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• SQL Authority News – Download Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Feature Pack and Microsoft SQL Server Developer’s Edition

  - by Pinal Dave

  Yesterday I attended the SQL Server Community Launch in Bangalore and presented on Performing an effective Presentation. It was a fun presentation and people very well received it. No matter on what subject, I present, I always end up talking about SQL. Here are two of the questions I had received during the event. Q1) I want to install SQL Server on my development server, where can we get it for free or at an economical price (I do not have MSDN)? A1) If you are not going to use your server in a production environment, you can just get SQL Server Developer’s Edition and you can read more about it over here. Here is another favorite question which I keep on receiving it during the event. Q2) I already have SQL Server installed on my machine, what are different feature pack should I install and where can I get them from. A2) Just download and install Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Service Pack. Here is the link for downloading it. The Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Feature Pack is a collection of stand-alone packages which provide additional value for Microsoft SQL Server. It includes tool and components for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 and add-on providers for Microsoft SQL Server 2014. Here is the list of component this product contains: Microsoft SQL Server Backup to Windows Azure Tool Microsoft SQL Server Cloud Adapter Microsoft Kerberos Configuration Manager for Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Semantic Language Statistics Microsoft SQL Server Data-Tier Application Framework Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Transact-SQL Language Service Microsoft Windows PowerShell Extensions for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Shared Management Objects Microsoft Command Line Utilities 11 for Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft ODBC Driver 11 for Microsoft SQL Server – Windows Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft Drivers 3.0 for PHP for Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Transact-SQL ScriptDom Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Transact-SQL Compiler Service Microsoft System CLR Types for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Remote Blob Store SQL RBS codeplex samples page SQL Server Remote Blob Store blogs Microsoft SQL Server Service Broker External Activator for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft OData Source for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft Balanced Data Distributor for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft Change Data Capture Designer and Service for Oracle by Attunity for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Master Data Service Add-in for Microsoft Excel Microsoft SQL Server StreamInsight Microsoft Connector for SAP BW for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Upgrade Advisor Microsoft OLEDB Provider for DB2 v5.0 for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 PowerPivot for Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 ADOMD.NET Microsoft Analysis Services OLE DB Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Analysis Management Objects Microsoft SQL Server Report Builder for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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• Running an intern program

  - by dotneteer

  This year I am running an unpaid internship program for high school students. I work for a small company. We have ideas for a few side projects but never have time to do them. So we experiment by making them intern projects. In return, we give these interns guidance to learn, personal attentions, and opportunities with real-world projects. A few years ago, I blogged about the idea of teaching kids to write application with no more than 6 hours of training. This time, I was able to reduce the instruction time to 4 hours and immediately put them into real work projects. When they encounter problems, I combine directions, pointer to various materials on w3school, Udacity, Codecademy and UTube, as well as encouraging them to  search for solutions with search engines. Now entering the third week, I am more than encouraged and feeling accomplished. Our the most senior intern, Christopher Chen, is a recent high school graduate and is heading to UC Berkeley to study computer science after the summer. He previously only had one year of Java experience through the AP computer science course but had no web development experience. Only 12 days into his internship, he has already gain advanced css skills with deeper understanding than more than half of the “senior” developers that I have ever worked with. I put him on a project to migrate an existing website to the Orchard content management system (CMS) with which I am new as well. We were able to teach each other and quickly gain advanced Orchard skills such as creating custom theme and modules. I felt very much a relationship similar to the those between professors and graduate students. On the other hand, I quite expect that I will lose him the next summer to companies like Google, Facebook or Microsoft. As a side note, Christopher and I will do a two part Orchard presentations together at the next SoCal code camp at UC San Diego July 27-28. The first part, “creating an Orchard website on Azure in 60 minutes”, is an introductory lecture and we will discuss how to create a website using Orchard without writing code. The 2nd part, “customizing Orchard websites without limit”, is an advanced lecture and we will discuss custom theme and module development with WebMatrix and Visual Studio.

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• Top 31 Favorite Features in Windows Server 2012

  - by KeithMayer

  Over the past month, my fellow IT Pro Technical Evangelists and I have authored a series of articles about our Top 31 Favorite Features in Windows Server 2012.  Now that our series is complete, I’m providing a clickable index below of all of the articles in the series for your convenience, just in case you perhaps missed any of them when they were first released.  Hope you enjoy our Favorite Features in Windows Server 2012! Top 31 Favorite Features in Windows Server 2012 The Cloud OS Platform by Kevin Remde Server Manager in Windows Server 2012 by Brian Lewis Feel the Power of PowerShell 3.0 by Matt Hester Live Migrate Your VMS in One Line of PowerShell by Keith Mayer Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Replica by Kevin Remde Right-size IT Budgets with “Storage Spaces” by Keith Mayer Yes, there is an “I” in Team – the NIC Team! by Kevin Remde Hyper-V Network Virtualization by Keith Mayer Get Happy over the FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 by Matt Hester Simplified BranchCache in Windows Server 2012 by Brian Lewis Getting Snippy with PowerShell 3.0 by Matt Hester How to Get Unbelievable Data Deduplication Results by Chris Henley of Veeam Simplified VDI Configuration and Management by Brian Lewis Taming the New Task Manager by Keith Mayer Improve File Server Resiliency with ReFS by Keith Mayer Simplified DirectAccess by Sumeeth Evans SMB 3.0 – The Glue in Windows Server 2012 by Matt Hester Continuously Available File Shares by Steven Murawski of Edgenet Server Core - Improved Taste, Less Filling, More Uptime by Keith Mayer Extend Your Hyper-V Virtual Switch by Kevin Remde To NIC or to Not NIC Hardware Requirements by Brian Lewis Simplified Licensing and Server Versions by Kevin Remde I Think, Therefore IPAM! by Kevin Remde Windows Server 2012 and the RSATs by Kevin Remde Top 3 New Tricks in the Active Directory Admin Center by Keith Mayer Dynamic Access Control by Brian Lewis Get the Gremlin out of Your Active Directory Virtualized Infrastructure by Matt Hester Scoping out the New DHCP Failover by Keith Mayer Gone in 8 Seconds – The New CHKDSK by Matt Hester New Remote Desktop Services (RDS) by Brian Lewis No Better Time Than Now to Choose Hyper-V by Matt Hester What’s Next? Keep Learning! Want to learn more about Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012?  Want to prepare for certification on Windows Server 2012? Do It: Join our Windows Server 2012 “Early Experts” Challenge online peer study group for FREE at http://earlyexperts.net. You’ll get FREE access to video-based lectures, structured study materials and hands-on lab activities to help you study and prepare!  Along the way, you’ll be part of an IT Pro community of over 1,000+ IT Pros that are all helping each other learn Windows Server 2012! What are Your Favorite Features? Do you have a Favorite Feature in Windows Server 2012 that we missed in our list above?  Feel free to share your favorites in the comments below! Keith Build Your Lab! Download Windows Server 2012 Don’t Have a Lab? Build Your Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Machines Want to Get Certified? Join our Windows Server 2012 "Early Experts" Study Group

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• Renewed as MVP

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). It is with great humbleness and honor that I accept Microsoft’s MVP award for 2010. This will be my .. I forget how many years, as an MVP. So suffice to say, I was a lot younger when I first got the MVP award, but also the excitement never dies. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still young, foolish and weird :). (and good looking, might I add) I’d like to share a few things with you on what I have learnt being a part of this very prestigious program that I am so unworthy of. Never aim to be an MVP. Let it be a consequence of what you already are. Always be down to earth, just because you’re an MVP doesn’t mean you’re better than anyone else. The biggest reward of the MVP program, yes much bigger than the free top notch MSDN subscription, is the amazing interaction you will have with other fellow MVPs, and incredibly smart people in the community in general. Get involved in the community, for your own sake! You will learn so much from your peers, it is a very very rewarding experience. Learn, Learn and Learn! Never under estimate the power of knowledge. Both technical and otherwise. I thank each one of you for all the attention you have given me over the past many years. And a very special thanks to my MVP lead, Melissa Travers, and my previous MVP lead Rafael Munoz (who isn’t with Microsoft anymore, but I am sure is kicking butt wherever he is). We are truly entering a very very exciting time in the technology space. Both Google and Apple are challenging Microsoft, forcing Microsoft to innovate at a pace like never before. Microsoft is coming out with an incredible amount of good, new and exciting stuff. Windows Mobile 7, Azure, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, IE9, and of course SharePoint 2010. The level of innovation in the tech industry is simply unprecedented. A truly exciting time for anyone who lives, breathes, sleeps and dreams of technology even when awake! (Like me!) As you know, I’ve been working on my SP2010 book lately. I’m happy to also inform that the book is DONE. WOOHOO!! :). So this means, I’ll have more time to blog, and cause more trouble in general. Once again! THANK YOU! Comment on the article ....

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• Silverlight Cream for April 07, 2010 -- #833

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Alan Mendelevich, Siyamand Ayubi, Rudi Grobler(-2-), Josh Smith, VinitYadav, and Dave Campbell. Shoutouts: Jordan Knight has a demo up of a project he did for DigiGirlz: DigiGirlz, Deep Zoom and Azure, hopefully we'll get source later :) Jeremy Likness has a must-read post on his Ten Reasons to use the Managed Extensibility Framework I put this on another post earlier, but if you want some desktop bling for WP7, Ozymandias has some: I Love Windows Phone Wallpaper If you're not going to be in 'Vegas next week, Tim Heuer reminds us there's an alternative: Watch the Silverlight 4 Launch event and LIVE QA with ScottGu and others From SilverlightCream.com: Ghost Lines in Silverlight Alan Mendelevich reports an issue when drawing lines with odd coordinate values. He originated it in Silverlight 3, but it is there in SL4RC as well... check it out and leave him a comment. A Framework to Animate WPF and Silverlight Pages Similar to the PowerPoint Slides Siyamand Ayubi has an interesting post up on animating WPF or Silverlight pages to make them progress in the manner of a PPT slideshow. And it can also make phone calls… Rudi Grobler has a list of 'tasks' you can do with WP7 such as PhoneCallTask or EmailComposeTask ... looks like this should be plasticized :) Using the GPS, Accelerometer & Vibration Controller Rudi Grobler is also investigating how to use the GPS, Accelerometer, and Vibration in WP7 with a bunch of external links to back it up. Assembly-level initialization at design time Josh Smith has a solution to the problem of initializing design-time data in Blend (did you know that was an issue?) ... the solution is great and so is the running commentary between Josh and Karl Shifflett in the comments! ySurf : A Yahoo Messenger Clone built in Silverlight VinitYadav built a Yahoo Messenger app in Silverlight and has detailed out all the ugly bits for us on the post, plus made everything available. Your First Silverlight Application Dave Campbell's first post at DZone cracking open a beginner's series on Silverlight. If you're expecting something heavy-duty, skip this. If you're wanting to learn Silverlight and haven't jumped in yet, give it a try. 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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• Nginx and PHP Fundamentals

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/08/01/nginx-and-php-fundamentals.aspxHot on the heels of my .NET caching course, I’ve had my first “fundamentals” course released on Pluralsight: Nginx and PHP Fundamentals. It’s a practical look at two of the biggest technologies on the web – Nginx, which is the fastest growing HTTP server around (currently hosting 100+ million sites), and PHP, which powers more websites than any other server-side framework (currently 240+ million sites). The two technologies work well together, both are open-source and cross-platform and both are lightweight and easy to get started with - you just need to download and unzip the runtimes, and with a text editor you can create and host dynamic websites. I’ve used PHP as a second (sometimes third) language since 2005 when I was brought cold into an established codebase to help improve performance, and Nginx to host tier 2 apps for the last couple of years. As with any training course, you learn new things as you produce it, and it was good to focus on a different stack from my commercial .NET world. In the course I start with a website in two parts – one which is just static content, and one which processes a user registration form using ASP.NET MVC, both running in IIS. Over four modules I migrate the app to Nginx and PHP: Hosting Static Content in Nginx – how to deploy and configure Nginx for a basic website; PHP Part 1: Basic Web Forms – installing PHP and an IDE, and building a simple form with server-side validation; PHP Part 2: Packages and Integration – using PECL and Composer for packages to connect to Azure, AWS, Mongo and reCAPTCHA; Hosting PHP in Nginx – configuring Nginx to host our PHP site. Along the way I run some performance stats with JMeter, and the headlines are that Nginx running on Linux outperforms IIS on Windows for static content,by 800 requests per second over 1000 concurrent requests; and Linux+Ngnix+PHP outperforms Windows+IIS+ASP.NET MVC by 700 request per second with the same load. Of course, the headline stats don’t tell the whole story, and when you add OpCode caching for PHP and the ASP.NET Output Cache, the results are very different. As Web architecture moves away from heavy server-side processing, to Single Page Apps with client-side frameworks like AngularJS and Knockout, I think there’s an increasing need for high-performance, low-cost server technologies, and the combination of Nginx and PHP makes a compelling case.

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• Guidance and Pricing for MSDN 2010

  - by John Alexander

  Sorry for the rather lengthy post here. I get asked this all the time so I decided to post it…Visual Studio 2010 editions will be available on April 12, 2010. Product Features Professional with MSDN Essentials Professional with MSDN Premium with MSDN Ultimate with MSDN Test Professional with MSDN Debugging and Diagnostics IntelliTrace (Historical Debugger)         Static Code Analysis       Code Metrics       Profiling       Debugger   Testing Tools Unit Testing   Code Coverage       Test Impact Analysis       Coded UI Test       Web Performance Testing         Load Testing1         Microsoft Test Manager 2010       Test Case Management2       Manual Test Execution       Fast-Forward for Manual Testing       Lab Management Configuration3       Integrated Development Environment Multiple Monitor Support   Multi-Targeting   One Click Web Deployment   JavaScript and jQuery Support   Extensible WPF-Based Environment Database Development Database Deployment       Database Change Management2       Database Unit Testing       Database Test Data Generation       Data Access   Development Platform Support Windows Development   Web Development   Office and SharePoint Development   Cloud Development   Customizable Development Experience   Architecture and Modeling Architecture Explorer         UML® 2.0 Compliant Diagrams (Activity, Use Case, Sequence, Class, Component)         Layer Diagram and Dependency Validation         Read-only diagrams (UML, Layer, DGML Graphs)         Lab Management Virtual environment setup & tear down3       Provision environment from template3       Checkpoint environment3       Team Foundation Server Version Control2   Work Item Tracking2   Build Automation2   Team Portal2   Reporting & Business Intelligence2   Agile Planning Workbook2   Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010   Test Case Management2       MSDN Subscription – Software and Services for Production Use Windows Azure Platform 20 hrs/mo † 50 hrs/mo † 100 hrs/mo † 250 hrs/mo † n/a Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010   Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 CAL   1 1 1 1 Microsoft Expression Studio 3       Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, Project Professional 2010, Visio Premium 2010 (following Office 2010 launch)       MSDN Subscription – Software for Development and Testing 4 Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 Toolkits, Software Development Kits, Driver Development Kits Previous versions of Windows (client and server operation systems)   Previous versions of Microsoft SQL Server   Microsoft Office       Microsoft Dynamics       All other Servers       Windows Embedded operating systems       Teamprise         MSDN Subscription – Other Benefits Technical support incidents 0 2 4 4 2 Priority support in MSDN Forums Microsoft e-learning collections (typically 10 courses or 20 hours) 0 1 2 2 1 MSDN Flash newsletter MSDN Online Concierge MSDN Magazine   System Requirements View View View View View Buy from (MSRP) $799 $1,199 $5,469 $11,899 $2,169 Renew from (MSRP) $549 (upgrade) $799 $2,299 $3,799 $899 † Availability varies by country and subscription level.  Details available on the MSDN site 1. May require one or more Microsoft Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 2. Requires Team Foundation Server and a Team Foundation Server CAL 3. Requires Microsoft Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 4. Per-user license allows unlimited installations and use for designing, developing, testing, and demonstrating applications. UML is a registered trademark of Object Management Group, Inc. Windows is either a registered trademark or trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

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• Big Data – Buzz Words: What is NoSQL – Day 5 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we explored the basic architecture of Big Data . In this article we will take a quick look at one of the four most important buzz words which goes around Big Data – NoSQL. What is NoSQL? NoSQL stands for Not Relational SQL or Not Only SQL. Lots of people think that NoSQL means there is No SQL, which is not true – they both sound same but the meaning is totally different. NoSQL does use SQL but it uses more than SQL to achieve its goal. As per Wikipedia’s NoSQL Database Definition – “A NoSQL database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that uses looser consistency models than traditional relational databases.“ Why use NoSQL? A traditional relation database usually deals with predictable structured data. Whereas as the world has moved forward with unstructured data we often see the limitations of the traditional relational database in dealing with them. For example, nowadays we have data in format of SMS, wave files, photos and video format. It is a bit difficult to manage them by using a traditional relational database. I often see people using BLOB filed to store such a data. BLOB can store the data but when we have to retrieve them or even process them the same BLOB is extremely slow in processing the unstructured data. A NoSQL database is the type of database that can handle unstructured, unorganized and unpredictable data that our business needs it. Along with the support to unstructured data, the other advantage of NoSQL Database is high performance and high availability. Eventual Consistency Additionally to note that NoSQL Database may not provided 100% ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) compliance.  Though, NoSQL Database does not support ACID they provide eventual consistency. That means over the long period of time all updates can be expected to propagate eventually through the system and data will be consistent. Taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice of classification of things or concepts and the principles. The NoSQL taxonomy supports column store, document store, key-value stores, and graph databases. We will discuss the taxonomy in detail in later blog posts. Here are few of the examples of the each of the No SQL Category. Column: Hbase, Cassandra, Accumulo Document: MongoDB, Couchbase, Raven Key-value : Dynamo, Riak, Azure, Redis, Cache, GT.m Graph: Neo4J, Allegro, Virtuoso, Bigdata As of now there are over 150 NoSQL Database and you can read everything about them in this single link. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss Buzz Word – Hadoop. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Using MAC Authentication for simple Web API’s consumption

  - by cibrax

  For simple scenarios of Web API consumption where identity delegation is not required, traditional http authentication schemas such as basic, certificates or digest are the most used nowadays. All these schemas rely on sending the caller credentials or some representation of it in every request message as part of the Authorization header, so they are prone to suffer phishing attacks if they are not correctly secured at transport level with https. In addition, most client applications typically authenticate two different things, the caller application and the user consuming the API on behalf of that application. For most cases, the schema is simplified by using a single set of username and password for authenticating both, making necessary to store those credentials temporally somewhere in memory. The true is that you can use two different identities, one for the user running the application, which you might authenticate just once during the first call when the application is initialized, and another identity for the application itself that you use on every call. Some cloud vendors like Windows Azure or Amazon Web Services have adopted an schema to authenticate the caller application based on a Message Authentication Code (MAC) generated with a symmetric algorithm using a key known by the two parties, the caller and the Web API. The caller must include a MAC as part of the Authorization header created from different pieces of information in the request message such as the address, the host, and some other headers. The Web API can authenticate the caller by using the key associated to it and validating the attached MAC in the request message. In that way, no credentials are sent as part of the request message, so there is no way an attacker to intercept the message and get access to those credentials. Anyways, this schema also suffers from some deficiencies that can generate attacks. For example, brute force can be still used to infer the key used for generating the MAC, and impersonate the original caller. This can be mitigated by renewing keys in a relative short period of time. This schema as any other can be complemented with transport security. Eran Rammer, one of the brains behind OAuth, has recently published an specification of a protocol based on MAC for Http authentication called Hawk. The initial version of the spec is available here. A curious fact is that the specification per se does not exist, and the specification itself is the code that Eran initially wrote using node.js. In that implementation, you can associate a key to an user, so once the MAC has been verified on the Web API, the user can be inferred from that key. Also a timestamp is used to avoid replay attacks. As a pet project, I decided to port that code to .NET using ASP.NET Web API, which is available also in github under https://github.com/pcibraro/hawknet Enjoy!.

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• Generate DROP statements for all extended properties

  - by jamiet

  This evening I have been attempting to migrate an existing on-premise database to SQL Azure using the wizard that is built-in to SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). When I did so I received the following error: The following objects are not supported = [MS_Description] = Extended Property Evidently databases containing extended properties can not be migrated using this particular wizard so I set about removing all of the extended properties – unfortunately there were over a thousand of them so I needed a better way than simply deleting each and every one of them manually. I found a couple of resources online that went some way toward this: Drop all extended properties in a MSSQL database by Angelo Hongens Modifying and deleting extended properties by Adam Aspin Unfortunately neither provided a script that exactly suited my needs. Angelo’s covered extended properties on tables and columns however I had other objects that had extended properties on them. Adam’s looked more complete but when I ran it I got an error: Msg 468, Level 16, State 9, Line 78 Cannot resolve the collation conflict between "Latin1_General_100_CS_AS" and "Latin1_General_CI_AS" in the equal to operation. So, both great resources but I wasn’t able to use either on their own to get rid of all of my extended properties. Hence, I combined the excellent work that Angelo and Adam had provided in order to manufacture my own script which did successfully manage to generate calls to sp_dropextendedproperty for all of my extended properties. If you think you might be able to make use of such a script then feel free to download it from https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=550f681dad532637&resid=550F681DAD532637!16707&parid=550F681DAD532637!16706&authkey=!APxPIQCatzC7BQ8. This script will remove extended properties on tables, columns, check constraints, default constraints, views, sprocs, foreign keys, primary keys, table triggers, UDF parameters, sproc parameters, databases, schemas, database files and filegroups. If you have any object types with extended properties on them that are not in that list then consult Adam’s aforementioned article – it should prove very useful. I repeat here the message that I have placed at the top of the script: /* This script will generate calls to sp_dropextendedproperty for every extended property that exists in your database. Actually, a caveat: I don't promise that it will catch each and every extended property that exists, but I'm confident it will catch most of them! It is based on this: http://blog.hongens.nl/2010/02/25/drop-all-extended-properties-in-a-mssql-database/ by Angelo Hongens. Also had lots of help from this: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Metadata/72609/ by Adam Aspin Adam actually provides a script at that link to do something very similar but when I ran it I got an error: Msg 468, Level 16, State 9, Line 78 Cannot resolve the collation conflict between "Latin1_General_100_CS_AS" and "Latin1_General_CI_AS" in the equal to operation. So I put together this version instead. Use at your own risk. Jamie Thomson 2012-03-25 */ Hope this is useful to someone! @Jamiet

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• Making the WPeFfort

  - by Laila

  Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 will be launched on April 12th. The basic layout looks pretty much as it did, so it is not immediately obvious on first inspection that it was completely rewritten in the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). The current VS 2008 codebase had reached the end of its life; It was getting slow to initialize and sluggish to run, and was never going to allow for multi-monitor support or easier extensibility. It can't have been an easy decision to rewrite Visual Studio, but the gamble seems to have paid off. Although certain bugs in the betas caused some anxiety about performance, these seem to have been fixed, and the new Visual Studio is definitely faster. In rewriting the codebase, it has been possible to make obvious improvements, such as being able to run different windows on different monitors, and you only being presented with the Toolbox controls and References that are appropriate to your target .NET version. There is also an IntelliTrace debugger, and Intellisense has been improved by virtue of separating a 'Suggestion Mode' and 'Completion Mode' (with its 'Generate From.' 'Highlight References.', and 'Navigate to...' features). At the same time, there has been quite a clearout; Certain features that had been tucked away in the previous versions, such as Brief or Emacs emulation support, have been dropped. (Yes, they were being used!) There are a lot of features that didn't require the rewrite, but are welcome. It is now easier to develop WPF applications (e.g. drag-and-drop Databinding), and there is support for Azure. There are more, and better templates and the design tools are greatly improved (e.g. Expression Web, Expression Blend, WPF Sketchflow, Silverlight designer, Document Map Margin and Inline Call Hierarchy). Sharepoint is better supported, and Office apps will benefit from C#'s support of optional and named arguments, and allowing several Office Solutions within a Deployment package. Most importantly, it is a vote of confidence in the WPF. VS 2010 is the essential missing component that has been impeding the faster adoption of WPF. The fact that it is actually now written in WPF should now reassure the doubters, and convince more developers to make the move from WinForms to WPF. In using WPF, the developers of Visual Studio have had the clout to fix some issues which have been bothering WPF developers for some time (such as blurred text). Do you see a brighter future as a result of transferring from WinForms to WPF? I'd love to know what you think. Cheers, Laila

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• Thinktecture.IdentityServer RC

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  I just uploaded the RC of IdentityServer to Codeplex. This release is feature complete and if I don’t get any bug reports this is also pretty much the final V1. Changes from B1 The configuration data access is now based on EF 4.1 code first. This makes it much easier to use different data stores. For RTM I will also provide a SQL script for SQL Server so you can move the configuration to a separate machine (e.g. for load balancing scenarios). I included the ASP.NET Universal Providers in the download. This adds official support for SQL Azure, SQL Server and SQL Compact for the membership, roles and profile features. Unfortunately the Universal Provider use a different schema than the original ASP.NET providers (that sucks btw!) – so I made them optional. If you want to use them go to web.config and uncomment the new provider. The relying party registration entries now have added fields to add extra data that you want to couple with the RP. One use case could be to give the UI a hint how the login experience should look like per RP. This allows to have a different look and feel for different relying parties. I also included a small helper API that you can use to retrieve the RP record based on the incoming WS-Federation query string. WS-Federation single sign out is now conforming to the spec. Certificate based endpoint identities for SSL endpoints are optional now. Added a initial configuration “wizard”. This sets up the signing certificate, issuer URI and site title on the first run. Installation This is still a “developer” release – that means it ships with source code that you have to build it etc. But from that point it should be a little more straightforward as it used to be: Make sure SSL is configured correctly for IIS Map the WebSite directory to a vdir in IIS Run the web site. This should bring up the initial configuration Make sure the worker process account has access to the signing certificate private key Make sure all your users are in the “IdentityServerUsers” role in your role store. Administrators need the “IdentityServerAdministrators” role That should be it. A proper documentation will be hopefully available soon (any volunteers?). Please provide feedback! thanks!

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• AWS .NET SDK v2: the message-pump pattern

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/10/11/aws-.net-sdk-v2--the-message-pump-pattern.aspxVersion 2 of the AWS SDK for .NET has had a few pre-release iterations on NuGet and is stable, if a bit lacking in step-by-step guides. There’s at least one big reason to try it out: the SQS queue client now supports asynchronous reads, so you don’t need a clumsy polling mechanism to retrieve messages. The new approach  is easy to use, and lets you work with AWS queues in a similar way to the message-pump pattern used in the latest Azure SDK for Service Bus queues and topics. I’ve posted a simple wrapper class for subscribing to an SQS hub on gist here: A wrapper for the SQS client in the AWS SDK for.NET v2, which uses the message-pump pattern. Here’s the core functionality in the subscribe method: private async void Subscribe() { if (_isListening) { var request = new ReceiveMessageRequest { MaxNumberOfMessages = 10 }; request.QueueUrl = QueueUrl; var result = await _sqsClient.ReceiveMessageAsync(request, _cancellationTokenSource.Token); if (result.Messages.Count > 0) { foreach (var message in result.Messages) { if (_receiveAction != null && message != null) { _receiveAction(message.Body); DeleteMessage(message.ReceiptHandle); } } } } if (_isListening) { Subscribe(); } } which you call with something like this: client.Subscribe(x=>Log.Debug(x.Body)); The async SDK call returns when there is something in the queue, and will run your receive action for every message it gets in the batch (defaults to the maximum size of 10 messages per call). The listener will sit there awaiting messages until you stop it with: client.Unsubscribe(); Internally it has a cancellation token which it sets when you call unsubscribe, which cancels any in-flight call to SQS and stops the pump. The wrapper will also create the queue if it doesn’t exist at runtime. The Ensure() method gets called in the constructor so when you first use the client for a queue (sending or subscribing), it will set itself up: if (!Exists()) { var request = new CreateQueueRequest(); request.QueueName = QueueName; var response = _sqsClient.CreateQueue(request); QueueUrl = response.QueueUrl; } The Exists() check has to do make a call to ListQueues on the SNS client, as it doesn’t provide its own method to check if a queue exists. That call also populates the Amazon Resource Name, the unique identifier for this queue, which will be useful later. To use the wrapper, just instantiate and go: var queueClient = new QueueClient(“ProcessWorkflow”); queueClient.Subscribe(x=>Log.Debug(x.Body)); var message = {}; //etc. queueClient.Send(message);

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• Windows Desktop Virtualization Gets Easier

  - by andrewbrust

  This past Thursday, Microsoft announced that Windows (7) Virtual PC (WVPC) and its XP Mode feature would no longer require hardware assisted virtualization (HAV).  That means any PC running Windows 7 Pro, or higher, can now run this software.  And that’s a great thing because, as I noted in a post almost five month ago, determining whether a given PC you might be planning to buy actually offers HAV can be extremely difficult.  That meant even dedicated, sophisticated PC users, with a budget for new hardware, might be blocked from using this technology.  And that was just plain silly. One of the features offered by WVPC, and utilized heavily by XP Mode, is the concept of virtual applications: apps within a guest VM that can actually run within the host’s desktop environment.  I find this feature so powerful that my February Redmond Review column entertained the notion of a future version of Windows that runs all applications in this manner. The elimination of the HAV requirement for XP Mode and WVPC was just one of many virtualization-related announcements Microsoft made on Thursday.  And, interestingly, most of the others were also desktop-related, rather than server-related.  This is a welcome change from the multi-year period in which Microsoft enhanced its server virtualization lineup (in Hyper-V) and let the desktop platform fester.  Microsoft now seems to understand desktop virtualization is in high-demand and strengthens the Windows franchise.  As I explained in the column, even cloud computing can have a desktop spin if desktop virtualization is part of the equation. One company that knows this well is Citrix, and a closer alliance between Microsoft and Citrix was one of the many announcements from Thursday.  In fact, there’s a whole Web site dedicated to the alliance at http://www.citrixandmicrosoft.com/. I’d love to see virtual applications and entire virtual desktops offered as Azure-branded services.  This could allow me to run, for example, the full Office client on a variety of desktops I might use, and for large organizations it could easily reduce the expense, burden and duration of the deployment cycle for new versions of Office.  Business Intelligence providers, including my own firm, twentysix New York, would find great relief in enabling their customers to run the newest version of Excel, with the latest BI capabilities, instead of having to wait the requisite two to three years it takes for many Fortune 500 customers to upgrade. Microsoft should do more, and faster.  WVPC still does not support 64-bit guest images, even on 64-bit hosts.  That needs to be fixed.  File access from the guest to the host needs to be improved (right now, it’s done through Terminal Services/Remote Desktop file sharing, and it’s slow) and VM load times need to be significantly reduced before virtualized apps can become the norm.  (I suppose the advance of solid state drive technology will help there.) I do think these improvements will come, because Microsoft is focused on the virtual desktop now.  And that’s a smart focus to have.

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• Travelling MVP #2: Community event at Bucharest, Romania

  - by DigiMortal

  My second trip was to DevReach with two stops. My first stop was at Bucharest where I met with my friend Dimitar Georgiev who is one of authors of Gym Realm service. Romanian MVP Andrei Ignat was our host there and organized meeting with local community guys. With me – it was first time in my life – was one more guy from Estonia visiting DevReach and he made the whole trip with me. Bucharest We arrived to Bucharest 29.09 at night. We stayed at Hotel Michelangelo. It’s small hotel with nice rooms, free WiFi and very good service. Although my room was on the first floor there was no street noise. We visited one restaurant that offers national cuisine and it was really great. Next day we went out with local guys and had some beers in “old town”. Bucharest “old town” is nice and cozy. There are many bars open and I am sure everybody will find there some very okay place. After supper we visited one warm karaoke bar where we had beers with local guys. Andrei Ignat – karaoke star Agu Suur and Andrei Ion Rinea enjoying karaoke and tequila Community event Next day we had community event. I made my session about ASP.NET Web API and Dimitar told about how to port ASP.NET web applications to cloud environment. Sessions were held at study class of one local company. Dimitar Georgiev speaking about porting web apps to Windows Azure. As it was usual community evening and not some bigger event there were about 12 guys attending from Bucharest. There were both IT-PROs and developers and one nice thing about Bucharest community is that they are listening to you very well and they ask questions if something is unclear or if you slide over from topic they are interested in. Okay, we tried to keep up good tempo so people stay awake and I think we succeeded. After sessions we went all together to local Piranha pub that was near event venue. We had some beers with local guys and talked with them on different technology topics. It was another good and interesting evening at Bucharest. I want to go back there for sure. As it was my first trip to Bucharest and mostly I gathered experiences I think my next community trip there will be way stronger. I take it as a challenge. Plus – I have there some new friends and I want to meet them too – be it community event or not. :)

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• SSIS and StreamInsight Working Together.

  I have been thinking a lot recently about what it would be like to have StreamInsight and SSIS working together.  Well the CAT team have produced a paper on some of our options here. Here are some of my thoughts. There is of course a slight mismatch in their types of usage.  StreamInsight is an Event Stream processing engine capable of operating on new data in the sub second timeframe.  The engine allows you to do real time analytics and take decisions on events that have potentially only just happened.  SSIS on the other hand is a batch processing engine.  In general I do not like having to invoke the same package more than once every 90 seconds or so as it can start to get expensive.  Usually when doing batch processing we have an hour or longer of grace before we have to move data from A –> B. StreamInsight operates on streams of data.  Before anyone mentions it yes I know StreamInsight is equally adept at using the IEnumerable interface, but I would argue live streaming and real-time analytics is a primary goal of the product.  SSIS does not have an “Always On” button I do not like the idea of embedding StreamInsight inside SSIS using a transform particularly.  It means StreamInsight becomes a batch processing engine because it can only operate when the SSIS package is running and SSIS is in charge of when that happens. If I am to have StreamInsight within SSIS then I prefer to have StreamInsight on the adapters.  This way you can force the adapters to stay open and introduce events into your Pipeline.   SSIS has a much richer set of transforms out of the box than StreamInsight.  Although “Always On” was not a design goal of SSIS I have used it like this and it works just fine. SSIS being called from within StreamInsight, now that excites me.  see below   For a while now I have been thinking what it would be like to decouple the Data Flow task from the SSIS package and expose it as something with which you can interact.  Anything can instantiate this version of a DFT as it would expose one or more  input interfaces and one or more output interfaces.  I can imagine that this would be a big hit when moving to “The Cloud” as well.  I could see the Data Flow task maybe being hosted in Azure Appfabric or some such layer. StreamInsight would be able to take advantage of this as well.   I am interested to see where this goes and will be pressing for more meat around the subject when I visit Redmond soon.

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• Why I Love Microsoft Development

  - by Brian Lanham

  I've been writing software for a while and recently had an opportunity to broaden my horizons and start developing for iOS. We decided to leverage, as much as possible, our existing skills and use MonoTouch and MonoDevelop by Novell.    For those of you who do not know, Mono is a .NET port originally designed for Linux but adapted for other platforms as well. MonoTouch is a port specifically for building iOS applications using the .NET framework. MonoDroid is a port (in CTP-esque release) for Android.   A MISSING COMPONENT - VISUAL DESIGNER   MonoDevelop lacks one very significant component compared with other tools I am using: NO VISUAL DESIGNER. Instead of using an integrated visual designer, MonoDevelop shells to the Mac OS "Interface Builder".  Since MonoDevelop lets me have a "Visual Studio-esque" feel *and* I get to use C#, AND it's FREE, I am gladly willing to overlook this.  In fact, it's not even a question.  Free?  Sure, I'll take it with no Visual Designer.   In my experiences I've grown from UNIX and DOS to .NET development through many steps. Java/JSP/Servlets; Windows; Web; etc. I've been doing .NET for quite a few years and I guess I just got "comfortable" with the tools.   WHY AM I NOT GETTING IT?   Interface Builder (IB) is amazingly confusing for me. I had the opportunity to speak at the Northern VA Code Camp on 12/11/2010. My presentation was "Getting Started with iOS Development using MonoTouch and C#".    At the visual design part of the presentation, I asked one of the 3 or 4 Mac developers in the room about my confusion with the IB. I don't understand why the "Classes" list includes objects. I don't understand what "File's Owner" is. And, most importantly, WHAT THE HECK IS AN OUTLET AND WHY IS IT NECESSARY?!?!?"   His response to these question (especially Outlets): "They did it wrong."   I'm accustom to a visual designer that creates variables for graphical widgets for me. Not IB. Instead, I have to create "Outlets" manually. I still do not understand why and, the explanation from a seasoned Mac developer is that it's wrong. (He received nods of confirmation from the other Mac devs in the room.)   I LOVE MS DEV   I love development for Microsoft platforms using Microsoft development tools. I love Windows 7. I love Visual Studio 2010. I love SQL Server. Azure, Entity Framework, Active Directory, Office, WCF/WF/WPF, etc. are all designed with integration in mind. They are also all designed with developers in mind.   Steve Ballmer recently ranted "It's the developers!" That's why it is relatively quick to build apps using MS tools. Clearly, MS knows that while we usually enjoy building technology solutions, we are here to make money. And we need tools that accelerate our time to market without compromising the power and quality of our solutions.   So, yeah, I am sucking up I guess. But I love Microsoft Development. Thank you, Microsoft, for providing the plethora of great development tools.    P.S. (but please slow down a bit…I'm having trouble keeping up!)

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• Software Architecture and MEF composition location

  - by Leonardo

  Introduction My software (a bunch of webapi's) consist of 4 projects: Core, FrontWebApi, Library and Administration. Library is a code library project that consists of only interfaces and enumerators. All my classes in other projects inherit from at least one interface, and this interface is in the library. Generally speaking, my interfaces define either Entities, Repositories or Controllers. This project references no other project or any special dlls... just the regular .Net stuff... Core is a class-library project where concrete implementation of Entities and Repositories. In some cases i have more than 1 implementation for a Repository (ex: one for azure table storage and one for regular Sql). This project handles the intelligence (business rules mostly) and persistence, and it references only the Library. FrontWebApi is a ASP.NET MVC 4 WebApi project that implements the controllers interfaces to handle web-requests (from a mobile native app)... It references the Core and the Library. Administration is a code-library project that represents a "optional-module", meaning: if it is present, it provides extra-features (such as Access Control Lists) to the application, but if its not, no problem. Administration is also only referencing the Library and implementing concrete classes of a few interfaces such as "IAccessControlEntry"... I intend to make this available with a "setup" that will create any required database table or anything like that. But it is important to notice that the Core has no reference to this project... Development Now, in order to have a decoupled code I decide to use IoC and because this is a small project, I decided to do it using MEF, specially because of its advertised "composition" capabilities. I arranged all the imports/exports and constructors and everything, but something is quite not perfect in my "mental-visualisation": Main Question Where should I "Compose" the objects? I mean: Technically, the only place where real implementation access is required is in the Repositories, because in order to retrieve data from wherever, entities instances will be necessary, and in all other places. The repositories could also provide a public "GetCleanInstanceOf()" right? Then all other places will be just fine working with the interfaces instead of concrete classes... Secondary Question Should "Administration" implement the concrete object for "IAccessControlGeneralRepository" or the Core should?

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• How Microsoft Market DotNet?

  - by Fendy

  I just read an Joel's article about Microsoft's breaking change (non-backwards compatibility) with dot net's introduction. It is interesting and explicitly reflected the condition during that time. But now almost 10 years has passed. The breaking change It is mainly on how bad is Microsoft introducing non-backwards compatibility development tools, such as dot net, instead of improving the already-widely used asp classic or VB6. As much have known, dot net is not natively embedded in windows XP (yes in vista or 7), so in order to use the .net apps, you need to install the .net framework of over 300mb (it's big that day). However, as we see that nowadays many business use .net as their main development tools, with asp.net or mvc as their web-based applications. C# nowadays be one of tops programming languages (the most questions in stackoverflow). The more interesing part is, win32api still alive even there is newer technology out there (and still widely used). Imagine if microsoft does not introduce the breaking change, there will many corporates still uses asp classic or vb-based applications (there still is, but not that much). There are many corporates use additional services such as azure or sharepoint (beside how expensive is it). Please note that I also know there are many flagships applications (maybe adobe's and blizzard's) still use C-based or older language and not porting to newer high-level language. The question How can Microsoft persuade the users to migrate their old applications into dot net? As we have known it is very hard and give no immediate value when rewrite the applications (netscape story), and it is very risky. I am more interested in Microsoft's way and not opinion such as "because dot net is OOP, or dot net is dll-embedable, etc". This question may be constructive, as the technology is vastly changes over times lately. As we can see, Microsoft changes Asp.Net webform to MVC, winform is legacy now, it is starting to change to use windows store rather than basic-installment, touchscreen and later on we will have see-through applications such as google class. And that will be breaking changes. We will need to account portability as an issue nowadays. We will need other than just mere technology choice, but also migration plans. Even maybe as critical as we might need multiplatform language compiler, as approached by Joel's Wasabi. (hey, I read his articles too much!)

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• Turnkey with LightSwitch

  - by Laila

  Microsoft has long wanted to find a replacement for Microsoft Access. The best attempt yet, which is due out in, or before, September is Visual Studio LightSwitch, with which it is said to be as 'easy as flipping a switch' to use Silverlight to create simple form-driven business applications. It is easy to get confused by the various initiatives from Microsoft. No, this isn't WebMatrix. There is no 'Razor', for this isn't meant for cute little ecommerce sites, but is designed to build simple database-applications of the card-box type. It is more clearly a .NET-based solution to the problem that every business seems to suffer from; the plethora of Access-based, and Excel-based 'private' and departmental database-applications. These are a nightmare for any IT department since they are often 'stealth' applications built by the business in the teeth of opposition from the IT Department zealots. As they are undocumented, it is scarily easy to bring a whole department into disarray by decommissioning a PC tucked under a desk somewhere. With LightSwitch, it is easy to re-write such applications in a standard, maintainable, way, using a SQL Server database, deployed somewhere reasonably safe such as Azure. Even Sharepoint or Windows Communication Foundation can be used as data sources. Oracle's ApEx has taken off remarkably well, and has shaken the perception that, for the business user, Oracle must remain a mystic force accessible only to the priests and acolytes. Microsoft, by comparison had only Access, which was first released in 1992, the year of the Madonna conical bustier. It looks just as dated. Microsoft badly needed an entirely new solution to the same business requirement that led to Access's and Foxpro's long-time popularity, but which had the same allure as ApEx. LightSwitch is sound in its ideas, and comfortingly conventional in its architecture. By giving an easy access to SQL Server databases, and providing a 'thumb and blanket' migration path to Access-heads, LightSwitch seems likely to offer a simple way of pulling more Microsoft users into the .NET community. If Microsoft puts its weight behind it, then it will give some glimmer of hope to the many Silverlight developers that Microsoft is capable of seeing through its .NET revolution.

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• TouchDevelop: The Fast Path to Windows 8 and Phone Apps

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Are you looking for a little extra cash for the upcoming holidays? Then you might be interested in creating some cool apps to sell in the Windows Store. Or maybe you’re simply curious and want to try your hand at developing for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. In either case, the newly released TouchDevelop Web App is for you. TouchDevelop Web App is a development environment to create apps on your tablet or smartphone, without requiring a separate PC. Scripts written by using TouchDevelop can access data, media, and sensors on the phone, tablet, and PC. The script can interact with cloud services, including storage, computing, and social networks. TouchDevelop lets you quickly create fun games and useful tools, turning your scripts into true Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps. A year ago, Microsoft Research released TouchDevelop for Windows Phone, which is being used by enthusiasts, students, and researchers to program their phones in fun, inventive, and interesting ways. These scripts are available at TouchDevelop for anyone to download and use. Ever since we released TouchDevelop, we’ve been eyeing the tablet form factor and working on a version for the browser. Now, with the release of TouchDevelop Web App, the wait is over: the tablet version is ready, so go play around with it. All TouchDevelop scripts that are developed on the smartphone can be downloaded to the tablet and run (if hardware allows). Any script that is developed on the tablet can also be accessed on the phone. And scripts can be converted to Windows Phone or Windows 8 apps and submitted to the Windows Phone Store or Windows Store, respectively. TouchDevelop Web App’s editor and programming language have been designed for tablet devices with touchscreens, but you can also use a keyboard and a mouse. So grab your web-enabled device and give the TouchDevelop Web App a try. It’s fun and easy, and could even put a little cash in your holiday-depleted wallet. Or at least give you bragging rights at family get-togethers. Are you interested in further tips on Windows 8 development?  Sign up for the 30 to launch program which will help you build a Windows Store application in 30 days.  You will receive a tip per day for 30 days, along with potential free design consultations and technical support from a Windows 8 expert. As always, stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows 8, Windows Azure and other Microsoft announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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• TechEd 2012: Recap

  - by Tim Murphy

  TechEd this week was a great experience and I wanted to wrap it up with a summary post. First let me say a thank you to John and Jeff from GWB for supplying power, connectivity and a place to work in between sessions.  The blogging hub was a great experience in itself.  Getting to talk with other bloggers and other conference goers turned into a series of interesting conversations.  And where else can you almost end up in the day 1 highlights video? The sessions at TechEd were a mixed bag of value.  The Keynotes rocked, both figuratively and literally and most of the sessions that I want to were a good experience and had gems of information to take away.  There were a few exceptions though.  A couple of the sessions turned out to be sales jobs.  Nothing turns me off more than that (there will be some really honest comments on those surveys). TechEd re-enforced for me that much of the value is not in the sessions, but in the networking opportunities. I got to talk with several Microsoft team members and MVPs as well as some of the vendor representative for companies like Inrule and ComponentOne. Also got to expand both my local and extended community with discussions at meal times and waiting for sessions to start. I think this is one of the benefits that a lot of people don’t take advantage of in these conferences that should be a bigger part of the advertising. Exposure to a wide variety of topics, many of which I had not been able to make time for up to this point was envigorating.  The list of topic includes: Office 365, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8, Metro, Azure.  I can’t wait to get back to work and dig into these subjects in more depth. The one complaint that I had and heard from other attendees was that there weren’t enough sessions that were actually about development.  I realize that TechEd started as an event for IT Pros, but there needs to be more value for the Devs.  It all went by too fast and it will take a couple more days to digest the material, but the batteries are and I’m ready to leverage what I’ve learned.  Hopefully we will do it again next year. del.icio.us Tags: TechEd,TechEd 2012

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• Workflow 4.5 is Awesome, cant wait for 5.0!

  - by JoshReuben

  About 2 years ago I wrote a blog post describing what I would like to see in Workflow vnext: http://geekswithblogs.net/JoshReuben/archive/2010/08/25/workflow-4.0---not-there-yet.aspx At the time WF 4.0 was a little rough around the edges – the State Machine was on codeplex and people were simulating state machines with Flowcharts. Last year I built a near- realtime machine management system using WF 4.0.1 – its managing the internal operations of this device: http://landanano.com/products/commercial   Well WF 4.5 has come a long way – many of my gripes have been addressed: C# expressions - no more VB 'AndAlso' clauses state machine awesomeness - can query current state many designer improvements - Document Outline is so much more succinct than Designer! Separate WCF Service Contract interfaces and ability to generate activities from contract operations ability to rehydrate to updated flow definitions via DynamicUpdateMap and WorkflowIdentity you can read about the new features here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh305677(VS.110).aspx   2013 could be the year of Workflow evangelism for .NET, as it comes together as the DSL language. Eg on Azure it could be used to graphically orchestrate between WebRoles, WorkerRoles and AppFabric Queues and the ServiceBus – that would be grand.   Here’s a list of things I’d like to see in Workflow 5.0: Stronger Parallelism support for true multithreaded workflows . A Workflow executes on a single thread – wouldn’t it be great if we had the ability to model TPL DataFlow? Parallel is not really parallel, just allows AsyncCodeActivity.     support for recursion an ExpressionTree activity with an editor design surface a math activity pack return of application level protocol (3.51 WF services) – automatically expose a state machine as a WCF service with bookmark Receive activities generated from OperationContract automatically placed in state transition triggers. A new HTML5 ActivityDesigner control – support with different CSS3  skinnable hooks,  remote connectivity (had to roll my own) A data flow view – crucial to understanding the big picture Ability to refactor a Sequence to custom activity in a separate .xaml file – like Expression Blend does for UserControl state machine global error handling - if all states goto an error state, you quickly get visual spagetti. Now you could nest a state machine, but what if you want an application level protocol whereby each state exposes certain WCF ops. DSL RAD editing - Make the Document Outline into a DSL editor for adding activities  – For WF to really succeed as a higher level of abstraction, It needs to be more productive than raw coding - drag & drop on the designer is currently too slow compared to just typing code. Extensible Wizard API - for pluggable WF editor experience other execution models beyond Sequence, Flowchart & StateMachine: SSIS, Behavior Trees,  Wolfram Model tool – surprise us! improvements to Designer debugging API - SourceLocation is tied to XAML file line number and char position, and ModelService access seems convoluted - why not leverage WPF LogicalTreeHelper / VisualTreeHelper ? Workflow Team , keep on rocking!

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• Microsoft BUILD 2013&ndash;Day 1 Summary

  - by Tim Murphy

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/27/microsoft-build-2013ndashday-1-summary.aspx I’m happy to be at BUILD this week, mainly because my flights finally got me here late on Tuesday.  My biggest complaints so far are the flights and the hotel.  It seems that almost every flight into San Francisco were delayed multiple hours.  The Sequester so lovingly forced on America by congress means that the airport was short controllers.   That, along with poor weather and airport construction meant most people were 2-3 hours late arriving.  Add on top of that the fact that the hotel that I picked durring registration is absolutely horrid.  It looks like something out of a ghost hunters show and smells like it too.  I think if Microsoft is going to select a hotel they need to make sure that it is adequate. Rant over! So what happened the first day?  Steve Balmer started off the keynote along with Julie Larson-Green and a cast of others.  We finally found out that there were around six thousand people attending BUILD and that the focus this year would be Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Azure.  For the rest of the keynote I am going to have a separate post. You can’t have a Microsoft conference without some fun.  This year they have a hunt for pins that represent different gestures in Windows 8.  I got all of mine.  Now they just need to pull my name. The sessions I attended were really good. They covered live tiles, what’s new in XAML and building Windows Phone UIs presented by Kraig Brockschmidt, Tim Heuer and Shawn Oster respectively.  These will also be covered in separate posts. The exhibit area was interesting, but somewhat disappointing.  TechEd 2012 I think was better organized and better staffed by the vendors.  It also seemed that the Microsoft teams’ booths were also in need of some organization and staffing. Overall it was a really fun day capped off by all six thousand attendees standing in like to get their Acer 8” tables and Surface Pros.  What a day!  Stay tuned for follow up posts. del.icio.us Tags: BUILD 2013,Windows 8.1,Winodws Phone,XAML,Keynote

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• Why would more CPU cores on virtual machine slow compile times?

  - by Sid

  [edit#2] If anyone from VMWare can hit me up with a copy of VMWare Fusion, I'd be more than happy to do the same as a VirtualBox vs VMWare comparison. Somehow I suspect the VMWare hypervisor will be better tuned for hyperthreading (see my answer too) I'm seeing something curious. As I increase the number of cores on my Windows 7 x64 virtual machine, the overall compile time increases instead of decreasing. Compiling is usually very well suited for parallel processing as in the middle part (post dependency mapping) you can simply call a compiler instance on each of your .c/.cpp/.cs/whatever file to build partial objects for the linker to take over. So I would have imagined that compiling would actually scale very well with # of cores. But what I'm seeing is: 8 cores: 1.89 sec 4 cores: 1.33 sec 2 cores: 1.24 sec 1 core: 1.15 sec Is this simply a design artifact due to a particular vendor's hypervisor implementation (type2:virtualbox in my case) or something more pervasive across more VMs to make hypervisor implementations more simpler? With so many factors, I seem to be able to make arguments both for and against this behavior - so if someone knows more about this than me, I'd be curious to read your answer. Thanks Sid [edit:addressing comments] @MartinBeckett: Cold compiles were discarded. @MonsterTruck: Couldn't find an opensource project to compile directly. Would be great but can't screwup my dev env right now. @Mr Lister, @philosodad: Have 8 hw threads, using VirtualBox, so should be 1:1 mapping without emulation @Thorbjorn: I have 6.5GB for the VM and a smallish VS2012 project - it's quite unlikely that I'm swapping in/out trashing the page file. @All: If someone can point to an open source VS2010/VS2012 project, that might be a better community reference than my (proprietary) VS2012 project. Orchard and DNN seem to need environment tweaking to compile in VS2012. I really would like to see if someone with VMWare Fusion also sees this (for VMWare vs VirtualBox compartmentalization) Test details: Hardware: Macbook Pro Retina CPU : Core i7 @ 2.3Ghz (quad core, hyper threaded = 8 cores in windows task manager) Memory : 16 GB Disk : 256GB SSD Host OS: Mac OS X 10.8 VM type: VirtualBox 4.1.18 (type 2 hypervisor) Guest OS: Windows 7 x64 SP1 Compiler: VS2012 compiling a solution with 3 C# Azure projects Compile times measure by VS2012 plugin called 'VSCommands' All tests run 5 times, first 2 runs discarded, last 3 averaged

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