Search Results

Search found 367 results on 15 pages for 'get blogged by joki'.

Page 11/15 | < Previous Page | 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15  | Next Page >

• SQLAuthority News – Why I am Going to Attend #SQLPASS Summit 2012 – Seattle

  - by pinaldave

  I am going to Seattle I once again attend SQLPASS this year. This will be my fourth SQLPASS. Lots of people ask me why I am going to SQLPASS every year. Well there are so many different reasons for that. I go to SQLPASS because – I love it!  Here are few of the reasons I go to SQLPASS. Meet friends whom I have never met before Meet community at large – it is fun to hang around with like minded people Meet Rick Morelan – my book co-author and friend Attend various SQL Parties – there are so many parties around – see the list below Explore various new tools from various third party vendors Meet fellow Chapter Leaders and Regional Mentors And of course attend SQL Server Learning Sessions from industry known experts. The three-day event will be marked by a lot of learning, sharing, and networking, which will help me increase both my knowledge and contacts. PASS Summit provides me a golden opportunity to build my network as well as to identify and meet potential customers or employees. If I am a consultant or vendor who is looking for better career opportunities, PASS Summit is the perfect platform to meet and show my skills to my new potential customers and employers. Further, breakfasts, lunches, and evening receptions, which are included with registration, are meant to provide more and more networking opportunities. At PASS Summit, I gain not only new ideas but also inspire myself from top professionals and experts. Learning new things about SQL Server, interacting with different kinds of professionals, and sharing issues and solutions will definitely improve my understanding and turn me into a better SQL Server professional who can leverage and optimize SQL Server to improve business. I am going – are you joining? Note: This is re-blogged with modification from my 2 years old blog posts on a similar subject. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• More on PHP and Oracle 11gR2 Improvements to Client Result Caching

  - by christopher.jones

  Oracle 11.2 brought several improvements to Client Result Caching. CRC is way for the results of queries to be cached in the database client process for reuse.  In an Oracle OpenWorld presentation "Best Practices for Developing Performant Application" my colleague Luxi Chidambaran had a (non-PHP generated) graph for the Niles benchmark that shows a DB CPU reduction up to 600% and response times up to 22% faster when using CRC. Sometimes CRC is called the "Consistent Client Cache" because Oracle automatically invalidates the cache if table data is changed.  This makes it easy to use without needing application logic rewrites. There are a few simple database settings to turn on and tune CRC, so management is also easy. PHP OCI8 as a "client" of the database can use CRC.  The cache is per-process, so plan carefully before caching large data sets.  Tables that are candidates for caching are look-up tables where the network transfer cost dominates. CRC is really easy in 11.2 - I'll get to that in a moment.  It was also pretty easy in Oracle 11.1 but it needed some tiny application changes.  In PHP it was used like: $s = oci_parse($c, "select /*+ result_cache */ * from employees"); oci_execute($s, OCI_NO_AUTO_COMMIT); // Use OCI_DEFAULT in OCI8 <= 1.3 oci_fetch_all($s, $res); I blogged about this in the past.  The query had to include a specific hint that you wanted the results cached, and you needed to turn off auto committing during execution either with the OCI_DEFAULT flag or its new, better-named alias OCI_NO_AUTO_COMMIT.  The no-commit flag rule didn't seem reasonable to me because most people wouldn't be specific about the commit state for a query. Now in Oracle 11.2, DBAs can now nominate tables for caching, either with CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE.  That means you don't need the query hint anymore.  As well, the no-commit flag requirement has been lifted.  Your code can now look like: $s = oci_parse($c, "select * from employees"); oci_execute($s); oci_fetch_all($s, $res); Since your code probably already looks like this, your DBA can find the top queries in the database and simply tune the system by turning on CRC in the database and issuing an ALTER TABLE statement for candidate tables.  Voila. Another CRC improvement in Oracle 11.2 is that it works with DRCP connection pooling. There is some fine print about what is and isn't cached, check the Oracle manuals for details.  If you're using 11.1 or non-DRCP "dedicated servers" then make sure you use oci_pconnect() persistent connections.  Also in PHP don't bind strings in the query, although binding as SQLT_INT is OK.

  Read the article

• Using jQuery to Make a Field Read Only in SharePoint

  - by Mark Rackley

  Okay… this will be my shortest blog post EVER. Very little rambling.. I promise, and I’m sure this has been blogged more than once, so I apologize for adding to the noise, but like I always say, I blog for myself so I have a global bookmark. So,let’s say you have a field on a SharePoint Form and you want to make it read only. You COULD just open it up in SPD and easily make it read only, but some people are purists and don’t like use SPD or modify the default new/edit/disp forms. Put me in the latter camp, I try to avoid modifying these forms and it seemed like such a simple task that I didn’t want to create a new un-ghosted form.  So.. how do you do it? It’s only one line of jQuery. All you need to do is find the id for your input field and capture the keypress on it so that it cannot be modified (you should probably capture clicks for dropdowns/checkboxes/etc. but I didn’t need to).  Anyway, here’s the entire script: <script src="jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> jQuery(document).ready(function($){ //capture keypress on our read only field and return false $('#idOfInputField').keypress(function() { return false; }); }) </script>   You can find the ID of your input field by viewing the source, this ID stays consistent as long as you don’t muck with the list or form in the wrong way.  Please note, you CANNOT disable the input field as an alternative to capturing the keypress. If you do this and save the form, any data in the disabled fields will be wiped out. There are probably a dozen ways to make a field read-only and if all you are using jQuery for is to make a field read-only, then you might want to question your use of adding the overhead (although it’s really not that much). Hey.. it’s another tool for your tool belt.

  Read the article

• Certification Notes: 70-583 Designing and Developing Windows Azure Applications

  - by BuckWoody

  Last Updated: 02/01/2011 It’s time for another certification, and we’ve just release the 70-583 exam on Windows Azure. I’ve blogged my “study plans” here before on other certifications, so I thought I would do the same for this one. I’ll also need to take exam 70-513 and 70-516; but I’ll post my notes on those separately. None of these are “brain dumps” or any questions from the actual tests - just the books, links and notes I have from my studies. I’ll update these references as I’m studying, so bookmark this site and watch my Twitter and Facebook posts for when I’ll update them, or just subscribe to the RSS feed. A “Green” color on the check-block means I’ve done that part so far, red means I haven’t. First, I need to refresh my memory on some basic coding, so along with the Azure-specific information I’m reading the following general programming books: Introducing Microsoft .NET (Pro-Developer): link   Head First C#, 2E: A Learner's Guide to Real-World Programming with Visual C# and .NET: link Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Step by Step: link  c The first place to start is at the official site for the certification. link c On that page you’ll find several resources, and the first you should follow is the “Save to my learning” so you have a place to track everything. Then click the “Related Learning Plans” link and follow the videos and read the documentation in each of those bullets. There are six areas on the learning plan that you should focus on - make sure you open the learning plan to drill into the specifics. c Designing Data Storage Architecture (18%) Books I’m Reading: Links: My Notes: c Optimizing Data Access and Messaging (17%) Books I’m Reading: Links: My Notes: c Designing the Application Architecture (19%) Books I’m Reading: Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform: link Links: My Notes: c Preparing for Application and Service Deployment (15%) Books I’m Reading: Links: My Notes: c Investigating and Analyzing Applications (16%) Books I’m Reading: Links: My Notes: c Designing Integrated Solutions (15%) Books I’m Reading: Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform (2nd mention) Links: My Notes:

  Read the article

• ASP.NET vNext Blog Post Series

  - by Soe Tun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/stun/archive/2014/06/04/asp.net-vnext-blog-post-series.aspxASP.NET vNext Blog Post Series ASP.NET vNext was announced at TechEd 2014, and I have been playing around with it a bit. ASP.NET vNext is an exciting and revolutionary change for the Microsoft .NET development platform. ASP.NET vNext is now open-source, and available on Github at this location: https://github.com/aspnet/Home. I want to start a blog post series on the ASP.NET vNext, and share my experience as I learn more about it. Keeping it simple Each blog post in the series will be short and simple so I can write them in a short amount of time, and keep it focused on one (at most two) topic(s) per post. My goal is to make it easy to absorb the information as there are a ton of great new stuff to cover. Many other people in the community have blogged about the key new features of the ASP.NET vNext. I will link to those blog posts in my next blog post. MVC 6 POCO Controller Today, I want to start this blog post series with a teaser code snippet for those developers familiar with the ASP.NET MVC. Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 6 article from ASP.NET website shows how to write a lightweight POCO (plain-old CLR object) MVC Controller class in the upcoming ASP.NET MVC 6. However, it doesn't show us how to use the IActionResultHelper interface to render a View. This is how I wrote my POCO MVC Controller based on the https://github.com/aspnet/Home/blob/master/samples/HelloMvc/Controllers/HomeController.cs sample from Github.   Note that this may not be the best way to write it, but this is good enough for now. using Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc; using Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.ModelBinding; using MvcSample.Web.Models; namespace MvcSample.Web { public class HomeController { IActionResultHelper html; IModelMetadataProvider mmp; public HomeController(IActionResultHelper h, IModelMetadataProvider mmp) { this.html = h; this.mmp = mmp; } public IActionResult Index() { var viewData = new ViewDataDictionary<User>(mmp) { Model = User() }; return html.View("Index", viewData); } public User User() { return new User { Name = "My name", Address = "My address" }; } } } Please feel free to give me feedback as this will greatly help me organize the blog posts in this series, and plan head. Thanks for reading!

  Read the article

• MySQL Connect in Only 5 Days – Some Fun Stuff!

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  72 1024x768 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} We’ve recently blogged about the various MySQL Connect sessions focused on MySQL Cluster, InnoDB, the MySQL Optimizer and MySQL Replication. But we also wanted to draw your attention to some great opportunities to network and have fun! That’s also part of what makes a good conference... MySQL Connect Reception San Francisco Hilton - Continental Ballroom 6:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m. A great opportunity to network with Oracle’s MySQL engineers, partners having a booth in the exhibition hall and just about everyone at MySQL Connect. Long time MySQL users will see many familiar faces, and new users will be able to build valuable relationships. A must attend reception for sure! Taylor Street Open House 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m. After two intense days at MySQL Connect, you’ll get the chance to relax and continue networking at the Taylor Street Café Open House on Sunday evening. Perhaps recharging batteries for a full week at Oracle OpenWorld… The Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival Starting on Sunday eve and running through the entire duration of Oracle OpenWorld, the first Oracle OpenWorld Musical Festival features some of today’s breakthrough musicians. It’s five nights of back-to-back performances in the heart of San Francisco. Registered Oracle conference attendees get free admission, so remember your badge when you head to a show. More information here. You can check out the full MySQL Connect program here as well as in the September edition of the MySQL newsletter. Not registered yet? You can still save US$ 300 over the on-site fee – Register Now!

  Read the article

• Critical Patch Updates During EBS 11i Exception to Sustaining Support Period

  - by Elke Phelps (Oracle Development)

  As previously blogged in the EBS 11i and 12.1 Support Timeline Changes entry, two important changes to the Oracle Lifetime Support policies were announced at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 - San Francisco.  These changes affect E-Business Suite Releases 11i and 12.1. Critical Patch Updates for EBS 11i during the Exception to Sustaining Support Period You may be wondering about the availability of Critical Patch Updates (CPU) for EBS 11i during the Exception to Sustaining Support period.  The following details the E-Business Suite Critical Patch Update support policy for EBS 11i during the Exception to Sustaining Support period: Oracle will continue to provide CPUs containing critical security fixes for E-Business Suite 11i.  CPUs will be packaged and released as as cumulative patches for both ATG RUP 6 and ATG RUP 7. As always, we try to minimize the number of patches and dependencies required for uptake of a CPU; however, there have been quite a few changes to the 11i baseline since its release.  For dependency reasons the 11i CPUs may require a higher number of files in order to bring them up to a consistent, stable, and well tested level. EBS 11i customer will continue to receive CPUs up to and including the October 2014 CPU. Where can I learn more? There are two interlocking policies that affect the E-Business Suite:  Oracle's Lifetime Support policies for each EBS release (timelines which were updated by this announcement), and the Error Correction Support policies (which state the minimum baselines for new patches). For more information about how these policies interact, see: Understanding Support Windows for E-Business Suite Releases What about E-Business Suite technology stack components? Things get more complicated when one considers individual techstack components such as Oracle Forms or the Oracle Database.  To learn more about the interlocking EBS+techstack component support windows, see these two articles: On Apps Tier Patching and Support: A Primer for E-Business Suite Users On Database Patching and Support: A Primer for E-Business Suite Users Where can I learn more about Critical Patch Updates?The Critical Patch Update Advisory is the starting point for relevant information. It includes a list of products affected, pointers to obtain the patches, a summary of the security vulnerabilities, and links to other important documents.  Related Articles EBS 11i and 12.1 Support Timeline Changes Frequently Asked Questions about Latest EBS Support Changes Extended Support Fees Waived for E-Business Suite 11i and 12.0

  Read the article

• Developing a Support Plan for Cloud Applications

  - by BuckWoody

  Last week I blogged about developing a High-Availability plan. The specifics of a given plan aren't as simple as "Step 1, then Step 2" because in a hybrid environment (which most of us have) the situation changes the requirements. There are those that look for simple "template" solutions, but unless you settle on a single vendor and a single way of doing things, that's not really viable. The same holds true for support. As I've mentioned before, I'm not fond of the term "cloud", and would rather use the tem "Distributed Computing". That being said, more people understand the former, so I'll just use that for now. What I mean by Distributed Computing is leveraging another system or setup to perform all or some of a computing function. If this definition holds true, then you're essentially creating a partnership with a vendor to run some of your IT - whether that be IaaS, PaaS or SaaS, or more often, a mix. In your on-premises systems, you're the first and sometimes only line of support. That changes when you bring in a Cloud vendor. For Windows Azure, we have plans for support that you can pay for if you like. http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/plans/ You're not off the hook entirely, however. You still need to create a plan to support your users in their applications, especially for the parts you control. The last thing they want to hear is "That's vendor X's problem - you'll have to call them." I find that this is often the last thing the architects think about in a solution. It's fine to put off the support question prior to deployment, but I would hold off on calling it "production" until you have that plan in place. There are lots of examples, like this one: http://www.va-interactive.com/inbusiness/editorial/sales/ibt/customer.html some of which are technology-specific. Once again, this is an "it depends" kind of approach. While it would be nice if there was just something in a box we could buy, it just doesn't work that way in a hybrid system. You have to know your options and apply them appropriately.

  Read the article

• Developing a Support Plan for Cloud Applications

  - by BuckWoody

  Last week I blogged about developing a High-Availability plan. The specifics of a given plan aren't as simple as "Step 1, then Step 2" because in a hybrid environment (which most of us have) the situation changes the requirements. There are those that look for simple "template" solutions, but unless you settle on a single vendor and a single way of doing things, that's not really viable. The same holds true for support. As I've mentioned before, I'm not fond of the term "cloud", and would rather use the tem "Distributed Computing". That being said, more people understand the former, so I'll just use that for now. What I mean by Distributed Computing is leveraging another system or setup to perform all or some of a computing function. If this definition holds true, then you're essentially creating a partnership with a vendor to run some of your IT - whether that be IaaS, PaaS or SaaS, or more often, a mix. In your on-premises systems, you're the first and sometimes only line of support. That changes when you bring in a Cloud vendor. For Windows Azure, we have plans for support that you can pay for if you like. http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/plans/ You're not off the hook entirely, however. You still need to create a plan to support your users in their applications, especially for the parts you control. The last thing they want to hear is "That's vendor X's problem - you'll have to call them." I find that this is often the last thing the architects think about in a solution. It's fine to put off the support question prior to deployment, but I would hold off on calling it "production" until you have that plan in place. There are lots of examples, like this one: http://www.va-interactive.com/inbusiness/editorial/sales/ibt/customer.html some of which are technology-specific. Once again, this is an "it depends" kind of approach. While it would be nice if there was just something in a box we could buy, it just doesn't work that way in a hybrid system. You have to know your options and apply them appropriately.

  Read the article

• Building Visual Studio Setup Projects with TFS 2010 Team Build

  - by Jakob Ehn

  One of the most common complaints from people starting to use Team Build is that is doesn’t support building Microsoft’s own Setup and Deployment project (*.vdproj). When creating a default build definition that compiles a solution containing a setup project, you’ll get the following warning: The project file "MyProject.vdproj" is not supported by MSBuild and cannot be built.   This is what the problem is all about. MSBuild, that is used for compiling your projects, does not understand the proprietary vdproj format defined by Microsoft quite some time ago. Unfortunately there is no sign that this will change in the near future, in fact the setup projects has barely changed at all since they were introduced. VS 2010 brings no new features or improvements hen it comes to the setup projects. VS 2010 does include a limited version of InstallShield which promises to be more MSBuild friendly and with more or less the same features as VS setup projects. I hope to get a closer look at this installer project type soon. But, how do we go about to build a Visual Studio setup project and produce an MSI as part of a Team Build process? Well, since only one application known to man understands the vdproj projects, we will have to installa copy of Visual Studio on the build server. Sad but true. After doing this, we use the Visual Studio command line interface (devenv) to perform the build. In this post I will show how to do this by using the InvokeProcess activity directly in a build workflow template. You’ll want to run build your setup projects after you have successfully compiled the projects.   Install Visual Studio 2010 on the build server(s)   Open your build process template /remember to branch or copy the xaml file before modifying it!)   Locate the Try to Compile the Project activity   Drop an instance of the InvokeProcess activity from the toolbox onto the designer, after the Run MSBuild for Project activity   Drop an instance of the WriteBuildMessage activity inside the Handle Standard Output section. Set the Importance property to Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.BuildMessageImportance.High (NB: This is necessary if you want the output from devenv to show up in the build log when running the build with the default verbosity) Set the Message property to stdOutput   Drop an instance of the WriteBuildError activity to the Handle Error Output section Set the Message property to errOutput   Select the InvokeProcess activity and set the values of the parameters to:     The finished workflow should look like this:     This will generate the MSI files, but they won’t be copied to the drop location. This is because we are using devenv and not MSBuild, so we have to do this explicitly   Drop a Sequence activity somewhere after the Copy to Drop location activity.   Create a variable in the Sequence activity of type IEnumerable<String> and call it GeneratedInstallers   Drop a FindMatchingFiles activity in the sequence activity and set the properties to:     Drop a ForEach<String> activity after the FindMatchingFiles activity. Set the Value property to GeneratedInstallers   Drop an InvokeProcess activity inside the ForEach activity.  FileName: “xcopy.exe” Arguments: String.Format("""{0}"" ""{1}""", item, BuildDetail.DropLocation) The Sequence activity should look like this:     Save the build process template and check it in.   Run the build and verify that the MSI’s is built and copied to the drop location.   Note 1: One of the drawback of using devenv like this in a team build is that since all the output from the default compilations is placed in the Binaries folder, the outputs is not avaialable when devenv is invoked, which causes the whole solution to rebuild again. In TFS 2008, this was pretty simple to fix by using the CustomizableOutDir property. In TFS 2010, the same feature is not avaialble. Jim Lamb blogged about this recently, have a look at it if you have a problem with this: http://blogs.msdn.com/jimlamb/archive/2010/04/13/customizableoutdir-in-tfs-2010.aspx   Note 2: Although the above solution works, a better approach is to wrap this in a custom activity that you can use in your builds. I will come back to this in a future post.

  Read the article

• Some VS 2010 RC Updates (including patches for Intellisense and Web Designer fixes)

  - by ScottGu

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] We are continuing to make progress on shipping Visual Studio 2010.  I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has downloaded and tried out the VS 2010 Release Candidate, and especially to those who have sent us feedback or reported issues with it. This data has been invaluable in helping us find and fix remaining bugs before we ship the final release. Last month I blogged about a patch we released for the VS 2010 RC that fixed a bad intellisense crash issue.  This past week we released two additional patches that you can download and apply to the VS 2010 RC to immediately fix two other common issues we’ve seen people run into: Patch that fixes crashes with Tooltip invocation and when hovering over identifiers The Visual Studio team recently released a second patch that fixes some crashes we’ve seen when tooltips are displayed – most commonly when hovering over an identifier to view a QuickInfo tooltip. You can learn more about this issue from this blog post, and download and apply the patch here. Patch that fixes issues with the Web Forms designer not correctly adding controls to the auto-generated designer files The Visual Web Developer team recently released a patch that fixes issues where web controls are not correctly added to the .designer.cs file associated with the .aspx file – which means they can’t be programmed against in the code-behind file.  This issue is most commonly described as “controls are not being recognized in the code-behind” or “editing existing .aspx files regenerates the .aspx.designer.(vb or cs) file and controls are now missing” or “I can’t embed controls within the Ajax Control Toolkit TabContainer or the <asp:createuserwizard> control”. You can learn more about the issue here, and download the patch that fixes it here. Common Cause of Intellisense and IDE sluggishness on Windows XP, Vista, Win Server 2003/2008 systems Over the last few months we’ve occasionally seen reports of people seeing tremendous slowness when typing and using intellisense within VS 2010 despite running on decent machines.  It took us awhile to track down the cause – but we have found that the common culprit seems to be that these machines don’t have the latest versions of the UIA (Windows Automation) component installed. UIA 3 ships with Windows 7, and is a recommended Windows Update patch on XP and Vista (which is why we didn’t see the problem in our tests – since our machines are patched with all recommended updates).  Many systems (especially on XP) don’t automatically install recommended updates, though, and are running with older versions of UIA. This can cause significant performance slow-downs within the VS 2010 editor when large lists are displayed (for example: with intellisense). If you are running on Windows XP, Vista, or Windows Server 2003 or 2008 and are seeing any performance issues with the editor or IDE, please install the free UIA 3 update that can be downloaded from this page.  If you scroll down the page you’ll find direct links to versions for each OS. Note that we are making improvements to the final release of VS 2010 so that we don’t have big perf issues when UIA 3 isn’t installed – and we are also adding a message within the IDE that will warn you if you don’t have UIA 3 installed and accessibility is activated. Improved Text Rendering with WPF 4 and VS 2010 We recently made some nice changes to WPF 4 which improve the text clarity and text crispness over what was in the VS 2010/.NET 4 Release Candidate.  In particular these changes improve scenarios where you have a dark background with light text. You can learn more about these improvements in this WPF Team blog post.  These changes will be in the final release of VS 2010 and .NET 4. Hope this helps, Scott

  Read the article

• Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers, and Implicit Line Continuation support with VB 2010

  - by ScottGu

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] This is the eighteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. A few days ago I blogged about two new language features coming with C# 4.0: optional parameters and named arguments.  Today I’m going to post about a few of my favorite new features being added to VB with VS 2010: Auto-Implemented Properties, Collection Initializers, and Implicit Line Continuation support. Auto-Implemented Properties Prior to VB 2010, implementing properties within a class using VB required you to explicitly declare the property as well as implement a backing field variable to store its value.  For example, the code below demonstrates how to implement a “Person” class using VB 2008 that exposes two public properties - “Name” and “Age”:   While explicitly declaring properties like above provides maximum flexibility, I’ve always found writing this type of boiler-plate get/set code tedious when you are simply storing/retrieving the value from a field.  You can use VS code snippets to help automate the generation of it – but it still generates a lot of code that feels redundant.  C# 2008 introduced a cool new feature called automatic properties that helps cut down the code quite a bit for the common case where properties are simply backed by a field.  VB 2010 also now supports this same feature.  Using the auto-implemented properties feature of VB 2010 we can now implement our Person class using just the code below: When you declare an auto-implemented property, the VB compiler automatically creates a private field to store the property value as well as generates the associated Get/Set methods for you.  As you can see above – the code is much more concise and easier to read. The syntax supports optionally initializing the properties with default values as well if you want to: You can learn more about VB 2010’s automatic property support from this MSDN page. Collection Initializers VB 2010 also now supports using collection initializers to easily create a collection and populate it with an initial set of values.  You identify a collection initializer by declaring a collection variable and then use the From keyword followed by braces { } that contain the list of initial values to add to the collection.  Below is a code example where I am using the new collection initializer feature to populate a “Friends” list of Person objects with two people, and then bind it to a GridView control to display on a page: You can learn more about VB 2010’s collection initializer support from this MSDN page. Implicit Line Continuation Support Traditionally, when a statement in VB has been split up across multiple lines, you had to use a line-continuation underscore character (_) to indicate that the statement wasn’t complete.  For example, with VB 2008 the below LINQ query needs to append a “_” at the end of each line to indicate that the query is not complete yet: The VB 2010 compiler and code editor now adds support for what is called “implicit line continuation support” – which means that it is smarter about auto-detecting line continuation scenarios, and as a result no longer needs you to explicitly indicate that the statement continues in many, many scenarios.  This means that with VB 2010 we can now write the above code with no “_” at all: The implicit line continuation feature also works well when editing XML Literals within VB (which is pretty cool). You can learn more about VB 2010’s Implicit Line Continuation support and many of the scenarios it supports from this MSDN page (scroll down to the “Implicit Line Continuation” section to find details). Summary The above three VB language features are but a few of the new language and code editor features coming with VB 2010.  Visit this site to learn more about some of the other VB language features coming with the release.  Also subscribe to the VB team’s blog to learn more and stay up-to-date with the posts they the team regularly publishes. Hope this helps, Scott

  Read the article

• Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool Extensions

  - by ScottGu

  Last month I blogged about the Extension Manager that is built-into VS 2010 – as well as about a cool VS 2010 PowerCommands extension that provides some extra features for Visual Studio.  The Visual Studio 2010 Extension Manager provides an easy way for developers to quickly find and install extensions and plugins that enhance the built-in functionality to VS 2010. New VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Release Earlier this week Jason Zander announced the availability of a new VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools release that includes a bunch of great new VS 2010 extensions that provide a bunch of cool new functionality for you to take advantage of.  You can download and install the release for free here.  Some of the code editor improvements it provides include: Entire Line Highlighting: Makes it easier to track cursor location within the editor Entire Line Selection: Triple Clicking a line in the code editor now selects the entire line (like with MS Word) Code Block Movement: Use Alt+Up/Down Arrow now moves selected code blocks up/down in the editor Consistent Tabs vs. Spaces: Ensure consistent tab vs. space usage across your projects Colorized Parameters: It is now easier to see/identify method parameters Column Guide: You can now add vertical column guidelines to help with text alignment and sizes Align assignments: Makes it easier to line-up multiple variable assignments within your code HTML Clipboard Support: Copy/paste code from VS into an HTML buffer (useful for blogging!) Ctrl + Click Go to Definition: You can now hold down the Ctrl key and click a type to go to its definition It also includes several tab management improvements for managing document tabs within the IDE: Show Close Button in Tab Well: Shows a close button in document well for the active tab (like VS 2008 did) Colored Tabs: You can now select the color of each document tab by project or by regex Pinned Tabs: Enables you to pin tabs to keep them always visible and available Vertical Tabs: You can now show document tabs vertically to fit more tabs than normal Remove Tabs by Usage Order: Better behavior when adding new tabs and one needs to be hidden for space reasons Sort Tabs by Project: Tabs can be sorted by project they belong to, keeping them grouped together Sort Tabs Alphabetically: Tabs can be sorted alphabetically And last – but not least – it includes a new and improved “Add Reference” dialog: This new Add Reference dialog caches assembly information – which means it loads within a second or two (note: the very first time it still loads assembly data – but it then caches it and makes it fast afterwards). The new Add Reference dialog also now includes searching support – making it easier to find the assembly you are looking for. You can read more about all of the above improvements in Jason’s blog post about the release. New Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack Release Earlier this week we also shipped a new feature pack that adds additional modeling and code visualization features to VS 2010 Ultimate.  You can download it here. The Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack includes a bunch of great new capabilities including: Web Site Visualization: New support for generating a DGML visualization for ASP.NET projects C/C++ Native Code Visualization: New support for generating DGML diagrams for C/C++ projects Generate Code from UML Class Diagrams: You can now generate code from your UML diagrams Create UML Class Diagrams from Code: Create UML diagrams from existing code bases Import UML from XML: Import UML class, sequence, and use case elements from XMI 2.1 files Custom Validation Layer Rules: Write custom code to create, modify, and validate layer diagrams Jason’s blog post covers more about these features as well. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for March 25, 2010 -- #820

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: René Schulte, Jeremy Likness, Hassan, Victor Gaudioso, SilverLaw, Mike Taulty, Phani Raj, Tim Heuer, Christian Schormann, Brad Abrams, David Anson, Diptimaya Patra, and Daniel Vaughan. Shoutouts: Last week, Koen Zwikstra announced Silverlight Spy at MIX10 Anand Iyer announced this for students on the Windows Team Blog: Be a Windows Phone 7 “Rockstar” Justin Angel blogged that Silverlight Isn't Fully Cross-Platform ... let him know if you think it's a yawn or important. On behalf of SilverlightShow, Cigdem Patlak posted MIX10: Laurent Bugnion on Silverlight adoption, WP7 and the EcoContest From SilverlightCream.com: Coding4Fun - Silverlight Real Time Face Detection René Schulte has a Coding 4 Fun article posted on facial recognition. Who better to be manipulating graphics like this than René? Sequential Asynchronous Workflows Part 2: Simplified Jeremy Likness follows up his previous post with another one that is 'simplified'. Remember his previous post began with a post on the Silverlight.net forum and Rob Eisenburg's MVVM presentation from MIX10 Windows Phone 7 Video Tutorial Hassan has a new video up on his AfricanGeek site, and that's a continuation of his previous WP7 video tutorial, adding a listbox and databinding it to the selected index of another listbox. The Los Angeles Silverlight Usergorup will be Streaming its March Meeting LIVE in Silverlight – Tonight! Victor Gaudioso used his Live Streaming knowledge to stream his User Group meeting last night from LA where Michael Washington presented on MVVM followed by Victor himself. That was last night. Today he has a couple of the videos up to view. Shining 3D Font Design - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has a "Shining 3D Font" tutorial up, and a video on it here: New Video: How to create a 3D effect on a Silverlight 3 Textblock ... this is also available in the Expression Gallery. Silverlight 4 RC – Signing trusted apps with home made certificates Mike Taulty has a post up about building a hand-rolled cert to test out the XAP signing features, and then gives a nod to John Papa with a link to the Silverlight White Paper I've posted about before, because this info is in there as well. Developing a Windows Phone 7 Application that consumes OData Phani Raj has a tutorial up on consuming the NetFlix OData catalog on the WP7 emulator ... now *that* is cool! Make your Silverlight applications Speak to you with Microsoft Translator Tim Heuer used Silverlight to demonstrate Microsoft Translator as a speech synthesis tool using the Speak API included ... pretty cool, Tim ... lots of external links and code. Blend 4: About Path Layout, Sidebar – More About ListBox Than You Ever Wanted To Know Christian Schormann has another outstanding tutorial up on the ListBox and PathLayout in Expression Blend ... just check out the screen shots and you'll wanna read it! Silverlight 4 + RIA Services: Ready for Business: Updating Data in the Client This is the continuation of Brad Abrams' series on WCF RIA Services and is a tutorial on setting up to deal with updating the data. Tip: The CLR wrapper for a DependencyProperty should do its job and nothing more David Anson is posting some "Development Tips", and this is the first ... discussing making sure your DependencyProperty CLR wrapper stays on point... Create and Apply Theme Silverlight Application Diptimaya Patra has a tutorial up on creating and using themes. He states that "Themes are nothing but some predefined styles" ... check it out and see if it's really that easy :) Building a Windows Phone 7 Puzzle Game Daniel Vaughan has a great post up starting with installing all the tools and ending with a maze game for WP7 using XNA for sound... this is the first I've seen that integrates XNA (I think). 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

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – 3 Challenges for DBA and Smart Solutions

  - by Pinal Dave

  Developer’s life is never easy. DBA’s life is even crazier. DBA’s Life When a developer wakes up in the morning, most of the time have no idea what different challenges they are going to face that day. Of course, most of the developers know the project and roadmap, which they are working on. However, developers have no clue what coding challenges which they are going face for that day. DBA’s life is even crazier. When DBA wakes up in the morning – they often thank that they were not disturbed during the night due to server issues. The very next thing they wish is that they do not want to challenge which they can’t solve for that day. The problems DBA face every single day are mostly unpredictable and they just have to solve them as they come during the day. Though the life of DBA is not always bad. There are always ways and methods how one can overcome various challenges. Let us see three of the challenges and how a DBA can use various tools to overcome them. Challenge #1 Synchronize Data Across Server A Very common challenge DBA receive is that they have to synchronize the data across the servers. If you try to manually write that up, it may take forever to accomplish the task. It is nearly impossible to do the same with the help of the T-SQL. However, thankfully there are tools like dbForge Studio which can save a day and synchronize data across servers. Read my detailed blog post about the same over here: SQL SERVER – Synchronize Data Exclusively with T-SQL. Challenge #2 SQL Report Builder DBA’s are often asked to build reports on the go. It really annoys DBA’s, but hardly people care about it. No matter how busy a DBA is, they are just called upon to build reports on things on very short notice. I personally like to avoid any task which is given to me accidently and personally building report can be boring. I rather spend time with High Availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning rather than building report. I use SQL third party tool when I have to work with SQL Report. Others have extended reporting capabilities. The latter group of products includes the SQL report builder built-in todbForge Studio for SQL Server. I have blogged about this earlier over here: SQL SERVER – SQL Report Builder in dbForge Studio for SQL Server. Challenge #3 Work with the OTHER Database The manager does not understand that MySQL is different from SQL Server and SQL Server is different from Oracle. For them everything is same. In my career hundreds of times I have faced a situation that I am given a database to manage or do some task when their regular DBA is on vacation or leave. When I try to explain I do not understand the underlying the technology, I have been usually told that my manager has trust on me and I can do anything. Honestly, I can’t but I hardly dare to argue. I fall back on the third party tool to manage database when it is not in my comfort zone. For example, I was once given MySQL performance tuning task (at that time I did not know MySQL so well). To simplify search for a problem query let us use MySQL Profiler in dbForge Studio for MySQL. It provides such commands as a Query Profiling Mode and Generate Execution Plan. Here is the blog post discussing about the same: MySQL – Profiler : A Simple and Convenient Tool for Profiling SQL Queries. Well, that’s it! There were many different such occasions when I have been saved by the tool. May be some other day I will write part 2 of this blog post. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL Tagged: Devart, SQL Tool

  Read the article

• Post MIX10 Decompression

  - by Dave Campbell

  With a big dose of reality, I walked into this place this morning and found out "yeah, I really do write .NET web apps and MS Access for a living" :( ... but it pays the bills and I've gotten *way* used to eating 3 times a day :) MIX10 was great, although the buzz didn't seem as big as MIX09, and I'm not sure why. It also seemed like a different crowd and other folks I talked to agreed with that. Of course now I can outwardly admit that the "Windows Phone 7 Series" is programmed with Silverlight ... how cool is that? I've been biting my tongue about that info for over a month! I cloistered myself in Ballroom A for the week, not counting the Keynotes. That's where the phone sessions were located. I tried to collect the full set, but ended up bailing on the last one because it was ending at the time that MIX10 was ending, and I hadn't spent a whole lot of time in 'The Commons'. I met a bunch of folks I've blogged about, or exchanged email with, and that's always fun. Renewed associations with folks I only see once or twice a year and way too long a list and don't want to mention some and leave off others... I did have an opportunity to meet Charles Petzold... wow that was interesting... I got into Windows development through Charles' Programming Windows 3.1 book 'back in the day' ... couldn't find anyone at Honeywell wanted to join my journey, so it was just me and 'Chuck' :) ... read every word of that book more than once... all marked up, tags sticking out of it. And now he's writing a WP7 book ... gotta get it: Free ebook: Programming Windows Phone 7 Series (DRAFT Preview) I went through my Big List-o-BlogsTM last night and it took over 2 hours because of all the new content since MIX10. I've got 90 posts tagged as of 9PM on 3/21. If everybody stopped right now, it would take me 9 days to push what I have now, so you'll have to be patient! I had another event on Thursday that was *extremely* tiring, so I ended up staying over another night. I drove back into the strip on Friday morning to try to find a non-cheesy souvenir for my wife, and didn't find much. Then I went to Blueberry Hill restaurant for 3 eggs, 3 strips of bacon, and 3 awesome potato pancakes. Check them out if you have time! And then hit the road. In case anyone is wondering, the 2-1/2 hour drive I took across Hoover Dam on Sunday afternoon only took 30 minutes on Friday afternoon... that was a more normal trip! I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent with everyone. Thanks to John Papa and his crew for the great Insider's party on Monday night... the Blues Brothers were a fun surprise and they did a good job! And the swag was great... thanks to all the contributors for a fun evening at their expense! All I can say is stay tuned, go to live.visitmix.com/videos and watch everything, get the phone tools, start working... everything's different and everything's fun... jump in, it's all Silverlight! Stay in the 'Light! Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone     MIX10

  Read the article

• Adding Fake Build Information in TFS 2010

  - by Jakob Ehn

  We have been using TFS 2010 build for distributing a build in parallel on several agents, but where the actual compilation is done by a bunch of external tools and compilers, e.g. no MSBuild involved. We are using the ParallelTemplate.xaml template that Jim Lamb blogged about previously, which distributes each configuration to a different agent. We developed custom activities for running these external compilers and collecting the information and errors by reading standard out/error and pushing it back to the build log. But since we aren’t using MSBuild we don’t the get nice configuration summary section on the build summary page that we are used to. We would like to show the result of each configuration with any errors/warnings as usual, together with a link to the log file. TFS 2010 API to the rescue! What we need to do is adding information to the InformationNode structure that is associated with every TFS build. The log that you normally see in the Log view is built up as a tree structure of IBuildInformationNode objects. This structure can we accessed by using the InformationNodeConverters class. This class also contain some helper methods for creating BuildProjectNode, which contain the information about each project that was build, for example which configuration, number of errors and warnings and link to the log file. Here is a code snippet that first creates a “fake” build from scratch and the add two BuildProjectNodes, one for Debug|x86 and one for Release|x86 with some release information:   TfsTeamProjectCollection collection = TfsTeamProjectCollectionFactory.GetTeamProjectCollection(new Uri("http://lt-jakob2010:8080/tfs")); IBuildServer buildServer = collection.GetService<IBuildServer>(); var buildDef = buildServer.GetBuildDefinition("TeamProject", "BuildDefinition"); //Create fake build with random build number var detail = buildDef.CreateManualBuild(new Random().Next().ToString()); // Create Debug|x86 project summary IBuildProjectNode buildProjectNode = detail.Information.AddBuildProjectNode(DateTime.Now, "Debug", "MySolution.sln", "x86", "$/project/MySolution.sln", DateTime.Now, "Default"); buildProjectNode.CompilationErrors = 1; buildProjectNode.CompilationWarnings = 1; buildProjectNode.Node.Children.AddBuildError("Compilation", "File1.cs", 12, 5, "", "Syntax error", DateTime.Now); buildProjectNode.Node.Children.AddBuildWarning("File2.cs", 3, 1, "", "Some warning", DateTime.Now, "Compilation"); buildProjectNode.Node.Children.AddExternalLink("Log File", new Uri(@"\\server\share\logfiledebug.txt")); buildProjectNode.Save(); // Create Releaes|x86 project summary buildProjectNode = detail.Information.AddBuildProjectNode(DateTime.Now, "Release", "MySolution.sln", "x86", "$/project/MySolution.sln", DateTime.Now, "Default"); buildProjectNode.CompilationErrors = 0; buildProjectNode.CompilationWarnings = 0; buildProjectNode.Node.Children.AddExternalLink("Log File", new Uri(@"\\server\share\logfilerelease.txt")); buildProjectNode.Save(); detail.Information.Save(); detail.FinalizeStatus(BuildStatus.Failed); When running this code, it will a create a build that looks like this: As you can see, it created two configurations with error and warning information and a link to a log file. Just like a regular MSBuild would have done. This is very useful when using TFS 2010 Build in heterogeneous environments. It would also be possible to do this when running compilations completely outside TFS build, but then push the results of the into TFS for easy access. You can push all information, including the compilation summary, drop location, test results etc using the API.

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for December 12, 2010 -- #1008

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Samuel Jack, Alfred Astort(-2-), Nokola(-2-), Avi Pilosof, Chris Klug, Pete Brown, Laurent Bugnion(-2-), and Jaime Rodriguez(-2-, -3-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight" Chris Klug WP7: "Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter" Jaime Rodriguez Training: "Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Koen Zwikstra announced the availability of the first Silverlight Spy 4 Preview 1 Gavin Wignall announced the Launch of Festive game built with Silverlight 4, hosted on Azure ... free to play. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act Michael Washington has an interesting take on writing a blog post with this 'play' version of Silverlight View Models and Expression Blend with a heaping dose of Behaviors added in for flavoring. Build a Windows Phone Game in 3 days – Day 1 Samuel Jack is attempting to build a WP7 game in 3 days including downloading the tools and an XNA book... interesting to see where he's headed wth this venture. 4 of 10 - Make sure your finger can hit the target and text is legible Continuing with a series of tips from the folks reviewing apps for the marketplace via Alfred Astort is this number 4 -- touch target size and legible text. 5 of 10 - Give feedback on touch and progress within your UI Alfred Astort's number 5 is also up, and continues the touch discussion with this tip about giving the user feedback on their touch. Fantasia Painter Released for Windows Phone 7 + Tips Nokola took the release of his Fantasia Painter on WP& as an opportunity not only to blog about the fact that we can go buy it, but has a blog full of hints and tips that he gathered while working on it. Games for Windows Phone 7 Resources: Reducing Load Times, RPG Kit; Other Nokola also blogged about the release of the new games education pack, and gives up the cursor he uses in his videos after being asked... The simplest way to do design-time ViewModels with MVVM and Blend. Avi Pilosof attacks the design-time ViewModel issue in Blend with a 'no code' solution. Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight Chris Klug is talking about sharing resources and styles across a large Silverlight project... near and dear to my heart at this moment. Dynamically Generating Controls in WPF and Silverlight Pete Brown has a post up that's generated some interest... creating controls at runtime... and he's demonstrating several different ways for both Silverlight and WPF #twitter for Windows Phone 7 protips (#wp7) Laurent Bugnion was posting these great tips for Twitter for WP7 and rolled all 16 of them up into a blog post... check them and the app out... Increasing touch surface (#wp7dev) Laurent Bugnion's most current post should be of great interest to WP7 devs... providing more touch surface for your user's fat fingers, err, I mean their fat fingerings :) ... great information and samples ... and interesting it is a fail point as listed by Alfred Astort above. Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter This material from Jaime Rodriguez actually hit prior to his Firestarter presentation, but should be required reading for anyone doing a WP7 app... great Performance tips from the trenches... slide deck, cheat-sheet, and code. UpdateSourceTrigger on Windows Phone data bindings Another post from Jaime Rodriguez actually went through a couple revisions already.. how about a WP7 TextBox that fires notifications to the ViewModel when the text changes? ... would you like a behavior with that? Details on the Push Notification app limits Jaime Rodriguez has yet another required reading post up on Push Notification limits ... what it really entails and how you can be a good WP7 citizen by the way you program your app. 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

  Read the article

• Building a Mafia&hellip;TechFest Style

  - by David Hoerster

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

  Read the article

• links for 2011-01-13

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Webcast: Oracle WebCenter Suite: Giving Users a Modern Experience Speakers: Vince Casarez (VP Enterprise 2.0 Product Management, Oracle),  Erin Smith (Consulting Practice Manager – Portals, Oracle), Robert Wessa (Consulting Technical Director – Enterprise 2.0 Infrastructure, Oracle)  (tags: oracle otn webcenter webcast enterprise2.0) Oracle & StickyMinds.com Webcast: Load Testing Techniques for Enterprise Applications Mughees Minhas, Senior Director of Product Management, Oracle Server Technologies, answers your questions about the latest techniques for effectively and efficiently testing enterprise application performance. Thursday, January 20, 2011. 10am PT / 1pm ET. (tags: oracle otn stickymings webcast) Bay Area Coherence Special Interest Group (BACSIG) Jan 20, 5:30pm - 8:00pm PT. Presentations: Coherence 3.6 Clustering Features (Rob Lee), Efficient Management and Update of Coherence Clusters to Reduce Down Time ( Rao Bhethanabotla), How To Build a Coherence Practice (Christer Fahlgren). (tags: oracle, otn coherence bacsig) Podcast Show Notes: William Ulrich and Neal McWhorter on Business Architecture (ArchBeat) A four-part interview with the authors of  "Business Architecture: The Art and Practice of Business Transformation"  (tags: oracle otn podcast businessarchitecture) John Brunswick: Overlapping Social Networks in your Enterprise? Strategies to Understand and Govern "Overall it is important to consider if tacit knowledge being captured by the social systems is able to be retained and somehow summarized into an overall organizational directory." - John Brunswick (tags: oracle otn enterprise2.0 socialnetworking) Coherence - How to develop a custom push replication publisher (Middlewarepedia) Cosmin Todur describes "a way of developing a custom push replication publisher that publishes data to a database via JDBC."  (tags: oracle coherence grid) Aino Andriessen: Oracle Diagnostics Logging (ODL) for application development "Logging is a very important aspect of application development as it offers run-time access to the behaviour and data of the application. It’s important for debugging purposes but also to investigate exception situations on production." -- Aino Andriessen (tags: oracle odl java jdeveloper weblogic) Security issues when upgrading a Web Catalog from 10g to 11g Oracle BI By Bakboord "I blogged about upgrading from Oracle BI EE 10g to Oracle BI EE 11g R1 earlier. Although this is a very straight forward process, you could end up with some security issues." -- Daan Bakboord (tags: oracle businessintelligence obiee) Angelo Santagata: SOA Composite Sensors : Good Practice "A good best practice is that for any composites you create, consider publishing a composite sensor value using a primary key of some sort , e.g. orderId, that way if you need to manipulate/query composites you can easily look up the instanceId using the sensorid." - Angelo Santagata (tags: oracle soa sca) Javier Ductor: WebCenter Spaces 11g PS2 Task Flow Customization "Previously, I wrote about Spaces Template Customization. In order to adapt Spaces to customers prototype, it was necessary to change template and skin, as well as the members task flow. In this entry, I describe how to customize this task flow." - Javier Ductor (tags: oracle otn enterprise2.0 webcenter) RonBatra's blog: Cloud Computing Series: VI: Industry Directions "When someone says their 'Product/Solution is in the Cloud,' ask them basic questions to seperate the spin from the reality. I would start with 'tell me what that means' and see which way the conversation goes." - Oracle ACE Director Ron Batra (tags: oracle otn oracleace cloud) First JSRs Proposed for Java EE 7 (The Java Source) With the approval of Java SE 7 and Java SE 8 JSRs last month, attention is now shifting towards the Java EE platform. (tags: oracle java jsr javaee)

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for April 16, 2010 -- #838

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Alan Beasley(-2-, -3-, -4-, -5-), Brian, Rishi, Pete Brown, Yavor Georgiev, and David Anson. Shoutouts: As usual, Tim Heuer has all the scoop on all the hot-off-the-presses releases: Silverlight 4 released. Availability of tools announcement. He covers all the main parts of interest. Tim Heuer also discusses Backward Compatibility with Silverlight 4 applications And before you ask, Tim Heuer announced the Silverlight Client for Facebook updated for Silverlight 4 release If you're having trouble with the install, Peter Bromberg has a post up to help bail you out: Get Silverlight 4 Installed: Tips and Tricks Christian Schormann has a link to probably the fastest intro to SketchFlow I've seen: Video: SketchFlow in 90 seconds, with Jon Harris Chris Rouw has a Summary of Silverlight at DevConnections on his site. I had the opportunity to spend some time with Chris and we had some good discussions. Rene Schulte describes how to get started with the new final Silverlight 4 RTW build and announces that he updated his samples and open source projects. He also shares what he wishes for the next Silverlight version: Silverlight 4 Up and Running From SilverlightCream.com: Building Better Buttons in Expression Blend and Silverlight I generally end up missing articles embedded at CodeProject, so Alan Beasley emailed me a link to these, they were new to me. In this first one, he's got a very nice tutorial up on making some awesome buttons in Expression Blend Arcade Button in Expression Blend and Silverlight Alan Beasley's second Expression Blend Button tutorial is the classic 'arcade button' ... this is great stuff.. check it out. Picture Frame Control in Expression Blend and Silverlight I wasn't going to do the full list Alan Beasley had sent me in one post, but they're all so good! This third takes an excursion away from buttons to do a Picture Frame control. Styled to the max, and another great Blend tutorial! The last building buttons article (Part1), in Expression Blend and Silverlight Alan Beasley finishes what may be a definitive work on buttons in Blend... even if you don't want to follow the tutorials (and why wouldn't you??) ... he's got 10 buttons you can download! ListBox Styling (Part1-ScrollBars) in Expression Blend & Silverlight In Alan Beasley's 5th post at Code Project, He has a great long tutorial on Styling Listbox Scrollbars in Expression Blend ... the ScrollBars are Part 1 of a series. Some Notes on DRM in Silverlight 4 Brian at Silverlight SDK has a post up on DRM ... WMDRM and PlayReady. If you're planning on utilizing this, Brian's post looks like a good starting point. nRoute: Now, More Wholesome Rishi has a detailed post up explaining the latest nRoute release now supporting Silverlight 4, WP7, and WPF. What a piece of work! Scanning an Image from Silverlight 4 using WIA Automation Pete Brown demonstrates using VS2010 and SL4 to lash up to his scanner. Lots of code and external links... all good stuff, Pete! Dealing with those pesky WCF CommunicationException “NotFound” errors in Silverlight Yavor Georgiev has a quick post up discussing WCF CommunicationException errors in Silverlight with a couple external links to explain the solution. New Silverlight 4 Toolkit released with today's Silverlight 4 RTW! David Anson blogged about the new Toolkit release that is live right now along with the Silverlight 4 Release, and has some release notes up on the Toolkit. 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

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for March 30, 2010 -- #825

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Jeremy Likness, Tim Greenfield, Tim Heuer, ondrejsv, XAML Ninja, Nikhil Kothari, Sergey Barskiy, Shawn Oster, smartyP, Christian Schormann(-2-), and John Papa And Glenn Block. Shoutouts: Victor Gaudioso produced a RefCard for DZone: Getting Started with Silverlight and Expression Blend Way to go Victor... it looks great! Gavin Wignall announced Metia launch FourSquare and Bing maps mash up – called Near.me Cheryl Simmons talks about VS2010 and the design surface: Changing Templates with the Silverlight Designer (and seeing the changes immediately) Michael S. Scherotter posted that New York Times Silverlight Kit Updated for Windows Phone 7 Series Jaime Rodriguez posted about 2 free chapters in his new book (with Yochay Kiriaty): A Journey Into Silverlight On Windows Phone -Via Learning WIndows PHone Programming Did you know there was "MSDN Radio"?? Tim Heuer posted follow-up answers to this morning's show: MSDN Radio follow-up answers: Prism for Silverlight, DomainServices and relationships Michael Klucher posted a great set of links for WP7 game development this morning: Great Game Development Tutorials for Windows Phone Zhiming Xue has 3 pages of synopsis and links for everything Windows Phone at MIX. This is the 1st, but at the top of the pages are links to the other two: Windows Phone 7 Content From MIX10 – Part I From SilverlightCream.com: Using WriteableBitmap to Simplify Animations with Clones Jeremy Likness takes a break from his LOB posts to demonstrate a page flip animation using WriteableBitmap to simplify the animation using clones. SAX-like Xml parsing Want some experience or fun with Rx? Tim Greenfield has a post up on building an observable XmlReader. nstalling Silverlight applications without the browser involved Last night I blogged Mike Taulty's take on the "Silent Install" for an OOB app, tonight, I'm posting Tim Heuer's insight on the topic. How to: Create computed/custom properties for sample data in Blend/Sketchflow ondrejsv posted an example of digging into the files that control the sample data for Blend to get what you really want. PathListBox Adventures – radial layout Check out the radial layout XAML Ninja did using the PathListBox ... and all code available. RIA Services and Validation Nikhil Kothari has a great (duh!) post up that follows his Silverlight TV on the same subject: RIA Services and validation... lots of good external links also. Windows Phone 7 Application with OData Sergey Barskiy did an OData to WP7 app by using the feed from MIX10. You can see a list of sessions, and click on one to see details. Getting Blur And DropShadow to work in the Windows Phone Emulator Shawn Oster responds to some forum questions about Blur and DropShadow effects not showing up in the WP7 emulator, and gives the code trick we have to do for now. Metro Icons for Windows Phone 7 We all got the other icon set for WP7 from MSDN, but smartyP pulled the Metro Icons from the PPT deck of the MIX10 presentations... good job! Fonts in SketchFlow Christian Schormann talks about fonts in Sketchflow, where they live on your machine, and how you can use them. Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part III Christian Schormann also has Part III of his epic tutorial up on Path Layout and Blend. This one is on dynamic resizing layouts, and he has links back to the other two if you missed them... or you can find them with a search at SilverlightCream... :) Simple ViewModel Locator for MVVM: The Patients Have Left the Asylum John Papa And Glenn Block teamed up to solve the View First model only without the maintenance involved with the ViewModel locator by using MEF. It only took these guys and hour... sigh... :) 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

  Read the article

• Dynamically creating meta tags in asp.net mvc

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  As we all know that Meta tag has very important roles in Search engine optimization and if we want to have out site listed with good ranking on search engines then we have to put meta tags. Before some time I have blogged about dynamically creating meta tags in asp.net 2.0/3.5 sites, in this blog post I am going to explain how we can create a meta tag dynamically very easily. To have meta tag dynamically we have to create a meta tag on server-side. So I have created a method like following. public string HomeMetaTags() { System.Text.StringBuilder strMetaTag = new System.Text.StringBuilder(); strMetaTag.AppendFormat(@"<meta content='{0}' name='Keywords'/>","Home Action Keyword"); strMetaTag.AppendFormat(@"<meta content='{0}' name='Descption'/>", "Home Description Keyword"); return strMetaTag.ToString(); } Here you can see that I have written a method which will return a string with meta tags. Here you can write any logic you can fetch it from the database or you can even fetch it from xml based on key passed. For the demo purpose I have written that hardcoded. So it will create a meta tag string and will return it. Now I am going to store that meta tag in ViewBag just like we have a title tag. In this post I am going to use standard template so we have our title tag there in viewbag message. Same way I am going save meta tag like following in ViewBag. public ActionResult Index() { ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!"; ViewBag.MetaTag = HomeMetaTags(); return View(); } Here in the above code you can see that I have stored MetaTag ViewBag. Now as I am using standard ASP.NET MVC3 template so we have our we have out head element in Shared folder _layout.cshtml file. So to render meta tag I have modified the Head tag part of _layout.cshtml like following. <head> <title>@ViewBag.Title</title> <link href="@Url.Content("~/Content/Site.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-1.5.1.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> @Html.Raw(ViewBag.MetaTag) </head> Here in the above code you can see I have use @Html.Raw method to embed meta tag in _layout.cshtml page. This HTML.Raw method will embed output to head tag section without encoding html. As we have already taken care of html tag in string function we don’t need the html encoding. Now it’s time to run application in browser. Now once you run your application in browser and click on view source you will find meta tag for home page as following. That’s its It’s very easy to create dynamically meta tag. Hope you liked it.. Stay tuned for more.. Till then happy programming.

  Read the article

• Using progress dialog in Visual Studio extensions

  - by Utkarsh Shigihalli

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/onlyutkarsh/archive/2014/05/23/using-progress-dialog-in-visual-studio-extensions.aspxAs a Visual Studio extension developer you are required to keep the aesthetics of Visual Studio in tact when you integrate your extension with Visual Studio. Your extension looks odd when you try to use windows controls and dialogs in your extensions. Visual Studio SDK exposes many interfaces so that your extension looks as integrated with Visual Studio as possible. When your extension is performing a long running task, you have many options to notify the progress to the user. One such option is through Visual Studio status bar. I have previously blogged about displaying progress through Visual Studio status bar. In this blog post I am going to highlight another way using IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 interface. One thing to note is, as the IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 interface name suggests it is a dialog hence user cannot perform any action when the dialog is being shown. So Visual Studio seems responsive to user, even when a task is being performed. Visual Studio itself makes use of this interface heavily. One example is when you are loading a solution (.sln) with lot of projects Visual Studio displays dialog implemented by this interface (screenshot below). So the first step is to get the instance of IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 interface using IServiceProvider interface. var dialogFactory = _serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(SVsThreadedWaitDialogFactory)) as IVsThreadedWaitDialogFactory; IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 dialog = null; if (dialogFactory != null) { dialogFactory.CreateInstance(out dialog); } So if your have the package initialized properly out object dialog will be not null and would contain the instance of IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 interface. Once the instance is got, you call the different methods to manage the dialog. I will cover 3 methods StartWaitDialog, EndWaitDialog and HasCanceled in this blog post. You show the progress dialog as below. if (dialog != null && dialog.StartWaitDialog( "Threaded Wait Dialog", "VS is Busy", "Progress text", null, "Waiting status bar text", 0, false, true) == VSConstants.S_OK) { Thread.Sleep(4000); } As you can see from the method syntax it is very similar to standard windows message box. If you pass true to the 7th parameter to StartWaitDialog method, you will also see a cancel button allowing user to cancel the running task. You can react when user cancels the task as below. bool isCancelled; dialog.HasCanceled(out isCancelled); if (isCancelled) { MessageBox.Show("Cancelled"); } Finally, you can close the dialog when you complete the task running as below. int usercancel; dialog.EndWaitDialog(out usercancel); To help you quickly experience the above code, I have created a sample. It is available for download from GitHub. The sample creates a tool window with two buttons to demo the above explained scenarios. The tool window can be accessed by clicking View –> Other Windows -> ProgressDialogDemo Window

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for January 04, 2011 -- #1022

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Dennis Doomen, Doug Holland, Kunal Chowdhury, Sacha Barber, Paul Sheriff, Mike Snow(-2-), Peter Kuhn(-2-), and Mike Ormond. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight: Fixing the BookShelf Sample" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Searching the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Programmatically" Doug Holland Prism/Cinch: "PRISM 4 Custom Transitioning Region" Sacha Barber Shoutouts: Sacha Barber the author of Cinch asks for some advice from users: Cinch V2 : Question For The Reader Michael Crump introduces us to SnippetManager as a way to organize your Silverlight snippets... I'm thinking any snippet: A better way to organize your Silverlight Code Snippets. Andy Beaulieu announced an update of Physics Helper 4.2 using Farseer 3.2 ... check out the breaking changes though! Dennis Doomen blogged about a new release of his Fluent Assertions: A new year with a new release of Fluent Assertions, with a blog post about it below From SilverlightCream.com: Verifying PropertyChanged events in Silverlight using Fluent Assertions Dennis Doomen release his latest Fluent Assertions for .NET and Silverlight and wrote up a big post about the new event monitoring syntax. Searching the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Programmatically Doug Holland has a post up on MSDN blogs talking about searching the WP7 Marketplace programmatically... ya know you should be able to do it... here's how. Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part - 5) Kunal Chowdhury has Part 5 of a tutorial series on Lightswitch up at SilverlightShow... working with custom validation this time, and for the first time in this series so far actually writes some code! PRISM 4 Custom Transitioning Region Sacha Barber took time to look at Prism4/MEF and Cinch2 and found things to be fine then wrote a custom PRISM region adaptor that uses a TransitionalElement from the Microsoft Transitionals project... code available, blog post to come. Get Application Title from Windows Phone Paul Sheriff has a cool chunk of code up... getting the Application's title programmatically... and other attributes as well, if you were wondering why you might wanna do that. Detecting Users Win7 Mobile Theme Color Mike Snow has a couple as well... first up is how to detect your user's theme... obviously useful if you wanna match it. Selecting an Item in a ComboBox after Adding Items Second for Mike Snow is a general Silverlight issue... setting the selected item on a ComboBox after filling it... if you haven't stumbled across this yet, you will... A Simplified Grid Markup Reloaded Peter Kuhn has a pair of posts up since last time... this first is an extension of Colin Eberhardt's simplified Grid markup system, but it's only useful if you don't plan on using Blend... can we get a show of hands? :) Silverlight: Fixing the BookShelf Sample Next Peter Kuhn has some changes to the Bookshelf code, but more importantly has some excelling tips about shader effects, Effects on Visual Elements and how to make best use of all the above. Displaying HTML Content in Windows Phone 7 Mike Ormond has a WP7 post up describing problems a customer had early on displaying rich text and an attempt to use the WebBrowser control to pull it off and the problems that caused... check out the resultant code, and read the comments as well. 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

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15  | Next Page >