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• Extending QuickBooks Reporting with the QuickBooks ADO.NET Data Provider

  - by dataintegration

  The ADO.NET Provider for QuickBooks comes with several reports you may request from QuickBooks by default. However, there are many more that are not readily available. The ADO.NET Provider for QuickBooks makes it easy for you to create new reports and customize existing ones. In this article, we will illustrate how to create your own report and retrieve it from the Server Explorer in Visual Studio. For this example we will show how to create an Item Profitability Report. Creating the report script file Step 1: Download the sample reports available here. Extract them to a folder of your choice. Step 2: Make a copy of the ReportGeneralSummary.rsd file and rename it to ItemProfitability.rsd. Then open the file in any text editor. Step 3: Open the installation directory of the ADO.NET Provider for QuickBooks. Under the \db\ folder, locate the ReportJob.rsb file. Open this file in another text editor. Note: Although we are using ReportJob.rsb for this example, other reports may be contained in other Report*.rsb files. We recommend consulting the included help file and first locating the Report stored procedure and ReportType you are looking for. Otherwise, you may open each Report*.rsb file and look under the "reporttype" input for the report you are attempting to create. Step 4: First, let's rename the title of ItemProfitability.rsd. Near the top of the file you will see a title and description. Change the title to match the name of the file. Change the description to anything you like. For example: <rsb:info title="ItemProfitability" description="Executes my custom report."> Just below the Title, there are a number of columns. The Id represents the row number. The RowType represents the type of data returned by QuickBooks. The ColumnValue* columns represent all of the column data returned by QuickBooks. In some instances, we may need to add additional ColumnValue columns. Step 5: To add additional ColumnValue columns, simply copy the last column, paste it directly below, and continue increasing the numerical value at end of the attribute name. For example: <attr name="ColumnValue9" xs:type="string" readonly="true" required="false" desc="Represents a column of data."/> <attr name="ColumnValue10" xs:type="string" readonly="true" required="false" desc="Represents a column of data."/> <attr name="ColumnValue11" xs:type="string" readonly="true" required="false" desc="Represents a column of data."/> <attr name="ColumnValue12" xs:type="string" readonly="true" required="false" desc="Represents a column of data."/> ... Caution: Do not rename the ColumnValue* definitions themselves. They are generalized so that we can understand each type of report returned by QuickBooks. Renaming them to something other than ColumnValue* will cause your columns to return with null values. Step 6: Now let's update the available inputs for the table. From the ReportJob.rsb file, copy all of the input elements into ItemProfitability under the "Psuedo-Column definitions" comment. You will be replacing the existing input elements in ItemProfitability with inputs from ReportJob. When you are done, it should look like this: <!-- Psuedo-Column definitions --> <input name="reporttype" description="The type of the report." value="ITEMESTIMATESVSACTUALS,ITEMPROFITABILITY,JOBESTIMATESVSACTUALSDETAIL,JOBESTIMATESVSACTUALSSUMMARY,JOBPROFITABILITYDETAIL,JOBPROFITABILITYSUMMARY," default="ITEMESTIMATESVSACTUALS" /> <input name="reportperiod" description="Report date range in the format (fromdate:todate), and either value may be omitted for an open ended range (e.g. 2009-12-25:). Supported date format: yyyy-MM-dd." /> <input name="reportdaterangemacro" description="Use a predefined date range." value="ALL,TODAY,THISWEEK,THISWEEKTODATE,THISMONTH,THISMONTHTODATE,THISQUARTER,THISQUARTERTODATE,THISYEAR,THISYEARTODATE,YESTERDAY,LASTWEEK,LASTWEEKTODATE,LASTMONTH,LASTMONTHTODATE,LASTQUARTER,LASTQUARTERTODATE,LASTYEAR,LASTYEARTODATE,NEXTWEEK,NEXTFOURWEEKS,NEXTMONTH,NEXTQUARTER,NEXTYEAR," default="ALL" /> ... Step 7: Now let's update the operationname attribute. This needs to match the same operationname used by ReportJob. After you have copied the correct value from ReportJob.rsb, the operationname in ItemProfitability should look like so: <rsb:set attr="operationname" value="qbReportJob"/> Step 8: There is one more thing we can do to make this a true Item Profitability report. We can remove the reporttype input and hardcode the value. To do this, copy and paste the rsb:set used for operationname. Then rename the attr and value to match the name and value you want to use. For example: <rsb:set attr="operationname" value="qbReportJob"/> <rsb:set attr="reporttype" value="ITEMPROFITABILITY"/> After this you can remove the input for reporttype. Now that you have your own report file, we can move on to displaying the report in the Visual Studio server explorer. Accessing the report through the Data Provider Step 1: Open Visual Studio. In the Server Explorer, configure a new connection with the QuickBooks Data Provider. Step 2: For the Location connection string property, enter the directory where the new report has been saved to. Step 3: The new report should appear as a new view in the Server Explorer. Let's retrieve data from it. Step 4: You can specify any inputs in the WHERE clause. New Report Example Script To help you get started using this new QuickBooks Data Provider report, you will need to download the QuickBooks ADO.NET Data Provider and the fully functional sample script.

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• Create Orchard Module in a Separate Project

  - by Steve Michelotti

  The Orchard Project is a new OOS Microsoft project that is being developed up on CodePlex. From the Orchard home page on CodePlex, it states “Orchard project is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through modules and themes.” The Orchard Project site contains additional information including documentation and walkthroughs. The ability to create a composite solution based on a collection of modules is a compelling feature. In Orchard, these modules can just be created as simple MVC Areas or they can also be created inside of stand-alone web application projects.  The walkthrough for writing an Orchard module that is available on the Orchard site uses a simple Area that is created inside of the host application. It is based on the Orchard MIX presentation. This walkthrough does an effective job introducing various Orchard concepts such as hooking into the navigation system, theme/layout system, content types, and more.  However, creating an Orchard module in a separate project does not seem to be concisely documented anywhere. Orchard ships with several module OOTB that are in separate assemblies – but again, it’s not well documented how to get started building one from scratch. The following are the steps I took to successfully get an Orchard module in a separate project up and running. Step 1 – Download the OrchardIIS.zip file from the Orchard Release page. Unzip and open up the solution. Step 2 – Add your project to the solution. I named my project “Orchard.Widget” and used and “MVC 2 Empty Web Application” project type. Make sure you put the physical path inside the “Modules” sub-folder to the main project like this: At this point the solution should look like: Step 3 – Add assembly references to Orchard.dll and Orchard.Core.dll. Step 4 – Add a controller and view.  I’ll just create a Hello World controller and view. Notice I created the view as a partial view (*.ascx). Also add the [Themed] attribute to the top of the HomeController class just like the normal Orchard walk through shows it. Step 5 – Add Module.txt to the project root. The is a very important step. Orchard will not recognize your module without this text file present.  It can contain just the name of your module: name: Widget Step 6 – Add Routes.cs. Notice I’ve given an area name of “Orchard.Widget” on lines 26 and 33. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Web.Mvc; 4: using System.Web.Routing; 5: using Orchard.Mvc.Routes; 6:   7: namespace Orchard.Widget 8: { 9: public class Routes : IRouteProvider 10: { 11: public void GetRoutes(ICollection<RouteDescriptor> routes) 12: { 13: foreach (var routeDescriptor in GetRoutes()) 14: { 15: routes.Add(routeDescriptor); 16: } 17: } 18:   19: public IEnumerable<RouteDescriptor> GetRoutes() 20: { 21: return new[] { 22: new RouteDescriptor { 23: Route = new Route( 24: "Widget/{controller}/{action}/{id}", 25: new RouteValueDictionary { 26: {"area", "Orchard.Widget"}, 27: {"controller", "Home"}, 28: {"action", "Index"}, 29: {"id", ""} 30: }, 31: new RouteValueDictionary(), 32: new RouteValueDictionary { 33: {"area", "Orchard.Widget"} 34: }, 35: new MvcRouteHandler()) 36: } 37: }; 38: } 39: } 40: } Step 7 – Add MainMenu.cs. This will make sure that an item appears in the main menu called “Widget” which points to the module. 1: using System; 2: using Orchard.UI.Navigation; 3:   4: namespace Orchard.Widget 5: { 6: public class MainMenu : INavigationProvider 7: { 8: public void GetNavigation(NavigationBuilder builder) 9: { 10: builder.Add(menu => menu.Add("Widget", item => item.Action("Index", "Home", new 11: { 12: area = "Orchard.Widget" 13: }))); 14: } 15:   16: public string MenuName 17: { 18: get { return "main"; } 19: } 20: } 21: } Step 8 – Clean up web.config. By default Visual Studio adds numerous sections to the web.config. The sections that can be removed are: appSettings, connectionStrings, authentication, membership, profile, and roleManager. Step 9 – Delete Global.asax. This project will ultimately be running from inside the Orchard host so this “sub-site” should not have its own Global.asax.   Now you’re ready the run the app.  When you first run it, the “Widget” menu item will appear in the main menu because of the MainMenu.cs file we added: We can then click the “Widget” link in the main menu to send us over to our view:   Packaging From start to finish, it’s a relatively painless experience but it could be better. For example, a Visual Studio project template that encapsulates aspects from this blog post would definitely make it a lot easier to get up and running with creating an Orchard module.  Another aspect I found interesting is that if you read the first paragraph of the walkthrough, it says, “You can also develop modules as separate projects, to be packaged and shared with other users of Orchard CMS (the packaging story is still to be defined, along with marketplaces for sharing modules).” In particular, I will be extremely curious to see how the “packaging story” evolves. The first thing that comes to mind for me is: what if we explored MvcContrib Portable Areas as a potential mechanism for this packaging? This would certainly make things easy since all artifacts (aspx, aspx, images, css, javascript) are all wrapped up into a single assembly. Granted, Orchard does have its own infrastructure for layouts and themes but it seems like integrating portable areas into this pipeline would not be a difficult undertaking. Maybe that’ll be the next research task. :)

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Using &lsquo;default&rsquo; to Get Default Values

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Today’s little wonder is another of those small items that can help a lot in certain situations, especially when writing generics.  In particular, it is useful in determining what the default value of a given type would be. The Problem: what’s the default value for a generic type? There comes a time when you’re writing generic code where you may want to set an item of a given generic type.  Seems simple enough, right?  We’ll let’s see! Let’s say we want to query a Dictionary<TKey, TValue> for a given key and get back the value, but if the key doesn’t exist, we’d like a default value instead of throwing an exception. So, for example, we might have a the following dictionary defined: 1: var lookup = new Dictionary<int, string> 2: { 3: { 1, "Apple" }, 4: { 2, "Orange" }, 5: { 3, "Banana" }, 6: { 4, "Pear" }, 7: { 9, "Peach" } 8: }; And using those definitions, perhaps we want to do something like this: 1: // assume a default 2: string value = "Unknown"; 3:  4: // if the item exists in dictionary, get its value 5: if (lookup.ContainsKey(5)) 6: { 7: value = lookup[5]; 8: } But that’s inefficient, because then we’re double-hashing (once for ContainsKey() and once for the indexer).  Well, to avoid the double-hashing, we could use TryGetValue() instead: 1: string value; 2:  3: // if key exists, value will be put in value, if not default it 4: if (!lookup.TryGetValue(5, out value)) 5: { 6: value = "Unknown"; 7: } But the “flow” of using of TryGetValue() can get clunky at times when you just want to assign either the value or a default to a variable.  Essentially it’s 3-ish lines (depending on formatting) for 1 assignment.  So perhaps instead we’d like to write an extension method to support a cleaner interface that will return a default if the item isn’t found: 1: public static class DictionaryExtensions 2: { 3: public static TValue GetValueOrDefault<TKey, TValue>(this Dictionary<TKey, TValue> dict, 4: TKey key, TValue defaultIfNotFound) 5: { 6: TValue value; 7:  8: // value will be the result or the default for TValue 9: if (!dict.TryGetValue(key, out value)) 10: { 11: value = defaultIfNotFound; 12: } 13:  14: return value; 15: } 16: } 17:  So this creates an extension method on Dictionary<TKey, TValue> that will attempt to get a value using the given key, and will return the defaultIfNotFound as a stand-in if the key does not exist. This code compiles, fine, but what if we would like to go one step further and allow them to specify a default if not found, or accept the default for the type?  Obviously, we could overload the method to take the default or not, but that would be duplicated code and a bit heavy for just specifying a default.  It seems reasonable that we could set the not found value to be either the default for the type, or the specified value. So what if we defaulted the type to null? 1: public static TValue GetValueOrDefault<TKey, TValue>(this Dictionary<TKey, TValue> dict, 2: TKey key, TValue defaultIfNotFound = null) // ... No, this won’t work, because only reference types (and Nullable<T> wrapped types due to syntactical sugar) can be assigned to null.  So what about a calling parameterless constructor? 1: public static TValue GetValueOrDefault<TKey, TValue>(this Dictionary<TKey, TValue> dict, 2: TKey key, TValue defaultIfNotFound = new TValue()) // ... No, this won’t work either for several reasons.  First, we’d expect a reference type to return null, not an “empty” instance.  Secondly, not all reference types have a parameter-less constructor (string for example does not).  And finally, a constructor cannot be determined at compile-time, while default values can. The Solution: default(T) – returns the default value for type T Many of us know the default keyword for its uses in switch statements as the default case.  But it has another use as well: it can return us the default value for a given type.  And since it generates the same defaults that default field initialization uses, it can be determined at compile-time as well. For example: 1: var x = default(int); // x is 0 2:  3: var y = default(bool); // y is false 4:  5: var z = default(string); // z is null 6:  7: var t = default(TimeSpan); // t is a TimeSpan with Ticks == 0 8:  9: var n = default(int?); // n is a Nullable<int> with HasValue == false Notice that for numeric types the default is 0, and for reference types the default is null.  In addition, for struct types, the value is a default-constructed struct – which simply means a struct where every field has their default value (hence 0 Ticks for TimeSpan, etc.). So using this, we could modify our code to this: 1: public static class DictionaryExtensions 2: { 3: public static TValue GetValueOrDefault<TKey, TValue>(this Dictionary<TKey, TValue> dict, 4: TKey key, TValue defaultIfNotFound = default(TValue)) 5: { 6: TValue value; 7:  8: // value will be the result or the default for TValue 9: if (!dict.TryGetValue(key, out value)) 10: { 11: value = defaultIfNotFound; 12: } 13:  14: return value; 15: } 16: } Now, if defaultIfNotFound is unspecified, it will use default(TValue) which will be the default value for whatever value type the dictionary holds.  So let’s consider how we could use this: 1: lookup.GetValueOrDefault(1); // returns “Apple” 2:  3: lookup.GetValueOrDefault(5); // returns null 4:  5: lookup.GetValueOrDefault(5, “Unknown”); // returns “Unknown” 6:  Again, do not confuse a parameter-less constructor with the default value for a type.  Remember that the default value for any type is the compile-time default for any instance of that type (0 for numeric, false for bool, null for reference types, and struct will all default fields for struct).  Consider the difference: 1: // both zero 2: int i1 = default(int); 3: int i2 = new int(); 4:  5: // both “zeroed” structs 6: var dt1 = default(DateTime); 7: var dt2 = new DateTime(); 8:  9: // sb1 is null, sb2 is an “empty” string builder 10: var sb1 = default(StringBuilder()); 11: var sb2 = new StringBuilder(); So in the above code, notice that the value types all resolve the same whether using default or parameter-less construction.  This is because a value type is never null (even Nullable<T> wrapped types are never “null” in a reference sense), they will just by default contain fields with all default values. However, for reference types, the default is null and not a constructed instance.  Also it should be noted that not all classes have parameter-less constructors (string, for instance, doesn’t have one – and doesn’t need one). Summary Whenever you need to get the default value for a type, especially a generic type, consider using the default keyword.  This handy word will give you the default value for the given type at compile-time, which can then be used for initialization, optional parameters, etc. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,default

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• Installing a DHCP Service On Win2k8 ( Windows Server 2008 )

  - by Akshay Deep Lamba

  Introduction Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a core infrastructure service on any network that provides IP addressing and DNS server information to PC clients and any other device. DHCP is used so that you do not have to statically assign IP addresses to every device on your network and manage the issues that static IP addressing can create. More and more, DHCP is being expanded to fit into new network services like the Windows Health Service and Network Access Protection (NAP). However, before you can use it for more advanced services, you need to first install it and configure the basics. Let’s learn how to do that. Installing Windows Server 2008 DHCP Server Installing Windows Server 2008 DCHP Server is easy. DHCP Server is now a “role” of Windows Server 2008 – not a windows component as it was in the past. To do this, you will need a Windows Server 2008 system already installed and configured with a static IP address. You will need to know your network’s IP address range, the range of IP addresses you will want to hand out to your PC clients, your DNS server IP addresses, and your default gateway. Additionally, you will want to have a plan for all subnets involved, what scopes you will want to define, and what exclusions you will want to create. To start the DHCP installation process, you can click Add Roles from the Initial Configuration Tasks window or from Server Manager à Roles à Add Roles. Figure 1: Adding a new Role in Windows Server 2008 When the Add Roles Wizard comes up, you can click Next on that screen. Next, select that you want to add the DHCP Server Role, and click Next. Figure 2: Selecting the DHCP Server Role If you do not have a static IP address assigned on your server, you will get a warning that you should not install DHCP with a dynamic IP address. At this point, you will begin being prompted for IP network information, scope information, and DNS information. If you only want to install DHCP server with no configured scopes or settings, you can just click Next through these questions and proceed with the installation. On the other hand, you can optionally configure your DHCP Server during this part of the installation. In my case, I chose to take this opportunity to configure some basic IP settings and configure my first DHCP Scope. I was shown my network connection binding and asked to verify it, like this: Figure 3: Network connection binding What the wizard is asking is, “what interface do you want to provide DHCP services on?” I took the default and clicked Next. Next, I entered my Parent Domain, Primary DNS Server, and Alternate DNS Server (as you see below) and clicked Next. Figure 4: Entering domain and DNS information I opted NOT to use WINS on my network and I clicked Next. Then, I was promoted to configure a DHCP scope for the new DHCP Server. I have opted to configure an IP address range of 192.168.1.50-100 to cover the 25+ PC Clients on my local network. To do this, I clicked Add to add a new scope. As you see below, I named the Scope WBC-Local, configured the starting and ending IP addresses of 192.168.1.50-192.168.1.100, subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, default gateway of 192.168.1.1, type of subnet (wired), and activated the scope. Figure 5: Adding a new DHCP Scope Back in the Add Scope screen, I clicked Next to add the new scope (once the DHCP Server is installed). I chose to Disable DHCPv6 stateless mode for this server and clicked Next. Then, I confirmed my DHCP Installation Selections (on the screen below) and clicked Install. Figure 6: Confirm Installation Selections After only a few seconds, the DHCP Server was installed and I saw the window, below: Figure 7: Windows Server 2008 DHCP Server Installation succeeded I clicked Close to close the installer window, then moved on to how to manage my new DHCP Server. How to Manage your new Windows Server 2008 DHCP Server Like the installation, managing Windows Server 2008 DHCP Server is also easy. Back in my Windows Server 2008 Server Manager, under Roles, I clicked on the new DHCP Server entry. Figure 8: DHCP Server management in Server Manager While I cannot manage the DHCP Server scopes and clients from here, what I can do is to manage what events, services, and resources are related to the DHCP Server installation. Thus, this is a good place to go to check the status of the DHCP Server and what events have happened around it. However, to really configure the DHCP Server and see what clients have obtained IP addresses, I need to go to the DHCP Server MMC. To do this, I went to Start à Administrative Tools à DHCP Server, like this: Figure 9: Starting the DHCP Server MMC When expanded out, the MMC offers a lot of features. Here is what it looks like: Figure 10: The Windows Server 2008 DHCP Server MMC The DHCP Server MMC offers IPv4 & IPv6 DHCP Server info including all scopes, pools, leases, reservations, scope options, and server options. If I go into the address pool and the scope options, I can see that the configuration we made when we installed the DHCP Server did, indeed, work. The scope IP address range is there, and so are the DNS Server & default gateway. Figure 11: DHCP Server Address Pool Figure 12: DHCP Server Scope Options So how do we know that this really works if we do not test it? The answer is that we do not. Now, let’s test to make sure it works. How do we test our Windows Server 2008 DHCP Server? To test this, I have a Windows Vista PC Client on the same network segment as the Windows Server 2008 DHCP server. To be safe, I have no other devices on this network segment. I did an IPCONFIG /RELEASE then an IPCONFIG /RENEW and verified that I received an IP address from the new DHCP server, as you can see below: Figure 13: Vista client received IP address from new DHCP Server Also, I went to my Windows 2008 Server and verified that the new Vista client was listed as a client on the DHCP server. This did indeed check out, as you can see below: Figure 14: Win 2008 DHCP Server has the Vista client listed under Address Leases With that, I knew that I had a working configuration and we are done!

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• MSDN Widget

  - by Harish Pavithran

  Just created a MSDN widget for my blog... http://geekswithblogs.net/harish/archive/2010/05/19/msdn-widget.aspx

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• What's going on with INETA and the Regional Speakers Bureau?

  - by Chris Williams

  For those of you that have been waiting patiently (and not so patiently) I'm happy to say that we're very near completion on some changes/enhancements/improvements that will allow us to finally go live with the INETA Regional Speakers Bureau. I know quite a few of you have already registered, which is great (though some of you may need to come back and update your info) and we've had a few folks submit requests, mostly in a test capacity, but soon we'll be up and live. Here's how it breaks down. Be sure to read this, because things have changed a bit from when we initially announced it. 1. The majority of our speaker/event funding is going into the Regional Speakers Bureau.  The National Bureau still exists, but it's a good bit smaller than it was before, and it's not an "every group" benefit anymore. We'll be using the National Bureau as more of a strategic task force, targeting high impact events and areas that need some community building love from INETA. These will be identified and handled on a case by case basis, and may include more than just user group events. 2. You're going to get more events per group, per year than you did before. Not only are we focusing more resources on this program, but we're also making a lot of efforts to use it more effectively. With the INETA Regional Speakers Bureau, you should be able to get 2-3 INETA speakers per year, on average. Not every geographical area will have exactly the same experience, but we're doing the best we can. 3. It's not a farm team program for the National Bureau. Unsurprisingly, I managed to offend a number of people when I previously made the comment that the Regional Speakers Bureau program was a farm team or stepping stone to the National Bureau. It was a poor choice of words.  Anyone can participate in the Regional Speakers Bureau, and I look forward to working with all of you. 4. There is assistance for your efforts. The exact final details are still being hammered out, but expect it to look something like this: (all distances listed are based on a round trip) Distances < 120 miles = $0 121 miles - 240 miles = $50 (effectively 1 to 2 hours, each way) 241 miles - 360 miles = $100 (effectively 2 to 3 hours, each way) 361 miles - 480 miles = $200 (effectively 3 to 4 hours, each way) For those of you who travel a lot, we're working on a solution to handle group visits when you're away from home. These will (for now) be handled on a case by case basis. 5. We're going to make it as easy as possible to work with the program. In order to do this, we need a few things from you. For speakers, that means your home address. It also means (maybe) filling out a simple 1 line expense report via the INETA website. For user groups, it means making sure your meeting address is up to date as well. 6. Distances will be automatically calculated from your home of record to the user group event and back. We realize that this is not a perfect solution to every instance, but we're not paying you to speak at an event, and you won't be taxed on this money. It's simply some assistance to make your community efforts easier. Our way of saying thanks for everything you do. 7. Sounds good so far, what's the catch? There's always a catch, right? In this case there are two of them: 1) At this time, Microsoft employees are welcome to use the website to line up speaking engagements with user groups, but are not eligible for financial assistance. 2) Anyone can register and use the website to line up speaking engagements with user groups, however you must receive and maintain a net score of 3+ positive ratings (we're implementing a thumbs up / thumbs down system) in order to receive financial assistance. These ratings are provided by the User Group leaders after the meeting has taken place. 8. Involvement by the User Group leaders is a key factor in the success of this program. Your job isn't done once you request a speaker. After you've had your meeting, it's critical that you go back to the website and take a very small survey. Doing this ensures that the speaker gets rated (and compensated if eligible) and also ensures that you can make another request, since you won't be able to make a new request if you have an old one outstanding. 9. What about Canada? We're definitely working on that. Unfortunately nothing new to report on that front, other than to say that we're trying. So... this is where things stand currently. We're working very quickly to get this in place and get speakers and groups together. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below and I'll answer them as quickly as possible. If I've forgotten anything, or if things change, I'll update it here. Thanks, Chris G. Williams INETA Board of Directors

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• Cannot set a credential for principal 'sa'

  - by hailey

  I was trying to change the SA password on my development server this morning and got an error. Msg 15535, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Cannot set a credential for principal 'sa'. It was a little frustrating to get an error for a seemingly simple task but then agian maybe I screwed something up.  After doing a couple of searches i found a Microsoft KB (support.microsoft.com/kb/956177) "You receive an exception in SQL Server 2008 when you try to modify the properties of the SQL Server Administrator account by using SQL Server Management Studio".  It was for SQL 2008 but it worked for my SQL 2005 sp3 server just fine.  You have to click the Map to Credential check box but you don't have to add any credetials just click the OK button to complete and that's it.

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• Analysis Services (SSAS) - Unexpected Internal Error when processing (ProcessUpdate). Workaround/Resolution

  - by James Rogers

  Many implementations require the use of ProcessUpdate to support Type 1 slowly changing dimensions. ProcessUpdate drops all of the affected indexes and aggregations in partitions affected by data that changes in the Dimension on which the ProcessUpdate is being performed. Twice now I have had situations where the processing fails with "Internal error: An unexpected exception occurred." Any subsequent ProcessUpdate processing will also fail with the same error. In talking with Microsoft the issue is corrupt indexes for the Dimension(s) being processed in the partitions of the affected measure group. I cannot guarantee that the following will correct your problem but it did in my case and saved us quite a bit of down time.   Workaround: ProcessIndexes on the entire cube that is being processed and throwing the error. This corrected the problem on both 2008 and 2008 R2.   Pros:  Does not require a complete rebuild of the data (ProcessFull) for either the Dimension or Cube. User access can continue while this ProcessIndexes in underway.   Cons: Can take a long time, especially on large cubes with many partitions, dimensions and/or aggregations. Query Performance is usually severely impacted due to the memory and CPU requirements for Aggregation and Index building   <Batch http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine"http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine">  <Parallel>     <Process xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:ddl2="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine/2" xmlns:ddl2_2="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine/2/2" xmlns:ddl100_100="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2008/engine/100/100" xmlns:ddl200="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2010/engine/200" xmlns:ddl200_200="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2010/engine/200/200">       <Object>         <DatabaseID>MyDatabase</DatabaseID>         <CubeID>MyCube</CubeID>       </Object>       <Type>ProcessIndexes</Type>       <WriteBackTableCreation>UseExisting</WriteBackTableCreation>     </Process>  </Parallel> </Batch>   The cube where the corruption exists can be found by having Profiler running while the ProcessUpdate is executing. The first partition that displays the "The Job has ended in failure." message in the TextData column will be part of the cube/measuregroup that has the corruption. You can try to run ProcessIndexes on just that measure group. This may correct the problem and save additional time if you have other large measure groups in the cube that are not affected by the corruption.   Remember to execute your normal ProcessUpdate batch after the successful completion of the ProcessIndexes. The ProcessIndexes does not pick up data changes.   Things that did not work: ProcessClearIndexes - why this doesn't work and ProcessIndexes does is unclear at this point. ProcessFull on the partition in question. In my latest case, this would clear up the problem for that partition. However, the next partition the ProcessUpdate touched that had data in it would generate and error. This leads me to believe the corruption problem will exist in all partitions in the affected measure group that have data in them.   NOTE: I experience this problem in both a SQL 2008 and SQL 2008 R2 Analysis Services environment, on separate built from the same relational database. This leads me to believe that some data condition in the tables used for the Dimension processing caused the corruption since the two environments were on physically separate hardware. I am waiting on Microsoft to analyze the dumps to give us more insight into what actually caused the corruption and will update this post accordingly.

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• Solving Euler Project Problem Number 1 with Microsoft Axum

  - by Jeff Ferguson

  Note: The code below applies to version 0.3 of Microsoft Axum. If you are not using this version of Axum, then your code may differ from that shown here. I have just solved Problem 1 of Project Euler using Microsoft Axum. The problem statement is as follows: If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000. My Axum-based solution is as follows: namespace EulerProjectProblem1{ // http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=1 // // If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. // The sum of these multiples is 23. // Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000. channel SumOfMultiples { input int Multiple1; input int Multiple2; input int UpperBound; output int Sum; } agent SumOfMultiplesAgent : channel SumOfMultiples { public SumOfMultiplesAgent() { int Multiple1 = receive(PrimaryChannel::Multiple1); int Multiple2 = receive(PrimaryChannel::Multiple2); int UpperBound = receive(PrimaryChannel::UpperBound); int Sum = 0; for(int Index = 1; Index < UpperBound; Index++) { if((Index % Multiple1 == 0) || (Index % Multiple2 == 0)) Sum += Index; } PrimaryChannel::Sum <-- Sum; } } agent MainAgent : channel Microsoft.Axum.Application { public MainAgent() { var SumOfMultiples = SumOfMultiplesAgent.CreateInNewDomain(); SumOfMultiples::Multiple1 <-- 3; SumOfMultiples::Multiple2 <-- 5; SumOfMultiples::UpperBound <-- 1000; var Sum = receive(SumOfMultiples::Sum); System.Console.WriteLine(Sum); System.Console.ReadLine(); PrimaryChannel::ExitCode <-- 0; } }} Let’s take a look at the various parts of the code. I begin by setting up a channel called SumOfMultiples that accepts three inputs and one output. The first two of the three inputs will represent the two possible multiples, which are three and five in this case. The third input will represent the upper bound of the problem scope, which is 1000 in this case. The lone output of the channel represents the sum of all of the matching multiples: channel SumOfMultiples{ input int Multiple1; input int Multiple2; input int UpperBound; output int Sum;} I then set up an agent that uses the channel. The agent, called SumOfMultiplesAgent, received the three inputs from the channel sent to the agent, stores the results in local variables, and performs the for loop that iterates from 1 to the received upper bound. The agent keeps track of the sum in a local variable and stores the sum in the output portion of the channel: agent SumOfMultiplesAgent : channel SumOfMultiples{ public SumOfMultiplesAgent() { int Multiple1 = receive(PrimaryChannel::Multiple1); int Multiple2 = receive(PrimaryChannel::Multiple2); int UpperBound = receive(PrimaryChannel::UpperBound); int Sum = 0; for(int Index = 1; Index < UpperBound; Index++) { if((Index % Multiple1 == 0) || (Index % Multiple2 == 0)) Sum += Index; } PrimaryChannel::Sum <-- Sum; }} The application’s main agent, therefore, simply creates a new SumOfMultiplesAgent in a new domain, prepares the channel with the inputs that we need, and then receives the Sum from the output portion of the channel: agent MainAgent : channel Microsoft.Axum.Application{ public MainAgent() { var SumOfMultiples = SumOfMultiplesAgent.CreateInNewDomain(); SumOfMultiples::Multiple1 <-- 3; SumOfMultiples::Multiple2 <-- 5; SumOfMultiples::UpperBound <-- 1000; var Sum = receive(SumOfMultiples::Sum); System.Console.WriteLine(Sum); System.Console.ReadLine(); PrimaryChannel::ExitCode <-- 0; }} The result of the calculation (which, by the way, is 233,168) is sent to the console using good ol’ Console.WriteLine().

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• Troubleshooting Microsoft Message Queuing Issues on Microsoft Lync Server 2010

  - by John Breakwell

  This blog post sounds specific but most of the troubleshooting tips can be applied to other scenarios: Troubleshooting Microsoft Message Queuing Issues on Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) plays an important role in the Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Monitoring/Archiving server infrastructure: in a distributed network environment, MSMQ is used to transmit data from agents located on other servers (such as Front End Servers) to Monitoring/Archiving servers. The purpose of this article is to help you discover the root cause of any MSMQ problems that you might encounter, and to provide suggested ways to fix those problems. Microsoft Lync Server is the new name for Microsoft Office Communications Server. It’s good to see a major product make use of MSMQ – there aren’t many in the public eye (Symantec’s Enterprise Vault comes to mind).

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• Next generation Three MiFi unit - call for questions to put to Three

  - by Liam Westley

  I've been invited to a preview of the next generation Three mobile Mi-Fi unit in their London offices this week. If you've got feedback on the current MiFi unit; niggles, wish list items or general feedback, or you've got any questions about what the next generation MiFi unit might be, drop me an e-mail or post a comment with your question on this blog. I'll be taking any questions from my blog or my twitter account @westleyl to Three, and if I get an answer I can publish, I'll add to this blog post with the details. Thanks Liam

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• Silverlight Cream for May 06, 2010 -- #857

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Alan Beasley, Josh Twist, Mike Snow(-2-, -3-), John Papa(-2-), David Kelley, and David Anson(-2-). Shoutout: John Papa posted a question: Do You Want be on Silverlight TV? From SilverlightCream.com: ListBox Styling (Part 3 - Additional Templates) in Expression Blend & Silverlight Alan Beasley has part 3 of his ListBox styling tutorial in Expression Blend up... another great tutorial and all the code. Securing Your Silverlight Applications Josh Twist has a nice long post up on Securing your Silverlight apps... definitions, services, various forms of authentication. Silverlight Tip of the Day #13 – Silverlight Mobile Development Mike Snow has Tip of the Day #13 up and is discussing creating Silverlight apps for WP7. Silverlight Tip of the Day #14 – Dynamically Loading a Control from a DLL on a Server Mike Snow's Tip #14 is step-by-step instructions for loading a UserControl from a DLL. Silverlight Tip of the Day #15 – Setting Default Browse in Visual Studio Mike Snow's Tip #15 is actually a Visual Studio tip -- how to set what browser your Silverlight app will launch in. Silverlight TV 24: eBay’s Silverlight 4 Simple Lister Application Here we are with Silverlight TV Thursday again! ... John Papa is interviewing Dave Wolf talking about the eBay Simple Lister app. Digitally Signing a XAP Silverlight John Papa has a post up about Digitally signing a Silverlight XAP. He actually is posting an excerpt from the Silverlight 4 Whitepaper he posted... and he has a link to the Whitepaper so we can all read the whole thing too! Hacking Silverlight Code Browser David Kelley has a very cool code browser up to keep track of all the snippets he uses... and we can too... this is a tremendous resource... thanks David! Simple workarounds for a visual problem when toggling a ContextMenu MenuItem's IsEnabled property directly David Anson dug into a ContextMenu problem reported by a couple readers and found a way to duplicate the problem plus a workaround while you're waiting for the next Toolkit drop. Upgraded my Windows Phone 7 Charting example to go with the April Developer Tools Refresh David Anson also has a post up describing his path from the previous WP7 code to the current upgrading his charting code. 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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• Silverlight Cream for January 13, 2011 -- #1026

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: András Velvárt, Tony Champion, Joost van Schaik, Jesse Liberty, Shawn Wildermuth, John Papa, Michael Crump, Sacha Barber, Alex Knight, Peter Kuhn, Senthil Kumar, Mike Hole, and WindowsPhoneGeek. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Create Custom Speech Bubbles in Silverlight." Michael Crump WP7: "Architecting WP7 - Part 9 of 10: Threading" Shawn Wildermuth Expression Blend: "PathListBox: Text on the path" Alex Knight From SilverlightCream.com: Behaviors for accessing the Windows Phone 7 MarketPlace and getting feedback András Velvárt shares almost insider information about how to get some user interaction with your WP7 app in the form of feedback ... he has 4 behaviors taken straight from his very cool SufCube app that he's sharing. Reloading a Collection in the PivotViewer Tony Champion keeps working with the PivotViewer ... this time discussing the fact that you can't Reload or Refresh the current collection from the server ... at least not initially, but he did find one :) Tombstoning MVVMLight ViewModels with SilverlightSerializer on Windows Phone 7 Joost van Schaik takes a shot at helping us all with Tombstoning a WP7 app... he's using Mike Talbot's SilverlightSerializer and created extension methods for it for tombstoning that he's willing to share with us. Windows Phone From Scratch #17: MVVM Light Toolkit Soup To Nuts Part 2 Jesse Liberty is up to Part 17 in his WP7 series, and this is the 2nd post on MVVMLight and WP7, and is digging into behaviors. Architecting WP7 - Part 9 of 10: Threading Shawn Wildermuth is up to part 9 of 10 in his series on Architecting WP7 apps. This episode finds Shawn discussing Threading ... know how to use and choose between BackgroundWorker and ThreadPool? ... Shawn will explain. Silverlight TV 57: Performance Tuning Your Apps In the latest Silverlight TV, John Papa chats with Mike Cook about tuning your Silverlight app to get the performance up there where your users will be happy. Create Custom Speech Bubbles in Silverlight. Michael Crump's already gotten a lot of airplay out of this, but it's so cool.. comic-style callout shapes without using the dlls that you normally would... in other words, paths, and very cool hand-drawn looks on some too... very cool, Michael! Showcasing Cinch MVVM framework / PRISM 4 interoperability Sacha Barber has a post up on CodeProject that demonstratest using Cinch and Prism4 together... handily using MEF since Cinch relies on MEFedMVVM... this is a heck of a post... lots of code, lots of explanations. PathListBox: Text on the path Alex Knight keeps making this PathListBox series better ... this time he is putting text on the path... moving text... too cool, Alex! Windows Phone 7: Pinch Gesture Sample Peter Kuhn digs into the WP7 toolkit and examines GestureListener, pinch events, and clipping... examples and code supplied. How to change the StartPage of the Windows Phone 7 Application in Visual Studio 2010 ? Senthil Kumar discusses how to change the StartPage of your WP7 app, or get the program running if you happen to move or rename MainPage.xaml WP7 Text Boxes – OnEnter (my 1st Behaviour) Mike Hole has a post up about the issue with the keyboard appearing in front of the textbox, and maybe using the enter key to drop it... and he's developed a behavior for that process. WP7 ContextMenu in depth | Part1: key concepts and API WindowsPhoneGeek has some good articles that I haven't posted, but I'll catch up. This one is a nice tutorial on the WP7 Context menu... good explanation, diagrams, and code. 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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• 45% off Apple and Microsoft dev books from Manning through June 17

  - by Brian Schroer

  I’m really enjoying “ASP.NET MVC 2 In Action” – Think I’ll pop for “JQuery in Action” now: http://campaign.constantcontact.com/render?v=001cQcN0FSUz163y8UN8daOKl273F1ld9De4lyrZZkZD2vOrQCOrZ21vmO0hNEKL8hP1eVm0aHcF4PEd5OUEWwg7qkJhUrJ-yrnzXtWKhq2XvhouzWyZAmHQa2ctUauOXhV

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• BizTalk - Removing BAM Activities and Views using bm.exe

  - by Stuart Brierley

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/StuartBrierley/archive/2013/10/16/biztalk---removing-bam-activities-and-views-using-bm.exe.aspxOn the project I am currently working on, we are making quite extensive use of BAM within our growing number of BizTalk applications, all of which are being deployed and undeployed using the excellent Deployment Framework for BizTalk 5.0.Recently I had an issue where problems on the build server had left the target development servers in a state where the BAM activities and views for a particular application were not being removed by the undeploy process and unfortunately the definition in the solution had changed meaning that I could not easily recreate the file from source control.  To get around this I used the bm.exe application from the command line to manually remove the problem BAM artifacts - bm.exe can be found at the following path:C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010\TrackingC:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010\TrackingStep1 :Get the BAM Definition FileRun the following command to get the BAm definition file, containing the details of all the activities, views and alerts:bm.exe get-defxml -FileName:{Path and File Name Here}.xmlStep 2: Remove the BAM ArtifactsAt this stage I chose to manually remove each of my problem BAM activities and views using seperate command line calls.  By looking in the definition file I could see the names of the activities and views that I wanted to remove and then use the following commands to remove first the views and then the activities:bm.exe remove-view -name:{viewname}bm.exe remove-activity -name:{activityname}

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• Roll your own free .NET technical conference

  - by Brian Schroer

  If you can’t get to a conference, let the conference come to you! There are a ton of free recorded conference presentations online… Microsoft TechEd Let’s start with the proverbial 800 pound gorilla. Recent TechEds have recorded the majority of presentations and made them available online the next day. Check out presentations from last month’s TechEd North America 2012 or last week’s TechEd Europe 2012. If you start at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd, you can also drill down to presentations from prior years or from other regional TechEds (Australia, New Zealand, etc.) The top presentations from my “View Queue”: Damian Edwards: Microsoft ASP.NET and the Realtime Web (SignalR) Jennifer Smith: Design for Non-Designers Scott Hunter: ASP.NET Roadmap: One ASP.NET – Web Forms, MVC, Web API, and more Daniel Roth: Building HTTP Services with ASP.NET Web API Benjamin Day: Scrum Under a Waterfall NDC The Norwegian Developer Conference site has the most interesting presentations, in my opinion. You can find the videos from the June 2012 conference at that link. The 2011 and 2010 pages have a lot of presentations that are still relevant also. My View Queue Top 5: Shay Friedman: Roslyn... hmmmm... what? Hadi Hariri: Just ‘cause it’s JavaScript, doesn’t give you a license to write rubbish Paul Betts: Introduction to Rx Greg Young: How to get productive in a project in 24 hours Michael Feathers: Deep Design Lessons ØREDEV Travelling on from Norway to Sweden... I don’t know why, but the Scandinavians seem to have this conference thing figured out. ØREDEV happens each November, and you can find videos here and here. My View Queue Top 5: Marc Gravell: Web Performance Triage Robby Ingebretsen: Fonts, Form and Function: A Primer on Digital Typography Jon Skeet: Async 101 Chris Patterson: Hacking Developer Productivity Gary Short: .NET Collections Deep Dive aspConf - The Virtual ASP.NET Conference Formerly known as “mvcConf”, this one’s a little different. It’s a conference that takes place completely on the web. The next one’s happening July 17-18, and it’s not too late to register (It’s free!). Check out the recordings from February 2011 and July 2010. It’s two years old and talks about ASP.NET MVC2, but most of it is still applicable, and Jimmy Bogard’s Put Your Controllers On a Diet presentation is the most useful technical talk I have ever seen. CodeStock Videos from the 2011 edition of this Tennessee conference are available. Presentations from last month’s 2012 conference should be available soon here. I’m looking forward to watching Matt Honeycutt’s Build Your Own Application Framework with ASP.NET MVC 3. UserGroup.tv User Group.tv was founded in January of 2011 by Shawn Weisfeld, with the mission of providing User Group content online for free. You can search by date, group, speaker and category tags. My View Queue Top 5: Sergey Rathon & Ian Henehan: UI Test Automation with Selenium Rob Vettor: The Repository Pattern Latish Seghal: The .NET Ninja’s Toolbelt Amir Rajan: Get Things Done With Dynamic ASP.NET MVC Jeffrey Richter: .NET Nuggets – Houston TechFest Keynote

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• Change in Job Title and Responsibilities

  - by John Conwell

  I've spent the past 7 years focused primarily on code and database performance.  It's an area that I have a passion for, as well as a propensity.  But what I've found is that its very hard to change the culture of a development environment.  You can teach performance, you can encourage performance, you might see slight shift in how devs think about performance.  But without full management backing and support you wont get long lasting changes in the development culture.  And in the end, you are back to being the "Perf Guy", fixing performance design flaws, after the fact, one by one by one. Which is why last year I asked my boss to changed my title and responsibilities to more naturally align with the team I was working for.  So now I'm a Computing Research Engineer (vague, I know), researching in the field of Big Data analytics and visualization. I've found this change revitalizing and a lot of fun.  And given the nature of Big Data (its, um…big) the performance aspects are always ever present.

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• P90X or How I Stopped Worrying and Love Exercise

  - by Matt Christian

  Last Wednesday, after many UPS delivery failures, I received P90X in the mail.  P90X is a series of DVD's and a nutrition guide you use to shed pounds and gain muscle.  Odds are you've seen the infomercial on TV at some point if you watch a little tube now and again.  I started last Thursday and am still standing to tell this tale. At it's core, P90X is a 12 DVD set of exercise videos.  Each video is comprised of a different workout routine that typically last around an hour (some up to 1 1/2 hours).  Every day you are supposed to do one of the workouts which are different every day (sometimes you may repeat a shorter 6 min workout dedicated to abs twice a week).  There are different 'programs' focused on different areas, for weight loss you do the Lean Program, standard weight loss and muscle gain do the Regular Program, and for those hardcore health-nuts, the Insane Program (which consists of 2 - 1 hour long exercises per day).  Each Program has a different set of workouts per week which you repeat for 3 weeks, followed by a 'Relaxation Week' which is essentially a slightly different order.  After the month of workouts is over, you've finished 1 phase out of 3.  P90X takes 90 days, split into 3 Phases (1 phase per month).  Every phase has a different workout order which is also focused on different areas (Weight Loss, Muscle Gain, etc...)  With the DVD's you also get a small glossy book of about 100 pages detailing the different workouts and the different programs as well as a sample workout to see if you're even ready to start P90X. The second part of P90X, which can also be considered the 'core' (actually the other half of the core) is the nutrition guide that is included.  The Nutrition Guide is a book similar to the one that defines the exercises (about 100 glossy pages) though it details foods you should eat, the amounts, and a number of healthy (and tasty!) recipes.  The guide is split up into 3 phases as well, promoting high protein and low carb/dairy at during Phase 1, and levelling off through to Phase 3 where you have a relatively balanced amount of every food group. So after 1 week where am I?  I've stuck quite close to the nutrition guide (there isn't 'diet food' in here people, it's ACTUALLY food) and done my exercise every day.  I think a lot of the first week is getting into the whole idea and learning the moves performed on the DVD.  Have I lost weight?  No.  Do I feel some definition already starting to poke out?  Absolutely (no pun intended). Tony Horton (the 51-year old hulk that runs the whole thing) is very fun to listen and work along with and the 'diet' really isn't too hard to follow unless all you eat is carbs.  I've tried the gym thing and could not get motivated enough to continue going.  P90X is the first time I've ached from a workout, BEFORE starting my next workout.  For anyone interested, Google 'P90X' or 'BeachBody' to find out more information about this awesome program!

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• Killer content for my Kindle - The Economist with no need for an iPad - yipeee!

  - by Liam Westley

  I admin it, I was jealous of someone's iPad. They were reading The Economist, for free, as they were a print subscriber. I'm a print subscriber too. However, I don't have an iPad or an iPhone, just an Android phone and a Kindle. As soon as I got the Kindle, I looked up how to get The Economist on it. £9.99 per month. Hmmm, twice as much again as a my print subscription and I wanted to maintain the print subscription. No way Amazon. Fortunately some nice person wrote similar comments on The Economist subscription for Kindle, but added a very important additional nugget of information; and there is no need, as a print subscriber you can just use the free Calibre e-book creation tool anyway. So I downloaded it, searched for The Economist online 'recipe', entered my login name and password (part of my print subscription) and off went Calibre to screen scrape every single article from the Christmas 2010 issue into a .mobi file, complete with front cover image and full indexing. It's wonderful. Truely wonderful. Every section individually indexed, with each article separated and all inline images preserved. It even feels wonderfully retro, back to the days when The Economist only used black and white images. So many thanks the guys behind Calibre and The Economist recipe creators. Finally, I have my essential Kindle content that I've been waiting for.

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• Cool SQL formatter tool

  - by AndyScott

  I have to deal with all types of code that was written by people from different organizations, different countries, using different languages, obviously standards are different across these sources.  One of the biggest headaches that I ahve come across is how people differ in the formatting of their SQL statements, specifically stored procs.  When you regularly get over 500 lines in a sproc, if the code is not formatted correctly, you can get lost trying to figure out where one nested BEGIN begins, and another nested END ends.  One of my co-workers showed me this site today that does a pretty damn good job of making sense of that type of code: http://www.dpriver.com/pp/sqlformat.htm.   This is a free website that offers a box to enter your nasty code, and click "Format SQL" and have it clean it for you.  I am sure that there are situations where this may not work, but given the code that I have been working with recently, it does a really good job.  There is a pay version with more options, including VS add-in, desktop component (with quickkeys to clean text in programs like notepad), the ability to output in HTML, and other stuff.  Heck, I watched a demo where the purchased version will take formatted SQL code and turn it into a generic Stringbuilder object embedded in a formatted. Yes, this seems like a shameless plug, but no, I have no relation/knowledge of anyone involved in the development of this product, it just seems useful.  Either way, I recommend checking out the free version.

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• March 2011 Chicago IT Arch Group Recap

  - by Tim Murphy

  This month’s meeting was outstanding.  We had a record turnout for John Sprunger’s presentation on mobile architectures.  I guess that is what happens when you put up a presentation on the most popular topic in technology.  I invite everyone to join us for next month’s event.   And while I love to see new faces it is always great to have people come back and continue the conversation. Here are some resources from last night’s presentation. Presentation slides Whitepaper Case study Stay tuned for information on our upcoming presentations.   del.icio.us Tags: CITAG,Chicago Information Technology Architects Group,Mobile Architecture

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• Creating my first F# program in my new &ldquo;Expert F# Book&rdquo;

  - by MarkPearl

  So I have a brief hour or so that I can dedicate today to reading my F# book. It’s a public holiday and my wife’s birthday and I have a ton of assignments for UNISA that I need to complete – but I just had to try something in F#. So I read chapter 1 – pretty much an introduction to the rest of the book – it looks good so far. Then I get to chapter 2, called “Getting Started with F# and .NET”. Great, there is a code sample on the first page of the chapter. So I open up VS2010 and create a new F# console project and type in the code which was meant to analyze a string for duplicate words… #light let wordCount text = let words = Split [' '] text let wordset = Set.ofList words let nWords = words.Length let nDups = words.Length - wordSet.Count (nWords, nDups) let showWordCount text = let nWords,nDups = wordCount text printfn "--> %d words in text" nWords printfn "--> %d duplicate words" nDups   So… bad start - VS does not like the “Split” method. It gives me an error message “The value constructor ‘Split’ is not defined”. It also doesn’t like wordSet.Count telling me that the “namespace or module ‘wordSet’ is not defined”. ??? So a bit of googling and it turns out that there was a bit of shuffling of libraries between the CTP of F# and the Beta 2 of F#. To have access to the Split function you need to download the F# PowerPack and hen reference it in your code… I download and install the powerpack and then add the reference to FSharp.Core and FSharp.PowerPack in my project. Still no luck! Some more googling and I get the suggestions I got were something like this…#r "FSharp.PowerPack.dll";; #r "FSharp.PowerPack.Compatibility.dll";; So I add the code above to the top of my Program.fs file and still no joy… I now get an error message saying… Error    1    #r directives may only occur in F# script files (extensions .fsx or .fsscript). Either move this code to a script file, add a '-r' compiler option for this reference or delimit the directive with '#if INTERACTIVE'/'#endif'. So what does that mean? If I put the code straight into the F# interactive it works – but I want to be able to use it in a project. The C# equivalent I would think would be the “Using” keyword. The #r doesn’t seem like it should be in the FSharp code. So I try what the compiler suggests by doing the following…#if INTERACTIVE #r "FSharp.PowerPack.dll";; #r "FSharp.PowerPack.Compatibility.dll";; #endif No luck, the Split method is still not recognized. So wait a second, it mentioned something about FSharp.PowerPack.Compatibility.dll – I haven’t added this as a reference to my project so I add it and remove the two lines of #r code. Partial success – the Split method is now recognized and not underlined, but wordSet.Count is still not working. I look at my code again and it was a case error – the original wordset was mistyped comapred to the wordSet. Some case correction and the compiler is no longer complaining. So the code now seems to work… listed below…#light let wordCount text = let words = String.split [' '] text let wordSet = Set.ofList words let nWords = words.Length let nDups = words.Length - wordSet.Count (nWords, nDups) let showWordCount text = let nWords,nDups = wordCount text printfn "--> %d words in text" nWords printfn "--> %d duplicate words" nDups  So recap – if I wanted to use the interactive compiler then I need to put the #r code. In my mind this is the equivalent of me adding the the references to my project. If however I want to use the powerpack in a project – I just need to make sure that the correct references are there. I feel like a noob once again!

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• Get to Know a Candidate (16 of 25): Stewart Alexander&ndash;Socialist Party USA

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Alexander is an American democratic socialist politician and a resident of California. Alexander was the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for Lieutenant Governor in 2006. He received 43,319 votes, 0.5% of the total. In August 2010, Alexander declared his candidacy for the President of the United States with the Socialist Party and Green Party. In January 2011, Alexander also declared his candidacy for the presidential nomination of the Peace and Freedom Party. Stewart Alexis Alexander was born to Stewart Alexander, a brick mason and minister, and Ann E. McClenney, a nurse and housewife.  While in the Air Force Reserve, Alexander worked as a full-time retail clerk at Safeway Stores and then began attending college at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Stewart began working overtime as a stocking clerk with Safeway to support himself through school. During this period he married to Freda Alexander, his first wife. They had one son. He was honorably discharged in October 1976 and married for the second time. He left Safeway in 1978 and for a brief period worked as a licensed general contractor. In 1980, he went to work for Lockheed Aircraft but quit the following year.  Returning to Los Angeles, he became involved in several civic organizations, including most notably the NAACP (he became the Labor and Industry Chairman for the Inglewood South Bay Branch of the NAACP). In 1986 he moved back to Los Angeles and hosted a weekly talk show on KTYM Radio until 1989. The show dealt with social issues affecting Los Angeles such as gangs, drugs, and redevelopment, interviewing government officials from all levels of government and community leaders throughout California. He also worked with Delores Daniels of the NAACP on the radio and in the street. The Socialist Party USA (SPUSA) is a multi-tendency democratic-socialist party in the United States. The party states that it is the rightful continuation and successor to the tradition of the Socialist Party of America, which had lasted from 1901 to 1972. The party is officially committed to left-wing democratic socialism. The Socialist Party USA, along with its predecessors, has received varying degrees of support, when its candidates have competed against those from the Republican and Democratic parties. Some attribute this to the party having to compete with the financial dominance of the two major parties, as well as the limitations of the United States' legislatively and judicially entrenched two-party system. The Party supports third-party candidates, particularly socialists, and opposes the candidates of the two major parties. Opposing both capitalism and "authoritarian Communism", the Party advocates bringing big business under public ownership and democratic workers' self-management. The party opposes unaccountable bureaucratic control of Soviet communism. Alexander has Ballot Access in: CO, FL, NY, OH (write-in access in: IN, TX) Learn more about Stewart Alexander and Socialist Party USA on Wikipedia.

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• Converting Creole to HTML, PDF, DOCX, ..

  - by Marko Apfel

  Challenge We documented a project on Github with the Wiki there. For most articles we used Creole as markup language. Now we have to deliver a lot of the content to our client in an usual format like PDF or DOCX. So we need a automatism to extract all relevant content, merge it together and convert the stuff to a new format. Problem One of the most popular toolsets to convert between several formats is Pandoc. But unfortunally Pandoc does not support Creole (see the converting matrix). Approach So we need an intermediate step: Converting from Creole to a supported Pandoc format. Creolo/c is a Creole to Html converter and does exactly what we need. After converting our Creole content to Html we could use Pandoc for all the subsequent tasks. Solution Getting the Creole stuff First at all we need the Creole content on our locale machines. This is easy. Because the Github Wiki themselves is a Git repository we could clone it to our machine. In the working copy we see now all the files and the suffix gives us the hint for the markup language. Converting and Merging Creole content to Html Because we would like all content from several Creole files in one HTML file, we have to convert and merge all the input files to one output file. Creole/c has an option (-b) to generate only the Html-stuff below a Html <Body>-tag. And this is hook for us to start. We have to create manually the additional preluding Html-tags (<html>, <head>, ..), then we merge all needed Creole content to our output file and last we add the closing tags. This could be done straightforward with a little bit old DOS magic: REM === Generate the intro tags === ECHO ^<html^> > %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^<head^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^<meta name="generator" content="creole/c"^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^</head^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^<body^> >> %TMP%\output.html REM === Mix in all interesting Creole stuff with creole/c === .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+overview.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+domain+CvdCaptureMode.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+domain+CvdDamageReducingActivity.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+lookup+IncidentDamageCodes.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+table+Attachments.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+table+TrafficLights.creole >> %TMP%\output.html REM === Generate the outro tags === ECHO ^</body^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^</html^> >> %TMP%\output.html REM === Convert the Html file to Docx with Pandoc === .\Pandoc\bin\pandoc.exe -o .\Database-Schema.docx %TMP%\output.html Some explanation for this The first ECHO call creates the file. Therefore the beginning <html> tag is send via > to a temporary working file. All following calls add content to the existing file via >>. The tag-characters < and > must be escaped. This is done by the caret sign (^). We use a file in the default temporary folder (%TMP%) to avoid writing in our current folders. (better for continuous integration) Both toolsets (Creole/c and Pandoc) are copied to a versioned tools folder in the Wiki. This is committable and no problem after pushing – Github does not do anything with it. In this folder is also the batch (Export-Docx.bat) for all the steps. Pandoc recognizes the conversion by the suffixes of the file names. So it is enough to specify only the input and output files.

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• Silverlight Cream for November 16, 2011 -- #1167

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Crump, Andrea Boschin, Michael Sync, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Erno de Weerd, Jesse Liberty, Derik Whittaker, Antoni Dol, Walter Ferrari, and Jeff Blankenburg(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 6 of 10)" Michael Crump WP7: "31 Days of Mango | Day #2: Device Status" Jeff Blankenburg Metro/WinRT/W8: "Lighting up your C# Metro apps by being a Share Target" Derik Whittaker Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up SilverlightShow has announced a webinar you probably don't want to miss: Webinar – Introduction to XAML Development on Windows 8 Check out the top 5 from last week at SilverlightShow: SilverlightShow for November 07 - 13, 2011 From SilverlightCream.com: 10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 6 of 10) Michael Crump covers a lot of territory in this Part 6 of his Silverlight 5 Beta series at SilverlightShow: P/Invoke, Multiple Windows, and Full Trust Windows Phone 7.5 - Manipulating camera stream Andrea Boschin has Part 4 of his Mango series up at SilverlightShow. He's discussing accessing the raw stream from the camera and saving it to a file. Blend 4 + VS 2011 (Preview) = Problem? Michael Sync reports a problem with Blend 4 and the VS2011 preview... followed up by a set of scripts that were posted on Connect to make the problem go away (at least for Michael) Windows Phone Toolkit MultiselectList in depth | Part1: key concepts and API WindowsPhoneGeek begins a series on the MultiselectList in the Phone Toolkit... if you've seen his tutorials, you know they're great... this one is no exception.. lots of code, info and notes getting you on-board with the features Getting Started with Windows Phone Alarms WindowsPhoneGeek next takes a sidestep from his new series and has this post on Alarms in WP7 apps .. one of the type of scheduled actions in WP7.1 ... good write-up, pictures and code Using AppHarbor, Bitbucket and Mercurial with ASP.NET and Silverlight – Part 3 Membership and Role Provider in SQL Server Erno de Weerd's part 3 of his series is up... adding Role and Membership to his application... check it out in this 17-step tutorial Yet Another Podcast #51–Shawn Wildermuth: //build, Xaml Programming & Beyond Jesse Liberty has another of his Yet Another Podcasts up and he's talking with Jon Galloway and Shawn Wildermuth... hear what *that* trio has to say about post //BUILD, and all things XAML Lighting up your C# Metro apps by being a Share Target Derik Whittaker continues to work with Metro... evidenced by this post on wiring your app up to be a Share Target .. allowing your app to consume data from other apps Photoshop in METRO style 2: Filters Antoni Dol follows up his Photoshop in Metro post with this one on filters... he's got some great screenshots... was hoping to see a link to the code... maybe I missed it! Silverlight and Sharepoint working together: a Silverlight menu for Sharepoint - Part 1 Walter Ferrari has part 1 of a series up at SilverlightShow talking about Sharepoint and Silverlight, and using Silverlight Navigation in place of what Sharepoint offers up. 31 Days of Mango | Day #2: Device Status Jeff Blankenburg is motoring along on his 31 Days of Mango. This is his Day 2 post and all about DeviceStatus, or just about everything you would like to know about your user's phone 31 Days of Mango | Day #3: Alarms and Reminders Day 3 of Jeff Blankenburg's series is about Alarms and Reminders... a way to alert your user that something needs to be done... you can create, edit, and delete them as needed 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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