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• Open Source MariaDB, the MySQL fork to replace MySQL?

  - by Jenson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Frankly speaking, I’ve been out of touch with the Open source world for quite some time. Until recently, after I’ve joined the new government agency, I managed to do some research while given time to learn new technologies and languages. I started reading tech blogs and tech news again (since I’m not as busy as before where I need to rush for project deadlines in and out), and I spotted this MariaDB that really attracts my attention, this is the link to ZDNet article - http://www.zdnet.com/open-source-mariadb-a-mysql-fork-challenges-oracle-7000008311/ Open-Source MariaDB, a MySQL fork, challenges Oracle Yes, you’re right, MariaDB is a MySQL fork, and as mentioned in the article, MariaDB is run by the founder of MySQL, Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius, and he claims MariaDB is faster, more secure and has more features than MySQL. I’m actually very excited to know that the code is maintained by the same dedicated core team of MySQL in the past 18 years. They even bother to form a foundation, the MariaDB Foundation, to promote MariaDB. Already, there’s a lot of open source software officially supporting MariaDB, such as  Drupal, Jelastic – Java in the cloud, Kajona, MediaWiki, phpMyAdmin, Plone, SaltOs, WordPress, and Zend Framework. But the hosting service provider might not be readily supporting MariaDB in their hosting solution. Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; 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; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} Time will tell whether MariaDB would be the real replacement for MySQL, I’m sorry I don’t think I should use alternative here ;-) For more information, please visit MariaDB official site. /* 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-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; 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; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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• Upcoming Events

  - by MOSSLover

  Here is a list of the events I will be speaking at in the next few months (Yes I am a sado-masochist): SharePoint Saturday Atlanta, Saturday, April 17th SharePoint .org Conference, April 18th-20th TEC, April 25th-28th SharePoint Saturday Huntsville, Saturday, May 1st SharePoint Saturday Philadelphia, Saturday, May 8th SharePoint Saturday DC, Saturday, May 15th SharePoint Saturday Ozarks, Saturday, June 13th I am trying to organize a SharePint at TEC after the LA SPUG meeting with Joel on Tuesday, April 27th.  Does anyone know if there is a good spot around the JW Marriott in downtown LA?  Maybe we can get a bunch of local SharePointers to attend. Technorati Tags: SharePoint Events,SharePoint Saturdays,SharePoint Conferences

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• No Visual studio template information found. See application log in Event viewer for more details

  - by sathya

  I tried installing the .NET Framework 4.0 and ASP.NET MVC 2 Framework through the web platform installer. It took a long time and finally i had a restart in between for .NET 4 installation and after that due to my system hang problems had to do a couple of restarts. And after that tried installing the ASP.NET MVC 2 alone and it succeeded. (During this time i had all my VS instances closed).  I am having VS 2008 SP1. And finally after opening VS 2008 and clicking on new project it said the above error no template info found. and i dint have even a single template in the new project template selection window. So these are the steps that i did for recovering the same.  Start Menu --> Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 --> Visual Studio Tools. Right-click over the Visual Studio Command Prompt shortcut and make sure you select Run as Administrator. Once the VS Command Prompt comes up, execute the command 1. "devenv /installvstemplates" 2. "devenv /resetsettings"  And that worked out. No Visual studio template information found. See application log in Event viewer for more detail

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• UppercuT and Mercurial (hg)

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  I mentioned this awhile back on twitter, but UppercuT (UC) has support for Mercurial for versioning your assemblies. In the settings file, all you need to do it tell UC to use hg. When you build your assemblies, they will use the changeset number in the version, and in the informational version, you get the hash, just like you do when using Git. Pretty sweet. By the way, UC also supports .NET 4.0 as of last week. With this knowledge you shall build.

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• Free HTML5 & CSS3 Fundamentals course

  - by TATWORTH

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/10/13/free-html5--css3-fundamentals-course.aspxAt http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/html5-css3-fundamentals-development-for-absolute-beginners there is a free course on HTML5 & CSS3 FundamentalsThis is not a course for pretty web design but for writing good standards compliant HTML. Please note that to get the work files for the course you need to go to http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/HTML5-CSS3-Fundamentals-Development-for-Absolute-Beginners/Series-Introduction-01 as the Microsoft Academy downloads do not seem to work!The course is done by Bob Tabor who runs http://www.learnvisualstudio.net

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• Add ability to add tabs to the end of a line in Windows PowerShell ISE

  - by deadlydog

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/deadlydog/archive/2013/06/24/add-ability-to-add-tabs-to-the-end-of-a.aspxIn the preamble of an earlier post I mentioned that one of the little things that bugs me about Windows PowerShell ISE is that you can add tabs to the start of a line, but not to the end of a line.  This is likely because it would interfere with the tab-completion feature.  I still like to be able to put tabs on the end of my code lines though so that I can easily line up my comments.  Here is how we can achieve this functionality in PowerShell ISE. Read more at http://blog.danskingdom.com/add-ability-to-add-tabs-to-the-end-of-a-line-in-windows-powershell-ise/

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• How to add a permanent redirect (301) for an htm file in IIS 7

  - by bconlon

  Looking in Web Analytics I could see several external sites pointing at an old .htm file on my web server that no longer existed, so I thought I would get IIS to redirect to the new .aspx replacement. How hard could it be? This has annoyed me for quite a while today so here is the answer. 1. Install the Http Redirection module - this is not installed by default!! Windows 7 Start->Control Panel->Programs and Features->Turn Windows Features on or off. Internet Information Services->World Wide Web Services->Common Http Features->HTTP Redirection. Windows Server 2008 Start->Administrative Tools->Server Manager. Roles->Web Server (IIS). Role Services->Add Role Services. Common Http Features->HTTP Redirection. 2. Edit your web.config file <configuration>     .....     <location path="oldfile.htm">         <system.webServer>             <httpRedirect enabled="true" destination="/newfile.aspx" exactDestination="true" childOnly="true" httpResponseStatus="Permanent" />         </system.webServer>     </location>     ..... </configuration> When a user clicks or Google crawls ‘oldfile.htm’ it will get a permanent redirect to ‘/newfile.aspx’ - and should take any Page Rank to the new file.  #

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• How-do-I Script Sample Videos

  - by Jialiang

  http://blogs.technet.com/b/onescript/archive/2012/10/14/how-do-i-script-sample-videos.aspx All-In-One Script Framework is featured by customer-driven script samples.  Each sample demonstrates how to automate one specific IT task that is frequently asked in TechNet forums, Microsoft support calls, and social media.   In order to give readers a better and quicker learning experience, the team starts to create short 5- to 10- minute videos to visually demonstrate some script samples.  These videos would show you how to accomplish the task by running the script sample, and illustrate some key script snippets in the sample project.  We sincerely hope that the IT Pro community will love our effort. The first how-do-I video has been published.  It demonstrates one of our recently released Windows 8 script sample: Get Network Adapter Properties in Windows 8 The video is embedded in the sample introduction page.

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• This not having job, is driving me nuts!

  - by Ratman21

  I had two jobs lined up (temporary but, hey they pay), one of which was in IT. A very low paying IT job for only 30 hours a week and only 3 weeks. At a large high tech company and a government (a not in my field job) temporary, paying a bit more, for little longer and for up to 40 hours a week. I was going to happily work my little self raged for the next 3 weeks. Guess what, the IT job fell thru and I now feel so let down. This I felt was my chance to get back in to IT, even if it was only for few weeks and maybe get note-us as hard working IT guy. I still have the other job but, let me add that there is no chance that it will turn in to something longer (I have been told that point blank). As I said this is nuts.

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• Procedure or function has too many arguments specified

  - by bullpit

  This error took me a while to figure out. I was using SqlDataSource with stored procedures for SELECT and UPDATE commands. The SELECT worked fine. Then I added UPDATE command and while trying to update, I would get this error: "Procedure of function has too many arguments specified" Apparently, good guys at .NET decided it is necessary to send SELECT parameters with the UPDATE command as well. So when I was sending the required parameters to the UPDATE sp, in reality, it was also getting my SELECT parameters, and thus failing. I had to add the extra parameters in the UPDATE stored procedure and make them NULLABLE so that they are not required....phew... Here is piece of SP with unused parameters. ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[UpdateMaintenanceRecord]        @RecordID INT     ,@District VARCHAR(255)     ,@Location VARCHAR(255)         --UNUSED PARAMETERS     ,@MTBillTo VARCHAR(255) = NULL     ,@SerialNumber VARCHAR(255) = NULL     ,@PartNumber VARCHAR(255) = NULL Update: I was getting that error because unkowingly, I had bound the extra fields in my GridVeiw with Bind() call. I changed all the extra one's, which did not need to be in Update, to Eval() and everything works fine.

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• Dynamic tests with mstest and T4

  - by Victor Hurdugaci

  If you used mstest and NUnit you might be aware of the fact that the former doesn't support dynamic, data driven test cases. For example, the following scenario cannot be achieved with the out-of-box mstest: given a dataset, create distinct test cases for each entry in it, using a predefined generic test case. The best result that can be achieved using mstest is a single testcase that will iterate through the dataset. There is one disadvantage: if the test fails for one entry in the dataset, the whole test case fails. So, in order to overcome the previously mentioned limitation, I decided to create a text template that will generate the test cases for me. As an example, I will write some tests for an integer multiplication function that has 2 bugs in it: Read more >> [Cross post from victorhurdugaci.com]

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• Visual Studio 2010 Find and Replace With Regular Expressions

  - by Lance Robinson

  Here is a quick notes about using regular expressions in the VS2010 Find Replace dialog.  1.  To create a backreference, use curly braces (“{“ and “}” ) instead of regular parentheses. 2.  To use the captured backreference, use \1\2 etc, where \1 is the first captured value, \2 is the second captured value, etc. Example: I want to find*: info.setFieldValue(param1, param2); and replace it with: SetFieldValue(info, param1, param2); To do this, I can use the following find/replace values: Find what: {[a-zA-Z0-9]+}.setFieldValue\({[a-zA-Z0-9., ]+}\); Replace with: SetFieldValue(\1, \2); Use Regular Expressions is checked, of course. *If you’re wondering why I’d want to do this – because I don’t have control over the setFieldValue function – its in a third party library that doesn’t behave in a very friendly manner. Technorati Tags: Visual Studio,Regular Expressions

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• Zenoss Setup for Windows Servers

  - by Jay Fox

  Recently I was saddled with standing up Zenoss for our enterprise.  We're running about 1200 servers, so manually touching each box was not an option.  We use LANDesk for a lot of automated installs and patching - more about that later.The steps below may not necessarily have to be completed in this order - it's just the way I did it.STEP ONE:Setup a standard AD user.  We want to do this so there's minimal security exposure.  Call the account what ever you want "domain/zenoss" for our examples.***********************************************************STEP TWO:Make the following local groups accessible by your zenoss account.Distributed COM UsersPerformance Monitor UsersEvent Log Readers (which doesn't exist on pre-2008 machines)Here's the Powershell script I used to setup access to these local groups:# Created to add Active Directory account to local groups# Must be run from elevated prompt, with permissions on the remote machine(s).# Create txt file should contain the names of the machines that need the account added, one per line.# Script will process machines line by line.foreach($i in (gc c:\tmp\computers.txt)){# Add the user to the first group$objUser=[ADSI]("WinNT://domain/zenoss")$objGroup=[ADSI]("WinNT://$i/Distributed COM Users")$objGroup.PSBase.Invoke("Add",$objUser.PSBase.Path)# Add the user to the second group$objUser=[ADSI]("WinNT://domain/zenoss")$objGroup=[ADSI]("WinNT://$i/Performance Monitor Users")$objGroup.PSBase.Invoke("Add",$objUser.PSBase.Path)# Add the user to the third group - Group doesn't exist on < Server 2008#$objUser=[ADSI]("WinNT://domain/zenoss")#$objGroup=[ADSI]("WinNT://$i/Event Log Readers")#$objGroup.PSBase.Invoke("Add",$objUser.PSBase.Path)}**********************************************************STEP THREE:Setup security on the machines namespace so our domain/zenoss account can access itThe default namespace for zenoss is:  root/cimv2Here's the Powershell script:#Grant account defined below (line 11) access to WMI Namespace#Has to be run as account with permissions on remote machinefunction get-sid{Param ($DSIdentity)$ID = new-object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount($DSIdentity)return $ID.Translate( [System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier] ).toString()}$sid = get-sid "domain\zenoss"$SDDL = "A;;CCWP;;;$sid" $DCOMSDDL = "A;;CCDCRP;;;$sid"$computers = Get-Content "c:\tmp\computers.txt"foreach ($strcomputer in $computers){    $Reg = [WMIClass]"\\$strcomputer\root\default:StdRegProv"    $DCOM = $Reg.GetBinaryValue(2147483650,"software\microsoft\ole","MachineLaunchRestriction").uValue    $security = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $strcomputer -Namespace root/cimv2 -Class __SystemSecurity    $converter = new-object system.management.ManagementClass Win32_SecurityDescriptorHelper    $binarySD = @($null)    $result = $security.PsBase.InvokeMethod("GetSD",$binarySD)    $outsddl = $converter.BinarySDToSDDL($binarySD[0])    $outDCOMSDDL = $converter.BinarySDToSDDL($DCOM)    $newSDDL = $outsddl.SDDL += "(" + $SDDL + ")"    $newDCOMSDDL = $outDCOMSDDL.SDDL += "(" + $DCOMSDDL + ")"    $WMIbinarySD = $converter.SDDLToBinarySD($newSDDL)    $WMIconvertedPermissions = ,$WMIbinarySD.BinarySD    $DCOMbinarySD = $converter.SDDLToBinarySD($newDCOMSDDL)    $DCOMconvertedPermissions = ,$DCOMbinarySD.BinarySD    $result = $security.PsBase.InvokeMethod("SetSD",$WMIconvertedPermissions)     $result = $Reg.SetBinaryValue(2147483650,"software\microsoft\ole","MachineLaunchRestriction", $DCOMbinarySD.binarySD)}***********************************************************STEP FOUR:Get the SID for our zenoss account.Powershell#Provide AD User get SID$objUser = New-Object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount("domain", "zenoss") $strSID = $objUser.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]) $strSID.Value******************************************************************STEP FIVE:Modify the Service Control Manager to allow access to the zenoss AD account.This command can be run from an elevated command line, or through Powershellsc sdset scmanager "D:(A;;CC;;;AU)(A;;CCLCRPRC;;;IU)(A;;CCLCRPRC;;;SU)(A;;CCLCRPWPRC;;;SY)(A;;KA;;;BA)(A;;CCLCRPRC;;;PUT_YOUR_SID_HERE_FROM STEP_FOUR)S:(AU;FA;KA;;;WD)(AU;OIIOFA;GA;;;WD)"******************************************************************In step two the script plows through a txt file that processes each computer listed on each line.  For the other scripts I ran them on each machine using LANDesk.  You can probably edit those scripts to process a text file as well.That's what got me off the ground monitoring the machines using Zenoss.  Hopefully this is helpful for you.  Watch the line breaks when copy the scripts.

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• Agile Data Book from O'Reilly Media

  - by Compudicted

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Compudicted/archive/2013/07/01/153309.aspxAs part of my ongoing self-education and approaching of some free time, yeah, both is a must for every IT person and geek! I have carefully examined the latest trends in the Computersphere with whatever tools I had at my disposal (nothing really fancy was used) and came to a conclusion that for a database pro the *hottest* topic today is undoubtedly the #BigData and all the rapidly growing and spawning ecosystem around it. Having recently immersed myself into the NoSQL world (let me tell here right away NoSQL means Not Only SQL) one book really stood out of the crowd: Book site: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025054.doDespite being a new book I am sure it will end up on the tables of many Big Data Generalists.In a few dozen words, it is primarily for two reasons:1) The author understands that a  typical business today cannot wait for a Data Scientist for too long to deliver results demanding as usual a very quick turnaround on investments (ROI), and 2) The book covers all the needed and proven modern brick and mortar offerings to get the job done by a relatively newcomer to the Big Data World.It certainly enables such a professional to grow and expand based on the acquired knowledge, and one can truly do it very fast.

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• Windows Azure Horror Story: The Phantom App that Ate my Data

  - by jasont

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/jasont/archive/2013/10/31/windows-azure-horror-story-the-phantom-app-that-ate-my.aspxI’ve posted in the past about how my company, Stackify, makes some great tools that enhance the Windows Azure experience. By just using the Azure Management Portal, you don’t get a lot of insight into what is happening inside your instances, which are just Windows VMs. This morning, I noticed something quite scary, and fittingly enough, it’s Halloween. I deleted a deployment after doing a new deployment and VIP swap. But, after a few minutes, the instance still appeared in my Stackify dashboard. I thought this odd, as we monitor these operations and remove devices that have been deleted. Digging in showed that it wasn’t a problem with Stackify. This instance was still there, and still sending data. You’ll notice though that the “Status” check shows that the instance no longer exists. And it gets scarier. I quickly checked the running services, and sure enough, the Windows Azure Guest Agent (which runs worker roles) was still running: “Surely, this can’t be” I’m thinking at this point. Knowing that this worker role is in our QA environment, it has debug logging turned on. And, using our log file tailing feature, I can see that, yes, indeed, this deleted deployment is still executing code. Pulling messages off queues. Sending alerts. Changing data. Fortunately, our tools give me the ability to manually disable the Windows service that runs this code. In the meantime, I have contacted everyone I know (and support) at Microsoft to address this issue. Needless to say, this is concerning. When you delete a deployment, it needs to actually delete. Not continue to eat your data. As soon as I learn more, I’ll be posting an update.

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• The Uganda .NET Usergroup meeting for January 2011 - a look back.

  - by Malisa L. Ncube

  We had a very interesting meeting on Friday 28th last week. We had 10 attendees and two speakers. The first topic presented was Cloud Computing, presented by Allan Rwakatungu @arwakatungu who works with MTN Uganda. He gave a very brilliant outline of how Cloud computing and service oriented applications had begun changing the platform for operating business and the costs it saves because of scalability and elasticity. He went on to demonstrate the steps you would take if you are beginning a new Windows Azure project. He explained the history and evolution of the Windows Azure, SQL Azure and cloud services offered by Amazon and google.com. The attendees had many questions to ask (obviously), but they were all answered very well. We once again thank Allan, for taking time to prepare the presentation and demonstrating for us. We recorded a video on the entire presentation and after doing some editing we will publish it. One wish which was echoed by most members was that Microsoft should open the cloud services and development for Africa. Microsoft currently does not even have servers here in Africa and so far, that does not put African developers in the same platform as other developers in other continents. Now is the time considering the improvements in network speeds and joining of the Seacom network and broadband.   I presented on Parallelism and Multithreading using .NET 4.0, I also gave some details on the language changes in C# 5.0 and the async keyword and the TaskEx class. I explained the Task, Scheduling of parallel tasks and demonstrated problems that may arise from using parallelism inappropriately. I also demonstrated the performance improvements that may be achieved by taking advantage of multi-core processors. You may download the presentation on Parallelism and Multi-threading from here. The resolution of the meeting was that we should meet more than once a month and begin other activities which should be more fun. e.g. Geek Dinner, Geek Beer or CodeCamp. Based on that we all agreed we shall have a mid-month meeting starting from February. Cheers folks! del.icio.us Tags: .net,usergroup,cloud computing,parallelism,multi-threading

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• Using Definition of Done to Drive Agile Maturity

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve been an Agile Coach at a lot of different clients over the years, and I want to share an approach I use to help them adopt and mature over time. It’s important to realize that “Agile” is not a black/white yes/no thing. Teams can be varying degrees of agile. I think of this as their agile maturity level. When I coach teams I want them to start out being a little agile, and get more agile as they mature. The approach I teach them is to use the definition of done as a technique to continuously improve their agile maturity over time. We’re probably all familiar with the concept of “Done Done” that represents what *actually* being done a feature means. Not just when a developer says he’s done right after he writes that last line of code that makes the feature kind-of work. Done Done means the coding is done, it’s been tested, installers and deployment packages have been created, user manuals have been updated, architecture docs have been updated, etc. To enable teams to internalize the concept of “Done Done”, they usually get together and come up with their Definition of Done (DoD) that defines all the activities that need to be completed before a feature is considered Done Done. The Done Done technique typically is applied only to features (aka User Stories). What I do is extend this to apply to several concepts such as User Stories, Sprints, Releases (and sometimes Check-Ins). During project kick-off I’ll usually sit down with the team and go through an exercise of creating DoD’s for each of these concepts (Stories/Sprints/Releases). We’ll usually start by just brainstorming a bunch of activities that could end up in these various DoD’s. Here’s some examples: Code Reviews StyleCop FxCop User Manuals Updated Architecture Docs Updated Tested by QA Tested by UAT Installers Created Support Knowledge Base Updated Deployment Instructions (for Ops) written Automated Unit Tests Run Automated Integration Tests Run Then we start by arranging these activities into the place they occur today (e.g. Do you do UAT testing only once per release? every sprint? every feature?). If the team was previously Waterfall most of these activities probably end up in the Release DoD. An extremely mature agile team would probably have most of these activities in the DoD for the User Stories (because an extremely mature agile team will probably do continuous deployment and release every story). So what we need to do as a team, is work to move these activities from their current home (Release DoD) down into the Sprint DoD and eventually into the User Story DoD (and maybe into the lower-level Check-In DoD if we decide to use that). We don’t have to move them all down to User Story immediately, but as a team we figure out what we think we’re capable of moving down to the Sprint cycle, and Story cycle immediately, and that becomes our starting DoD’s. Over time the team makes an effort to continue moving activities down from Release->Sprint->Story as they become more agile and more mature. I try to encourage them to envision a world in which they deploy to production as each User Story is completed. They would need to be updating User Manuals, creating installers, doing UAT testing (typical Release cycle activities) on every single User Story. They may never actually reach that point, but they should envision that, and strive to keep driving the activities down closer to the User Story cycle s they mature. This is a great technique to give a team an easy-to-follow roadmap to mature their agile practices over time. Sure there’s other aspects to maturity outside of this, but it’s a great technique, that’s easy to visualize, to drive agility into the team. Just keep moving those activities (aka “gates”) down the board from Release->Sprint->Story. I’ll try to give an example of what a recent client of mine had for their DoD’s (this is from memory, so probably not 100% accurate): Release Create/Update deployment Instructions For Ops Instructional Videos Updated Run manual regression test suite UAT Testing In this case that meant deploying to an environment shared across the enterprise that mirrored production and asking other business groups to test their own apps to ensure we didn’t break anything outside our system Sprint Deploy to UAT Environment But not necessarily actually request UAT testing occur User Guides updated Sprint Features Video Created In this case we decided to create a video each sprint showing off the progress (video version of Sprint Demo) User Story Manual Test scripts developed and run Tested by BA Deployed in shared QA environment Using automated deployment process Peer Code Review Code Check-In Compiled (warning-free) Passes StyleCop Passes FxCop Create installer packages Run Automated Tests Run Automated Integration Tests PS – One of my clients had a great question when we went through this activity. They said that if a Sprint is by definition done when the end-date rolls around (time-boxed), isn’t a DoD on a sprint meaningless – it’s done on the end-date regardless of whether those other activities are complete or not? My answer is that while that statement is true – the sprint is done regardless when the end date rolls around – if the DoD activities haven’t been completed I would consider the Sprint a failure (similar to not completing what was committed/planned – failure may be too strong a word but you get the idea). In the Retrospective that will become an agenda item to discuss and understand why we weren’t able to complete the activities we agreed would need to be completed each Sprint.

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• Combining Shared Secret and Certificates

  - by Michael Stephenson

  As discussed in the introduction article this walkthrough will explain how you can implement WCF security with the Windows Azure Service Bus to ensure that you can protect your endpoint in the cloud with a shared secret but also combine this with certificates so that you can identify the sender of the message.   Prerequisites As in the previous article before going into the walk through I want to explain a few assumptions about the scenario we are implementing but to keep the article shorter I am not going to walk through all of the steps in how to setup some of this. In the solution we have a simple console application which will represent the client application. There is also the services WCF application which contains the WCF service we will expose via the Windows Azure Service Bus. The WCF Service application in this example was hosted in IIS 7 on Windows 2008 R2 with AppFabric Server installed and configured to auto-start the WCF listening services. I am not going to go through significant detail around the IIS setup because it should not matter in relation to this article however if you want to understand more about how to configure WCF and IIS for such a scenario please refer to the following paper which goes into a lot of detail about how to configure this. The link is: http://tinyurl.com/8s5nwrz   Setting up the Certificates To keep the post and sample simple I am going to use the local computer store for all certificates but this bit is really just the same as setting up certificates for an example where you are using WCF without using Windows Azure Service Bus. In the sample I have included two batch files which you can use to create the sample certificates or remove them. Basically you will end up with: A certificate called PocServerCert in the personal store for the local computer which will be used by the WCF Service component A certificate called PocClientCert in the personal store for the local computer which will be used by the client application A root certificate in the Root store called PocRootCA with its associated revocation list which is the root from which the client and server certificates were created   For the sample Im just using development certificates like you would normally, and you can see exactly how these are configured and placed in the stores from the batch files in the solution using makecert and certmgr.   The Service Component To begin with let's look at the service component and how it can be configured to listen to the service bus using a shared secret but to also accept a username token from the client. In the sample the service component is called Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.Cert.Services. It has a single service which is the Visual Studio template for a WCF service when you add a new WCF Service Application so we have a service called Service1 with its Echo method. Nothing special so far!.... The next step is to look at the web.config file to see how we have configured the WCF service. In the services section of the WCF configuration you can see I have created my service and I have created a local endpoint which I simply used to do a little bit of diagnostics and to check it was working, but more importantly there is the Windows Azure endpoint which is using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding (note that this should also work just the same if your using netTcpRelayBinding). The key points to note on the above picture are the service behavior called MyServiceBehaviour and the service bus endpoints behavior called MyEndpointBehaviour. We will go into these in more detail later.   The Relay Binding The relay binding for the service has been configured to use the TransportWithMessageCredential security mode. This is the important bit where the transport security really relates to the interaction between the service and listening to the Azure Service Bus and the message credential is where we will use our certificate like we have specified in the message/clientCrentialType attribute. Note also that we have left the relayClientAuthenticationType set to RelayAccessToken. This means that authentication will be made against ACS for accessing the service bus and messages will not be accepted from any sender who has not been authenticated by ACS.   The Endpoint Behaviour In the below picture you can see the endpoint behavior which is configured to use the shared secret client credential for accessing the service bus and also for diagnostic purposes I have included the service registry element.     Hopefully if you are familiar with using Windows Azure Service Bus relay feature the above is very familiar to you and this is a very common setup for this section. There is nothing specific to the username token implementation here. The Service Behaviour Now we come to the bit with most of the certificate stuff in it. When you configure the service behavior I have included the serviceCredentials element and then setup to use the clientCertificate check and also specifying the serviceCertificate with information on how to find the servers certificate in the store.     I have also added a serviceAuthorization section where I will implement my own authorization component to perform additional security checks after the service has validated that the message was signed with a good certificate. I also have the same serviceSecurityAudit configuration to log access to my service. My Authorization Manager The below picture shows you implementation of my authorization manager. WCF will eventually hand off the message to my authorization component before it calls the service code. This is where I can perform some logic to check if the identity is allowed to access resources. In this case I am simple rejecting messages from anyone except the PocClientCertificate.     The Client Now let's take a look at the client side of this solution and how we can configure the client to authenticate against ACS but also send a certificate over to the service component so it can implement additional security checks on-premise. I have a console application and in the program class I want to use the proxy generated with Add Service Reference to send a message via the Azure Service Bus. You can see in my WCF client configuration below I have setup my details for the azure service bus url and am using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding.   Next is my configuration for the relay binding. You can see below I have configured security to use TransportWithMessageCredential so we will flow the token from a certificate with the message and also the RelayAccessToken relayClientAuthenticationType which means the component will validate against ACS before being allowed to access the relay endpoint to send a message.     After the binding we need to configure the endpoint behavior like in the below picture. This contains the normal transportClientEndpointBehaviour to setup the ACS shared secret configuration but we have also configured the clientCertificate to look for the PocClientCert.     Finally below we have the code of the client in the console application which will call the service bus. You can see that we have created our proxy and then made a normal call to a WCF in exactly the normal way but the configuration will jump in and ensure that a token is passed representing the client certificate.     Conclusion As you can see from the above walkthrough it is not too difficult to configure a service to use both a shared secret and certificate based token at the same time. This gives you the power and protection offered by the access control service in the cloud but also the ability to flow additional tokens to the on-premise component for additional security features to be implemented. Sample The sample used in this post is available at the following location: https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCBlogSamples/Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.Cert.zip

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• Almost time to hit the road again

  - by Chris Williams

  I’ve had a few months of not much traveling, but now that the weather is improving… conference season is starting up again. That means it’s time for me to start hitting the road. In June, I have Tech Ed 2010 in New Orleans, LA. I lived in New Orleans for several years, both as military and civilian and I have a few friends still down there. I haven’t been there since before Hurricane Katrina, so I have mixed feelings about returning… but I am still looking forward to it. Also in June, I have Codestock in Knoxville, TN. Codestock is one of my favorite events, primarily because of the excellent people that speak there and also attend sessions. It’s a great mix of people and technologies. Sometime in July or August, I’m headed to Austin, TX for a couple days. I don’t know the exact date yet, but if you have an event down there in that timeframe, let me know and maybe we can sort something out. In September, I’m heading to Seattle for my first PAX (Penny Arcade Expo.)  I’m going strictly as an attendee and it looks like a LOT of fun. Really excited to check it out. Also in September, I’m headed to Omaha for the Heartland Developers Conference. This is a FANTASTIC event, and certainly one of my local favorites. (I guess local is relative, it’s about a 6 hour drive.) In addition to speaking on WP7, I’ll be doing a series of hands on labs on XNA they day before the conference starts, so that should be a lot of fun as well.   In addition to all this stuff, I have my own XNA User Group to take care of. In August, Andy “The Z-Man” Dunn is coming to speak and check out the various food on a stick offerings at the Minnesota State Fair!

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• BaltoMSDN and Richmond Code Camp

  - by Steve Michelotti

  Tomorrow (5/19/2010) I’ll be at BaltoMSDN presenting C# 4.0.  Also, on Saturday I’ll be presenting MVC 2 at the Richmond Code Camp.  Hope to see you there!

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• Stylecop 4.5.20.0 is available

  - by TATWORTH

  Stylecop 4.5.20.0 is available is available at http://stylecop.codeplex.com/releases/view/62209 This is the StyleCop 4.5 RC8. "This release includes the very latest StyleCop for ReSharper plugin and will automatically uninstall previous versions of StyleCop. This updated release contains around 200 bug fixes since the 4.4 RTW release and includes 5 new rules. Support for the async CTP is also added. SA1125 - UseShorthandForNullableTypes SA1411 - AttributeConstructorMustNotUseUnnecessaryParenthesis SA1517 - CodeMustNotContainBlankLinesAtStartOfFile SA1518 - CodeMustNotContainBlankLinesAtEndOfFile SA1649 - FileHeaderFileNameDocumentationMustMatchTypeName" StyleCop / Resharper 5.0 integration continues to improve. If you have not yet used them in your C# development, I urge you to try them out. I have found StyleCop 4.5 RC8 (and its RC predecessors) to be stable. Making changes to the code to make it style cop compliant is now very much easier. Can't code withoutThe best C# & VB.NET refactoring plugin for Visual Studio

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• The future is looking brighter &ndash; debugging Windows Azure in the cloud with IntelliTrace

  - by Eric Nelson

  One of the “warts” on Windows Azure development has been that once your application was deployed to the cloud, if things went wrong it was pretty tough to figure out the root problem. I knew for sometime we had a solution coming for Visual Studio 2010 users and I couldn’t wait to tell folks about it once it became public. I planned to do a detailed post subsequent to briefly mentioning it when I talked about the 1.2 SDK release. However … other stuff just keeps on getting in the way. Hence I have decided to point at Somas blog post on just that. Enjoy. Check out Peering into the cloud with IntelliTrace  NB: You will need the Ultimate Edition of Visual Studio 2010 to use this feature. Sorry.

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• TechEd 2010 Schedule and Twitter Tool

  - by Scott Dorman

  If you’re going to TechEd 2010* (North America), be sure to check out the TechEd 2010 Schedule and Twitter Tool. If you have a mobile device (Windows Mobile 6.5, Android, iPhone), a tablet (Windows 7, iPad), or even a laptop (Windows Vista or Windows 7 gadgets) then this tool is essential. It allows you to view all of the session details and build your own customized schedule. You can also keep up with all of the TechEd related Twitter traffic from the same application. By default, the #TechEd hashtag is tracked, but you can add your own favorite hash tags as well. You can also send tweets using SMS. Technorati Tags: TechEd

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• Q&amp;A: How do I cancel my Windows Azure Platform Introductory Special? (or any Subscription)

  - by Eric Nelson

  Short answer: Don’t! Just kidding :-) Long answer: I believe it is the same process as for other Microsoft Online Services – but I have never tried it. Hence please post a comment if you follow this successfully or not and I will amend. From http://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/mocp/, search for “cancel” and you get: What I am not clear about is whether an Introductory Special is classed as a trial. Either way, the answer is to contact support and ask to cancel. I would suggest you are fully armed with details of your subscription which you can get from signing in to https://mocp.microsoftonline.com. You can contact support via a online web form at https://mocp-support.custhelp.com/ Or You can call them. The details are again on the support page http://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/mocp/  In the UK you can call 0800 731 8457 or (0) 20 3027 6039 Monday – Friday 09:00 – 17:00 GMT (UTC). I hope that helps.

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• Contract Work - Lessons Learned

  - by samerpaul

  I thought I would write a post of a different nature today, but still relevant to the tech world. I do a lot of contract jobs myself and really enjoy it. It's nice to keep jumping from project to project, and not having to go to an office or keep regular hours, etc. I really enjoy it. I have learned a lot in the past few years of doing it (both from experience and from help given to me from others, and the internet) so I thought I'd share some of that knowledge/experience today.So here's my own personal "lesson's learned" that hopefully will help you if you find yourself doing contract work:Should I take the job?Ok, so this is the first step. Assuming you were given sufficient information about what they want, then you should really think about what you're capable of doing and whether or not you should take this job. Personally, my rule is, if I know it's possible, I'll say yes, even if I don't yet know how to do it. That's because the internet is such a great help, it would be rare to run into an issue that you can't figure out with some help. So if your clients are asking for something that you don't yet know how to program, but you know you can do it on the platform then go for it. How else are you going to learn?Use this rule with some limitation, however. If you're really lacking the expertise or foundation in something, then unless you have tons of time to complete the project, then I wouldn't say yes. For example, I haven't personally done any 3d/openGL programming yet so I wouldn't say yes to a project that extensively uses it. OK, so I want the job, but how much do I charge?This part can be tricky. There is no set formula really, but I have some tips for pricing that will hopefully give you a better idea on how to confidently ask your price and have them accept. Here are some personal guidelinesHow much time do you have to complete the project? If it's shorter than average, then charge more. You can even make a subtle note about this (or not so subtle if they still don't get it.) If it seems too short of a time (i.e. near impossible to complete), be sure to say that. It looks bad to promise a time that you can't keep--and it makes it less likely for them to return to you for work.Your Hourly rate: How long have you been working in that language? Do you have existing projects to back you up? Or previous contacts that can vouch for your work? Are there very few people with your particular skill set? All of these things will lend themselves to setting an hourly rate. I'd also try out a quick google search of what your line of work is, to see what the industry standard is at that point in time.I wouldn't price too low, because you want to make your time worth it. You also want them to feel like they're paying for quality work (assuming you can deliver it :) ). Finally, think about your client. If it's a small business, then don't price it too high if you want the job. If it's an enterprise (like a Fortune company), then don't be afraid to price higher. They have the budget for it.Fixed price: If they want a fixed price project, then you need to think about how many hours it will take you to complete it and multiply it by the hourly rate you set for yourself. Then, honestly, I would add 10-20% on top of that. Why? Because nothing ever works exactly how you want it to. There are lots of times that something "trivial" is way harder than it should be, or something that "should work" doesn't for hours and it eats away at your hourly rate. I can't count the number of times I encountered a logical bug that took away an entire's day work because debuggers don't help in those cases. By adding that padding in, it's still OK to have those days where you don't get as much done as you want. And another useful tip: Depending on your client, and the scope, you most likely want to set that you both sign off on a specification sheet before doing any work, and that any changes will result in a re-evaulation of the price. This is to help protect you from being handed a huge new addition to the project half-way in, without any extra payment.Scope of project: Finally, is it a huge project? Is it really small/fast? This affects how much your client will be willing to pay. If it sounds big, they will be willing to pay more for it. If it seems really small, then you won't be able to get away with a large asking price (as easily).Ok, I priced it, now what?So now that you have the price, you want to make sure it feels justified to your client. I never set a price before I can really think about everything. For example, if you're still in your introduction phase, and they want a price, don't give one! Just comment that you will send them a proposal sheet with all the features outlined, and a price for everything. You don't want to shout out a low number and then deliver something that is way higher. You also don't want to shock them with a big number before they feel like they are getting a great product.Make up a proposal document in a word editor. Personally, I leave the price till the very end. Why? Because by the time they reach the end, you've already discussed all the great features you plan to implement, and how it's the best product they'll ever use, etc etc...so your price comes off as a steal! If you hit them up front with a price, they will read through the document with a negative bias. Think about those commercials on TV. They always go on about their product, then at the end, ask "What would you pay for something like this? $100? $50? How about $20!!". This is not by accident.Scenario: I finished the job way earlier than expectedYou have two options then. You can either polish the hell out of the application, and even throw in a few bonus features (assuming they are in-line with the customer's needs) or you can sit and wait on it until you near your deadline. Why don't you want to turn it in too early? Because you should treat that extra time as a surplus. If you said it is going to take you 3 weeks, and it took you only 1, you have a surplus of 2 weeks. I personally don't want to let them know that I can do a 3 week project in 1 week. Why not? Because that may not always be the case! I may later have a 3 week project that takes all 3 weeks, but if I set a precedent of delivering super early, then the pressure is on for that longer project. It also makes it harder to quote longer times if you keep delivering too early.Feel free to deliver early, but again, don't do it too early. They may also wonder why they paid you for 3 weeks of work if you're done in 1. They may further wonder if the product sucks, or what is wrong with it, if it's done so early, etc.I would just polish the application. Everyone loves polish in their applications. The smallest details are what make an application go from "functional" to "fantastic". And since you are still delivering on time, then they are still going to be very happy with you.Scenario: It's taking way too long to finish this, and the deadline is nearing/here!So this is not a fun scenario to be in, but it'll happen. Sometimes the scope of the project gets out of hand. The best policy here is OPENNESS/HONESTY. Tell them that the project is taking longer than expected, and give a reasonable time for when you think you'll have it done. I typically explain it in a way that makes it sound like it isn't something that I did wrong, but it's just something about the nature of the project. This really goes for any scenario, to be honest. Just continue to stay open and communicative about your progress. This doesn't mean that you should email them every five minutes (unless they want you to), but it does mean that maybe every few days or once a week, give them an update on where you're at, and what's next. They'll be happy to know they are paying for progress, and it'll make it easier to ask for an extension when something goes wrong, because they know that you've been working on it all along.Final tips and thoughts:In general, contract work is really fun and rewarding. It's nice to learn new things all the time, as mandated by the project ,and to challenge yourself to do things you may not have done before. The key is to build a great relationship with your clients for future work, and for recommendations. I am always very honest with them and I never promise something I can't deliver. Again, under promise, over deliver!I hope this has proved helpful!Cheers,samerpaul

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