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• Silverlight Cream for December 13, 2010 -- #1010

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Rénald Nollet, Benjamin Gavin, Dennis Doomen, Tim Greenfield, Mike Taulty, Jeff Blankenburg, Michael Crump, Laurent Duveau, Dragos Manolescu, KeyboardP, Yochay Kiriaty. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight RIA Services and Basic, Anonymous Authentication" Benjamin Gavin WP7: "lving Circular Navigation in Windows Phone Silverlight Applications" Yochay Kiriaty SQL Azure: "SQL Azure Database Manager – Part 1 : How to connect to your SQL Azure DB" Rénald Nollet Shoutouts: Yochay Kiriaty has a post up on the Windows Phone Devloper Blog about open source (MSPL) projects helping WP7 devs: Windows Phone Recipes – Helping the Community Jesse Liberty's latest Yet Another Podcast is up and thie time it's Joe Stagner: Yet Another Podcast #18 – Joe Stagner Josh Schwartzberg sent me this link to what is apparently his yearly web-only rock Christmas album: MetalXmas... done in Silverlight and RIA Services From SilverlightCream.com: SQL Azure Database Manager – Part 1 : How to connect to your SQL Azure DB Rénald Nollet posted Part 1 of a series on a SQL Azure database manager all in Silverlight... has a live demo running, some description, and is making us wait for the next part! Silverlight RIA Services and Basic, Anonymous Authentication Benjamin Gavin has a quick post up resolving a basic RIA Services problem that I bet a lot of folks are looking for the answer on... like 500 series errors... cool little find he ferreted out... A night of Silverlight, WPF, unit testing and Caliburn Micro Dennis Doomen in concert with his employer gave a couple talks at the local DotNED user group, and covered literally a cornucopia of topics... slides, and example code for both talks... lotsa material here... Tim Greenfield on PuzzleTouch WP7 Application Tim Greenfield is the latest WP7 app developer to be interviewed by the SilverlightShow crew... lots of interesting comments and insight from Tim. Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 4) Mike Taulty has part 4 of his PDC 2010 Silverlight app construction project up and is taking the app into Blend, and the considerations that brought to the table. What I Learned In WP7 – Issue #2 Jeff Blankenburg continues his "What I Learned" series with this discussion about fonts, the Non-Linear Navigation service I mention below, and possible WP7 jobs. Part 3 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers Michael Crump has Part 3 of his Tips/Tricks up today. Lots of goodies this time: underlining in a TextBlock, getting browser info, startup params, VisualTreeHelper, and child windows. My Windows Phone 7 presentation in Montreal Laurent Duveau gave a WP7 presentation in Montreal as part of the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Developer's Briefing, and has posted his materials and slide deck WP7 Code: Mocking Event Streams with IEnumerable Dragos Manolescu has a very cool post up on using IEnumerable to Mock event streams by leveraging the IObservable/IEnumerable duality, and uses the 2D bubble app that you can run and test in the emulator without needing an accelerometer Transparent Wallpapers – Video Tutorial KeyboardP has had so many queries about his Transparent wallpaper for WP7 that he produced a video tutorial for it... Solving Circular Navigation in Windows Phone Silverlight Applications Yochay Kiriaty discusses the first recipe they are releasing ... see the shoutout above, a Nonlinear Navigation Service ... to help with apps that have loops in navigation. 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 February 09, 2011 -- #1044

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Vikas, Tony Champion, Peter Kuhn, Ollie Riches, Rich Griffin, Rob Eisenberg, Andrea Boschin, Rudi Grobler(-2-), Jesse Liberty, Dan Wahlin, Roberto Sonnino, Deborah Kurata. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight double click event" Vikas WP7: "Logging in Silverlight and WP7 with MVVM Light" Tony Champion XNA: "XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 3 - Animation (transforms)" Peter Kuhn Shoutouts: Vikas deserves congratulations for passing the beta Silverlight 4 exam, but in the process he has a great list of resources to help you do the same: Exam 70-506 ( TS: Silverlight 4, Development ) From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight double click event Vikas demonstrates 3 ways to come up with a double-click in Silverlight: Timer, Rx Framework, and Behavior with code for each. Logging in Silverlight and WP7 with MVVM Light Tony Champion is discussing logging... and since he finds himself doing it in every project, he's setting up an extensible solution he can reuse and is doing so with MVVMLight XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 3 - Animation (transforms) Peter Kuhn has part 3 of his XNA for WP7 series up at SilverlightShow. In this 3rd tutorial, Peter is discussing animation with Transformations.... remember... this is XNA! WP7Contrib: Location Push Model Ollie Riches posts from the WP7C and discusses how they provide an interface for location service by abstracting away the GeoCoordinateWatcher class and provide a clean push model using the IObservable as the return types for all variants. WP7 Contrib – When messaging becomes messy and services shine Rich Griffin pulls another post up from WP7C where he discusses swapping out using Service Styles rather than Messenger Styles... in his words "when we start getting friction trying to bend the framework api to do something that it was not really meant for its time to use something [that] solves the problem better" Herding Code 104: Rob Eisenberg on Caliburn Micro Rob Eisenberg is interviewed on the latest Herding Code, talking about his baby, Caliburn Micro, and tons of other stuff as well... just check out the list of links generated for this show. Windows Phone 7 - Part #4: The application lifecycle Andrea Boschin has part 4 of his WP7 tutorial series up at SilverlightShow... In this tutorial he does a complete run-down the the WP7 Application Life-Cycle Simple Error Reporting on WP7 Rudi Grobler has a code snippet up that, with the end-user's permission of course, emails problem reports back to you... very cool idea. Simple Error Reporting on WP7 REDUX Rudi Grobler demonstrates using the Coding4Fun toolkit to display an exception prompt to the user... and then possibly email the report to you..see Rudi's other post on that. Creating An Application Bar–Don’t Panic In his latest (number 31) WP7 From Scratch episode, Jesse Liberty takes on the ApplicationBar, and uses Blend to get the job done easier. Syncing Data with a Server using Silverlight and HTTP Polling Duplex Dan Wahlin revisits some older posts of his about Push technologies in Silverlight, and provides some great insight (and code) into Http Polling Duplex Quick WPF/Silverlight tips to make great videos of your apps Roberto Sonnino has some great tips on making awesome videos of your WPF or Silverlight app. Simple Silverlight MVVM Base Class Deborah Kurata has her take at a good MVVM base class as the subject of her latest post... good points and good 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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• Some thoughts on email hosting for one’s own domain

  - by jamiet

  I have used the same email providers for my own domains for a few years now however I am considering moving over to a new provider. In this email I’ll share my current thoughts and hopefully I’ll get some feedback that might help me to decide on what to do next. What I use today I have three email addresses that I use primarily (I have changed the domains in this blog post as I don’t want to give them away to spammers): [email protected] – My personal account that I give out to family and friends and which I use to register on websites [email protected]  - An account that I use to catch email from the numerous mailing lists that I am on [email protected] – I am a self-employed consultant so this is an account that I hand out to my clients, my accountant, and other work-related organisations Those two domains (jtpersonaldomain.com & jtworkdomain.com) are both managed at http://domains.live.com which is a fantastic service provided by Microsoft that for some perplexing reason they never bother telling anyone about. It offers multiple accounts (I have seven at jtpersonaldomain.com though as already stated I only use two of them) which are accessed via Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail.com) along with usage reporting plus a few other odds and sods that I never use. Best of all though, its totally free. In addition, given that I have got both domains hosted using http://domains.live.com I can link my various accounts together and switch between them at Outlook.com without having to login and logout: N.B. You’ll notice that there are two other accounts listed there in addition to the three I already mentioned. One is my mum’s account which helps me provide IT support/spam filtering services to her and the other is the donation account for AdventureWorks on Azure. I find that linking feature to be very handy indeed. Finally, http://domains.live.com is the epitome of “it just works”. I set up jtworkdomain.com at http://domains.live.com over three years ago and I am pretty certain I haven’t been back there even once to administer it. Proposed changes OK, so if I like http://domains.live.com so much why am I considering changing? Well, I earn my corn in the Microsoft ecosystem and if I’m reading the tea-leaves correctly its looking increasingly likely that the services that I’m going to have to be familiar with in the future are all going to be running on top of and alongside Windows Azure Active Directory and Office 365 respectively. Its clear to me that Microsoft’s are pushing their customers toward cloud services and, like it or lump it, data integration developers like me may have to come along for the ride. I don’t think the day is too far off when we can log into Windows Azure SQL Database (aka SQL Azure), Team Foundation Service, Dynamics etc… using the same credentials that are currently used for Office 365 and over time I would expect those things to get integrated together a lot better – that integration will be based upon a Windows Azure Active Directory identity. This should not come as a surprise, in my opinion Microsoft’s whole enterprise play over the past 15 or 20 years can be neatly surmised as “get people onto Windows Server and Active Directory then upsell from there” – in the not-too-distant-future the only difference is that they’re trying to do it in the cloud. I want to get familiar with these services and hence I am considering moving jtworkdomain.com onto Office 365. I’ll lose the convenience of easily being able to switch to that account at Outlook.com and moreover I’ll have to start paying for it (I think it’ll be about fifty quid a year – not a massive amount but its quite a bit more than free) but increasingly this is beginning to look like a move I have to make. So that’s where my head is at right now. Anyone have any relevant thoughts or experiences to share? Please let me know in the comments below. @Jamiet

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• Doing your first mock with JustMock

  - by mehfuzh

  In this post, i will start with a  more traditional mocking example that  includes a fund transfer scenario between two different currency account using JustMock.Our target interface that we will be mocking looks similar to: public interface ICurrencyService {     float GetConversionRate(string fromCurrency, string toCurrency); } Moving forward the SUT or class that will be consuming the  service and will be invoked by user [provided that the ICurrencyService will be passed in a DI style] looks like: public class AccountService : IAccountService         {             private readonly ICurrencyService currencyService;               public AccountService(ICurrencyService currencyService)             {                 this.currencyService = currencyService;             }               #region IAccountService Members               public void TransferFunds(Account from, Account to, float amount)             {                 from.Withdraw(amount);                 float conversionRate = currencyService.GetConversionRate(from.Currency, to.Currency);                 float convertedAmount = amount * conversionRate;                 to.Deposit(convertedAmount);             }               #endregion         }   As, we can see there is a TransferFunds action implemented from IAccountService  takes in a source account from where it withdraws some money and a target account to where the transfer takes place using the provided conversion rate. Our first step is to create the mock. The syntax for creating your instance mocks is pretty much same and  is valid for all interfaces, non-sealed/sealed concrete instance classes. You can pass in additional stuffs like whether its an strict mock or not, by default all the mocks in JustMock are loose, you can use it as default valued objects or stubs as well. ICurrencyService currencyService = Mock.Create<ICurrencyService>(); Using JustMock, setting up your expectations and asserting them always goes with Mock.Arrang|Assert and this is pretty much same syntax no matter what type of mocking you are doing. Therefore,  in the above scenario we want to make sure that the conversion rate always returns 2.20F when converting from GBP to CAD. To do so we need to arrange in the following way: Mock.Arrange(() => currencyService.GetConversionRate("GBP", "CAD")).Returns(2.20f).MustBeCalled(); Here, I have additionally marked the mock call as must. That means it should be invoked anywhere in the code before we do Mock.Assert, we can also assert mocks directly though lamda expressions  but the more general Mock.Assert(mocked) will assert only the setups that are marked as "MustBeCalled()”. Now, coming back to the main topic , as we setup the mock, now its time to act on it. Therefore, first we create our account service class and create our from and to accounts respectively. var accountService = new AccountService(currencyService);   var canadianAccount = new Account(0, "CAD"); var britishAccount = new Account(0, "GBP"); Next, we add some money to the GBP  account: britishAccount.Deposit(100); Finally, we do our transfer by the following: accountService.TransferFunds(britishAccount, canadianAccount, 100); Once, everything is completed, we need to make sure that things were as it is we have expected, so its time for assertions.Here, we first do the general assertions: Assert.Equal(0, britishAccount.Balance); Assert.Equal(220, canadianAccount.Balance); Following, we do our mock assertion,  as have marked the call as “MustBeCalled” it will make sure that our mock is actually invoked. Moreover, we can add filters like how many times our expected mock call has occurred that will be covered in coming posts. Mock.Assert(currencyService); So far, that actually concludes our  first  mock with JustMock and do stay tuned for more. Enjoy!!

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• Gnome Shell Theme Problem on Ubuntu 11.10

  - by Khurram Majeed

  I am trying to install ANewStart GNOME shell themes on Ubuntu 11.10. I have installed gnome shell extension for themes: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/gnome3 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extensions-user-theme I got the instructions from here ANewStart GNOME Shell Theme + AwOken Icons Theme = Pure Art. But when I go to "Advanced Settings - Shell Extensions" its empty... There is nothing. Also there is a orange triangle sign next to Shell Theme drop down in Advanced Settings - Theme. When I try to run the gnome-tweak-tool from terminal I get following error: imresh@imresh-laptop:~$ gnome-tweak-tool CRITICAL: Error parsing schema org.gnome.shell (/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.shell.gschema.xml) Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtweak/gsettings.py", line 45, in __init__ summary = key.getElementsByTagName("summary")[0].childNodes[0].data IndexError: list index out of range WARNING : Error detecting shell Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtweak/tweaks/tweak_shell_extensions.py", line 145, in __init__ shell = GnomeShellFactory().get_shell() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtweak/utils.py", line 38, in getinstance instances[cls] = cls() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtweak/gshellwrapper.py", line 123, in __init__ v = map(int,proxy.version.split(".")) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtweak/gshellwrapper.py", line 46, in version return json.loads(self.execute_js('const Config = imports.misc.config; Config.PACKAGE_VERSION')) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtweak/gshellwrapper.py", line 39, in execute_js result, output = self.proxy.Eval('(s)', js) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/overrides/Gio.py", line 148, in __call__ kwargs.get('flags', 0), kwargs.get('timeout', -1), None) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/types.py", line 43, in function return info.invoke(*args, **kwargs) GError: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.Shell was not provided by any .service files WARNING : Shell not running Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtweak/tweaks/tweak_shell.py", line 57, in __init__ self._shell = GnomeShellFactory().get_shell() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtweak/utils.py", line 38, in getinstance instances[cls] = cls() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtweak/gshellwrapper.py", line 123, in __init__ v = map(int,proxy.version.split(".")) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtweak/gshellwrapper.py", line 46, in version return json.loads(self.execute_js('const Config = imports.misc.config; Config.PACKAGE_VERSION')) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtweak/gshellwrapper.py", line 39, in execute_js result, output = self.proxy.Eval('(s)', js) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/overrides/Gio.py", line 148, in __call__ kwargs.get('flags', 0), kwargs.get('timeout', -1), None) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/types.py", line 43, in function return info.invoke(*args, **kwargs) GError: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.Shell was not provided by any .service files WARNING : Could not list shell extensions Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtweak/tweaks/tweak_shell.py", line 62, in __init__ extensions = self._shell.list_extensions() AttributeError: ShellThemeTweak instance has no attribute '_shell' (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed (gnome-tweak-tool:5323): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_preferred_height_for_width: assertion `width >= 0' failed Please help me in fixing this. I have also restarted the computer many times it does not make a difference.

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• How to create managed properties at site collection level in SharePoint2013

  - by ybbest

  In SharePoint2013, you can create managed properties at site collection. Today, I’d like to show you how to do so through PowerShell. 1. Define your managed properties and crawled properties and managed property Type in an external csv file. PowerShell script will read this file and create the managed and the mapping. 2. As you can see I also defined variant Type, this is because you need the variant type to create the crawled property. In order to have the crawled properties, you need to do a full crawl and also make sure you have data populated for your custom column. However, if you do not want to a full crawl to create those crawled properties, you can create them yourself by using the PowerShell; however you need to make sure the crawled properties you created have the same name if created by a full crawl. Managed properties type: Text = 1 Integer = 2 Decimal = 3 DateTime = 4 YesNo = 5 Binary = 6 Variant Type: Text = 31 Integer = 20 Decimal = 5 DateTime = 64 YesNo = 11 3. You can use the following script to create your managed properties at site collection level, the differences for creating managed property at site collection level is to pass in the site collection id. param( [string] $siteUrl="http://SP2013/", [string] $searchAppName = "Search Service Application", $ManagedPropertiesList=(IMPORT-CSV ".\ManagedProperties.csv") ) Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue $searchapp = $null function AppendLog { param ([string] $msg, [string] $msgColor) $currentDateTime = Get-Date $msg = $msg + " --- " + $currentDateTime if (!($logOnly -eq $True)) { # write to console Write-Host -f $msgColor $msg } # write to log file Add-Content $logFilePath $msg } $scriptPath = Split-Path $myInvocation.MyCommand.Path $logFilePath = $scriptPath + "\CreateManagedProperties_Log.txt" function CreateRefiner {param ([string] $crawledName, [string] $managedPropertyName, [Int32] $variantType, [Int32] $managedPropertyType,[System.GUID] $siteID) $cat = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataCategory –Identity SharePoint -SearchApplication $searchapp $crawledproperty = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataCrawledProperty -Name $crawledName -SearchApplication $searchapp -SiteCollection $siteID if($crawledproperty -eq $null) { Write-Host AppendLog "Creating Crawled Property for $managedPropertyName" Yellow $crawledproperty = New-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataCrawledProperty -SearchApplication $searchapp -VariantType $variantType -SiteCollection $siteID -Category $cat -PropSet "00130329-0000-0130-c000-000000131346" -Name $crawledName -IsNameEnum $false } $managedproperty = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataManagedProperty -Identity $managedPropertyName -SearchApplication $searchapp -SiteCollection $siteID -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue if($managedproperty -eq $null) { Write-Host AppendLog "Creating Managed Property for $managedPropertyName" Yellow $managedproperty = New-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataManagedProperty -Name $managedPropertyName -Type $managedPropertyType -SiteCollection $siteID -SearchApplication $searchapp -Queryable:$true -Retrievable:$true -FullTextQueriable:$true -RemoveDuplicates:$false -RespectPriority:$true -IncludeInMd5:$true } $mappedProperty = $crawledproperty.GetMappedManagedProperties() | ?{$_.Name -eq $managedProperty.Name } if($mappedProperty -eq $null) { Write-Host AppendLog "Creating Crawled -> Managed Property mapping for $managedPropertyName" Yellow New-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataMapping -CrawledProperty $crawledproperty -ManagedProperty $managedproperty -SearchApplication $searchapp -SiteCollection $siteID } $mappedProperty = $crawledproperty.GetMappedManagedProperties() | ?{$_.Name -eq $managedProperty.Name } #Get-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledPropertyMapping -ManagedProperty $managedproperty } $searchapp = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication $searchAppName $site= Get-SPSite $siteUrl $siteId=$site.id Write-Host "Start creating Managed properties" $i = 1 FOREACH ($property in $ManagedPropertiesList) { $propertyName=$property.managedPropertyName $crawledName=$property.crawledName $managedPropertyType=$property.managedPropertyType $variantType=$property.variantType Write-Host $managedPropertyType Write-Host "Processing managed property $propertyName $($i)..." $i++ CreateRefiner $crawledName $propertyName $variantType $managedPropertyType $siteId Write-Host "Managed property created " $propertyName } Key Concepts Crawled Properties: Crawled properties are discovered by the search index service component when crawling content. Managed Properties: Properties that are part of the Search user experience, which means they are available for search results, advanced search, and so on, are managed properties. Mapping Crawled Properties to Managed Properties: To make a crawled property available for the Search experience—to make it available for Search queries and display it in Advanced Search and search results—you must map it to a managed property. References Administer search in SharePoint 2013 Preview Managing Metadata

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• Silverlight Cream for February 07, 2011 -- #1043

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Roy Dallal, Kevin Dockx, Gill Cleeren, Oren Gal, Colin Eberhardt, Rudi Grobler, Jesse Liberty, Shawn Wildermuth, Kirupa Chinnathambi, Jeremy Likness, Martin Krüger(-2-), Beth Massi, and Michael Crump. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "A Circular ProgressBar Style using an Attached ViewModel" Colin Eberhardt WP7: "Isolated Storage" Jesse Liberty Lightswitch: "How To Create Outlook Appointments from a LightSwitch Application" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Gergely Orosz has a summary of his 4-part series on Styles in Silverlight: Everything a Developer Needs To Know From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Memory Leak, Part 2 Roy Dallal has part 2 of his memory leak posts up... and discusses the results of runnin VMMap and some hints on how to make best use of it. Using a Channel Factory in Silverlight (instead of adding a Service Reference). With cows. Kevin Dockx has a post up for those of you that don't like the generated code that comes about when adding a service reference, and the answer is a Channel Factory... and he has an example app in the post that populates a list of cows... honest ... check it out. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 4) Gill Cleeren has Part 4 of his deep-dive into studying for the Silverlight Certification exam. This time out he's got probably half a gazillion links for working with data... seriously! Sync unlimited instances of one Silverlight application How about a cross-browser sync of an unlimited number of instances of the same Silverlight app... Oren Gal has just that going on, and discusses his first two attempts and how he finally honed in on the solution. A Circular ProgressBar Style using an Attached ViewModel Wow... check out what Colin Eberhardt's done with the "Progress Bar" ... using an Attached View Model which he discussed in a post a while back... these are awesome! WP7 - Professional Audio Recorder Rudi Grobler discusses an audio recorder for WP7 that uses the NAudio audio library for not only the recording but visualization. Isolated Storage Jesse Liberty's got his 30th 'From Scratch' post up and this time he's talking about Isolated Storage. Learning OData? MSDN and Shawn Wildermuth has the videos for you! Shawn Wildermuth produced a couple series of videos for MSDN on OData: Getting Started and Consuming OData... get the link on Shawn's post. Creating Sample Data from a Class - Page 1 Kirupa Chinnathambi shows us how to use a schema of your own design in Blend... yet still have Blend produce sample data A Pivot-Style Data Grid without the DataGrid Jeremy Likness discusses the lack of an open-source grid with dynamic columns ... let him know if you've done one! ... and then he continues on to demonstrate his build-out of the same. Synchronize a freeform drawing and a real path creation Martin Krüger has a few new samples up in the Expression Gallery. This first is taking mouse movement in an InkPresenter and creating path statements from it in a canvas and playing them back. How to: use Storyboard completed behaviors Martin Krüger's next post is about Storyboards and firing one off the end of another, in Blend... so he ended up producing a behavior for doing that... and it's in the Expression Gallery How To Create Outlook Appointments from a LightSwitch Application Beth Massi has a new Lightswitch post up... her previous was email from Lightswitch... this is Outlook appointments... pretty darn cool. Quick run through of the WP7 Developer Tools January 2011 Michael Crump has a really good Quick look at the new WP7 Dev Tools that were released last week posted on his blog 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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• Windows Azure Recipe: Mobile Computing

  - by Clint Edmonson

  A while back, mashups were all the rage. The idea was to compose solutions that provided aggregation and integration across applications and services to make information more available, useful, and personal. Mashups ushered in the era of Web 2.0 in all it’s socially connected goodness. They taught us that to be successful, we needed to add web service APIs to our web applications. Web and client based mashups met with great success and have evolved even further with the introduction of the internet connected smartphone. Nothing is more available, useful, or personal than our smartphones. The current generation of cloud connected mobile computing mashups allow our mobilized workforces to receive, process, and react to information from disparate sources faster than ever before. Drivers Integration Reach Time to market Solution Here’s a sketch of a prototypical mobile computing solution using Windows Azure: Ingredients Web Role – with the phone running a dedicated client application, the web role is responsible for serving up backend web services that implement the solution’s core connected functionality. Database – used to store core operational and workflow data for the solution’s web services. Access Control – this service is used to authenticate and manage users identity, roles, and groups, possibly in conjunction with 3rd identity providers such as Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook. Worker Role – this role is used to handle the orchestration of long-running, complex, asynchronous operations. While much of the integration and interaction with other services can be handled directly by the mobile client application, it’s possible that the backend may need to integrate with 3rd party services as well. Offloading this work to a worker role better distributes computing resources and keeps the web roles focused on direct client interaction. Queues – these provide reliable, persistent messaging between applications and processes. They are an absolute necessity once asynchronous processing is involved. Queues facilitate the flow of distributed events and allow a solution to send push notifications back to mobile devices at appropriate times. Training & Resources These links point to online Windows Azure training labs and resources where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone is designed to make it easier for you to build mobile applications that leverage cloud services running in Windows Azure. The toolkit includes Visual Studio project templates for Windows Phone and Windows Azure, class libraries optimized for use on the phone, sample applications, and documentation Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS The Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS is a toolkit for developers to make it easy to access Windows Azure storage services from native iOS applications. The toolkit can be used for both iPhone and iPad applications, developed using Objective-C and XCode. Windows Azure Toolkit for Android The Windows Azure Toolkit for Android is a toolkit for developers to make it easy to work with Windows Azure from native Android applications. The toolkit can be used for native Android applications developed using Eclipse and the Android SDK. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• Tech Ed/BI Conference 2010: A Recovering Industry in a Recovering City

  - by andrewbrust

  I tried writing a post for this blog last night, while at the this year’s Microsoft Tech Ed and Business Intelligence conferences, in New Orleans. But I literally fell asleep while writing it.  That’s probably a sign that my readers might have done the same while reading it. Why the writer’s block? This was a very good show for me, but I think I was having trouble figuring out exactly why.  Now that I’m on the flight home, I’m starting to piece it together. One reason, for sure, was that I’ve spent years in both the developer and the BI worlds, and a show that combined the two was really enjoyable for me.  Typically, the subject matter, the attendees, the Microsoft execs and managers, and even the social circles have been separate.  This year’s Tech Ed facilitated a fusion of each of these previously segregated groups.  That was good for me as a speaker; for example, I facilitated a Birds of a Feather session on PowerPivot (Microsoft’s new self-service BI offering) which was well-attended, and by a large number of non-BI pros.  The fusion was good for me as an attendee too, as Microsoft BI, in the form of a new Pivot Viewer control, made it into the Day 1 keynote, demoed by Microsoft’s key BI champion, Amir Netz.  And it was good for me socially, as I was able to meet with peers in both camps, and at one location. Speaking of meeting with industry colleagues, I did a lot of that at this show.  Probably for the first time ever, I carefully scheduled and conducted a series of meetings with friends and business acquaintances in the developer tools, data visualization, utilities, publishing and training areas of the Microsoft ecosystem.  Beside the time efficiencies in conducting so many meetings, I discovered another benefit. I got a real handle on the tech industry’s economic health. The news here is good.  First of all, 2010 has been a great year for just about everyone I spoke to.  The mood is positive, energy is high, and people are working really hard.  This is, of course, refreshing to see, and it’s a huge relief.  Add to that the fact that this year’s Tech Ed was about 2.5 times larger in headcount than last year’s (based on numbers from unofficial, but reliable, sources), and the economic prognosis seems excellent.  But there’s more to it than that. Here’s the thing: everyone I talked to seems to be working, and succeeding, at changing their business models to adapt to changes in the industry.  Whether it’s the Internet’s impact on publishing and training, the increased importance of the developer audience in South Asia, the shift of affordable developer and business talent to unfamiliar locales abroad, or even lapses in Microsoft’s performance in the market, partner companies aren’t just rolling with the punches; they’re welcoming the changes and working them to their advantage.  No one seemed downtrodden, or even fatigued.  Even for businesses who have seen core revenue streams become commoditized, everyone seems to be changing their market strategy and winning.  Even Microsoft, of whom I have been critical recently, showed signs of successful hard work and playbook change, in the maturing of their cloud strategy, their commitment to it and their excitement around it.  And the embedded, managed, self-service BI strategy that Microsoft has been touting looks like it’s already being embraced by customers, even though PowerPivot, and other new Microsoft BI products, were released only recently. The collective optimism I have witnessed, and that I have felt, tells me good things about this industry and the economy.  The stock market had huge mood swings during my stay, and that may yet subdue the industry recovery I have seen this week.  Nonetheless, I am convinced that a strong foundation of hard work, innovative thinking and, if I may,  true renaissance is underlying this industry’s success. That kind of strength will generate a strong recovery, I am certain, whether now or once we’re past another round of choppy weather in the broader economy.  The fundamentals are good.

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• Project structure: where to put business logic

  - by Mister Smith

  First of all, I'm not asking where does business logic belong. This has been asked before and most answers I've read agree in that it belongs in the model: Where to put business logic in MVC design? How much business logic should be allowed to exist in the controller layer? How accurate is "Business logic should be in a service, not in a model"? Why put the business logic in the model? What happens when I have multiple types of storage? However people disagree in the way this logic should be distributed across classes. There seem to exist three major currents of thought: Fat model with business logic inside entity classes. Anemic model and business logic in "Service" classes. It depends. I find all of them problematic. The first option is what most Fowlerites stick to. The problem with a fat model is that sometimes a business logic funtion is not only related to a class, and instead uses a bunch of other classes. If, for example, we are developing a web store, there should be a function that calcs an order's total. We could think of putting this function inside the Order class, but what actually happens is that the logic needs to use different classes, not only data contained in the Order class, but also in the User class, the Session class, and maybe the Tax class, Country class, or Giftcard, Payment, etc. Some of these classes could be composed inside the Order class, but some others not. Sorry if the example is not very good, but I hope you understand what I mean. Putting such a function inside the Order class would break the single responsibility principle, adding unnecesary dependences. The business logic would be scattered across entity classes, making it hard to find. The second option is the one I usually follow, but after many projects I'm still in doubt about how to name the class or classes holding the business logic. In my company we usually develop apps with offline capabilities. The user is able to perform entire transactions offline, so all validation and business rules should be implemented in the client, and then there's usually a background thread that syncs with the server. So we usually have the following classes/packages in every project: Data model (DTOs) Data Access Layer (Persistence) Web Services layer (Usually one class per WS, and one method per WS method). Now for the business logic, what is the standard approach? A single class holding all the logic? Multiple classes? (if so, what criteria is used to distribute the logic across them?). And how should we name them? FooManager? FooService? (I know the last one is common, but in our case it is bad naming because the WS layer usually has classes named FooWebService). The third option is probably the right one, but it is also devoid of any useful info. To sum up: I don't like the first approach, but I accept that I might have been unable to fully understand the Zen of it. So if you advocate for fat models as the only and universal solution you are welcome to post links explaining how to do it the right way. I'd like to know what is the standard design and naming conventions for the second approach in OO languages. Class names and package structure, in particular. It would also be helpful too if you could include links to Open Source projects showing how it is done. Thanks in advance.

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• Problem when trying to update "Duplicate sources.list"

  - by Coca Akat

  I got this problem when trying to update using sudo apt-get update W: Duplicate sources.list entry http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ saucy-backports/multiverse amd64 Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_saucy-backports_multiverse_binary-amd64_Packages) W: Duplicate sources.list entry http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ saucy-backports/multiverse i386 Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_saucy-backports_multiverse_binary-i386_Packages) W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems This is my souces.list : # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 13.10 _Saucy Salamander_ - Release amd64 (20131016.1)]/ saucy main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy universe deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy multiverse deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy-updates multiverse ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy-backports main restricted universe multiverse deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy-security main restricted deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy-security universe deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy-security multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. # deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy main # deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy main # deb http://archive.canonical.com/ saucy partner # deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ saucy partner # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy-backports multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software.

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• Automated SSRS deployment with the RS utility

  - by Stacy Vicknair

  If you’re familiar with SSRS and development you are probably aware of the SSRS web services. The RS utility is a tool that comes with SSRS that allows for scripts to be executed against against the SSRS web service without needing to create an application to consume the service. One of the better benefits of using this format rather than writing an application is that the script can be modified by others who might be involved in the creation and addition of scripts or management of the SSRS environment.   Reporting Services Scripter Jasper Smith from http://www.sqldbatips.com created Reporting Services Scripter to assist with the created of a batch process to deploy an entire SSRS environment. The helper scripts below were created through the modification of his generated scripts. Why not just use this tool? You certainly can. For me, the volume of scripts generated seems less maintainable than just using some common methods extracted from these scripts and creating a deployment in a single script file. I would, however, recommend this as a product if you do not think that your environment will change drastically or if you do not need to deploy with a higher level of control over the deployment. If you just need to replicate, this tool works great. Executing with RS.exe Executing a script against rs.exe is fairly simple. The Script Half the battle is having a starting point. For the scripting I needed to do the below is the starter script. A few notes: This script assumes integrated security. This script assumes your reports have one data source each. Both of the above are just what made sense for my scenario and are definitely modifiable to accommodate your needs. If you are unsure how to change the scripts to your needs, I recommend Reporting Services Scripter to help you understand how the differences. The script has three main methods: CreateFolder, CreateDataSource and CreateReport. Scripting the server deployment is just a process of recreating all of the elements that you need through calls to these methods. If there are additional elements that you need to deploy that aren’t covered by these methods, again I suggest using Reporting Services Scripter to get the code you would need, convert it to a repeatable method and add it to this script! Public Sub Main() CreateFolder("/", "Data Sources") CreateFolder("/", "My Reports") CreateDataSource("/Data Sources", "myDataSource", _ "Data Source=server\instance;Initial Catalog=myDatabase") CreateReport("/My Reports", _ "MyReport", _ "C:\myreport.rdl", _ True, _ "/Data Sources", _ "myDataSource") End Sub   Public Sub CreateFolder(parent As String, name As String) Dim fullpath As String = GetFullPath(parent, name) Try RS.CreateFolder(name, parent, GetCommonProperties()) Console.WriteLine("Folder created: {0}", name) Catch e As SoapException If e.Detail.Item("ErrorCode").InnerText = "rsItemAlreadyExists" Then Console.WriteLine("Folder {0} already exists and cannot be overwritten", fullpath) Else Console.WriteLine("Error : " + e.Detail.Item("ErrorCode").InnerText + " (" + e.Detail.Item("Message").InnerText + ")") End If End Try End Sub   Public Sub CreateDataSource(parent As String, name As String, connectionString As String) Try RS.CreateDataSource(name, parent,False, GetDataSourceDefinition(connectionString), GetCommonProperties()) Console.WriteLine("DataSource {0} created successfully", name) Catch e As SoapException Console.WriteLine("Error : " + e.Detail.Item("ErrorCode").InnerText + " (" + e.Detail.Item("Message").InnerText + ")") End Try End Sub   Public Sub CreateReport(parent As String, name As String, location As String, overwrite As Boolean, dataSourcePath As String, dataSourceName As String) Dim reportContents As Byte() = Nothing Dim warnings As Warning() = Nothing Dim fullpath As String = GetFullPath(parent, name)   'Read RDL definition from disk Try Dim stream As FileStream = File.OpenRead(location) reportContents = New [Byte](stream.Length-1) {} stream.Read(reportContents, 0, CInt(stream.Length)) stream.Close()   warnings = RS.CreateReport(name, parent, overwrite, reportContents, GetCommonProperties())   If Not (warnings Is Nothing) Then Dim warning As Warning For Each warning In warnings Console.WriteLine(Warning.Message) Next warning Else Console.WriteLine("Report: {0} published successfully with no warnings", name) End If   'Set report DataSource references Dim dataSources(0) As DataSource   Dim dsr0 As New DataSourceReference dsr0.Reference = dataSourcePath Dim ds0 As New DataSource ds0.Item = CType(dsr0, DataSourceDefinitionOrReference) ds0.Name=dataSourceName dataSources(0) = ds0     RS.SetItemDataSources(fullpath, dataSources)   Console.Writeline("Report DataSources set successfully")       Catch e As IOException Console.WriteLine(e.Message) Catch e As SoapException Console.WriteLine("Error : " + e.Detail.Item("ErrorCode").InnerText + " (" + e.Detail.Item("Message").InnerText + ")") End Try End Sub     Public Function GetCommonProperties() As [Property]() 'Common CatalogItem properties Dim descprop As New [Property] descprop.Name = "Description" descprop.Value = "" Dim hiddenprop As New [Property] hiddenprop.Name = "Hidden" hiddenprop.Value = "False"   Dim props(1) As [Property] props(0) = descprop props(1) = hiddenprop Return props End Function   Public Function GetDataSourceDefinition(connectionString as String) Dim definition As New DataSourceDefinition definition.CredentialRetrieval = CredentialRetrievalEnum.Integrated definition.ConnectString = connectionString definition.Enabled = True definition.EnabledSpecified = True definition.Extension = "SQL" definition.ImpersonateUser = False definition.ImpersonateUserSpecified = True definition.Prompt = "Enter a user name and password to access the data source:" definition.WindowsCredentials = False definition.OriginalConnectStringExpressionBased = False definition.UseOriginalConnectString = False Return definition End Function   Private Function GetFullPath(parent As String, name As String) As String If parent = "/" Then Return parent + name Else Return parent + "/" + name End If End Function

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• 65536% Autogrowth!

  - by Tara Kizer

  Twice a year, we move our production systems to our disaster recovery site.  Last Saturday night was one of those days.  There are about 50 SQL Server databases to be moved to the DR site, which is done via database mirroring.  It takes only a few seconds to failover, but some databases have a bit more involved work such as setting up replication.  Everything went relatively smooth, but we encountered a weird bug on our most mission critical system.  After everything was successfully failed over to the DR site, it was noticed that mirroring was in a suspended state on one of the databases.  We thought we had run into a SQL Server 2005 bug that we had been encountering and were working with Microsoft on a fix.  Microsoft did fix it in both SQL Server 2005 service pack 3 cumulative update package 13 and service pack 4 cumulative update package 2, however SP3 CU13 and SP4 both recently failed on this system so we were not patched yet with the bug fix.  As the suspended state was causing us issues with replication, we dropped mirroring.  We then noticed we had 10MB of free disk space on the mount point where the principal’s data files are stored.  I knew something went amiss as this system should have at least 150GB free on that mount point.  I immediately checked the main database’s data file and was shocked to see an autgrowth size of 65536%.  The data file autogrew right before mirroring went into the suspended state. 65536%! I didn’t have a lot of time to research if this autgrowth problem was a known SQL Server bug, so I deferred that research to today.  A quick Google search yielded no results but emphasis on “quick”.  I checked our performance system, which was recently restored with a copy of the affected production database, and found the autogrowth setting to be 512MB.  So this autogrowth bug was encountered sometime in the last two weeks.  On February 26th, we had attempted to install SQL 2005 SP4 on production, however it had failed (PSS case open with Microsoft).  I suspected that the SP4 failure was somehow related to this autgrowth bug although that turned out not to be the case. I then tweeted (@TaraKizer) about this problem to see if the SQL Server community (#sqlhelp) had any insights.  It seems several people have either heard of this bug or encountered it.  Aaron Bertrand (blog|twitter) referred me to this Connect item. Our affected database originated on SQL Server 2000 and was upgraded to SQL Server 2005 in 2007.  Back on SQL Server 2000, we were using the default file growth setting which was a percentage.  Sometime after the 2005 upgrade is when we changed it to 512MB.  Our situation seemed to fit the bug Aaron referred to me, so now the question was whether Microsoft had fixed it yet. I received a reply to my tweet from Amit Banerjee (twitter) that it had been fixed in SP3 CU1 (KB958004).  My affected system is SP3 CU8, so I was initially confused why we had encountered the bug.  Because I don’t read things fully, I had missed that there are additional steps you have to follow after applying the bug fix.  Amit set me straight.  Although you can read this information in the KB article, I will also copy it here in case you are as lazy as me and miss the most important section of it (although if you are as lazy as me, you won’t have read this far down my blog post): This hotfix will prevent only future occurrences of this problem. For example, if you restore a database from SQL Server 2000 to a SQL Server 2005 instance that contains this hotfix, this problem will not occur. However, if you already have a database that is affected by this problem, you must follow these steps to resolve this problem manually: Apply this hotfix. Set the file growth settings for the affected files to percentage settings, and then set the settings back to megabyte settings. Take the database offline, and then bring it back online. Verify that the values of the is_percent_growth column are correct in the sys.database_files system table and in the sys.master_files system table.

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• Announcing the Winnipeg VS.NET 2012 Community Launch Event!

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Back in May 2010 the local Winnipeg technical community got together and put on a launch event for VS.NET 2010. That event was such a good time that we’re doing it again this year for the VS.NET 2012 launch! On December 6th, the Winnipeg .NET User Group is hosting a full day VS.NET 2012 Community Launch Event at the Imax theatre in Portage Place! We have 4 sessions planned covering dev tools, ALM/TFS, web development, and cloud development, presented by Dylan Smith, Tyler Doerksen, and myself. You can get all the details and register on our Eventbrite site: http://wpgvsnet2012launch.eventbrite.ca/ I’ve included the details below as well for convenience: Winnipeg VS.NET 2012 Community Launch Event Join us for a full day of sessions highlighting the new features and capabilities of Visual Studio .NET 2012 and the .NET 4.5 Framework! Hosted by the Winnipeg .NET User Group, this community event is FREE thanks to the generous support from our event sponsors: Imaginet Online Business Systems Prairie Developer Conference Event Details When: Thursday, Decemer 6th from 8:00 AM - 4:00 PM Where: IMAX Theatre, Portage Place Cost: *FREE!* Agenda 8:00 - 9:00 Continental Breakfast and Registration 9:00 - 9:15 Welcome 9:15 - 10:30 End-To-End Application Lifecycle Management with TFS 2012 10:30 - 10:45 Break 10:45 - 12:00 Improving Developer Productivity with Visual Studio 2012 12:00 - 1:00 Lunch Break (Lunch Not Provided) 1:00 - 2:15 Web Development in Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 2:15 - 2:30  Break 2:30 - 3:45 Microsoft Cloud Development with Azure and Visual Studio 2012 3:45 - 4:00 Prizes and Thanks Session Abstracts End-To-End Application Lifecycle Management with TFS 2012 Dylan Smith, Imaginet In this session we'll walk through the application development lifecycle from end-to-end and see how some of the new capabilities in TFS 2012 help streamline the software delivery process. There are some exciting new capabilities around Agile Project Management, Gathering Feedback, Code Reviews, Unit Testing, Version Control, Storyboarding, etc. During this session we’ll follow a fictional software development team through the process of planning, developing, testing, and deployment focusing on where the new functionality in VS/TFS 2012 fits in to make teams more effective. Improving Developer Productivity with Visual Studio 2012 Dylan Smith, Imaginet Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 enables developers to take full advantage of the capability of Windows using the skills and technologies developers already know and love to deliver exceptional and compelling apps.  Whether working individually or in a small, medium or large development team Visual Studio 2012 sets a new standard for development tools, helping teams deliver superior results for their customers that help set them apart from their competitors.  In this session we’ll walk through new features in Visual Studio 2012 specifically focusing on how these improve Developer Productivity. Web Development in Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 D’Arcy Lussier, Online Business Systems It’s an exciting time to be a web developer in the Microsoft ecosystem! The launch of Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 brings new tooling and features, and the ASP.NET team is continually releasing updates for MVC, SignalR, Web API, and other platform features. In this session we’ll take a tour of the new features and technologies available for Microsoft web developers here in 2012! Microsoft Cloud Development with Azure and Visual Studio 2012 Tyler Doerksen, Imaginet Microsoft’s public cloud platform is nearing its third year of public availability, supporting web site/service hosting, storage, relational databases, virtual machines, virtual networks and much more. Windows Azure provides both power and flexibility.  But to capture this power you need to have the right tools!  This session will demonstrate the primary ways you can harness Windows Azure with the .NET platform.  We’ll explain cloud service development, packaging, deployment, testing and show how Visual Studio 2012 with the Windows Azure SDK and other Microsoft tools can be used to develop for and manage Windows Azure.Harness the power of the cloud from the comfort of Visual Studio 2012!

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• Building a personal website using Silverlight.

  - by mbcrump

  I’ve always believed that as a developer you should always have a hobby project going on. I think a hobby project needs to contain at least one of following things: Something that you have never done before. Something that you are interested in. Something that you can work on in your spare time without affecting your *paying* job. I decided my hobby project would be an entire web application written in Silverlight that could be used as a self-promotion/marketing tool. This goal of the site is to provide information on the work that I’ve done to conferences, future employers and anyone else that wanted to learn more about me. Before I go any further, if you just want to check out the site then it is located at http://michaelcrump.info. So, what did I use to create it? MVVM Light – I’m a big fan of this software. The item and project templates plus code snippets make this a huge win for any SL/WPF/WP7 application. Jetpack Theme by Microsoft – I suck at designing so I used this template to help speed up this project. ComponentOne 3rd Party Controls – I have a license and really like several of their products. A User Control that Jeremy Likness created called DynamicXaml (used with his permission). I had created my own version of this a while back, but Jeremy’s implementation was simply better. Main Page – Designed to create my “brand”. This was built for a quick glimpse of who I am and what do I do.  Blog – The best marketing tool for a developer is their blog. I decided to go with an HTML page displaying my site and the user could pop into full-screen if desired. I also included my feed and Silverlight-Zone. (Another site I work on) Online – This page links to sites that I have been featured on as well as community involvement and awards. I also have a web service that I can update this information without re-compiling the Silverlight App. Projects – I’ve been wanting to use a CoverFlow for a really long time now. =) This page list several hobby projects as well as a few professional projects.  Resume Page – This page only exist because I got tired of sending companies my resume in e-mail. I can now provide a deep link to this page and the recruiter can print, search or save my resume. The PDF of my resume exist in a folder that I can easily update without recompiling the app. Contact Page – Just a contact page with a web service that sends the email. The Send button becomes disabled after a successful send. I thought of adding captcha to this page but in the end didn’t think it was worth it. Looking back at this app, I’m happy with how it turned out. I love Silverlight and I am already thinking of my next hobby project. (Thinking another Windows Phone 7 app or MVC3).  Subscribe to my feed

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• My First Iteration Zero

  - by onefloridacoder

  I recently watched a web cast that covered the idea of planning from the concept stage to the product backlog.  It was the first content I had seen related to Iteration Zero and it made a lot of sense from a planning and engagement perspective where the customer is concerned.  It illuminated some of the problems I’ve experienced with getting a large project of the ground.  The idea behind this is to just figure out get everyone to understand what needs to be constructed and to build the initial feature set from a *very* high level.  Once that happens other parts of the high level construction start to take place.  You end up with a feature list that describes what the business wants the system to do, and what it potentially may (or may not) interact with.  Low tech tools are used to create UI mockups that can be used as a starting point for some of the key UI pieces. Toward the end of the webcast they speaker introduced something that was new to me.  He referred to it as an executable skeleton or the steel thread.  The idea with this part of the webcast was to describe walking through the different mocked layers of the application.  Not all layers and collaborators are involved at this stage since it’s Iteration Zero, and each layer is either hard-coded or completely mocked to provide a 35K foot view of how the different layers layers work together.  So imagine two actors on each side of a layer diagram and the flow goes down from the upper left side down through a a consumer, thorough a service layer and then back up the service layer to the destination/actor. I would imagine much could be discussed moving through new/planned or existing/legacy layers, or a little of both to see what’s implied by the current high-level design. One part of the web cast has the business and design team creating the product box (think of your favorite cereal or toy box) with all of the features and even pictures laid out on the outside of the box.  The notion here is that if you handed this box to someone and told them your system was inside they would have an understanding of what the system would be able to do, or the features it could provide.    One of the interesting parts of the webcast was where the speaker described that he worked with a couple of groups in the same room and each group came up with a different product box – the point is that each group had a different idea of what the system was supposed to do.  At this point of the project I thought that to be valuable considering my experience has been that historically this has taken longer than a week to realize that the business unit and design teams see the high level solution differently.  Once my box is finished I plan on moving to the next stage of solution definition which is to plan the UI for this small application using Excel, to map out the UI elements.  I’m my own customer so it feels like cheating, but taking these slow deliberate steps have already provided a few learning opportunities.    So I resist the urge to load all of my user stories into my newly installed VS2010  TFS project and try to reduce or add to, the number of user stories and/or refine the high level estimates I’ve come up with so far.

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• AWS .NET SDK v2: setting up queues and topics

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/10/13/aws-.net-sdk-v2-setting-up-queues-and-topics.aspxFollowing on from my last post, reading from SQS queues with the new SDK is easy stuff, but linking a Simple Notification Service topic to an SQS queue is a bit more involved. The AWS model for topics and subscriptions is a bit more advanced than in Azure Service Bus. SNS lets you have subscribers on multiple different channels, so you can send a message which gets relayed to email address, mobile apps and SQS queues all in one go. As the topic owner, when you request a subscription on any channel, the owner needs to confirm they’re happy for you to send them messages. With email subscriptions, the user gets a confirmation request from Amazon which they need to reply to before they start getting messages. With SQS, you need to grant the topic permission to write to the queue. If you own both the topic and the queue, you can do it all in code with the .NET SDK. Let’s say you want to create a new topic, a new queue as a topic subscriber, and link the two together. Creating the topic is easy with the SNS client (which has an expanded name, AmazonSimpleNotificationServiceClient, compare to the SQS class which is just called QueueClient): var request = new CreateTopicRequest(); request.Name = TopicName; var response = _snsClient.CreateTopic(request); TopicArn = response.TopicArn; In the response from AWS (which I’m assuming is successful), you get an ARN – Amazon Resource Name – which is the unique identifier for the topic. We create the queue using the same code from my last post, AWS .NET SDK v2: the message-pump pattern, and then we need to subscribe the queue to the topic. The topic creates the subscription request: var response = _snsClient.Subscribe(new SubscribeRequest { TopicArn = TopicArn, Protocol = "sqs", Endpoint = _queueClient.QueueArn }); That response will give you an ARN for the subscription, which you’ll need if you want to set attributes like RawMessageDelivery. Then the SQS client needs to confirm the subscription by allowing the topic to send messages to it. The SDK doesn’t give you a nice mechanism for doing that, so I’ve extended my AWS wrapper with a method that encapsulates it: internal void AllowSnsToSendMessages(TopicClient topicClient) { var policy = Policies.AllowSendFormat.Replace("%QueueArn%", QueueArn).Replace("%TopicArn%", topicClient.TopicArn); var request = new SetQueueAttributesRequest(); request.Attributes.Add("Policy", policy); request.QueueUrl = QueueUrl; var response = _sqsClient.SetQueueAttributes(request); } That builds up a policy statement, which gets added to the queue as an attribute, and specifies that the topic is allowed to send messages to the queue. The statement itself is a JSON block which contains the ARN of the queue, the ARN of the topic, and an Allow effect for the sqs:SendMessage action: public const string AllowSendFormat= @"{ ""Statement"": [ { ""Sid"": ""MySQSPolicy001"", ""Effect"": ""Allow"", ""Principal"": { ""AWS"": ""*"" }, ""Action"": ""sqs:SendMessage"", ""Resource"": ""%QueueArn%"", ""Condition"": { ""ArnEquals"": { ""aws:SourceArn"": ""%TopicArn%"" } } } ] }"; There’s a new gist with an updated QueueClient and a new TopicClient here: Wrappers for the SQS and SNS clients in the AWS SDK for .NET v2. Both clients have an Ensure() method which creates the resource, so if you want to create a topic and a subscription you can use:  var topicClient = new TopicClient(“BigNews”, “ImListening”); And the topic client has a Subscribe() method, which calls into the message pump on the queue client: topicClient.Subscribe(x=>Log.Debug(x.Body)); var message = {}; //etc. topicClient.Publish(message); So you can isolate all the fiddly bits and use SQS and SNS with a similar interface to the Azure SDK.

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• Windows Azure SDK 1.3 addresses early adopter feedback

  - by Eric Nelson

  At the end of November 2010 we released a new version of the Windows Azure SDK which contains many new features driven by the great feedback of early adopters plus a shiny new portal. New Portal implemented in Silverlight: The new portal is implemented using Silverlight and replaces the (IMHO rather clunky) original HTML + JavaScript portal. It is 100% better although does still have a few bugs. Enjoy! P.S. You can if you wish still use the old portal:   New runtime functionality: The following functionality is now generally available through the Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio and the new Windows Azure Management Portal: Elevated Privileges and Full IIS. You can now run a portion or all of your code in Web and Worker roles with elevated administrator privileges. The Web role now provides Full IIS functionality, which enables multiple IIS sites per Web role and the ability to install IIS modules. Remote Desktop functionality enables you to connect to a running instance of your application or service in order to monitor activity and troubleshoot common problems. Windows Server 2008 R2 Roles: Windows Azure now supports Windows Server 2008 R2 in its Web, worker and VM roles. This new support enables you to take advantage of the full range of Windows Server 2008 R2 features such as IIS 7.5, AppLocker, and enhanced command-line and automated management using PowerShell Version 2.0. New runtime functionality – in beta: Windows Azure Virtual Machine Role: Support for more types of new and existing Windows applications will soon be available with the introduction of the Virtual Machine (VM) role. You can move more existing applications to Windows Azure, reducing the need to make costly code or deployment changes. Extra Small Windows Azure Instance, which is priced at $0.05 per compute hour, provides developers with a cost-effective training and development environment. Developers can also use the Extra Small instance to prototype cloud solutions at a lower cost. Windows Azure Connect: (formerly Project Sydney), which enables a simple and easy-to-manage mechanism to set up IP-based network connectivity between on-premises and Windows Azure resources, is the first Windows Azure Virtual Network feature that we’re making available as a CTP. You can sign up for any of the betas via the Windows Azure Management Portal. Improved processes and simplified operations New portal! (see above) Access to new diagnostic information including the ability to click on a role to see role type, deployment time and last reboot time A new sign-up process that dramatically reduces the number of steps needed to sign up for Windows Azure. New scenario based Windows Azure Platform forums to help answer questions and share knowledge more efficiently. Multiple Service Administrators: Windows Azure now supports multiple Windows Live IDs to have administrator privileges on the same Windows Azure account. The objective is to make it easy for a team to work on the same Windows Azure account while using their individual Windows Live IDs.   Related Links Please also let us know through Microsoft Platform Ready if and when you intend to build an application using the Windows Azure Platform. Or indeed if you already have (Well done). You will get access to some great benefits if you do (more on that in a future post). It also really helps us better understand the demand out there which directly impacts how we will plan the next six months of activities around the Windows Azure Platform. Visit Microsoft Platform Ready to tell us about your plans for your applications UK based? Interested in the Windows Azure Platform? Join http://ukazure.ning.com Get started with the Windows Azure Platform http://bit.ly/startazure

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• Big Data – Interacting with Hadoop – What is Sqoop? – What is Zookeeper? – Day 17 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the Pig and Pig Latin in Big Data Story. In this article we will understand what is Sqoop and Zookeeper in Big Data Story. There are two most important components one should learn when learning about interacting with Hadoop – Sqoop and Zookper. What is Sqoop? Most of the business stores their data in RDBMS as well as other data warehouse solutions. They need a way to move data to the Hadoop system to do various processing and return it back to RDBMS from Hadoop system. The data movement can happen in real time or at various intervals in bulk. We need a tool which can help us move this data from SQL to Hadoop and from Hadoop to SQL. Sqoop (SQL to Hadoop) is such a tool which extract data from non-Hadoop data sources and transform them into the format which Hadoop can use it and later it loads them into HDFS. Essentially it is ETL tool where it Extracts, Transform and Load from SQL to Hadoop. The best part is that it also does extract data from Hadoop and loads them to Non-SQL (or RDBMS) data stores. Essentially, Sqoop is a command line tool which does SQL to Hadoop and Hadoop to SQL. It is a command line interpreter. It creates MapReduce job behinds the scene to import data from an external database to HDFS. It is very effective and easy to learn tool for nonprogrammers. What is Zookeeper? ZooKeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. In other words Zookeeper is a replicated synchronization service with eventual consistency. In simpler words – in Hadoop cluster there are many different nodes and one node is master. Let us assume that master node fails due to any reason. In this case, the role of the master node has to be transferred to a different node. The main role of the master node is managing the writers as that task requires persistence in order of writing. In this kind of scenario Zookeeper will assign new master node and make sure that Hadoop cluster performs without any glitch. Zookeeper is the Hadoop’s method of coordinating all the elements of these distributed systems. Here are few of the tasks which Zookeepr is responsible for. Zookeeper manages the entire workflow of starting and stopping various nodes in the Hadoop’s cluster. In Hadoop cluster when any processes need certain configuration to complete the task. Zookeeper makes sure that certain node gets necessary configuration consistently. In case of the master node fails, Zookeepr can assign new master node and make sure cluster works as expected. There many other tasks Zookeeper performance when it is about Hadoop cluster and communication. Basically without the help of Zookeeper it is not possible to design any new fault tolerant distributed application. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about very important components of the Big Data Ecosystem – Big Data Analytics. 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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• Unable to Sign in to the Microsoft Online Services Signin application from Windows 7 client located behind ISA firewall

  - by Ravindra Pamidi

  A while ago i helped a customer troubleshoot authentication problem with Microsoft Online Services Signin application.  This customer was evaluating Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services) and was having trouble using the single sign on application behind ISA 2004 firewall.The network structure is fairly simple with single Windows 2003 Active Directory domain and Windows 7 clients. On a successful logon to the Microsoft Online Services Signin application, this application provides single signon functionality to all of Microsoft online services in the BPOS package. Symptoms:When trying to signin it fails with error "The service is currently unavailable. Please try again later. If problems continue, contact your service administrator". If ISA 2004 firewall is removed from the picture the authentication succeeds.Troubleshooting: Enabled ISA Server firewall logging along with Microsoft Network Monitor tool on the Windows 7 Client while reproducing the issue. Analysis of the ISA Server Firewall logs and Microsoft Network capture revealed that the Microsoft Online Services Sign In application when sending request to ISA Server does not send the domain credentials and as a result ISA Server responds with an error code of HTTP 407 Proxy authentication required listing out the supported authentication mechanisms.  The application in question is expected to send the credentials of the domain user in response to this request. However in this case, it fails to send the logged on user's domain credentials. Bit of researching on the Internet revealed that The "Microsoft Online Services Sign In" application by default does not support Outbound Internet Proxy authentication. In order for it to send the logged on user's domain credentials we had to make  changes to its configuration file "SignIn.exe.config" located under "Program Files\Microsoft Online Services\Sign In" folder. Step by Step details to configure the configuration file are documented on Microsoft TechNet website given below.  Configure your outbound authenticating proxy serverhttp://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/helphowto/cc54100d-d149-45a9-8e96-f248ecb1b596.htm After the above problem was addressed we were still not able to use the "Microsoft Online Services Sign In" application and it failed with the same error.  Analysis of another network capture revealed that the application in question is now sending the required credentials and the connection seems to terminate at a later stage. Enabled verbose logging for the "Microsoft Online Services Sign In" application and then reproduced the problem. Analysis of the logs revealed a time difference between the local client and Microsoft Online services server of around seven minutes which is above the acceptable time skew of five minutes. Excerpt from Microsoft Online Services Sign In application verbose log:  1/26/2012 1:57:51 PM Verbose SingleSignOn.GetSSOGenericInterface SSO Interface URL: https://signinservice.apac.microsoftonline.com/ssoservice/UID1/26/2012 1:57:52 PM Exception SSOSignIn.SignIn The security timestamp is invalid because its creation time ('2012-01-26T08:34:52.767Z') is in the future. Current time is '2012-01-26T08:27:52.987Z' and allowed clock skew is '00:05:00'.1/26/2012 1:57:52 PM Exception SSOSignIn.SignIn  Although the Windows 7 Clients successfully synchronized time to the domain controller for the domain, the domain controller was not configured to synchronize time with external NTP servers. This caused a gradual drift in time on the network thus resulting in the above issue. Reconfigured the domain controller holding the PDC FSMO role to synchronize time with external time source ( time.nist.gov ) and edited the system policy on the ISA server firewall to allow NTP traffic to time.nist.gov Configure the time source for the forest:Windows Time Servicehttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794937(WS.10).aspx Forced synchronization of Windows time using the command w32tm /resync on the domain controller and later on the clients each of which had corrected the seven minutes difference. This resolved the problem with logon to Microsoft Online Services Sign In.

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• Parsing T-SQL – The easy way

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Every once in a while, I hit an issue that would require me to interrogate/parse some T-SQL code.  Normally, I would shy away from this and attempt to solve the problem in some other way.  I have written parsers before in the the past using LEX and YACC, and as much fun and awesomeness that path is,  I couldnt justify the time it would take. However, this week I have been faced with just such an issue and at the back of my mind I can remember reading through the SQLServer 2012 feature pack and seeing something called “Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Transact-SQL Language Service “.  This is described there as : “The SQL Server Transact-SQL Language Service is a component based on the .NET Framework which provides parsing validation and IntelliSense services for Transact-SQL for SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 2008 R2, and SQL Server 2008. “ Sounds just what I was after.  Documentation is very scant on this so dont take what follows as best practice or best use, just a practice and a use. Knowing what I was sort of looking for something, I found the relevant assembly in the gac which is the simply named ,’Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser’. Even knowing that you wont find much in terms of documentation if you do a web-search, but you will find the MSDN documentation that list the members and methods etc… The “scanner”  class sounded the most appropriate for my needs as that is described as “Scans Transact-SQL searching for individual units of code or tokens.”. After a bit of poking, around the code i ended up with was something like [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser") | Out-Null $ParseOptions = New-Object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.ParseOptions $ParseOptions.BatchSeparator = 'GO' $Parser = new-object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Scanner($ParseOptions) $Sql = "Create Procedure MyProc as Select top(10) * from dbo.Table" $Parser.SetSource($Sql,0) $Token=[Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Tokens]::TOKEN_SET $Start =0 $End = 0 $State =0 $IsEndOfBatch = $false $IsMatched = $false $IsExecAutoParamHelp = $false while(($Token = $Parser.GetNext([ref]$State ,[ref]$Start, [ref]$End, [ref]$IsMatched, [ref]$IsExecAutoParamHelp ))-ne [Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Tokens]::EOF) { try{ ($TokenPrs =[Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Tokens]$Token) | Out-Null $TokenPrs $Sql.Substring($Start,($end-$Start)+1) }catch{ $TokenPrs = $null } } As you can see , the $Sql variable holds the sql to be parsed , that is pushed into the $Parser object using SetSource,  and then we will use GetNext until the EOF token is returned.  GetNext will also return the Start and End character positions within the source string of the parsed text. This script’s output is : TOKEN_CREATE Create TOKEN_PROCEDURE Procedure TOKEN_ID MyProc TOKEN_AS as TOKEN_SELECT Select TOKEN_TOP top TOKEN_INTEGER 10 TOKEN_FROM from TOKEN_ID dbo TOKEN_TABLE Table note that the ‘(‘, ‘)’  and ‘*’ characters have returned a token type that is not present in the Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Tokens Enum that has caused an error which has been caught in the catch block.  Fun, Fun ,Fun , Simple T-SQL Parsing.  Hope this helps someone in the same position,  let me know how you get on.

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• Musings on the launch of SQL Monitor

  - by Phil Factor

  For several years, I was responsible for the smooth running of a large number of enterprise database servers. We ran a network monitoring tool that was primitive by today’s standards but which performed the useful function of polling every system, including all the Servers in my charge. It ran a configurable script for each service that you needed to monitor that was merely required to return one of a number of integer values. These integer values represented the pain level of the service, from 10 (“hurtin’ real bad”) to 1 (“Things is great”). Not only could you program the visual appearance of each server on the network diagram according to the value of the integer, but you could even opt to run a sound file. Very soon, we had a large TFT Screen, high on the wall of the server room, with every server represented by an icon, and a speaker next to it that would give out a series of grunts, groans, snores, shrieks and funeral marches, depending on the problem. One glance at the display, and you could dive in with iSQL/QA/SSMS and check what was going on with your favourite diagnostic tools. If you saw a server icon burst into flames on the screen or droop like a jelly, you dropped your mug of coffee to do it.  It was real fun, but I remember it more for the huge difference it made to have that real-time visibility into how your servers are performing. The management soon stopped making jokes about the real reason we wanted the TFT screen. (It rendered DVDs beautifully they said; particularly flesh-tints). If you are instantly alerted when things start to go wrong, then there was a good chance you could fix it before being alerted to the problem by the users of the system.  There is a world of difference between this sort of tool, one that gives whoever is ‘on watch’ in the server room the first warning of a potential problem on one of any number of servers, and the breed of tool that attempts to provide some sort of prosthetic DBA Brain. I like to get the early warning, to get the right information to help to diagnose a problem: No auto-fix, but just the information. I prefer to leave the task of ascertaining the exact cause of a problem to my own routines, custom code, intuition and forensic instincts. A simulated aircraft cockpit doesn’t do anything for me, especially before I know where I should be flying.  Time has moved on, and that TFT screen is now, with SQL Monitor, an iPad or any other mobile or static device that can support a browser. Rather than trying to reproduce the conceptual topology of the servers, it lists them in their groups so as to give a display that scales with the increasing number of databases you monitor.  It gives the history of the major events and trends for the servers. It gives the icons and colours that you can spot out of the corner of your eye, but goes on to give you just enough information in drill-down to give you a much clearer idea of where to look with your DBA tools and routines. It doesn't swamp you with information.  Whereas a few server and database-level problems are pretty easily fixed, others depend on judgement and experience to sort out.  Although the idea of an application that automates the bulk of a DBA’s skills is attractive to many, I can’t see it happening soon. SQL Server’s complexity increases faster than the panaceas can be created. In the meantime, I believe that the best way of helping  DBAs  is to make the monitoring process as simple and effective as possible,  and provide the right sort of detail and ‘evidence’ to allow them to decide on the fix. In the end, it is still down to the skill of the DBA.

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• SharePoint For Newbie Developers: Code Scope

  - by Mark Rackley

  So, I continue to try to come up with diagrams and information to help new SharePoint developers wrap their heads around this SharePoint beast, especially when those newer to development are on my team. To that end, I drew up the below diagram to help some of our junior devs understand where/when code is being executed in SharePoint at a high level. Note that I say “High Level”… This is a simplistic diagram that can get a LOT more complicated if you want to dive in deeper.  For the purposes of my lesson it served its purpose well. So, please no comments from you peanut gallery about information 3 levels down that’s missing unless it adds to the discussion.  Thanks So, the diagram below details where code is executed on a page load and gives the basic flow of the page load. There are actually many more steps, but again, we are staying high level here. I just know someone is still going to say something like “Well.. actually… the dlls are getting executed when…”  Anyway, here’s the diagram with some information I like to point out: Code Scope / Where it is executed So, looking at the diagram we see that dlls and XSL are executed on the server and that JavaScript/jQuery are executed on the client. This is the main thing I like to point out for the following reasons: XSL (for the most part) is faster than JavaScript I actually get this question a lot. Since XSL is executed on the server less data is getting passed over the wire and a beefier machine (hopefully) is doing the processing. The outcome of course is better performance. When You are using jQuery and making Web Service calls you are building XML strings and sending them to the server, then ALL the results come back and the client machine has to parse through the XML and use what it needs and ignore the rest (and there is a lot of garbage that comes back from SharePoint Web Service calls). XSL and JavaScript cannot work together in the same scope Let me clarify. JavaScript can send data back to SharePoint in postbacks that XSL can then use. XSL can output JavaScript and initiate JavaScript variables.  However, XSL cannot call a JavaScript method to get a value and JavaScript cannot directly interact with XSL and call its templates. They are executed in there scope only. No crossing of boundaries here. So, what does this all mean? Well, nothing too deep. This is just some basic fundamental information that all SharePoint devs need to understand. It will help you determine what is the best solution for your specific development situation and it will help the new guys understand why they get an error when trying to call a JavaScript Function from within XSL.  Let me know if you think quick little blogs like this are helpful or just add to the noise. I could probably put together several more that are similar.  As always, thanks for stopping by, hope you learned something new.

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• Cloud Computing Pricing - It's like a Hotel

  - by BuckWoody

  I normally don't go into the economics or pricing side of Distributed Computing, but I've had a few friends that have been surprised by a bill lately and I wanted to quickly address at least one aspect of it. Most folks are used to buying software and owning it outright - like buying a car. We pay a lot for the car, and then we use it whenever we want. We think of the "cloud" services as a taxi - we'll just pay for the ride we take an no more. But it's not quite like that. It's actually more like a hotel. When you subscribe to Azure using a free offering like the MSDN subscription, you don't have to pay anything for the service. But when you create an instance of a Web or Compute Role, Storage, that sort of thing, you can think of the idea of checking into a hotel room. You get the key, you pay for the room. For Azure, using bandwidth, CPU and so on is billed just like it states in the Azure Portal. so in effect there is a cost for the service and then a cost to use it, like water or power or any other utility. Where this bit some folks is that they created an instance, played around with it, and then left it running. No one was using it, no one was on - so they thought they wouldn't be charged. But they were. It wasn't much, but it was a surprise.They had the hotel room key, but they weren't in the room, so to speak. To add to their frustration, they had to talk to someone on the phone to cancel the account. I understand the frustration. Although we have all this spelled out in the sign up area, not everyone has the time to read through all that. I get that. So why not make this easier? As an explanation, we bill for that time because the instance is still running, and we have to tie up resources to be available the second you want them, and that costs money. As far as being able to cancel from the portal, that's also something that needs to be clearer. You may not be aware that you can spin up instances using code - and so cancelling from the Portal would allow you to do the same thing. Since a mistake in code could erase all of your instances and the account, we make you call to make sure you're you and you really want to take it down. Not a perfect system by any means, but we'll evolve this as time goes on. For now, I wanted to make sure you're aware of what you should do. By the way, you don't have to cancel your whole account not to be billed. Just delete the instance from the portal and you won't be charged. You don't have to call anyone for that. And just FYI - you can download the SDK for Azure and never even hit the online version at all for learning and playing around. No sign-up, no credit card, PO, nothing like that. In fact, that's how I demo Azure all the time. Everything runs right on your laptop in an emulated environment.  

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• My architecture has a problem with views that required information from different objects. How can I solve this?

  - by Oscar

  I am building an architecture like this: These are my SW layers ______________ | | | Views | |______________| ______________ | | |Business Logic| |______________| ______________ | | | Repository | |______________| My views are going to generate my HTML to be sent to the user Business logic is where all the business logics are Repository is a layer to access the DB My idea is that the repository uses entities (that are basically the representation of the tables, in order to perform DB queries. The layers communicate between themselves using Business Objects, that are objects that represent the real-world-object itself. They can contain business rules and methods. The views build/use DTOs, they are basically objects that have the information required to be shown on the screen. They expect also this kind of object on actions and, before calling the business logic, they create BO. First question: what is your overall feeling about this architecture? I've used similar architecture for some projects and I always got this problem: If my view has this list to show : Student1, age, course, Date Enrolled, Already paid? It has information from different BO. How do you think one should build the structure? These were the alternatives I could think of: The view layer could call the methods to get the student, then the course it studies, then the payment information. This would cause a lot of DB accesses and my view would have the knowledge about how to act to generate this information. This just seems wrong for me. I could have an "adapter object", that has the required information (a class that would have a properties Student, Course and Payment). But I would required one adapter object for each similar case, this may get very bad for big projects. I still don't like them. Would you have ideas? How would you change the architecture to avoid this kind of problems? @Rory: I read the CQRS and I don't think this suits my needs. As taken from a link references in your link Before describing the details of CQRS we need to understand the two main driving forces behind it: collaboration and staleness That means: many different actors using the same object (collaboration) and once data has been shown to a user, that same data may have been changed by another actor – it is stale (staleness). My problem is that I want to show to the user information from different BO, so I would need to receive them from the service layer. How can my service layer assemble and deliver this information? Edit to @AndrewM: Yes, you understood it correctly, the original idea was to have the view layer to build the BOs, but you have a very nice point about the creation of the BO inside the business layers. Assuming I follow your advice and move the creation logic inside the business layer, my business layer interface would contain the DTOs, for instance public void foo(MyDTO object) But as far as I understand, the DTO is tightly coupled to each view, so it would not be reusable by a second view. In order to use it, the second view would need to build a specific DTO from a specific view or I would have to duplicate the code in the business layer. Is this correct or am I missing something?

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