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• Welcome Oracle Data Integration 12c: Simplified, Future-Ready Solutions with Extreme Performance

  - by Irem Radzik

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 The big day for the Oracle Data Integration team has finally arrived! It is my honor to introduce you to Oracle Data Integration 12c. Today we announced the general availability of 12c release for Oracle’s key data integration products: Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c. The new release delivers extreme performance, increase IT productivity, and simplify deployment, while helping IT organizations to keep pace with new data-oriented technology trends including cloud computing, big data analytics, real-time business intelligence. With the 12c release Oracle becomes the new leader in the data integration and replication technologies as no other vendor offers such a complete set of data integration capabilities for pervasive, continuous access to trusted data across Oracle platforms as well as third-party systems and applications. Oracle Data Integration 12c release addresses data-driven organizations’ critical and evolving data integration requirements under 3 key themes: Future-Ready Solutions Extreme Performance Fast Time-to-Value       There are many new features that support these key differentiators for Oracle Data Integrator 12c and for Oracle GoldenGate 12c. In this first 12c blog post, I will highlight only a few:·Future-Ready Solutions to Support Current and Emerging Initiatives: Oracle Data Integration offer robust and reliable solutions for key technology trends including cloud computing, big data analytics, real-time business intelligence and continuous data availability. Via the tight integration with Oracle’s database, middleware, and application offerings Oracle Data Integration will continue to support the new features and capabilities right away as these products evolve and provide advance features. E    Extreme Performance: Both GoldenGate and Data Integrator are known for their high performance. The new release widens the gap even further against competition. Oracle GoldenGate 12c’s Integrated Delivery feature enables higher throughput via a special application programming interface into Oracle Database. As mentioned in the press release, customers already report up to 5X higher performance compared to earlier versions of GoldenGate. Oracle Data Integrator 12c introduces parallelism that significantly increases its performance as well. Fast Time-to-Value via Higher IT Productivity and Simplified Solutions:  Oracle Data Integrator 12c’s new flow-based declarative UI brings superior developer productivity, ease of use, and ultimately fast time to market for end users.  It also gives the ability to seamlessly reuse mapping logic speeds development.Oracle GoldenGate 12c ‘s Integrated Delivery feature automatically optimally tunes the process, saving time while improving performance. This is just a quick glimpse into Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c. On November 12th we will reveal much more about the new release in our video webcast "Introducing 12c for Oracle Data Integration". Our customer and partner speakers, including SolarWorld, BT, Rittman Mead will join us in launching the new release. Please join us at this free event to learn more from our executives about the 12c release, hear our customers’ perspectives on the new features, and ask your questions to our experts in the live Q&A. Also, please continue to follow our blogs, tweets, and Facebook updates as we unveil more about the new features of the latest release. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Kendo UI Mobile with Knockout for Master-Detail Views

  - by Steve Michelotti

  Lately I’ve been playing with Kendo UI Mobile to build iPhone apps. It’s similar to jQuery Mobile in that they are both HTML5/JavaScript based frameworks for buildings mobile apps. The primary thing that drew me to investigate Kendo UI was its innate ability to adaptively render a native looking app based on detecting the device it’s currently running on. In other words, it will render to look like a native iPhone app if it’s running on an iPhone and it will render to look like a native Droid app if it’s running on a Droid. This is in contrast to jQuery Mobile which looks the same on all devices and, therefore, it can never quite look native for whatever device it’s running on. My first impressions of Kendo UI were great. Using HTML5 data-* attributes to define “roles” for UI elements is easy, the rendering looked great, and the basic navigation was simple and intuitive. However, I ran into major confusion when trying to figure out how to “correctly” build master-detail views. Since I was already very family with KnockoutJS, I set out to use that framework in conjunction with Kendo UI Mobile to build the following simple scenario: I wanted to have a simple “Task Manager” application where my first screen just showed a list of tasks like this:   Then clicking on a specific task would navigate to a detail screen that would show all details of the specific task that was selected:   Basic navigation between views in Kendo UI is simple. The href of an <a> tag just needs to specify a hash tag followed by the ID of the view to navigate to as shown in this jsFiddle (notice the href of the <a> tag matches the id of the second view):   Direct link to jsFiddle: here. That is all well and good but the problem I encountered was: how to pass data between the views? Specifically, I need the detail view to display all the details of whichever task was selected. If I was doing this with my typical technique with KnockoutJS, I know exactly what I would do. First I would create a view model that had my collection of tasks and a property for the currently selected task like this: 1: function ViewModel() { 2: var self = this; 3: self.tasks = ko.observableArray(data); 4: self.selectedTask = ko.observable(null); 5: } Then I would bind my list of tasks to the unordered list - I would attach a “click” handler to each item (each <li> in the unordered list) so that it would select the “selectedTask” for the view model. The problem I found is this approach simply wouldn’t work for Kendo UI Mobile. It completely ignored the click handlers that I was trying to attach to the <a> tags – it just wanted to look at the href (at least that’s what I observed). But if I can’t intercept this, then *how* can I pass data or any context to the next view? The only thing I was able to find in the Kendo documentation is that you can pass query string arguments on the view name you’re specifying in the href. This enabled me to do the following: Specify the task ID in each href – something like this: <a href=”#taskDetail?id=3></a> Attach an “init method” (via the “data-show” attribute on the details view) that runs whenever the view is activated Inside this “init method”, grab the task ID passed from the query string to look up the item from my view model’s list of tasks in order to set the selected task I was able to get all that working with about 20 lines of JavaScript as shown in this jsFiddle. If you click on the Results tab, you can navigate between views and see the the detail screen is correctly binding to the selected item:   Direct link to jsFiddle: here.   With all that being done, I was very happy to get it working with the behavior I wanted. However, I have no idea if that is the “correct” way to do it or if there is a “better” way to do it. I know that Kendo UI comes with its own data binding framework but my preference is to be able to use (the well-documented) KnockoutJS since I’m already familiar with that framework rather than having to learn yet another new framework. While I think my solution above is probably “acceptable”, there are still a couple of things that bug me about it. First, it seems odd that I have to loop through my items to *find* my selected item based on the ID that was passed on the query string - normally, with Knockout I can just refer directly to my selected item from where it was used. Second, it didn’t feel exactly right that I had to rely on the “data-show” method of the details view to set my context – normally with Knockout, I could just attach a click handler to the <a> tag that was actually clicked by the user in order to set the “selected item.” I’m not sure if I’m being too picky. I know there are many people that have *way* more expertise in Kendo UI compared to me – I’d be curious to know if there are better ways to achieve the same results.

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• Why I&rsquo;m Getting an iPad

  - by andrewbrust

  I have never purchased an Apple product in my life.  That’s a “true fact.”  And, for that matter, the last Apple product I really wanted was an Apple IIe, back in the 1980s.  I couldn’t afford it though (I was in high school), so I got a Commodore 64 instead…it had the same microprocessor, after all.  If the iPhone were on Verizon, I probably would have picked one up in December, when I got my Droid.  And if the iPod Touch worked with my Napster subscription (which of course it does not, but my Sonos does) I might have picked on of those instead. That’s three strikes, but Apple’s not out.  I’ve decided I want the iPad.  Why?  Well, to start with, my birthday is March 31st…the iPad comes out on April 3rd, and my wife wanted to know what to get me.  Also, my house is a 7-minute walk from the Apple Store on West 14th Street in Manhattan.  This makes it easy to get my pre-ordered device on launch day, and get home quickly with it.  Oh, and I agreed to write an article for Redmond Magazine, the fee for which will pay for the device…that way the birthday present doesn’t have to be an extravagant expense.  Plus, I’m a contrarian, so I want to buy the one device from Apple that the fanboys have actually panned. Think those are bad reasons? How about this: I want to experience iPhone and iPad development and, although my app will probably never hit the App Store and run on the actual device, I still think owning one will help me develop something better.  i want to see if the slate form factor has good business usage scenarios.  I want to see if Business Intelligence technology on a device like this can work.  Imagine a dashboard on this thing. And, for the consumer experience, I really want a touch device on which I can surf the Web while I’m in the kitchen, or on the couch.  I don’t want the small form factor of my phone, I don’t want to use my TV, and I don’t want a keyboard that will get dirty or in my way. I don’t want to watch movies on it (my TV is good for that), so I don’t care that the iPad has a 4:3 screen.  I don’t want to read books on it, so I don’t care that the display is backlit LCD, rather than eInk. But really what I want is to understand, first hand, why people have such brand loyalty to Apple.  I know the big reasons; I’m not detached from society.  But I want to know the subtle points of what Apple does really well, and also what they do poorly.  And I’d like to know, once and for all, if Microsoft can beat Apple, if Microsoft can think the right way to beat Apple and if Microsoft should  even try to beat Apple. I expect to share my thoughts on these questions, as they develop.

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• Tell me what&rsquo;s wrong! &ndash; An XNA sample demonstrating exception handling and reporting in

  - by George Clingerman

  I’ve always enjoyed using Nick Gravelyn’s exception handling in all of my games. You’re always going to encounter those unhandled exception that your players are going to ferret out and having a method to display them rather than just crashing to the dashboard is definitely more of an elegant solution. But the other day I got to thinking…what if we could do more? What if instead of just displaying the error, we could encourage the players to send us the error. So I started playing with that an expanding upon Nick’s sample code to see what I could come up with. I got close to what I envisioned, but unfortunately there were some limitations to just what the XNA API could do. In my head I was picturing the players hitting “Send Message” and a 360 message would just be sent to the XBLIG developer. Unfortunately, you can only send messages in an XNA game to someone you’re currently in a network session with. Since I didn’t want to have a 360 server running all the time, virally connecting to players just to get error messages, I did the next best thing and just open up a 360 message and encourage them to manually enter the gamertag. Maybe someday we’ll be able to do that a little better, but this works for now. In the sample, players can hit the “A” button or key to generate in an exception. If the debugger is not attached, then the Exception message screen will be shown explaining what has happened and giving the player a chance to send a 360 message to the gamertag provided or maybe even just send an email. Nick’s code has been changed just a bit. It now accepts any PlayerIndex (no longer hard coded to just PlayerIndex.One) and it no longer uses a MessageBox to get the users selection. The code has also been modified so that it works both for the 360 and for the PC. Check out “Tell me what’s wrong!” and let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions. I really do appreciate the feedback.

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• Advanced Continuous Delivery to Azure from TFS, Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great

  - by jasont

  The folks over on the TFS / Visual Studio team have been working hard at releasing a steady stream of new features for their new hosted Team Foundation Service in the cloud. One of the most significant features released was simple continuous delivery of your solution into your Azure deployments. The original announcement from Brian Harry can be found here. Team Foundation Service is a great platform for .Net developers who are used to working with TFS on-premises. I’ve been using it since it became available at the //BUILD conference in 2011, and when I recently came to work at Stackify, it was one of the first changes I made. Managing work items is much easier than the tool we were using previously, although there are some limitations (more on that in another blog post). However, when continuous deployment was made available, it blew my mind. It was the killer feature I didn’t know I needed. Not to say that I wasn’t previously an advocate for continuous delivery; just that it was always a pain to set up and configure. Having it hosted - and a one-click setup – well, that’s just the best thing since sliced bread. It made perfect sense: my source code is in the cloud, and my deployment is in the cloud. Great! I can queue up a build from my iPad or phone and just let it go! I quickly tore through the quick setup and saw it all work… sort of. This will be the first in a three part series on how to take the building block of Team Foundation Service continuous delivery and build a CD model that will actually work for any team deploying something more advanced than a “Hello World” example. Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great Part 2: A Model That Works: Branching and Multiple Deployment Environments Part 3: Other Considerations: SQL, Custom Tasks, Etc Good Enough Is Not Great There. I’ve said it. I certainly hope no one on the TFS team is offended, but it’s the truth. Let’s take a look under the hood and understand how it works, and then why it’s not enough to handle real world CD as-is. How it works. (note that I’ve skipped a couple of steps; I already have my accounts set up and something deployed to Azure) The first step is to establish some oAuth magic between your Azure management portal and your TFS Instance. You do this via the management portal. Once it’s done, you have a new build process template in your TFS instance. (Image lifted from the documentation) From here, you’ll get the usual prompts for security, allowing access, etc. But you’ll also get to pick which Solution in your source control to build. Here’s what the bulk of the build definition looks like. All I’ve had to do is add in the solution to build (notice that mine is from a specific branch – Release – more on that later) and I’ve changed the configuration. I trigger the build, and voila! I have an Azure deployment a few minutes later. The beauty of this is that it’s all in the cloud and I’m not waiting for my machine to compile and upload the package. (I also had to enable the build definition first – by default it is created in disabled state, probably a good thing since it will trigger on every.single.checkin by default.) I get to see a history of deployments from the Azure portal, and can link into TFS to see the associated changesets and work items. You’ll notice also that this build definition also automatically put my code in the Staging slot of my Azure deployment – more on this soon. For now, I can VIP swap and be in production. (P.S. I hate VIP swap and “production” and “staging” in Azure. More on that later too.) That’s it. That’s the default out-of-box experience. Easy, right? But it’s full of room for improvement, so let’s get into that….   The Problems Nothing is perfect (except my code – it’s always perfect), and neither is Continuous Deployment without a bit of work to help it fit your dev team’s process. So what are the issues? Issue 1: Staging vs QA vs Prod vs whatever other environments your team may have. This, for me, is the big hairy one. Remember how this automatically deployed to staging rather than prod for us? There are a couple of issues with this model: If I want to deliver to prod, it requires intervention on my part after deployment (via a VIP swap). If I truly want to promote between environments (i.e. Nightly Build –> Stable QA –> Production) I likely have configuration changes between each environment such as database connection strings and this process (and the VIP swap) doesn’t account for this. Yet. Issue 2: Branching and delivering on every check-in. As I mentioned above, I have set this up to target a specific branch – Release – of my code. For the purposes of this example, I have adopted the “basic” branching strategy as defined by the ALM Rangers. This basically establishes a “Main” trunk where you branch off Dev and Release branches. Granted, the Release branch is usually the only thing you will deploy to production, but you certainly don’t want to roll to production automatically when you merge to the Release branch and check-in (unless you like the thrill of it, and in that case, I like your style, cowboy….). Rather, you have nightly build and QA environments, or if you’ve adopted the feature-branch model you have environments for those. Those are the environments you want to continuously deploy to. But that takes us back to Issue 1: we currently have a 1:1 solution to Azure deployment target. Issue 3: SQL and other custom tasks. Let’s be honest and address the elephant in the room: I need to get some sleep because I see an elephant in the room. But seriously, I can’t think of an application I have touched in the last 10 years that doesn’t need to consider SQL changes when deploying code and upgrading an environment. Microsoft seems perfectly content to ignore this elephant for now: yes, they’ve added Data Tier Applications. But let’s be honest with ourselves again: no one really uses it, and it’s not suitable for anything more complex than a Hello World sample project database. Why? Because it doesn’t fit well into a great source control story. Developers make stored procedure and table changes all day long while coding complex applications, and if someone forgets to go update the DACPAC before the automated deployment, you have a broken build until it’s completed. Developers – not just DBAs – also like to work with SQL in SQL tools, not in Visual Studio. I’m really picking on SQL because that’s generally the biggest concern that I hear. But we need to account for any custom tasks as well in the build process.   The Solutions… ? We’ve taken a look at how this all works, and addressed the shortcomings. In my next post (which I promise will be very, very soon), I will detail how I’ve overcome these shortcomings and used this foundation to create a mature, flexible model for deploying my app – any version, any time, to any environment.

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• Silverlight Cream for May 18, 2010 -- #864

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Jesse Liberty, Chris Koenig, Kyle McClellan, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), Tim Heuer, and Jonathan van de Veen. Shoutout: René Schulte has posted a SLARToolkit Beginner's Guide Erik Mork and the Sparkling Podcast crew posted Silverlight Week – Silverlight Android? John Papa opens up a dialog: Ask the Experts on Silverlight TV ... get your questions answered! From SilverlightCream.com: Windows Phone 7 For Silverlight Programmers Jesse Liberty's starting a series on WP7, so you obviously don't want to miss this... source, commentary, external links, how-to's... what more could you ask for?? WP7 Part 3: Navigation Chris Koenig is revamping his WP7 application to use Community Megaphone instead of Nerd Dinner and in this episode 3 he's looking into Navigation ... definitely good stuff here. RIA Services Authentication Out-Of-Browser Kyle McClellan has code up demonstrating how to get around the fact that the Browser networking stack handles cookies differently than the client networking stack used OOB, and achieve forms authentication OOB. How to work with the Silverlight BusyIndicator? Kunal Chowdhury has a post up talking about the busy indicator and how to use it to show an active indicator while disabling other content. Drag and Drop Operation in Silverlight ListBox In a second entry, Kunal Chowdhury has a nice long post displaying drag-and-drop within and between ListBox controls. Silverlight 4 Tools, WCF RIA Services and Themes Released As usual, Tim Heuer has a great post up about the new releases not only for those with 'clean' machines, but also instructions for those that have been playing along. Advanced printing in Silverlight 4 Just after a post on printing yesterday, Jonathan van de Veen has a post up at SilverlightShow on printing as well, and is demonstrating fitting the text to the page and printing multiple pages. 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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• GWB | What is the next feature you want to see?

  - by Jeff Julian

  We want to know what you are thinking bloggers and visitors of Geekswithblogs.net.  If you were able to add items to the product backlog for this site, what would they be? New skins? Better search? Organic tag system? Better twitter integration? More ways to link other social media outlets to your blog like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Flickr? …. What would you like to see?   You can leave feedback on this post or email me at [email protected].  We love this community and want to see how we can continue to make Geekswithblogs.net relevant to developers in 2010. Technorati Tags: Geekswithblogs,2010,Next Features

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• Responsive Design: Media Query Bookmarket - shows the applied media queries and current window size

  - by ihaynes

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/ihaynes/archive/2013/06/19/153181.aspxThere are any number of tools for resizing the browser window to check responsive designs. One that stands out for me is the Media Query Bookmarklet from the Sparkbox Foundry. This shows you the currently applied media queries and browser size in both pixels and ems. Once you've used this you'll wonder how you managed without it.Note: The main page says in works in Chrome and Safari. It also works in IE10.Details at http://seesparkbox.com/foundry/media_query_bookmarklet

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• SSIS ForEachLoop Container

  - by Leonard Mwangi

  I recently had a client request to create an SSIS package that would loop through a set of data in SQL tables to allow them to complete their data transformation processes. Knowing that Integration Services does have ForEachLoop Container, I knew the task would be easy but the moment I jumped into it I figured there was no straight forward way to accomplish the task since for each didn’t really have a loop through the table enumerator. With the capabilities of integration Services, I was still confident that it was possible it was just a matter of creativity to get it done. I set out to discover what different ForEach Loop Editor Enumerators did and settled with Variable Enumerator.  Here is how I accomplished the task. 1.       Drop your ForEach Loop Container in your WorkArea. 2.       Create a few SSIS Variable that will contain the data. Notice I have assigned MyID_ID variable a value of “TEST’ which is not evaluated either. This variable will be assigned data from the database hence allowing us to loop. 3.       In the ForEach Loop Editor’s Collection select Variable Enumerator 4.       Once this is all set, we need a mechanism to grab the data from the SQL Table and assigning it to the variable. Fig: Select Top 1 record Fig: Assign Top 1 record to the variable 5.       Now all that’s required is a house cleaning process that will update the table that you are looping so that you can be able to grab the next record   A look of the complete package

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• My New Job

  - by Stuart Brierley

  Last year I started a new job with a logistics company in the North of England, where I was responsible for the management, design and development of IT Integration strategies, architectures and solutions using BizTalk Server 2009.  This included the design and implementation of the BizTalk Server 2009 infrastructure, the definition of development standards, mentoring a fellow developer in the ways of BizTalk and migrating a number of existing solutions from Softshare over to BizTalk 2009. Unfortunately I then realised that, following this initial set up, there didn't actually seem to be that much BizTalk work for me to get stuck into and reluctantly I have now moved on from this role to a very similar role with the country's largest office supplies company.  Based in Sheffield, we distribute office supplies on a UK wide basis and computer supplies across Europe. The situation here is slightly different than when I first joined my previous employer.  Whereas that was a green field installation with no previous BizTalk solutions in place, my new employer currently has a number of live BizTalk 2000 (!) and BizTalk 2006 solutions in place.  Unfortunately the infrastructure around these is less than ideal; with no clear distinction between development and test environments and no source control what so ever! We are currently building a proposal for a new BizTalk Server 2010 implementation, where I am hopeful of being able to implement fully independent development, test and pseudo-live environments, alongside an enterprise level live installation.  We should also be introducing Team Foundation Server to the development process, thereby giving us some much needed source control capabilities. Following this is likely to be a period of migration for the existing BizTalk Solutions, along with the onward development of new projects and initiatives - I'm hoping to be a busy man for the forseeable future :o)

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• Adding Custom Pipeline code to the Pipeline Component Toolbox

  - by Geordie

  Add ... "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\GacUtil.exe" /nologo /i "$(TargetPath)" /f  xcopy "$(TargetPath)" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Pipeline Components" /d /y to the 'Post Build event command line' for the pipeline support component project in visual studio. This will automatically put the support dll in the GAC and BizTalk’s Pipeline component directory on building the solution/project. Build the project. Right Click on title bar and select Choose items. Click on the BizTalk Pipeline Components tab and select the new component from the list. If it is not available in the list Browse to the BizTalk pipeline component folder (C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Pipeline Components) and select the dll.

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• Conferences: Starting the round for 2011 with Mix

  - by Enrique Lima

  There are several conferences lining up for 2011.  There are some private conferences I will be participating in and some other where there is an invitation to submit content for consideration.  That is the case with Mix 2011. The date:  April 12-14, 2011 The venue: Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas Here is the general information: http://live.visitmix.com/ To submit content: http://live.visitmix.com/opencall

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• SQL Azure Security: DoS

  - by Herve Roggero

  Since I decided to understand in more depth how SQL Azure works I started to dig into its performance characteristics. So I decided to write an application that allows me to put SQL Azure to the test and compare results with a local SQL Server database. One of the options I added is the ability to issue the same command on multiple threads to get certain performance metrics. That's when I stumbled on an interesting security feature of SQL Azure: its Denial of Service (DoS) detection engine. What this security feature does is that it performs a check on the number of connections being established, and if the rate of connection is too high, SQL Azure blocks all communication from that machine. I am still trying to learn more about this specific feature, but it appears that going to the SQL Azure portal and testing the connection from the portal "resets" the feature and you are allowed to connect again... until you reach the login threashold. In the specific test I was performing, all the logins were successful. I haven't tried to login with an invalid account or password... that will be for next time. On my Linked In group (SQL Server and SQL Azure Security: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2569994&trk=hb_side_g) Chip Andrews (www.sqlsecurity.com) pointed out that this feature in itself could present an internal threat. In theory, a rogue application could be issuing many login requests from a NATed network, which could potentially prevent any production system from connecting to SQL Azure within the same network. My initial response was that this could indeed be the case. However, while the TCP protocol contains the latest NATed IP address of a machine (which masks the origin of the machine making the SQL request), the TDS protocol itself contains the IP Address of the machine making the initial request; so technically there would be a way for SQL Azure to block only the internal IP address making the rogue requests.  So this warrants further investigation... stay tuned...

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• Extending Blend for Visual Studio 2013

  - by Chris Skardon

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/cskardon/archive/2013/11/01/extending-blend-for-visual-studio-2013.aspxSo, I got a comment yesterday on my post about Extending Blend 4 and Blend for Visual Studio 2012 asking if I knew how to get it working for Blend for Visual Studio 2013.. My initial thoughts were, just change the location to get the blend dlls from Visual Studio 11.0 to 12.0 and you’re all set, so I went to do that, only to discover that the dlls I normally reference, well – they don’t exist. So… I’ve made a presumption that the actual process of using MEF etc is still the same. I was wrong. So, the route to discovery – required DotPeek and opening a few of blends dlls.. Browsing through the Blend install directory (./Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0/Blend/) I notice the .addin files: So I decide to peek into the SketchFlow dll, then promptly remember SketchFlow is quite a big thing, and hunting through there is not ideal, luckily there is another dll using an .addin file, ‘Microsoft.Expression.Importers.Host’, so we’ll go for that instead. We can see it’s still using the ‘IPackage’ formula, but where is that sucker? Well, we just press F12 on the ‘IPackage’ bit and DotPeek takes us there, with a very handy comment at the top: // Type: Microsoft.Expression.Framework.IPackage // Assembly: Microsoft.Expression.Framework, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a // MVID: E092EA54-4941-463C-BD74-283FD36478E2 // Assembly location: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Blend\Microsoft.Expression.Framework.dll Now we know where the IPackage interface is defined, so let’s just try writing a control. Last time I did a separate dll for the control, this time I’m not, but it still works if you want to do it that way. Let’s build a control! STEP 1 Create a new WPF application Naming doesn’t matter any more! I have gone with ‘Hello2013’ (see what I did there?) STEP 2 Delete: App.Config App.xaml MainWindow.xaml We won’t be needing them STEP 3 Change your application to be a Class Library instead. (You might also want to delete the ‘vshost’ stuff in your output directory now, as they only exist for hosting the WPF app, and just cause clutter) STEP 4 Add a reference to the ‘Microsoft.Expression.Framework.dll’ (which you can find in ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Blend’ – that’s Program Files (x86) if you’re on an x64 machine!). STEP 5 Add a User Control, I’m going with ‘Hello2013Control’, and following from last time, it’s just a TextBlock in a Grid: <UserControl x:Class="Hello2013.Hello2013Control" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="300"> <Grid> <TextBlock>Hello Blend for VS 2013</TextBlock> </Grid> </UserControl> STEP 6 Add a class to load the package – I’ve called it – yes you guessed – Hello2013Package, which will look like this: namespace Hello2013 { using Microsoft.Expression.Framework; using Microsoft.Expression.Framework.UserInterface; public class Hello2013Package : IPackage { private Hello2013Control _hello2013Control; private IWindowService _windowService; public void Load(IServices services) { _windowService = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); Initialize(); } private void Initialize() { _hello2013Control = new Hello2013Control(); if (_windowService.PaletteRegistry["HelloPanel"] == null) _windowService.RegisterPalette("HelloPanel", _hello2013Control, "Hello Window"); } public void Unload(){} } } You might note that compared to the 2012 version we’re no longer [Exporting(typeof(IPackage))]. The file you create in STEP 7 covers this for us. STEP 7 Add a new file called: ‘<PROJECT_OUTPUT_NAME>.addin’ – in reality you can call it anything and it’ll still read it in just fine, it’s just nicer if it all matches up, so I have ‘Hello2013.addin’. Content wise, we need to have: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <AddIn AssemblyFile="Hello2013.dll" /> obviously, replacing ‘Hello2013.dll’ with whatever your dll is called. STEP 8 We set the ‘addin’ file to be copied to the output directory: STEP 9 Build! STEP 10 Go to your output directory (./bin/debug) and copy the 3 files (Hello2013.dll, Hello2013.pdb, Hello2013.addin) and then paste into the ‘Addins’ folder in your Blend directory (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Blend\Addins) STEP 11 Start Blend for Visual Studio 2013 STEP 12 Go to the ‘Window’ menu and select ‘Hello Window’ STEP 13 Marvel at your new control! Feel free to email me / comment with any problems!

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• C# Simple Twitter Update

  - by mroberts

  For what it's worth a simple twitter update. 1: using System; 2: using System.IO; 3: using System.Net; 4: using System.Text; 5:   6: namespace Server.Actions 7: { 8: public class TwitterUpdate 9: { 10: public string Body { get; set; } 11: public string Login { get; set; } 12: public string Password { get; set; } 13:   14: public override void Execute() 15: { 16: try 17: { 18: //encode user name and password 19: string creds = Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(string.Format("{0}:{1}", this.Login, this.Password))); 20:   21: //encode tweet 22: byte[] tweet = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes("status=" + this.Body); 23:   24: //setup request 25: HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"); 26: request.Method = "POST"; 27: request.ServicePoint.Expect100Continue = false; 28: request.Headers.Add("Authorization", string.Format("Basic {0}", creds)); 29: request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"; 30: request.ContentLength = tweet.Length; 31:   32: //write to stream 33: Stream reqStream = request.GetRequestStream(); 34: reqStream.Write(tweet, 0, tweet.Length); 35: reqStream.Close(); 36:   37: //check response 38: HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse(); 39:   40: //... 41: } 42: catch (Exception e) 43: { 44: //... 45: } 46: } 47: } 48: }   BTW, this is my first blog post.  Nothing earth shattering, I admit, but I needed to figure out how to post formatted code.  In the past I’ve used Alex Gorbatchev’s Syntax Highlighter with great success, but here at GWB I couldn’t get it to work. Windows Live Writer though, being a stand alone writer, worked with no problems.  For now, that’s what I’ll use.

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• How to fix a Silverlight download progress indicator that jumps from 0% to 100%

  - by JaydPage

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/JaydPage/archive/2013/10/29/fixing-a-broken-silverlight-xap-file-download-progress-indicator-that.aspxAfter moving our silverlight application to a new server I came across an problem whereby the download progress indicator on the splash screen was stuck on 0% until the file had completely downloaded.After about an hour of searching for the answer I realised that there is a distinct lack of help out there for this problem.It is a simple fix:1) On the server that is hosting your website, go into IIS and click on the website.2) Click on the compression section3) Un-check the option that says "Dynamic Content Compression"4) Save changes

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• Writing a SQL Azure Book - Notes

  - by Herve Roggero

  Over the last few months I have had the opportunity to ramp up significantly on SQL Azure.  In fact I will be the co-author of Pro SQL Azure, published by Apress. This is going to be a book on how to best leverage SQL Azure, both from a technology and design standpoint. Talking about design, one of the things I realized is that understanding the key limitations and boundary parameters of Azure in general, and more specifically SQL Azure, will play an important role in making sounds design decisions that both meet reasonable performance requirements and minimize the costs associated with running a cloud computing solution.   The book touches on many design considerations including link encryption, pricing model, design patterns, and also some important performance techniques that need to be leveraged when developing in Azure, including Caching, Lazy Properties and more.   Finally I started working with Shards and how to implement them in Azure to ensure database scalability beyond the current size limitations. Implementing shards is not simple, and the book will address how to create a shard technology within your code to provide a scale-out mechanism for your SQL Azure databases.   As you can see, there are many factors to consider when designing a SQL Azure database. While we can think of SQL Azure as a cloud version of SQL Server, it is best to look at it as a new platform to make sure you don’t make any assumptions on how to best leverage it.

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• I&rsquo;m IN!

  - by Aaron Kowall

  Got an email this morning.(yes I checked and it wasn’t an April Fools joke) congratulating me on becoming a Microsoft MVP. I’ve been working with and among MVP’s for quite a while and quite frankly felt left out.  Well, I’m finally part of the crowd. I received an MVP for Visual Studio ALM.  This makes me VERY proud as I know the high caliber of the existing Visual Studio ALM MVP’s and am honored to now count myself among them. Now my challenge is to make sure I continue to do those things that got me nominated so that I can retain this honor. Technorati Tags: MVP,VS2010,ALM

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• Red Gate in the Community

  - by Nick Harrison

  Much has been said recently about Red Gate's community involvement and commitment to the DotNet community. Much of this has been unduly negative. Before you start throwing stones and spewing obscenities, consider some additional facts: Red Gate's software is actually very good. I have worked on many projects where Red Gate's software was instrumental in finishing successfully. Red Gate is VERY good to the community. I have spoken at many user groups and code camps where Red Gate has been a sponsor. Red Gate consistently offers up money to pay for the venue or food, and they will often give away licenses as door prizes. There are many such community events that would not take place without Red Gate's support. All I have ever seen them ask for is to have their products mentioned or be listed as a sponsor. They don't insist on anyone following a specific script. They don't monitor how their products are showcased. They let their products speak for themselves. Red Gate sponsors the Simple Talk web site. I publish there regularly. Red Gate has never exerted editorial pressure on me. No one has ever told me we can't publish this unless you mention Red Gate products. No one has ever said, you need to say nice things about Red Gate products in order to be published. They have told me, "you need to make this less academic, so you don't alienate too many readers. "You need to actually write an introduction so people will know what you are talking about". "You need to write this so that someone who isn't a reflection nut will follow what you are trying to say." In short, they have been good editors worried about the quality of the content and what the readers are likely to be interested in. For me personally, Red Gate and Simple Talk have both been excellent to work with. As for the developer outrage… I am a little embarrassed by so much of the response that I am seeing. So much of the complaints remind me of little children whining "but you promised" Semantics aside. A promise is just a promise. It's not like they "pinky sweared". Sadly no amount name calling or "double dog daring" will change the economics of the situation. Red Gate is not a multibillion dollar corporation. They are a mid size company doing the best they can. Without a doubt, their pockets are not as deep as Microsoft's. I honestly believe that they did try to make the "freemium" model work. Sadly it did not. I have no doubt that they intended for it to work and that they tried to make it work. I also have no doubt that they labored over making this decision. This could not have been an easy decision to make. Many people are gleefully proclaiming a massive backlash against Red Gate swearing off their wonderful products and promising to bash them at every opportunity from now on. This is childish behavior that does not represent professionals. This type of behavior is more in line with bullies in the school yard than professionals in a professional community. Now for my own prediction… This back lash against Red Gate is not likely to last very long. We will all realize that we still need their products. We may look around for alternatives, but realize that they really do have the best in class for every product that they produce, and that they really are not exorbitantly priced. We will see them sponsoring Code Camps and User Groups and be reminded, "hey this isn't such a bad company". On the other hand, software shops like Red Gate, will remember this back lash and give a second thought to supporting open source projects. They will worry about getting involved when an individual wants to turn over control for a product that they developed but can no longer support alone. Who wants to run the risk of not being able to follow through on their best intentions. In the end we may all suffer, even the toddlers among us throwing the temper tantrum, "BUT YOU PROMISED!" Disclaimer Before anyone asks or jumps to conclusions, I do not get paid by Red Gate to say any of this. I have often written about their products, and I have long thought that they are a wonderful company with amazing products. If they ever open an office in the SE United States, I will be one of the first to apply.

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• Adding and accessing custom sections in your C# App.config

  - by deadlydog

  So I recently thought I’d try using the app.config file to specify some data for my application (such as URLs) rather than hard-coding it into my app, which would require a recompile and redeploy of my app if one of our URLs changed.  By using the app.config it allows a user to just open up the .config file that sits beside their .exe file and edit the URLs right there and then re-run the app; no recompiling, no redeployment necessary. I spent a good few hours fighting with the app.config and looking at examples on Google before I was able to get things to work properly.  Most of the examples I found showed you how to pull a value from the app.config if you knew the specific key of the element you wanted to retrieve, but it took me a while to find a way to simply loop through all elements in a section, so I thought I would share my solutions here.   Simple and Easy The easiest way to use the app.config is to use the built-in types, such as NameValueSectionHandler.  For example, if we just wanted to add a list of database server urls to use in my app, we could do this in the app.config file like so: 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <configuration> 3: <configSections> 4: <section name="ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers" type="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler" /> 5: </configSections> 6: <startup> 7: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" /> 8: </startup> 9: <ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers> 10: <add key="localhost" value="localhost" /> 11: <add key="Dev" value="Dev.MyDomain.local" /> 12: <add key="Test" value="Test.MyDomain.local" /> 13: <add key="Live" value="Prod.MyDomain.com" /> 14: </ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers> 15: </configuration>   And then you can access these values in code like so: 1: string devUrl = string.Empty; 2: var connectionManagerDatabaseServers = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers") as NameValueCollection; 3: if (connectionManagerDatabaseServers != null) 4: { 5: devUrl = connectionManagerDatabaseServers["Dev"].ToString(); 6: }   Sometimes though you don’t know what the keys are going to be and you just want to grab all of the values in that ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers section.  In that case you can get them all like this: 1: // Grab the Environments listed in the App.config and add them to our list. 2: var connectionManagerDatabaseServers = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers") as NameValueCollection; 3: if (connectionManagerDatabaseServers != null) 4: { 5: foreach (var serverKey in connectionManagerDatabaseServers.AllKeys) 6: { 7: string serverValue = connectionManagerDatabaseServers.GetValues(serverKey).FirstOrDefault(); 8: AddDatabaseServer(serverValue); 9: } 10: }   And here we just assume that the AddDatabaseServer() function adds the given string to some list of strings.  So this works great, but what about when we want to bring in more values than just a single string (or technically you could use this to bring in 2 strings, where the “key” could be the other string you want to store; for example, we could have stored the value of the Key as the user-friendly name of the url).   More Advanced (and more complicated) So if you want to bring in more information than a string or two per object in the section, then you can no longer simply use the built-in System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler type provided for us.  Instead you have to build your own types.  Here let’s assume that we again want to configure a set of addresses (i.e. urls), but we want to specify some extra info with them, such as the user-friendly name, if they require SSL or not, and a list of security groups that are allowed to save changes made to these endpoints. So let’s start by looking at the app.config: 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <configuration> 3: <configSections> 4: <section name="ConnectionManagerDataSection" type="ConnectionManagerUpdater.Data.Configuration.ConnectionManagerDataSection, ConnectionManagerUpdater" /> 5: </configSections> 6: <startup> 7: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" /> 8: </startup> 9: <ConnectionManagerDataSection> 10: <ConnectionManagerEndpoints> 11: <add name="Development" address="Dev.MyDomain.local" useSSL="false" /> 12: <add name="Test" address="Test.MyDomain.local" useSSL="true" /> 13: <add name="Live" address="Prod.MyDomain.com" useSSL="true" securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges="ConnectionManagerUsers" /> 14: </ConnectionManagerEndpoints> 15: </ConnectionManagerDataSection> 16: </configuration>   The first thing to notice here is that my section is now using the type “ConnectionManagerUpdater.Data.Configuration.ConnectionManagerDataSection” (the fully qualified path to my new class I created) “, ConnectionManagerUpdater” (the name of the assembly my new class is in).  Next, you will also notice an extra layer down in the <ConnectionManagerDataSection> which is the <ConnectionManagerEndpoints> element.  This is a new collection class that I created to hold each of the Endpoint entries that are defined.  Let’s look at that code now: 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Configuration; 4: using System.Linq; 5: using System.Text; 6: using System.Threading.Tasks; 7:  8: namespace ConnectionManagerUpdater.Data.Configuration 9: { 10: public class ConnectionManagerDataSection : ConfigurationSection 11: { 12: /// <summary> 13: /// The name of this section in the app.config. 14: /// </summary> 15: public const string SectionName = "ConnectionManagerDataSection"; 16: 17: private const string EndpointCollectionName = "ConnectionManagerEndpoints"; 18:  19: [ConfigurationProperty(EndpointCollectionName)] 20: [ConfigurationCollection(typeof(ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection), AddItemName = "add")] 21: public ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection ConnectionManagerEndpoints { get { return (ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection)base[EndpointCollectionName]; } } 22: } 23:  24: public class ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection : ConfigurationElementCollection 25: { 26: protected override ConfigurationElement CreateNewElement() 27: { 28: return new ConnectionManagerEndpointElement(); 29: } 30: 31: protected override object GetElementKey(ConfigurationElement element) 32: { 33: return ((ConnectionManagerEndpointElement)element).Name; 34: } 35: } 36: 37: public class ConnectionManagerEndpointElement : ConfigurationElement 38: { 39: [ConfigurationProperty("name", IsRequired = true)] 40: public string Name 41: { 42: get { return (string)this["name"]; } 43: set { this["name"] = value; } 44: } 45: 46: [ConfigurationProperty("address", IsRequired = true)] 47: public string Address 48: { 49: get { return (string)this["address"]; } 50: set { this["address"] = value; } 51: } 52: 53: [ConfigurationProperty("useSSL", IsRequired = false, DefaultValue = false)] 54: public bool UseSSL 55: { 56: get { return (bool)this["useSSL"]; } 57: set { this["useSSL"] = value; } 58: } 59: 60: [ConfigurationProperty("securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges", IsRequired = false)] 61: public string SecurityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges 62: { 63: get { return (string)this["securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges"]; } 64: set { this["securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges"] = value; } 65: } 66: } 67: }   So here the first class we declare is the one that appears in the <configSections> element of the app.config.  It is ConnectionManagerDataSection and it inherits from the necessary System.Configuration.ConfigurationSection class.  This class just has one property (other than the expected section name), that basically just says I have a Collection property, which is actually a ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection, which is the next class defined.  The ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection class inherits from ConfigurationElementCollection and overrides the requied fields.  The first tells it what type of Element to create when adding a new one (in our case a ConnectionManagerEndpointElement), and a function specifying what property on our ConnectionManagerEndpointElement class is the unique key, which I’ve specified to be the Name field. The last class defined is the actual meat of our elements.  It inherits from ConfigurationElement and specifies the properties of the element (which can then be set in the xml of the App.config).  The “ConfigurationProperty” attribute on each of the properties tells what we expect the name of the property to correspond to in each element in the app.config, as well as some additional information such as if that property is required and what it’s default value should be. Finally, the code to actually access these values would look like this: 1: // Grab the Environments listed in the App.config and add them to our list. 2: var connectionManagerDataSection = ConfigurationManager.GetSection(ConnectionManagerDataSection.SectionName) as ConnectionManagerDataSection; 3: if (connectionManagerDataSection != null) 4: { 5: foreach (ConnectionManagerEndpointElement endpointElement in connectionManagerDataSection.ConnectionManagerEndpoints) 6: { 7: var endpoint = new ConnectionManagerEndpoint() { Name = endpointElement.Name, ServerInfo = new ConnectionManagerServerInfo() { Address = endpointElement.Address, UseSSL = endpointElement.UseSSL, SecurityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges = endpointElement.SecurityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges.Split(',').Where(e => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(e)).ToList() } }; 8: AddEndpoint(endpoint); 9: } 10: } This looks very similar to what we had before in the “simple” example.  The main points of interest are that we cast the section as ConnectionManagerDataSection (which is the class we defined for our section) and then iterate over the endpoints collection using the ConnectionManagerEndpoints property we created in the ConnectionManagerDataSection class.   Also, some other helpful resources around using app.config that I found (and for parts that I didn’t really explain in this article) are: How do you use sections in C# 4.0 app.config? (Stack Overflow) <== Shows how to use Section Groups as well, which is something that I did not cover here, but might be of interest to you. How to: Create Custom Configuration Sections Using Configuration Section (MSDN) ConfigurationSection Class (MSDN) ConfigurationCollectionAttribute Class (MSDN) ConfigurationElementCollection Class (MSDN)   I hope you find this helpful.  Feel free to leave a comment.  Happy Coding!

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• Poll Results: Foreign Key Constraints

  - by Darren Gosbell

  A few weeks ago I did the following post asking people – if they used foreign key constraints in their star schemas. The poll is still open if you are interested in adding to it, but here is what the chart looks like as of today. (at the bottom of the poll itself there is a link to the live results, unfortunately I cannot link the live results in here as the blogging platform blocks the required javascript)   Interestingly the results are fairly even. Of the 78 respondents, fractionally over half at least aim to start with referential integrity in their star schemas. I did not want to influence the results by sharing my opinion, but my personal preference is to always aim to have foreign key constraints. But at the same time, I am pragmatic about it, I do have projects where for various reasons some constraints are not defined. And I also have other designs that I have inherited, where it would just be too much work to go back and add foreign key constraints. If you are going to implement foreign keys in your star schema, they really need to be there at the start. In fact this poll was was the result of a feature request for BIDSHelper asking for a feature to check for null/missing foreign keys and I am entirely convinced that BIDS is the wrong place for this sort of functionality. BIDS is a design tool, your data needs to be constantly checked for consistency. It's not that I think that it's impossible to get a design working without foreign key constraints, but I like the idea of failing as soon as possible if there is an error and enforcing foreign key constraints lets me "fail early" if there are constancy issues with my data. By far the biggest concern with foreign keys is performance and I suppose I'm curious as to how often people actually measure and quantify this. I worked on a project a number of years ago that had very large data volumes and we did find that foreign key constraints did have a measurable impact, but what we did was to disable the constraints before loading the data, then enabled and checked them afterwards. This saved as time (although not as much as not having constraints at all), but still let us know early in the process if there were any consistency issues. For the people that do not have consistent data, if you have ETL processes that you control that are building your star schema which you also control, then to be blunt you only have yourself to blame. It is the job of the ETL process to make the data consistent. There are techniques for handling situations like missing data as well as  early and late arriving data. Ralph Kimball's book – The Data Warehouse Toolkit goes through some design patterns for handling data consistency. Having foreign key relationships can also help the relational engine to optimize queries as noted in this recent blog post by Boyan Penev

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• Cooking With Expression: HTML 5 and Expression Web

  - by David Wesst

  I finally got the first one done! This is the first of a series of webcasts that I have wanted to do for a while. I call it Cooking with Expression because developing great user experiences are very similar to cooking great food. So please, check it out, leave some feedback, and enjoy! --- To kick off the series, we want to talk about some techniques that we will be using throughout the series for the different recipes. Since HTML 5 is literally the future of the web and buzz topic in development today, we thought we would start off with that. In this episode we are going to teach you how to use one of your your present day tools Microsoft Expression Web with HTML 5. Cooking with Expression - HTML 5 in Expression Web from David Wesst on Vimeo.

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• Syntax Highlighting for Gherkin (Cucumber Language)

  - by Liam McLennan

  SyntaxHighlighter is the de facto standard for syntax highlighting on the web. I am currently working on a tool for publishing BDD specifications on the web and I want syntax highlighting. Unfortunately, SyntaxHighlighter does not support Gherkin, the language Cucumber and SpecFlow use to define BDD specifications. Writing new language parsers for SyntaxHighlighter is very easy, so I implemented one for Gherkin. Here is what a syntax highlighted Gherkin file looks like: # A comment here Feature: Some terse yet descriptive text of what is desired In order to realize a named business value As a explicit system actor I want to gain some beneficial outcome which furthers the goal @secretlabel Scenario: Some determinable business situation Given some precondition And some other precondition When some action by the actor And some other action And yet another action Then some testable outcome is achieved And something else we can check happens too Like all SyntaxHighlighter brushes to use this one you need to install the brush (shBrushGherkin.js). I have also used a custom theme to get it just the way I wanted it (shThemeGherkin.css). If you would like to use my Gherkin brush you may download the code and example page.

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• Where'd My Data Go? (and/or...How Do I Get Rid of It?)

  - by David Paquette

  Want to get a better idea of how cascade deletes work in Entity Framework Code First scenarios? Want to see it in action? Stick with us as we quickly demystify what happens when you tell your data context to nuke a parent entity. This post is authored by Calgary .NET User Group Leader David Paquette with help from Microsoft MVP in Asp.Net James Chambers. We got to spend a great week back in March at Prairie Dev Con West, chalk full of sessions, presentations, workshops, conversations and, of course, questions.  One of the questions that came up during my session: "How does Entity Framework Code First deal with cascading deletes?". James and I had different thoughts on what the default was, if it was different from SQL server, if it was the same as EF proper and if there was a way to override whatever the default was.  So we built a set of examples and figured out that the answer is simple: it depends.  (Download Samples) Consider the example of a hockey league. You have several different entities in the league including games, teams that play the games and players that make up the teams. Each team also has a mascot.  If you delete a team, we need a couple of things to happen: The team, games and mascot will be deleted, and The players for that team will remain in the league (and therefore the database) but they should no longer be assigned to a team. So, let's make this start to come together with a look at the default behaviour in SQL when using an EDMX-driven project. The Reference – Understanding EF's Behaviour with an EDMX/DB First Approach First up let’s take a look at the DB first approach.  In the database, we defined 4 tables: Teams, Players, Mascots, and Games.  We also defined 4 foreign keys as follows: Players.Team_Id (NULL) –> Teams.Id Mascots.Id (NOT NULL) –> Teams.Id (ON DELETE CASCADE) Games.HomeTeam_Id (NOT NULL) –> Teams.Id Games.AwayTeam_Id (NOT NULL) –> Teams.Id Note that by specifying ON DELETE CASCADE for the Mascots –> Teams foreign key, the database will automatically delete the team’s mascot when the team is deleted.  While we want the same behaviour for the Games –> Teams foreign keys, it is not possible to accomplish this using ON DELETE CASCADE in SQL Server.  Specifying a ON DELETE CASCADE on these foreign keys would cause a circular reference error: The series of cascading referential actions triggered by a single DELETE or UPDATE must form a tree that contains no circular references. No table can appear more than one time in the list of all cascading referential actions that result from the DELETE or UPDATE – MSDN When we create an entity data model from the above database, we get the following:   In order to get the Games to be deleted when the Team is deleted, we need to specify End1 OnDelete action of Cascade for the HomeGames and AwayGames associations.   Now, we have an Entity Data Model that accomplishes what we set out to do.  One caveat here is that Entity Framework will only properly handle the cascading delete when the the players and games for the team have been loaded into memory.  For a more detailed look at Cascade Delete in EF Database First, take a look at this blog post by Alex James.   Building The Same Sample with EF Code First Next, we're going to build up the model with the code first approach.  EF Code First is defined on the Ado.Net team blog as such: Code First allows you to define your model using C# or VB.Net classes, optionally additional configuration can be performed using attributes on your classes and properties or by using a Fluent API. Your model can be used to generate a database schema or to map to an existing database. Entity Framework Code First follows some conventions to determine when to cascade delete on a relationship.  More details can be found on MSDN: If a foreign key on the dependent entity is not nullable, then Code First sets cascade delete on the relationship. If a foreign key on the dependent entity is nullable, Code First does not set cascade delete on the relationship, and when the principal is deleted the foreign key will be set to null. The multiplicity and cascade delete behavior detected by convention can be overridden by using the fluent API. For more information, see Configuring Relationships with Fluent API (Code First). Our DbContext consists of 4 DbSets: public DbSet<Team> Teams { get; set; } public DbSet<Player> Players { get; set; } public DbSet<Mascot> Mascots { get; set; } public DbSet<Game> Games { get; set; } When we set the Mascot –> Team relationship to required, Entity Framework will automatically delete the Mascot when the Team is deleted.  This can be done either using the [Required] data annotation attribute, or by overriding the OnModelCreating method of your DbContext and using the fluent API. Data Annotations: public class Mascot { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } [Required] public virtual Team Team { get; set; } } Fluent API: protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) { modelBuilder.Entity<Mascot>().HasRequired(m => m.Team); } The Player –> Team relationship is automatically handled by the Code First conventions. When a Team is deleted, the Team property for all the players on that team will be set to null.  No additional configuration is required, however all the Player entities must be loaded into memory for the cascading to work properly. The Game –> Team relationship causes some grief in our Code First example.  If we try setting the HomeTeam and AwayTeam relationships to required, Entity Framework will attempt to set On Cascade Delete for the HomeTeam and AwayTeam foreign keys when creating the database tables.  As we saw in the database first example, this causes a circular reference error and throws the following SqlException: Introducing FOREIGN KEY constraint 'FK_Games_Teams_AwayTeam_Id' on table 'Games' may cause cycles or multiple cascade paths. Specify ON DELETE NO ACTION or ON UPDATE NO ACTION, or modify other FOREIGN KEY constraints. Could not create constraint. To solve this problem, we need to disable the default cascade delete behaviour using the fluent API: protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) { modelBuilder.Entity<Mascot>().HasRequired(m => m.Team); modelBuilder.Entity<Team>() .HasMany(t => t.HomeGames) .WithRequired(g => g.HomeTeam) .WillCascadeOnDelete(false); modelBuilder.Entity<Team>() .HasMany(t => t.AwayGames) .WithRequired(g => g.AwayTeam) .WillCascadeOnDelete(false); base.OnModelCreating(modelBuilder); } Unfortunately, this means we need to manually manage the cascade delete behaviour.  When a Team is deleted, we need to manually delete all the home and away Games for that Team. foreach (Game awayGame in jets.AwayGames.ToArray()) { entities.Games.Remove(awayGame); } foreach (Game homeGame in homeGames) { entities.Games.Remove(homeGame); } entities.Teams.Remove(jets); entities.SaveChanges();   Overriding the Defaults – When and How To As you have seen, the default behaviour of Entity Framework Code First can be overridden using the fluent API.  This can be done by overriding the OnModelCreating method of your DbContext, or by creating separate model override files for each entity.  More information is available on MSDN.   Going Further These were simple examples but they helped us illustrate a couple of points. First of all, we were able to demonstrate the default behaviour of Entity Framework when dealing with cascading deletes, specifically how entity relationships affect the outcome. Secondly, we showed you how to modify the code and control the behaviour to get the outcome you're looking for. Finally, we showed you how easy it is to explore this kind of thing, and we're hoping that you get a chance to experiment even further. For example, did you know that: Entity Framework Code First also works seamlessly with SQL Azure (MSDN) Database creation defaults can be overridden using a variety of IDatabaseInitializers  (Understanding Database Initializers) You can use Code Based migrations to manage database upgrades as your model continues to evolve (MSDN) Next Steps There's no time like the present to start the learning, so here's what you need to do: Get up-to-date in Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010 | SP1) or Visual Studio 2012 (VS2012) Build yourself a project to try these concepts out (or download the sample project) Get into the community and ask questions! There are a ton of great resources out there and community members willing to help you out (like these two guys!). Good luck! About the Authors David Paquette works as a lead developer at P2 Energy Solutions in Calgary, Alberta where he builds commercial software products for the energy industry.  Outside of work, David enjoys outdoor camping, fishing, and skiing. David is also active in the software community giving presentations both locally and at conferences. David also serves as the President of Calgary .Net User Group. James Chambers crafts software awesomeness with an incredible team at LogiSense Corp, based in Cambridge, Ontario. A husband, father and humanitarian, he is currently residing in the province of Manitoba where he resists the urge to cheer for the Jets and maintains he allegiance to the Calgary Flames. When he's not active with the family, outdoors or volunteering, you can find James speaking at conferences and user groups across the country about web development and related technologies.

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• VS 2010 ALM Whitepapers &ndash; link from Neno Loje

  - by johndoucette

  Overview of Visual Studio ALM Whitepapers by Microsoft Overview Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance Installation, Configuration & Administration Team Foundation Installation Guide for Visual Studio Team System 2010 Administration Guide for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Visual Studio 2010 TFS Upgrade Guide Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 VM Factory TFS Integration Platform Visual Studio 2010 Licensing White Paper Requirements Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Requirements Management Guidance Version Control & Configuration Management Visual Studio TFS Branching Guide 2010 Some guide or whitepaper missing? Let me know!

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