details on the change and how to re-enable HW acceleration inside VS here. 2) We have discovered an issue where installing SP1 can cause TSQL intellisense within SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 to stop working (typing still works – but intellisense doesn’t show up).  The SQL team is investigating this now and I’ll post an update on how to fix this once more details are known.  Hope this helps, Scott P.S. I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Silverlight Cream for June 08, 2010 -- #877

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Miroslav Miroslavov, Chris Klug, Beau, Christian Schormann(-2-), Dan Wahlin, Pete Brown, Michael S. Scherotter, Philipp Sumi, Andy Wigley, and Phil Middlemiss. Shoutouts: Mark Tucker set about learning Caliburn, and in the process is writing a Caliburn Book: Chapters 1-3 Jesse Liberty has a great link-laden post up about why we should all be learning/using Blend: Why Developers Should, Must, Do Care About The New Expression Blend be sure to read what he says about WP7 development, however! Charlie Kindel announced an Install problem with the Developer Tools CTP Refresh and the WP7 tools... check this out if you're having problems. John Papa has a good post up on the happenings yesterday: Expression Studio 4 Launch of Blend, SketchFlow, Encoder and More! Erik Mork & Company's latest "This Week in Silverlight" is titled First Drop: Prism v4 – First Drop is Available From SilverlightCream.com: Animated navigation between Pages Miroslav Miroslavov has Part 8 of his "Silverlight in Action" series up, detailing cool things from the CompleteIT site... this one is on Animated navigation between pages. Subtitling videos Chris Klug got a gig adding subtitles to videos for Microsoft (sweet) ... and no, not *that* kind of subtitles... read how he approached the final solution. Silverlight Watermark TextBox I'm not sure we can have too many Watermark TextBoxes, and neither does Beau , who sent me a link to this one... give it a dance and decide. Blend 4: Collaborative SketchFlow Feedback with SharePoint With the new Blend release, Christian Schormann has a post up describing the lashup to Sharepoint for sharing Sketchflow and getting feedback. New Utility, Links, and Tutorials for Path-Based Layout Christian Schormann also has a collection of resources for Path-Based Layouts, including a utility "that lets you apply a whole bunch of position-specific effects without having to write any code"... lots of links to resources here. Tales from the Trenches – Building a Real-World Silverlight Line of Business Application Dan Wahlin draws on his recent experience and lays out some of the fun and pitfalls of building LOB apps in Silverlight... WCF, MVVM, slides, and code included WPF (and Silverlight): Choose your Fonts and Text Rendering Options Wisely Pete Brown has a great post up on using fonts wisely across multiple platforms... lots of info and good discussion in the comments as well. Ball Watch USA Remember the awesome watch Michael S. Scherotter did in Silverlight 1 and then converted to Updated Ball Trainmaster Cannonball Watch to Silverlight 2? Well... there's now a contest underfoot and 8 videos to help you get started... all good stuff, and good luck! ... Michael has a post up about the contest: Enter to Win a Ball Watch by Creating One in Silverlight Announcing Sketchables – Rapid Mockup Creation with SketchFlow By way of Jesse Libertyhttp://jesseliberty.com/2010/06/08/why-developers-should-must-do-care-about-the-new-expression-blend/, this is a cool production by Philipp Sumi about a simple mockup framework he's created. Perst - a database for Windows Phone 7 Silverlight I think one of my first comments to Michael Washington back at the MVP Summit 2010 was that we'd need a database engine, and too cool, but we've got one, Andy Wigley discusses Perst in this post... to save you some time, here's the Perst site A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 7 Phil Middlemiss has part 7 of his great theme-building series up... this time he's giving the accordian control a once-over. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Building a Mafia&hellip;TechFest Style

  - by David Hoerster

  It’s been a few months since I last blogged (not that I blog much to begin with), but things have been busy.  We all have a lot going on in our lives, but I’ve had one item that has taken up a surprising amount of time – Pittsburgh TechFest 2012.  After the event, I went through some minutes of the first meetings for TechFest, and I started to think about how it all came together.  I think what inspired me the most about TechFest was how people from various technical communities were able to come together and build and promote a common event.  As a result, I wanted to blog about this to show that people from different communities can work together to build something that benefits all communities.  (Hopefully I've got all my facts straight.)  TechFest started as an idea Eric Kepes and myself had when we were planning our next Pittsburgh Code Camp, probably in the summer of 2011.  Our Spring 2011 Code Camp was a little different because we had a great infusion of some folks from the Pittsburgh Agile group (especially with a few speakers from LeanDog).  The line-up was great, but we felt our audience wasn’t as broad as it should have been.  We thought it would be great to somehow attract other user groups around town and have a big, polyglot conference. We started contacting leaders from Pittsburgh’s various user groups.  Eric and I split up the ones that we knew about, and we just started making contacts.  Most of the people we started contacting never heard of us, nor we them.  But we all had one thing in common – we ran user groups who’s primary goal is educating our members to make them better at what they do. Amazingly, and I say this because I wasn’t sure what to expect, we started getting some interest from the various leaders.  One leader, Greg Akins, is, in my opinion, Pittsburgh’s poster boy for the polyglot programmer.  He’s helped us in the past with .NET Code Camps, is a Java developer (and leader in Pittsburgh’s Java User Group), works with Ruby and I’m sure a handful of other languages.  He helped make some e-introductions to other user group leaders, and the whole thing just started to snowball. Once we realized we had enough interest with the user group leaders, we decided to not have a Fall Code Camp and instead focus on this new entity. Flash-forward to October of 2011.  I set up a meeting, with the help of Jeremy Jarrell (Pittsburgh Agile leader) to hold a meeting with the leaders of many of Pittsburgh technical user groups.  We had representatives from 12 technical user groups (Python, JavaScript, Clojure, Ruby, PittAgile, jQuery, PHP, Perl, SQL, .NET, Java and PowerShell) – 14 people.  We likened it to a scene from a Godfather movie where the heads of all the families come together to make some deal.  As a result, the name “TechFest Mafia” was born and kind of stuck. Over the next 7 months or so, we had our starts and stops.  There were moments where I thought this event would not happen either because we wouldn’t have the right mix of topics (was I off there!), or enough people register (OK, I was wrong there, too!) or find an appropriate venue (hmm…wrong there, too) or find enough sponsors to help support the event (wow…not doing so well).  Overall, everything fell into place with a lot of hard work from Eric, Jen, Greg, Jeremy, Sean, Nicholas, Gina and probably a few others that I’m forgetting.  We also had a bit of luck, too.  But in the end, the passion that we had to put together an event that was really about making ourselves better at what we do really paid off. I’ve never been more excited about a project coming together than I have been with Pittsburgh TechFest 2012.  From the moment the first person arrived at the event to the final minutes of my closing remarks (where I almost lost my voice – I ended up being diagnosed with bronchitis the next day!), it was an awesome event.  I’m glad to have been part of bringing something like this to Pittsburgh…and I’m looking forward to Pittsburgh TechFest 2013.  See you there!

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• Instant Rename and Rename Refactoring

  - by Petr

  During the last weeks I have got  a few questions about rename refactoring and some users also complain to me that the refactoring in NetBeans 6.x was much faster. So I would like to explain the situation. For some people, who don't know, Instant Rename action and Rename Refactoring  can look like one action. But it's not true, even if  both actions use the same shortcut (CTRL + R). NetBeans 6.x contained only Instant Rename action (speaking about PHP support), which we can mark as very simple rename refactoring through one file. From NetBeans 7.0 the Instant Rename action works only in "non public" context. It means that this action is used for fast renaming variables that has local context like inside a method, or for renaming private methods and fields that can not be used outside of the scope, where they are declared. From user point of view these two action can be simply recognized. When is after CTRL+R called Instant Rename action, then the identifier is surrounded with rectangle and you can rename it directly in the file. It's fast and simple, also the usages of this identifier are renamed in the same time as you write. The picture below shows Instant Rename action for $message identifier, that is visible only in the print_test method and due this after CTRL+R is called Instant Rename. In NetBeans 7.0, there was added Rename Refactoring that is called for public identifiers. It means for identifiers that could be used in other files. If you press CTRL+R shortcut when the caret is inside $hello identifier from the picture above, NetBeans recognizes that $hello is declared / used in a global context and calls the Rename Refactoring that brings a dialog to change the name of the identifier. From this dialog you have to preview suggested changes, through pressing Preview button and then execute the refactoring through Do Refactoring button. Yes, it's more complicated from user point of view than Instant Rename, but in Rename Refactoring NetBeans can change more files at once. It should be  the developer responsibility to decide whether the suggested changes are right and the refactoring can be executed or in some files original name should be kept. Someone can argue that he doesn't use $hello variable in any other file so Instant Rename could be used in such case. Yes it's true, but in such case NetBeans has to know all usages of all identifiers and keep this informations up to date during editing a file. I'm sure that this is not possible due to the performance problems, mainly for big projects. So the usages are computed after pressing the Preview button. And why is the Refactor button always disabled in the Rename dialog and user has to always go through the preview phase? NetBeans has API and SPI for implementing refactoring actions and this dialog is a part of this infrastructure. If you rename an identifier for example in Java, the Refactor buttons is enabled, but Java is strongly type language and you can be almost in 99% sure that the IDE will suggest the right results. In PHP as a dynamic language, we can not be sure, what NetBeans finds is only a "guess". This is why NetBeans pushes developers to preview the changes for PHP rename. I hope that I have explain it clearly. I'm open to any discussion. What I have described above is situation in NetBeans 7.0, 7.0.1 and probably it will be also in NetBeans 7.1, because there is no plan to change it. Please write your opinion here.

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• Guest (and occasional co-host) on Jesse Liberty's Yet Another Podcast

  - by Jon Galloway

  I was a recent guest on Jesse Liberty's Yet Another Podcast talking about the latest Visual Studio, ASP.NET and Azure releases. Download / Listen: Yet Another Podcast #75–Jon Galloway on ASP.NET/ MVC/ Azure Co-hosted shows: Jesse's been inviting me to co-host shows and I told him I'd show up when I was available. It's a nice change to be a drive-by co-host on a show (compared with the work that goes into organizing / editing / typing show notes for Herding Code shows). My main focus is on Herding Code, but it's nice to pop in and talk to Jesse's excellent guests when it works out. Some shows I've co-hosted over the past year: Yet Another Podcast #76–Glenn Block on Node.js & Technology in China Yet Another Podcast  #73 - Adam Kinney on developing for Windows 8 with HTML5 Yet Another Podcast #64 - John Papa & Javascript Yet Another Podcast #60 - Steve Sanderson and John Papa on Knockout.js Yet Another Podcast #54–Damian Edwards on ASP.NET Yet Another Podcast #53–Scott Hanselman on Blogging Yet Another Podcast #52–Peter Torr on Windows Phone Multitasking Yet Another Podcast #51–Shawn Wildermuth: //build, Xaml Programming & Beyond And some more on the way that haven't been released yet. Some of these I'm pretty quiet, on others I get wacky and hassle the guests because, hey, not my podcast so not my problem. Show notes from the ASP.NET / MVC / Azure show: What was just released Visual Studio 2012 Web Developer features ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms Strongly Typed data controls Data access via command methods Similar Binding syntax to ASP.NET MVC Some context: Damian Edwards and WebFormsMVP Two questions from Jesse: Q: Are you making this harder or more complicated for Web Forms developers? Short answer: Nothing's removed, it's just a new option History of SqlDataSource, ObjectDataSource Q: If I'm using some MVC patterns, why not just move to MVC? Short answer: This works really well in hybrid applications, doesn't require a rewrite Allows sharing models, validation, other code between Web Forms and MVC ASP.NET MVC Adaptive Rendering (oh, also, this is in Web Forms 4.5 as well) Display Modes Mobile project template using jQuery Mobile OAuth login to allow Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc. login Jon (and friends') MVC 4 book on the way: Professional ASP.NET MVC 4 Windows 8 development Jesse and Jon announce they're working on a new book: Pro Windows 8 Development with XAML and C# Jon and Jesse agree that it's nice to be able to write Windows 8 applications using the same skills they picked up for Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone development. Compare / contrast ASP.NET MVC and Windows 8 development Q: Does ASP.NET and HTML5 development overlap? Jon thinks they overlap in the MVC world because you're writing HTML views without controls Jon describes how his web development career moved from a preoccupation with server code to a focus on user interaction, which occurs in the browser Jon mentions his NDC Oslo presentation on Learning To Love HTML as Beautiful Code Q: How do you apply C# / XAML or HTML5 skills to Windows 8 development? Q: If I'm a XAML programmer, what's the learning curve on getting up to speed on ASP.NET MVC? Jon describes the difference in application lifecycle and state management Jon says it's nice that web development is really interactive compared to application development Q: Can you learn MVC by reading a book? Or is it a lot bigger than that? What is Azure, and why would I use it? Jon describes the traditional Azure platform mode and how Azure Web Sites fits in Q: Why wouldn't Jesse host his blog on Azure Web Sites? Domain names on Azure Web Sites File hosting options Q: Is Azure just another host? How is it different from any of the other shared hosting options? A: Azure gives you the ability to scale up or down whenever you want A: Other services are available if or when you want them

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• From NaN to Infinity...and Beyond!

  - by Tony Davis

  It is hard to believe that it was once possible to corrupt a SQL Server Database by storing perfectly normal data values into a table; but it is true. In SQL Server 2000 and before, one could inadvertently load invalid data values into certain data types via RPC calls or bulk insert methods rather than DML. In the particular case of the FLOAT data type, this meant that common 'special values' for this type, namely NaN (not-a-number) and +/- infinity, could be quite happily plugged into the database from an application and stored as 'out-of-range' values. This was like a time-bomb. When one then tried to query this data; the values were unsupported and so data pages containing them were flagged as being corrupt. Any query that needed to read a column containing the special value could fail or return unpredictable results. Microsoft even had to issue a hotfix to deal with failures in the automatic recovery process, caused by the presence of these NaN values, which rendered the whole database inaccessible! This problem is history for those of us on more current versions of SQL Server, but its ghost still haunts us. Recently, for example, a developer on Red Gate’s SQL Response team reported a strange problem when attempting to load historical monitoring data into a SQL Server 2005 database via the C# ADO.NET provider. The ratios used in some of their reporting calculations occasionally threw out NaN or infinity values, and the subsequent attempts to load these values resulted in a nasty error. It turns out to be a different manifestation of the same problem. SQL Server 2005 still does not fully support the IEEE 754 standard for floating point numbers, in that the FLOAT data type still cannot handle NaN or infinity values. Instead, they just added validation checks that prevent the 'invalid' values from being loaded in the first place. For people migrating from SQL Server 2000 databases that contained out-of-range FLOAT (or DATETIME etc.) data, to SQL Server 2005, Microsoft have added to the latter's version of the DBCC CHECKDB (or CHECKTABLE) command a DATA_PURITY clause. When enabled, this will seek out the corrupt data, but won’t fix it. You have to do this yourself in what can often be a slow, painful manual process. Our development team, after a quizzical shrug of the shoulders, simply decided to represent NaN and infinity values as NULL, and move on, accepting the minor inconvenience of not being able to tell them apart. However, what of scientific, engineering and other applications that really would like the luxury of being able to both store and access these perfectly-reasonable floating point data values? The sticking point seems to be the stipulation in the IEEE 754 standard that, when NaN is compared to any other value including itself, the answer is "unequal" (i.e. FALSE). This is clearly different from normal number comparisons and has repercussions for such things as indexing operations. Even so, this hardly applies to infinity values, which are single definite values. In fact, there is some encouraging talk in the Connect note on this issue that they might be supported 'in the SQL Server 2008 timeframe'. If didn't happen; SQL 2008 doesn't support NaN or infinity values, though one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, based on the MSDN documentation for the FLOAT type, which states that "The behavior of float and real follows the IEEE 754 specification on approximate numeric data types". However, the truth is revealed in the XPath documentation, which states that "…float (53) is not exactly IEEE 754. For example, neither NaN (Not-a-Number) nor infinity is used…". Is it really so hard to fix this problem the right way, and properly support in SQL Server the IEEE 754 standard for the floating point data type, NaNs, infinities and all? Oracle seems to have managed it quite nicely with its BINARY_FLOAT and BINARY_DOUBLE types, so it is technically possible. We have an enterprise-class database that is marketed as being part of an 'integrated' Windows platform. Absurdly, we have .NET and XPath libraries that fully support the standard for floating point numbers, and we can't even properly store these values, let alone query them, in the SQL Server database! Cheers, Tony.

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• Introducing functional programming constructs in non-functional programming languages

  - by Giorgio

  This question has been going through my mind quite a lot lately and since I haven't found a convincing answer to it I would like to know if other users of this site have thought about it as well. In the recent years, even though OOP is still the most popular programming paradigm, functional programming is getting a lot of attention. I have only used OOP languages for my work (C++ and Java) but I am trying to learn some FP in my free time because I find it very interesting. So, I started learning Haskell three years ago and Scala last summer. I plan to learn some SML and Caml as well, and to brush up my (little) knowledge of Scheme. Well, a lot of plans (too ambitious?) but I hope I will find the time to learn at least the basics of FP during the next few years. What is important for me is how functional programming works and how / whether I can use it for some real projects. I have already developed small tools in Haskell. In spite of my strong interest for FP, I find it difficult to understand why functional programming constructs are being added to languages like C#, Java, C++, and so on. As a developer interested in FP, I find it more natural to use, say, Scala or Haskell, instead of waiting for the next FP feature to be added to my favourite non-FP language. In other words, why would I want to have only some FP in my originally non-FP language instead of looking for a language that has a better support for FP? For example, why should I be interested to have lambdas in Java if I can switch to Scala where I have much more FP concepts and access all the Java libraries anyway? Similarly: why do some FP in C# instead of using F# (to my knowledge, C# and F# can work together)? Java was designed to be OO. Fine. I can do OOP in Java (and I would like to keep using Java in that way). Scala was designed to support OOP + FP. Fine: I can use a mix of OOP and FP in Scala. Haskell was designed for FP: I can do FP in Haskell. If I need to tune the performance of a particular module, I can interface Haskell with some external routines in C. But why would I want to do OOP with just some basic FP in Java? So, my main point is: why are non-functional programming languages being extended with some functional concept? Shouldn't it be more comfortable (interesting, exciting, productive) to program in a language that has been designed from the very beginning to be functional or multi-paradigm? Don't different programming paradigms integrate better in a language that was designed for it than in a language in which one paradigm was only added later? The first explanation I could think of is that, since FP is a new concept (it isn't new at all, but it is new for many developers), it needs to be introduced gradually. However, I remember my switch from imperative to OOP: when I started to program in C++ (coming from Pascal and C) I really had to rethink the way in which I was coding, and to do it pretty fast. It was not gradual. So, this does not seem to be a good explanation to me. Or can it be that many non-FP programmers are not really interested in understanding and using functional programming, but they find it practically convenient to adopt certain FP-idioms in their non-FP language? IMPORTANT NOTE Just in case (because I have seen several language wars on this site): I mentioned the languages I know better, this question is in no way meant to start comparisons between different programming languages to decide which is better / worse. Also, I am not interested in a comparison of OOP versus FP (pros and cons). The point I am interested in is to understand why FP is being introduced one bit at a time into existing languages that were not designed for it even though there exist languages that were / are specifically designed to support FP.

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• Scid Chess Program Compiling issue

  - by lbochitt

  First of all I would like to point that I'm new to Ubuntu so sorry if what I am asking is ridiculous. I have downloaded Scid 4.4 chess program and I have tried to compile it as it was explained on its website: 1) Initialize git. 2) Create a folder where you want to download and (?) compile the source, then cast: git init on your command line. 3) You're now ready to download the sources recall Fulvio's spell: git clone git://scid.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/scid/scid This should get you the latest Scid source. 4) You're now ready to compile Scid. In principle, all you need to do is: ./configure and then make 5) If you get stuck, you probably need to get developer versions of tcl/tk. This translates into issuing these three commands: sudo apt-get install tcl8.5-dev sudo apt-get install tk8.5-dev sudo apt-get install zlib1g -dev 6) You should now be ready to compile The problem is that when I run ./configure to start compiling the following message appears on Terminal: configure: Makefile configuration program for Scid Tcl/Tk version: 8.5 Your operating system is: Linux 3.8.0-19-generic Location of "tcl.h": /usr/include/tcl8.5 Location of "tk.h": /usr/include/tcl8.5 Location of Tcl 8.5 library: not found Location of Tk 8.5 library: not found Checking if your system already has zlib installed: yes. Using Makefile.conf. Not all settings could be determined! The default Makefile was written. You will need to edit it before you can compile Scid. What should I do? Has anybody faced this problem before? Thanks in advance I have run ls -l /usr/include/tcl8.5/tcl.h here's the result: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 87291 abr 22 10:45 /usr/include/tcl8.5/tcl.h I have also tried what you suggested Could you run git reset --hard HEAD and git clean -d -f to clean up everything using Git? Then run ./configure again. Just a shot in the dark - I've seen some GNU automake stuff still listening to its "cached" version of the results or something. Still no solution. I don't know why it can't recognize the library though it is installed I opened configure to see where the program looked for the library. This is the code: # libraryPath: List of possible locations of Tcl/Tk library. set libraryPath { /usr/lib /usr/lib64 /usr/local/tcl/lib /usr/local/lib /usr/X11R6/lib /opt/tcltk/lib /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu } lappend libraryPath "/usr/lib/tcl${tclv}" lappend libraryPath "/usr/lib/tk${tclv}" lappend libraryPath "/usr/lib/tcl${tclv_nodot}" lappend libraryPath "/usr/lib/tk${tclv_nodot}" # Try to add tcl_library and auto_path values to libraryPath, # in case the user has a non-standard Tcl/Tk library location: if {[info exists ::tcl_library]} { lappend headerPath \ [file join [file dirname [file dirname $::tcl_library]] include] lappend libraryPath [file dirname $::tcl_library] lappend libraryPath $::tcl_library } if {[info exists ::auto_path]} { foreach name $::auto_path { lappend libraryPath $name } } if {! [info exists var(TCL_INCLUDE)]} { puts -nonewline { Location of "tcl.h": } set opt(tcl_h) [findDir "tcl.h" $headerPath "TCL_VERSION.*$tclv"] if {$opt(tcl_h) == ""} { puts "not found" set success 0 set opt(tcl_h) "$::defaultVar(TCL_INCLUDE)" } else { puts $opt(tcl_h) } } set opt(tcl_lib) "" if {! [info exists var(TCL_LIBRARY)]} { puts -nonewline " Location of Tcl $tclv library: " set opt(tcl_lib) [findDir "libtcl${tclv}.*" $libraryPath] if {$opt(tcl_lib) == ""} { set opt(tcl_lib) [findDir "libtcl${tclv_nodot}.*" $libraryPath] if {$opt(tcl_lib) == ""} { puts "not found" set success 0 set opt(tcl_lib) "$opt(tcl_h)" set opt(tcl_lib_file) "tcl\$(TCL_VERSION)" } else { set opt(tcl_lib_file) "tcl${tclv_nodot}" puts $opt(tcl_lib) } } else { set opt(tcl_lib_file) "tcl\$(TCL_VERSION)" puts $opt(tcl_lib) } } if {! [info exists var(TCL_INCLUDE)]} { set var(TCL_INCLUDE) "-I$opt(tcl_h)" } if {! [info exists var(TCL_LIBRARY)]} { set var(TCL_LIBRARY) "-L$opt(tcl_lib) -l$opt(tcl_lib_file)" } return $success So I guess (And by guess I mean i have no idea how to code) I should write somewhere in here usr/lib/tcl8.5 and usr/lib/tk8.5, am I right?

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• The Evolution Of C#

  - by Paulo Morgado

  The first release of C# (C# 1.0) was all about building a new language for managed code that appealed, mostly, to C++ and Java programmers. The second release (C# 2.0) was mostly about adding what wasn’t time to built into the 1.0 release. The main feature for this release was Generics. The third release (C# 3.0) was all about reducing the impedance mismatch between general purpose programming languages and databases. To achieve this goal, several functional programming features were added to the language and LINQ was born. Going forward, new trends are showing up in the industry and modern programming languages need to be more: Declarative With imperative languages, although having the eye on the what, programs need to focus on the how. This leads to over specification of the solution to the problem in hand, making next to impossible to the execution engine to be smart about the execution of the program and optimize it to run it more efficiently (given the hardware available, for example). Declarative languages, on the other hand, focus only on the what and leave the how to the execution engine. LINQ made C# more declarative by using higher level constructs like orderby and group by that give the execution engine a much better chance of optimizing the execution (by parallelizing it, for example). Concurrent Concurrency is hard and needs to be thought about and it’s very hard to shoehorn it into a programming language. Parallel.For (from the parallel extensions) looks like a parallel for because enough expressiveness has been built into C# 3.0 to allow this without having to commit to specific language syntax. Dynamic There was been lots of debate on which ones are the better programming languages: static or dynamic. The fact is that both have good qualities and users of both types of languages want to have it all. All these trends require a paradigm switch. C# is, in many ways, already a multi-paradigm language. It’s still very object oriented (class oriented as some might say) but it can be argued that C# 3.0 has become a functional programming language because it has all the cornerstones of what a functional programming language needs. Moving forward, will have even more. Besides the influence of these trends, there was a decision of co-evolution of the C# and Visual Basic programming languages. Since its inception, there was been some effort to position C# and Visual Basic against each other and to try to explain what should be done with each language or what kind of programmers use one or the other. Each language should be chosen based on the past experience and familiarity of the developer/team/project/company and not by particular features. In the past, every time a feature was added to one language, the users of the other wanted that feature too. Going forward, when a feature is added to one language, the other will work hard to add the same feature. This doesn’t mean that XML literals will be added to C# (because almost the same can be achieved with LINQ To XML), but Visual Basic will have auto-implemented properties. Most of these features require or are built on top of features of the .NET Framework and, the focus for C# 4.0 was on dynamic programming. Not just dynamic types but being able to talk with anything that isn’t a .NET class. Also introduced in C# 4.0 is co-variance and contra-variance for generic interfaces and delegates. Stay tuned for more on the new C# 4.0 features.

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• Best Practices for Handing over Legacy Code

  - by PersonalNexus

  In a couple of months a colleague will be moving on to a new project and I will be inheriting one of his projects. To prepare, I have already ordered Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code. But this books as well as most questions on legacy code I found so far are concerned with the case of inheriting code as-is. But in this case I actually have access to the original developer and we do have some time for an orderly hand-over. Some background on the piece of code I will be inheriting: It's functioning: There are no known bugs, but as performance requirements keep going up, some optimizations will become necessary in the not too distant future. Undocumented: There is pretty much zero documentation at the method and class level. What the code is supposed to do at a higher level, though, is well-understood, because I have been writing against its API (as a black-box) for years. Only higher-level integration tests: There are only integration tests testing proper interaction with other components via the API (again, black-box). Very low-level, optimized for speed: Because this code is central to an entire system of applications, a lot of it has been optimized several times over the years and is extremely low-level (one part has its own memory manager for certain structs/records). Concurrent and lock-free: While I am very familiar with concurrent and lock-free programming and have actually contributed a few pieces to this code, this adds another layer of complexity. Large codebase: This particular project is more than ten thousand lines of code, so there is no way I will be able to have everything explained to me. Written in Delphi: I'm just going to put this out there, although I don't believe the language to be germane to the question, as I believe this type of problem to be language-agnostic. I was wondering how the time until his departure would best be spent. Here are a couple of ideas: Get everything to build on my machine: Even though everything should be checked into source code control, who hasn't forgotten to check in a file once in a while, so this should probably be the first order of business. More tests: While I would like more class-level unit tests so that when I will be making changes, any bugs I introduce can be caught early on, the code as it is now is not testable (huge classes, long methods, too many mutual dependencies). What to document: I think for starters it would be best to focus documentation on those areas in the code that would otherwise be difficult to understand e.g. because of their low-level/highly optimized nature. I am afraid there are a couple of things in there that might look ugly and in need of refactoring/rewriting, but are actually optimizations that have been out in there for a good reason that I might miss (cf. Joel Spolsky, Things You Should Never Do, Part I) How to document: I think some class diagrams of the architecture and sequence diagrams of critical functions accompanied by some prose would be best. Who to document: I was wondering what would be better, to have him write the documentation or have him explain it to me, so I can write the documentation. I am afraid, that things that are obvious to him but not me would otherwise not be covered properly. Refactoring using pair-programming: This might not be possible to do due to time constraints, but maybe I could refactor some of his code to make it more maintainable while he was still around to provide input on why things are the way they are. Please comment on and add to this. Since there isn't enough time to do all of this, I am particularly interested in how you would prioritize.

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• Silverlight Cream for February 04, 2011 -- #1040

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Shawn Wildermuth, John Papa, Jesse Liberty(-2-), Mike Wolf, Matt Casto, Levente Mihály, Roy Dallal, Mark Monster, Andrea Boschin, and Oren Gal. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Accept and Cancel Buttons Behavior in Silverlight" Matt Casto WP7: "Windows Phone 7 Runtime Debugging" Mike Wolf Shoutouts: Al Pascual announced a get-together if you're going to be in Phoenix on February 10 (next Thursday)... I just can't tell what time it is from the page: Phoenix Dev Meet-Up From SilverlightCream.com: Ten Pet Peeves of WP7 Applications Check out Shawn Wildermuth's Top 10 annoyances when trying out any new app on the WP7... if you're a dev, you might want to keep these in mind. Silverlight TV 60: Checking Out the Zero Gravity Game, Now on Windows Phone 7 John Papa has Silverlight TV number 60 up and this one features Phoenix' own Ryan Plemons discussing the game Zero Gravity and some of the things he had to do to take the game to WP7 ... and the presentation looks as good from here as it did inside the studio :) The Full Stack: Entity Framework To Phone, The Server Side Jesse Liberty and Jon Galloway have Part 6 of their full-stack podcast up ... this is their exploration of MVC3, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and WP7... pair programming indeed! Life Cycle: Page State Management Jesse Liberty also has episode 29 (can you believe that??) of his Windows Phone From Scratch series up ... he's continuing his previous LifeCycle discussion with Page State Management this time. Windows Phone 7 Runtime Debugging Mike Wolf is one of those guys that when he blogs, we should all pay attention, and this post is no exception... he has contributed a run-time diagnostics logger to the WP7Contrib project ... wow... too cool! Accept and Cancel Buttons Behavior in Silverlight Matt Casto has his blog back up and has a behavior up some intuitive UX on ChildWindows by being able to bind to a default or cancel button and have those events activated when the user hits Enter or Escape... very cool, Matt! A classic memory game: Part 3 - Porting the game to Windows Phone 7 Levente Mihály has Part 3 of his tutorial series up at SilverlightShow, and this go-around is porting his 'memory game' to WP7... and this is pretty all-encompassing... Blend for the UI, Performance, and Tombstoning... plus all the source. Silverlight Memory Leak, Part 1 Roy Dallal completely describes how he used a couple easily-downloadable tools to find the root cause of his memory problems with is Silvleright app. Lots of good investigative information. How to cancel the closing of your Silverlight application (in-browser and out-of-browser) Mark Monster revisits a two-year old post of his on cancelling the closing of a Silverlight app... and he's bringing that concept of warning the user the he's about to exit into the OOB situation as well. Windows Phone 7 - Part #3: Understanding navigation Also continuing his WP7 tutorial series on SilverlightShow, Andrea Boschin has part 3 up which is all about Navigation and preserving state... he also has a video on the page to help demonstrate the GoBack method. Multiple page printing in Silverlight 4 Oren Gal built a Silverlight app for last years' ESRI dev summit, and decided to upgrade it this year with functionality such as save/restore, selecting favorite sessions, and printing. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• SQL SERVER – Sends backups to a Network Folder, FTP Server, Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3

  - by pinaldave

  Let me tell you about one of the most useful SQL tools that every DBA should use – it is SQLBackupAndFTP. I have been using this tool since 2009 – and it is the first program I install on a SQL server. Download a free version, 1 minute configuration and your daily backups are safe in the cloud. In summary, SQLBackupAndFTP Creates SQL Server database and file backups on schedule Compresses and encrypts the backups Sends backups to a network folder, FTP Server, Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3 Sends email notifications of job’s success or failure SQLBackupAndFTP comes in Free and Paid versions (starting from $29) – see version comparison. Free version is fully functional for unlimited ad hoc backups or for scheduled backups of up to two databases – it will be sufficient for many small customers. What has impressed me from the beginning – is that I understood how it works and was able to configure the job from a single form (see Image 1 – Main form above) Connect to you SQL server and select databases to be backed up Click “Add backup destination” to configure where backups should go to (network, FTP Server, Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3) Enter your email to receive email confirmations Set the time to start daily full backups (or go to Settings if you need Differential or  Transaction Log backups on a flexible schedule) Press “Run Now” button to test You can get to this form if you click “Settings” buttons in the “Schedule section”. Select what types of backups and how often you want to run them and you will see the scheduled backups in the “Estimated backup plan” list A detailed tutorial is available on the developer’s website. Along with SQLBackupAndFTP setup gives you the option to install “One-Click SQL Restore” (you can install it stand-alone too) – a basic tool for restoring just Full backups. However basic, you can drag-and-drop on it the zip file created by SQLBackupAndFTP, it unzips the BAK file if necessary, connects to the SQL server on the start, selects the right database, it is smart enough to restart the server to drop open connections if necessary – very handy for developers who need to restore databases often. You may ask why is this tool is better than maintenance tasks available in SQL Server? While maintenance tasks are easy to set up, SQLBackupAndFTP is still way easier and integrates solution for compression, encryption, FTP, cloud storage and email which make it superior to maintenance tasks in every aspect. On a flip side SQLBackupAndFTP is not the fanciest tool to manage backups or check their health. It only works reliably on local SQL Server instances. In other words it has to be installed on the SQL server itself. For remote servers it uses scripting which is less reliable. This limitations is actually inherent in SQL server itself as BACKUP DATABASE command  creates backup not on the client, but on the server itself. This tool is compatible with almost all the known SQL Server versions. It works with SQL Server 2008 (all versions) and many of the previous versions. It is especially useful for SQL Server Express 2005 and SQL Server Express 2008, as they lack built in tools for backup. I strongly recommend this tool to all the DBAs. They must absolutely try it as it is free and does exactly what it promises. You can download your free copy of the tool from here. Please share your experience about using this tool. I am eager to receive your feedback regarding this article. 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, SQL Utility, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – How to Compare the Schema of Two Databases with Schema Compare

  - by Pinal Dave

  Earlier I wrote about An Efficiency Tool to Compare and Synchronize SQL Server Databases and it was very much well received. Since the blog post I have received quite a many question that just like data how we can also compare schema and synchronize it. If you think about comparing the schema manually, it is almost impossible to do so. Table Schema has been just one of the concept but if you really want the all the schema of the database (triggers, views, stored procedure and everything else) it is just impossible task. If you are developer or database administrator who works in the production environment than you know that there are so many different occasions when we have to compare schema of the database. Before deploying any changes to the production server, I personally like to make note of the every single schema change and document it so in case of any issue , I can always go back and refer my documentation. As discussed earlier it is absolutely impossible to do this task without the help of third party tools. I personally use Devart Schema Compare for this task. This is an extremely easy tool. Let us see how it works. First I have two different databases – a) AdventureWorks2012 and b) AdventureWorks2012-V1. There are total three changes between these databases. Here is the list of the same. One of the table has additional column One of the table have new index One of the stored procedure is changed Now let see how dbForge Schema Compare works in this scenario. First open dbForge Schema Compare studio. Click on New Schema Comparison. It will bring you to following screen where we have to configure the database needed to configure. I have selected AdventureWorks2012 and AdventureWorks-V1 databases. In the next screen we can verify various options but for this demonstration we will keep it as it is. We will not change anything in schema mapping screen as in our case it is not required but generically if you are comparing across schema you may need this. This is the most important screen as on this screen we select which kind of object we want to compare. You can see the options which are available to select. The screen lets you select the objects from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2012. Once you click on compare in previous screen it will bring you to this screen, which will essentially display the comparative difference between two of the databases which we had selected in earlier screen. As mentioned above there are three different changes in the database and the same has been listed over here. Two of the changes belongs to the tables and one changes belong to the procedure. Let us click each of them one by one to see what is the difference between them. In very first option we can see that there is an additional column in another database which did not exist earlier. In this example we can see that AdventureWorks2012 database have an additional index. Following example is very interesting as in this case, we have changed the definition of the stored procedure and the result pan contains the same. dbForget Schema Compare very effectively identify the changes in schema and lists them neatly to developers. Here is one more screen. This software not only compares the schema but also provides the options to update or drop them as per the choice. I think this is brilliant option. Well, I have been using schema compare for quite a while and have found it very useful. Here are few of the things which dbForge Schema Compare can do for developers and DBAs. Compare and synchronize SQL Server database schemas Compare schemas of live database and SQL Server backup Generate comparison reports in Excel and HTML formats Eliminate mistakes in schema changes propagation across environments Track production database changes and customizations Automate migration of schema changes using command line interface I suggest that you try out dbForge Schema Compare and let me know what you think of this product. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL

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• Three Easy Ways of Providing Feedback to the Oracle AutoVue Team

  - by Celine Beck

  Customer feedback is essential in helping us deliver best-in-class Enterprise Visualization solutions which are centered around real-world usage. As the Oracle AutoVue Product Management team is busy prioritizing the next round of improvements, enhancements and new innovation to the AutoVue platform, I thought it would be a good idea to provide our blog-readers with a recap of how best to provide product feedback to the AutoVue Product Management team. This gives you the opportunity to help shape our future agenda and make our solutions better for you. Enterprise Visualization Special Interest Group (EV SIG): the AutoVue EV SIG is a customer-driven initiative that has recently been created to share knowledge and information between members and discuss common and best practices around Enterprise Visualization. The EV SIG also serves as a mechanism for establishing and communicating to AutoVue Product Management users’ collective priorities for the future development, direction and enhancement of the AutoVue product family with the objective of ensuring their continuous improvement. Essentially, EV SIG members meet in order to share and prioritize feedback and use this input to begin dialog with the AutoVue Product Management team on what they deem to be the most important improvements to Enterprise Visualization solutions. The AutoVue EV SIG is by far the best platform for sharing and relaying feedback to our Product Strategy / Management team regarding general product enhancements, industry-specific scenarios, new use cases, usability, support, deployability, etc, and helping us shape the future direction of Enterprise Visualization solutions. We strongly encourage ALL our customers to sign up for the SIG;  here is how you can do so: Sign up for the EVSIG mailing list b.    Visit the group’s website c.    Contact Dennis Walker at Harris Corporation directly should you have any questions: dwalke22-AT-harris-DOT-com Customer / Partner Advisory Boards: The AutoVue Product Strategy / Management team also periodically runs Customer and Partner Advisory Boards. These invitation-only events bring together individuals chosen from Oracle AutoVue’s top customers that are using AutoVue at the enterprise level, as well as strategic partners.  The idea here is to establish open lines of communication between top customers and partners and the Oracle AutoVue Product Strategy team, help us communicate AutoVue’s product direction, share perspectives on today and tomorrow’s challenges and needs for Enterprise Visualization, and validate that proposed additions to the product are valid industry solutions. Our next Customer / Partner Advisory Board will be held in San Francisco during Oracle Open World, please contact your account manager to find out more about the CAB Members’ nomination process. Enhancement Requests:  Enhancement requests are request logged by customers or partners with Product Development for a feature that is not currently available in Oracle AutoVue. Enhancement requests (ER) can be logged easily via the My Oracle Support portal. This is the best way to share feedback with us at the functionality level; for instance if you would like to see a new format supported in AutoVue or make suggestions as per how certain functionality can be improved or should behave. Once the ER is logged, it is then evaluated by Product Management based on feasibility, product adequation and business justification. Product Management then decides whether to consider this ER for future release or not. What helps accelerate the process is hearing from a large number of customers who urgently need a particular feature or configuration. Hence the importance of logging Metalink Service Requests, and describing in details your business expectations. You can include key milestones dates and justifications as to why this request is important and the benefits your organization stands to gain should this request be accepted. Again, feedback from customers and partners is critical to ensure we offer solutions that have the biggest impact on customers’ business processes and day-to-day operations. All feedback is welcome,. So please don’t be shy! 

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• F# WPF Form &ndash; the basics

  - by MarkPearl

  I was listening to Dot Net Rocks show #560 about F# and during the podcast Richard Campbell brought up a good point with regards to F# and a GUI. In essence what I understood his point to be was that until one could write an end to end application in F#, it would be a hard sell to developers to take it on. In part I agree with him, while I am beginning to really enjoy learning F#, I can’t but help feel that I would be a lot further into the language if I could do my Windows Forms like I do in C# or VB.NET for the simple reason that in “playing” applications I spend the majority of the time in the UI layer… So I have been keeping my eye out for some examples of creating a WPF form in a F# project and came across Tim’s F# Twitter Stream Sample, which had exactly this…. of course he actually had a bit more than a basic form… but it was enough for me to scrap the insides and glean what I needed. So today I am going to make just the very basic WPF form with all the goodness of a XAML window. Getting Started First thing we need to do is create a new solution with a blank F# application project – I have made mine called FSharpWPF. Once you have the project created you will need to change the project type from a Console Application to a Windows Application. You do this by right clicking on the project file and going to its properties… Once that is done you will need to add the appropriate references. You do this by right clicking on the References in the Solution Explorer and clicking “Add Reference'”. You should add the appropriate .Net references below for WPF & XAMl to work. Once these references are added you then need to add your XAML file to the project. You can do this by adding a new item to the project of type xml and simply changing the file extension from xml to xaml. Once the xaml file has been added to the project you will need to add valid window XAML. Example of a very basic xaml file is shown below… <Window xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="F# WPF WPF Form" Height="350" Width="525"> <Grid> </Grid> </Window> Once your xaml file is done… you need to set the build action of the xaml file from “None” to “Resource” as depicted in the picture below. If you do not set this you will get an IOException error when running the completed project with a message along the lines of “Cannot locate resource ‘window.xaml’ You then need to tie everything up by putting the correct F# code in the Program.fs to load the xaml window. In the Program.fs put the following code… module Program open System open System.Collections.ObjectModel open System.IO open System.Windows open System.Windows.Controls open System.Windows.Markup [<STAThread>] [<EntryPoint>] let main(_) = let w = Application.LoadComponent(new System.Uri("/FSharpWPF;component/Window.xaml", System.UriKind.Relative)) :?> Window (new Application()).Run(w) Once all this is done you should be able to build and run your project. What you have done is created a WPF based window inside a FSharp project. It should look something like below…   Nothing to exciting, but sufficient to illustrate the very basic WPF form in F#. Hopefully in future posts I will build on this to expose button events etc.

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• Book Review: Programming Windows Identity Foundation

  - by DigiMortal

  Programming Windows Identity Foundation by Vittorio Bertocci is right now the only serious book about Windows Identity Foundation available. I started using Windows Identity Foundation when I made my first experiments on Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service. I wanted to generalize the way how people authenticate theirselves to my systems and AppFabric ACS seemed to me like good point where to start. My first steps trying to get things work opened the door to whole new authentication world for me. As I went through different blog postings and articles to get more information I discovered that the thing I am trying to use is the one I am looking for. As best security API for .NET was found I wanted to know more about it and this is how I found Programming Windows Identity Foundation. What’s inside? Programming WIF focuses on architecture, design and implementation of WIF. I think Vittorio is very good at teaching people because you find no too complex topics from the book. You learn more and more as you read and as a good thing you will find that you can also try out your new knowledge on WIF immediately. After giving good overview about WIF author moves on and introduces how to use WIF in ASP.NET applications. You will get complete picture how WIF integrates to ASP.NET request processing pipeline and how you can control the process by yourself. There are two chapters about ASP.NET. First one is more like introduction and the second one goes deeper and deeper until you have very good idea about how to use ASP.NET and WIF together, what issues you may face and how you can configure and extend WIF. Other two chapters cover using WIF with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) band   Windows Azure. WCF chapter expects that you know WCF very well. This is not introductory chapter for beginners, this is heavy reading if you are not familiar with WCF. The chapter about Windows Azure describes how to use WIF in cloud applications. Last chapter talks about some future developments of WIF and describer some problems and their solutions. Most interesting part of this chapter is section about Silverlight. Who should read this book? Programming WIF is targeted to developers. It does not matter if you are beginner or old bullet-proof professional – every developer should be able to be read this book with no difficulties. I don’t recommend this book to administrators and project managers because they find almost nothing that is related to their work. I strongly recommend this book to all developers who are interested in modern authentication methods on Microsoft platform. The book is written so well that I almost forgot all things around me when I was reading the book. All additional tools you need are free. There is also Azure AppFabric ACS test version available and you can try it out for free. Table of contents Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction Part I Windows Identity Foundation for Everybody 1 Claims-Based Identity 2 Core ASP.NET Programming Part II Windows Identity Foundation for Identity Developers 3 WIF Processing Pipeline in ASP.NET 4 Advanced ASP.NET Programming 5 WIF and WCF 6 WIF and Windows Azure 7 The Road Ahead Index

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