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• SnagIt Live Writer Plug-in Updated

  - by Rick Strahl

  Ah, I love SnagIt from TechSmith and I use the heck out of it almost every day. So no surprise that I've decided some time ago to integrate SnagIt into a few applications that require screen shots extensively. It's been a while since I've posted an update to my small SnagIt Windows Live Writer plug-in. There have been a few nagging issues that have crept up with recent changes in the way SnagIt handles captures in recent versions and they have been addressed in this update of SnagIt. Personally I love SnagIt and use it extensively mostly for blogging, but also for writing documentation and articles etc. While there are many other (and also free) tools out there to do basic screen captures, SnagIt continues to be the most convenient tool for me with its nice built in capture and effects editor that makes creating professional looking captures childishly simple. And maybe even more importantly: SnagIt has a COM interface that can be automated and  makes it super easy to embed into other applications. I've built plugins for SnagIt as well as for one of my company's own tools, Html Help Builder. If you use the Windows Live Writer offline WebLog Editor to write blog posts and have a copy of SnagIt it's probably worth your while to check this out if you haven't already. In case you haven't, this plugin integrates SnagIt with Live Writer so you can easily capture and edit content and embed it into a post. Captures are shown in the SnagIt Preview editor where you can edit the image and apply image markup or effects, before selecting Finish (or Cancel). The final image can then be pasted directly into your Live Writer post. When installed the SnagIt plug-in shows up on the PlugIn list or in the Plug-Ins toolbar shortcut: Once you select the Plug in you get the capture window that allows you to customize the capture process which includes most of the useful SnagIt capture options: Once you're done capturing the image shows up in the SnagIt Image Editor and you can crop, mark up and apply effects. When done you click the Finish button and the image is embedded right into your blog post. Easy - how do you think the images in this blog entry got in here? The beauty of SnagIt is that it's all easily integrated - Capturing, editing and embedding, it only takes a few seconds to do it all especially if you save image effect presets in SnagIt. What's updated The main issue addressed in this update has to do with the plug-in updates the Live Writer window. When a capture starts Live Writer gets minimized to get out of the way to let you pick your capture source. When the capture is complete and the image has been embedded Live Writer is activated once again. Recent versions of SnagIt however had changed the Window positioning of SnagIt so that Live Writer ended up popping up back behind the SnagIt window which was pretty annoying. This update pushes Live Writer back to the top of the window stack using some delaying tactics in the code. There have also been a few small changes to the way the code interacts with the COM object which is more reliable if a capture fails or SnagIt blows up or is locked because it's already in a capture outside of the automation interface. Source Code SnagIt Automation is something I actually use a lot. As mentioned I've integrated this automation into Live Writer as well as my documentation tool Html Help Builder, which I use just about daily. The SnagIt integration has a similar interface in that application and provides similar functionality. It's quite useful to integrate SnagIt into other applications. Because it's quite useful to embed SnagIt into other apps there's source code that you can download and embed into your own applications. The code includes both the dialog class that is automated from Live Writer, as well as the basic capture component that captures images to a disk file. Resources Download the SnagIt Capture Plug-in Installer An MSI installer that you can run that will install the plug-in into Live Writer's PlugIns directory. Source Code to the SnagIt Capture Plug-in Contains the plug-in assembly, as well as the source code to the plug-in and the setup project.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in Live Writer  WebLog   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Edit Media Center TV Recordings with Windows Live Movie Maker

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Have you ever wanted to take a TV program you’ve recorded in Media Center and remove the commercials or save clips of favorite scenes? Today we’ll take a look at editing WTV and DVR-MS files with Windows Live Movie Maker. Download and Install Windows Live Movie Maker. The download link can be found at the end of the article. WLMM is part of Windows Live Essentials, but you can choose to install only the applications you want. You’ll also want to be sure to uncheck any unwanted settings like settings Bing as default search provider or MSN as your browser home page.   Add your recorded TV file to WLMM by clicking the Add videos and photos button, or by dragging and dropping it onto the storyboard.   You’ll see your video displayed in the Preview window on the left and on the storyboard. Adjust the Zoom Time Scale slider at the lower right to change the level of detail displayed on the storyboard. You may want to start zoomed out and zoom in for more detailed edits.   Removing Commercials or Unwanted Sections Note: Changes and edits made in Windows Live Movie Maker do not change or effect the original video file. To accomplish this, we will makes cuts, or “splits,” and the beginning and end of the section we want to remove, and then we will delete that section from our project. Click and drag the slider bar along the the storyboard to scroll through the video. When you get to the end of a row in on the storyboard, drag the slider down to the beginning of the next row. We’ve found it easiest and most accurate to get close to the end of the commercial break and then use the Play button and the Previous Frame and Next Frame buttons underneath the Preview window to fine tune your cut point. When you find the right place to make your first cut, click the split button on the Edit tab on the ribbon. You will see your video “split” into two sections. Now, repeat the process of scrolling through the storyboard to find the end of the section you wish to cut. When you are at the proper point, click the Split button again.   Now we’ll delete that section by selecting it and pressing the Delete key, selecting remove on the Home tab, or by right clicking on the section and selecting Remove.   Trim Tool This tool allows you to select a portion of the video to keep while trimming away the rest.   Click and drag the sliders in the preview windows to select the area you want to keep. The area outside the sliders will be trimmed away. The area inside is the section that is kept in the movie. You can also adjust the Start and End points manually on the ribbon.   Delete any additional clips you don’t want in the final output. You can also accomplish this by using the Set start point and Set end point buttons. Clicking Set start point will eliminate everything before the start point. Set end point will eliminate everything after the end point. And you’re left with only the clip you want to keep.   Output your Video Select the icon at the top left, then select Save movie. All of these settings will output your movie as a WMV file, but file size and quality will vary by setting. The Burn to DVD option also outputs a WMV file, but then opens Windows DVD Maker and prompts you to create and burn a DVD.   Conclusion WLMM is one of the few applications that can edit WTV files, and it’s the only one we’re aware of that’s free. We should note only WTV and DVR-MS files will appear in the Recorded TV library in Media Center, so if you want to view your WMV output file in WMC you’ll need to add it to the Video or Movie library. Would you like to learn more about Windows Live Movie Maker? Check out are article on how to turn photos and home videos into movies with Windows Live Movie Maker. Need to add videos from a network location? WLMM doesn’t allow this by default, but you check out how to add network support to Windows Live Move Maker. Download Windows Live Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Rotate a Video 90 degrees with VLC or Windows Live Movie MakerHow to Make/Edit a movie with Windows Movie Maker in Windows VistaFamily Fun: Share Photos with Photo Gallery and Windows Live SpacesAutomatically Mount and View ISO files in Windows 7 Media CenterAutomatically Start Windows 7 Media Center in Live TV Mode TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor

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• To ref or not to ref

  - by nmarun

  So the question is what is the point of passing a reference type along with the ref keyword? I have an Employee class as below: 1: public class Employee 2: { 3: public string FirstName { get; set; } 4: public string LastName { get; set; } 5:  6: public override string ToString() 7: { 8: return string.Format("{0}-{1}", FirstName, LastName); 9: } 10: } In my calling class, I say: 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: Employee employee = new Employee 6: { 7: FirstName = "John", 8: LastName = "Doe" 9: }; 10: Console.WriteLine(employee); 11: CallSomeMethod(employee); 12: Console.WriteLine(employee); 13: } 14:  15: private static void CallSomeMethod(Employee employee) 16: { 17: employee.FirstName = "Smith"; 18: employee.LastName = "Doe"; 19: } 20: }   After having a look at the code, you’ll probably say, Well, an instance of a class gets passed as a reference, so any changes to the instance inside the CallSomeMethod, actually modifies the original object. Hence the output will be ‘John-Doe’ on the first call and ‘Smith-Doe’ on the second. And you’re right: So the question is what’s the use of passing this Employee parameter as a ref? 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: Employee employee = new Employee 6: { 7: FirstName = "John", 8: LastName = "Doe" 9: }; 10: Console.WriteLine(employee); 11: CallSomeMethod(ref employee); 12: Console.WriteLine(employee); 13: } 14:  15: private static void CallSomeMethod(ref Employee employee) 16: { 17: employee.FirstName = "Smith"; 18: employee.LastName = "Doe"; 19: } 20: } The output is still the same: Ok, so is there really a need to pass a reference type using the ref keyword? I’ll remove the ‘ref’ keyword and make one more change to the CallSomeMethod method. 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: Employee employee = new Employee 6: { 7: FirstName = "John", 8: LastName = "Doe" 9: }; 10: Console.WriteLine(employee); 11: CallSomeMethod(employee); 12: Console.WriteLine(employee); 13: } 14:  15: private static void CallSomeMethod(Employee employee) 16: { 17: employee = new Employee 18: { 19: FirstName = "Smith", 20: LastName = "John" 21: }; 22: } 23: } In line 17 you’ll see I’ve ‘new’d up the incoming Employee parameter and then set its properties to new values. The output tells me that the original instance of the Employee class does not change. Huh? But an instance of a class gets passed by reference, so why did the values not change on the original instance or how do I keep the two instances in-sync all the times? Aah, now here’s the answer. In order to keep the objects in sync, you pass them using the ‘ref’ keyword. 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: Employee employee = new Employee 6: { 7: FirstName = "John", 8: LastName = "Doe" 9: }; 10: Console.WriteLine(employee); 11: CallSomeMethod(ref employee); 12: Console.WriteLine(employee); 13: } 14:  15: private static void CallSomeMethod(ref Employee employee) 16: { 17: employee = new Employee 18: { 19: FirstName = "Smith", 20: LastName = "John" 21: }; 22: } 23: } Viola! Now, to prove it beyond doubt, I said, let me try with another reference type: string. 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: string name = "abc"; 6: Console.WriteLine(name); 7: CallSomeMethod(ref name); 8: Console.WriteLine(name); 9: } 10:  11: private static void CallSomeMethod(ref string name) 12: { 13: name = "def"; 14: } 15: } The output was as expected, first ‘abc’ and then ‘def’ - proves the 'ref' keyword works here as well. Now, what if I remove the ‘ref’ keyword? The output should still be the same as the above right, since string is a reference type? 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: string name = "abc"; 6: Console.WriteLine(name); 7: CallSomeMethod(name); 8: Console.WriteLine(name); 9: } 10:  11: private static void CallSomeMethod(string name) 12: { 13: name = "def"; 14: } 15: } Wrong, the output shows ‘abc’ printed twice. Wait a minute… now how could this be? This is because string is an immutable type. This means that any time you modify an instance of string, new memory address is allocated to the instance. The effect is similar to ‘new’ing up the Employee instance inside the CallSomeMethod in the absence of the ‘ref’ keyword. Verdict: ref key came to the rescue and saved the planet… again!

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• JavaScript Class Patterns

  - by Liam McLennan

  To write object-oriented programs we need objects, and likely lots of them. JavaScript makes it easy to create objects: var liam = { name: "Liam", age: Number.MAX_VALUE }; But JavaScript does not provide an easy way to create similar objects. Most object-oriented languages include the idea of a class, which is a template for creating objects of the same type. From one class many similar objects can be instantiated. Many patterns have been proposed to address the absence of a class concept in JavaScript. This post will compare and contrast the most significant of them. Simple Constructor Functions Classes may be missing but JavaScript does support special constructor functions. By prefixing a call to a constructor function with the ‘new’ keyword we can tell the JavaScript runtime that we want the function to behave like a constructor and instantiate a new object containing the members defined by that function. Within a constructor function the ‘this’ keyword references the new object being created -  so a basic constructor function might be: function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; this.toString = function() { return this.name + " is " + age + " years old."; }; } var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); Note that by convention the name of a constructor function is always written in Pascal Case (the first letter of each word is capital). This is to distinguish between constructor functions and other functions. It is important that constructor functions be called with the ‘new’ keyword and that not constructor functions are not. There are two problems with the pattern constructor function pattern shown above: It makes inheritance difficult The toString() function is redefined for each new object created by the Person constructor. This is sub-optimal because the function should be shared between all of the instances of the Person type. Constructor Functions with a Prototype JavaScript functions have a special property called prototype. When an object is created by calling a JavaScript constructor all of the properties of the constructor’s prototype become available to the new object. In this way many Person objects can be created that can access the same prototype. An improved version of the above example can be written: function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; } Person.prototype = { toString: function() { return this.name + " is " + this.age + " years old."; } }; var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); In this version a single instance of the toString() function will now be shared between all Person objects. Private Members The short version is: there aren’t any. If a variable is defined, with the var keyword, within the constructor function then its scope is that function. Other functions defined within the constructor function will be able to access the private variable, but anything defined outside the constructor (such as functions on the prototype property) won’t have access to the private variable. Any variables defined on the constructor are automatically public. Some people solve this problem by prefixing properties with an underscore and then not calling those properties by convention. function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; } Person.prototype = { _getName: function() { return this.name; }, toString: function() { return this._getName() + " is " + this.age + " years old."; } }; var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); Note that the _getName() function is only private by convention – it is in fact a public function. Functional Object Construction Because of the weirdness involved in using constructor functions some JavaScript developers prefer to eschew them completely. They theorize that it is better to work with JavaScript’s functional nature than to try and force it to behave like a traditional class-oriented language. When using the functional approach objects are created by returning them from a factory function. An excellent side effect of this pattern is that variables defined with the factory function are accessible to the new object (due to closure) but are inaccessible from anywhere else. The Person example implemented using the functional object construction pattern is: var personFactory = function(name, age) { var privateVar = 7; return { toString: function() { return name + " is " + age * privateVar / privateVar + " years old."; } }; }; var john2 = personFactory("John Lennon", 40); console.log(john2.toString()); Note that the ‘new’ keyword is not used for this pattern, and that the toString() function has access to the name, age and privateVar variables because of closure. This pattern can be extended to provide inheritance and, unlike the constructor function pattern, it supports private variables. However, when working with JavaScript code bases you will find that the constructor function is more common – probably because it is a better approximation of mainstream class oriented languages like C# and Java. Inheritance Both of the above patterns can support inheritance but for now, favour composition over inheritance. Summary When JavaScript code exceeds simple browser automation object orientation can provide a powerful paradigm for controlling complexity. Both of the patterns presented in this article work – the choice is a matter of style. Only one question still remains; who is John Galt?

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• JavaScript Class Patterns

  - by Liam McLennan

  To write object-oriented programs we need objects, and likely lots of them. JavaScript makes it easy to create objects: var liam = { name: "Liam", age: Number.MAX_VALUE }; But JavaScript does not provide an easy way to create similar objects. Most object-oriented languages include the idea of a class, which is a template for creating objects of the same type. From one class many similar objects can be instantiated. Many patterns have been proposed to address the absence of a class concept in JavaScript. This post will compare and contrast the most significant of them. Simple Constructor Functions Classes may be missing but JavaScript does support special constructor functions. By prefixing a call to a constructor function with the ‘new’ keyword we can tell the JavaScript runtime that we want the function to behave like a constructor and instantiate a new object containing the members defined by that function. Within a constructor function the ‘this’ keyword references the new object being created -  so a basic constructor function might be: function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; this.toString = function() { return this.name + " is " + age + " years old."; }; } var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); Note that by convention the name of a constructor function is always written in Pascal Case (the first letter of each word is capital). This is to distinguish between constructor functions and other functions. It is important that constructor functions be called with the ‘new’ keyword and that not constructor functions are not. There are two problems with the pattern constructor function pattern shown above: It makes inheritance difficult The toString() function is redefined for each new object created by the Person constructor. This is sub-optimal because the function should be shared between all of the instances of the Person type. Constructor Functions with a Prototype JavaScript functions have a special property called prototype. When an object is created by calling a JavaScript constructor all of the properties of the constructor’s prototype become available to the new object. In this way many Person objects can be created that can access the same prototype. An improved version of the above example can be written: function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; } Person.prototype = { toString: function() { return this.name + " is " + this.age + " years old."; } }; var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); In this version a single instance of the toString() function will now be shared between all Person objects. Private Members The short version is: there aren’t any. If a variable is defined, with the var keyword, within the constructor function then its scope is that function. Other functions defined within the constructor function will be able to access the private variable, but anything defined outside the constructor (such as functions on the prototype property) won’t have access to the private variable. Any variables defined on the constructor are automatically public. Some people solve this problem by prefixing properties with an underscore and then not calling those properties by convention. function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; } Person.prototype = { _getName: function() { return this.name; }, toString: function() { return this._getName() + " is " + this.age + " years old."; } }; var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); Note that the _getName() function is only private by convention – it is in fact a public function. Functional Object Construction Because of the weirdness involved in using constructor functions some JavaScript developers prefer to eschew them completely. They theorize that it is better to work with JavaScript’s functional nature than to try and force it to behave like a traditional class-oriented language. When using the functional approach objects are created by returning them from a factory function. An excellent side effect of this pattern is that variables defined with the factory function are accessible to the new object (due to closure) but are inaccessible from anywhere else. The Person example implemented using the functional object construction pattern is: var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); var personFactory = function(name, age) { var privateVar = 7; return { toString: function() { return name + " is " + age * privateVar / privateVar + " years old."; } }; }; var john2 = personFactory("John Lennon", 40); console.log(john2.toString()); Note that the ‘new’ keyword is not used for this pattern, and that the toString() function has access to the name, age and privateVar variables because of closure. This pattern can be extended to provide inheritance and, unlike the constructor function pattern, it supports private variables. However, when working with JavaScript code bases you will find that the constructor function is more common – probably because it is a better approximation of mainstream class oriented languages like C# and Java. Inheritance Both of the above patterns can support inheritance but for now, favour composition over inheritance. Summary When JavaScript code exceeds simple browser automation object orientation can provide a powerful paradigm for controlling complexity. Both of the patterns presented in this article work – the choice is a matter of style. Only one question still remains; who is John Galt?

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• SQL SERVER – Fundamentals of Columnstore Index

  - by pinaldave

  There are two kind of storage in database. Row Store and Column Store. Row store does exactly as the name suggests – stores rows of data on a page – and column store stores all the data in a column on the same page. These columns are much easier to search – instead of a query searching all the data in an entire row whether the data is relevant or not, column store queries need only to search much lesser number of the columns. This means major increases in search speed and hard drive use. Additionally, the column store indexes are heavily compressed, which translates to even greater memory and faster searches. I am sure this looks very exciting and it does not mean that you convert every single index from row store to column store index. One has to understand the proper places where to use row store or column store indexes. Let us understand in this article what is the difference in Columnstore type of index. Column store indexes are run by Microsoft’s VertiPaq technology. However, all you really need to know is that this method of storing data is columns on a single page is much faster and more efficient. Creating a column store index is very easy, and you don’t have to learn new syntax to create them. You just need to specify the keyword “COLUMNSTORE” and enter the data as you normally would. Keep in mind that once you add a column store to a table, though, you cannot delete, insert or update the data – it is READ ONLY. However, since column store will be mainly used for data warehousing, this should not be a big problem. You can always use partitioning to avoid rebuilding the index. A columnstore index stores each column in a separate set of disk pages, rather than storing multiple rows per page as data traditionally has been stored. The difference between column store and row store approaches is illustrated below: In case of the row store indexes multiple pages will contain multiple rows of the columns spanning across multiple pages. In case of column store indexes multiple pages will contain multiple single columns. This will lead only the columns needed to solve a query will be fetched from disk. Additionally there is good chance that there will be redundant data in a single column which will further help to compress the data, this will have positive effect on buffer hit rate as most of the data will be in memory and due to same it will not need to be retrieved. Let us see small example of how columnstore index improves the performance of the query on a large table. As a first step let us create databaseset which is large enough to show performance impact of columnstore index. The time taken to create sample database may vary on different computer based on the resources. USE AdventureWorks GO -- Create New Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail]( [SalesOrderID] [int] NOT NULL, [SalesOrderDetailID] [int] NOT NULL, [CarrierTrackingNumber] [nvarchar](25) NULL, [OrderQty] [smallint] NOT NULL, [ProductID] [int] NOT NULL, [SpecialOfferID] [int] NOT NULL, [UnitPrice] [money] NOT NULL, [UnitPriceDiscount] [money] NOT NULL, [LineTotal] [numeric](38, 6) NOT NULL, [rowguid] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL, [ModifiedDate] [datetime] NOT NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Create clustered index CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [CL_MySalesOrderDetail] ON [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] ( [SalesOrderDetailID]) GO -- Create Sample Data Table -- WARNING: This Query may run upto 2-10 minutes based on your systems resources INSERT INTO [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] SELECT S1.* FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail S1 GO 100 Now let us do quick performance test. I have kept STATISTICS IO ON for measuring how much IO following queries take. In my test first I will run query which will use regular index. We will note the IO usage of the query. After that we will create columnstore index and will measure the IO of the same. -- Performance Test -- Comparing Regular Index with ColumnStore Index USE AdventureWorks GO SET STATISTICS IO ON GO -- Select Table with regular Index SELECT ProductID, SUM(UnitPrice) SumUnitPrice, AVG(UnitPrice) AvgUnitPrice, SUM(OrderQty) SumOrderQty, AVG(OrderQty) AvgOrderQty FROM [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GROUP BY ProductID ORDER BY ProductID GO -- Table 'MySalesOrderDetail'. Scan count 1, logical reads 342261, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0. -- Create ColumnStore Index CREATE NONCLUSTERED COLUMNSTORE INDEX [IX_MySalesOrderDetail_ColumnStore] ON [MySalesOrderDetail] (UnitPrice, OrderQty, ProductID) GO -- Select Table with Columnstore Index SELECT ProductID, SUM(UnitPrice) SumUnitPrice, AVG(UnitPrice) AvgUnitPrice, SUM(OrderQty) SumOrderQty, AVG(OrderQty) AvgOrderQty FROM [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GROUP BY ProductID ORDER BY ProductID GO It is very clear from the results that query is performance extremely fast after creating ColumnStore Index. The amount of the pages it has to read to run query is drastically reduced as the column which are needed in the query are stored in the same page and query does not have to go through every single page to read those columns. If we enable execution plan and compare we can see that column store index performance way better than regular index in this case. Let us clean up the database. -- Cleanup DROP INDEX [IX_MySalesOrderDetail_ColumnStore] ON [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GO TRUNCATE TABLE dbo.MySalesOrderDetail GO DROP TABLE dbo.MySalesOrderDetail GO In future posts we will see cases where Columnstore index is not appropriate solution as well few other tricks and tips of the columnstore index. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Create a Slide Show in Windows 7 Media Center

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Are you looking for a nice way to create and display a slide show from your photo collection? Today we’ll show you how to create a slide show, how to add music to it, and watch it from the comfort of your couch in Windows 7 Media Center. Create Slide Show Launch Windows 7 Media Center and click on the Picture Library tile found under Pictures and Videos.   In the Pictures Library, scroll across to slide shows and click on Create Slide show.   Enter a name for the slide show and click Next.   If you are using a Windows Media Center remote, click on the OK button to bring up the onscreen keyboard. Use the directional buttons to navigate across the keyboard and press OK to select each letter. Click Done when finished. Select Picture Library and click Next. Select the pictures to include in your slide show. If using a remote, navigate through the images and press OK to select. If you are using a mouse, simply click on the selections. When you are finished, click Next.    Now, we can review and edit the slide show. Click the up or down pointing arrows to move pictures up and down in the order.  (more intuitive titles would be helpful in this case as opposed to the randomly generated titles in the example below) If you are finished, click Create. You can also choose to go back and add music to your slide show. (or even more pictures) We’ll take a look at adding some music in our example. Click on the Add More button.   Add Music to Your Slide Show Here we’ll select Music Library to add a song. Click Next.   You’ll now be able to browse your Music Library to select songs for your slide show. Select your songs and click Next.   When you are finished adding Music and Pictures click Create.   Once your slide show is saved, you can play it any time by going to clicking on slide shows in the Picture Library, then selecting the slide show title. Select play slide show when you’re ready to enjoy your new production.   If you ever want to edit or delete the slide show, select it in the Picture Library, and scroll to Actions. You’ll see those option under additional commands. You have the option to Edit Slide Show, Burn a CD/DVD, or Delete. Editing Slide Show Settings Within Media Center, go to Tasks… Click on Pictures…   Then choose Slide Shows. From the Slide Show settings you have the option to Show pictures in random order, Show picture information, Show song information, and Use Pan and zoom effect. You can also adjust the length of time to display each picture, and change the background color. Be sure to click Save to apply and changes before exiting. If you choose to show picture information, the picture title, date, and star rating will be displayed in the top right.   If your slide show is accompanied by music and you choose to show song information, you will get a translucent overlay for a few seconds at the beginning of each song to indicate the song, album, and artist. One of the really cool things about creating a slide show in Windows 7 Media Center is you can complete the entire process using just a Media Center remote. Can’t get enough slide shows? Check out how to turn your desktop into a picture slide show in Windows 7. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Add Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program GuideIntegrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7Schedule Updates for Windows Media CenterTurn Your Desktop into a Picture Slideshow in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook Recycle ! Find That Elusive Icon with FindIcons

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• Prevent Changing the Screen Saver and Wallpaper in Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  Sometimes you might not want users to have the ability to change Screen Savers and Wallpaper on Windows 7 workstations. Today we look at how to prevent them from changing either one or both. You might administer computers in your home or small office and find it annoying when users continuously change the wallpaper and Screen Savers to something obnoxious. A lot of times they might be inexperienced users and download these so-called “wonderful and free” Screen Saver/Wallpaper packages from shady sites that include loads of Spyware. Preventing users from changing them is another helpful tool to avoid wasteful time spent switching things back. Prevent Changing Screensavers & Wallpaper Using Group Policy Editor  Note: This method uses Group Policy which is not available in Home versions on Windows 7. Open the Start Menu and enter gpedit.msc into the Search box and hit Enter. When Local Group Policy Editor opens, navigate to User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Control Panel \ Personalization. Then in the right column double-click on Prevent changing desktop background. Now check the radio button next to Enabled, then click OK. Back on the Group Policy Screen, double-click on Prevent changing screen saver. In the next screen select the radio button next to Enable, click OK, then close out of Group Policy Editor. Now when a user goes into the Personalization section, the Desktop Background hyperlink is now grayed out and inactive. Notice the message One or more of the settings on this page has been disabled by the system administrator at the bottom of the section. If they click to change the Screen Saver, an error message will pop up letting them know the function is disabled. Prevent Changing Screensavers & Wallpaper Using a Registry Hack You can also make a couple Registry changes to prevent users from changing the Wallpaper & Screen Saver…which will work on Home versions of Windows 7. Before making any Registry changes make sure you back it up first. Open the Registry by typing regedit into the Search box in the Start menu and hit Enter. First we’ll start with the Wallpaper. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System and create a new String Value and name it Wallpaper. Then modify the Value data to point to the location of the Wallpaper you want it to always be. Where in this example it’s our main wallpaper on our local drive…then click OK. Now let’s make sure they can’t change the Screen Saver. In the same Registry location, we need to make a new DWORD (32-bit) Value. Give it the Value name of NoDispScrSavPage and the value data of “1” and click OK. Close out of the Registry and restart the machine or simply log off then back on again for the changes to take effect. Results For the Wallpapers, a user can still go in and see the selections, however if they try to change it to something else… It will just go back to the Personalization screen and no changes will be made, as we set the value to only be the background we specified. If the user tries to make a change to the Screen Saver, the hyperlink will be grayed out and inactive, and the message One or more of the settings on this page has been disabled by the system administrator will be displayed at the bottom of the section. Conclusion If you’re tired of users changing the Wallpaper and Screen Saver, and want another way to help avoid Malware, locking down these settings can help a lot. Again, before making any changes to the Registry, make sure to back it up. These settings should work in Vista and XP as well. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Save 1-4% More Battery Life With Windows Vista Battery SaverCustomize Your Windows Vista Logon ScreenEnable "Ubuntu Style" Logons in Windows VistaManage the Delete Confirmation Dialog box in Windows 7Dual Monitors: Use a Different Wallpaper on Each Desktop TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott

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• BPM Suite 11gR1 Released

  - by Manoj Das

  This morning (April 27th, 2010), Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 became available for download from OTN and eDelivery. If you have been following our plans in this area, you know that this is the release unifying BEA ALBPM product, which became Oracle BPM10gR3, with the Oracle stack. Some of the highlights of this release are: BPMN 2.0 modeling and simulation Web based Process Composer for BPMN and Rules authoring Zero-code environment with full access to Oracle SOA Suite’s rich set of application and other adapters Process Spaces – Out-of-box integration with Web Center Suite Process Analytics – Native process cubes as well as integration with Oracle BAM You can learn more about this release from the documentation. Notes about downloading and installing Please note that Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 is delivered and installed as part of SOA 11.1.1.3.0, which is a sparse release (only incremental patch). To install: Download and install SOA 11.1.1.2.0, which is a full release (you can find the bits at the above location) Download and install SOA 11.1.1.3.0 During configure step (using the Fusion Middleware configuration wizard), use the Oracle Business Process Management template supplied with the SOA Suite11g (11.1.1.3.0) If you plan to use Process Spaces, also install Web Center 11.1.1.3.0, which also is delivered as a sparse release and needs to be installed on top of Web Center 11.1.1.2.0 Some early feedback We have been receiving very encouraging feedback on this release. Some quotes from partners are included below: “I just attended a preview workshop on BPM Studio, Oracle's BPMN 2.0 tool, held by Clemens Utschig Utschig from Oracle HQ. The usability and ease to get started are impressive. In the business view analysts can intuitively start modeling, then developers refine in their own, more technical view. The BPM Studio sets itself apart from pure play BPMN 2.0 tools by being seamlessly integrated inside a holistic SOA / BPM toolset: BPMN models are placed in SCA-Composites in SOA Suite 11g. This allows to abstract away the complexities of SOA integration aspects from business process aspects. For UIs in BPMN tasks, you have the richness of ADF 11g based Frontends. With BPM Studio we architects have a new modeling and development IDE that gives us interesting design challenges to grasp and elaborate, since many things BPMN 2.0 are different from good ol' BPEL. For example, for simple transformations, you don't use BPEL "assign" any more, but add the transformation directly to the service call. There is much less XPath involved. And, there is no translation from model to BPEL code anymore, so the awkward process model to BPEL roundtrip, which never really worked as well as it looked on marketing slides, is obsolete: With BPMN 2.0 "the model is the code". Now, these are great times to start the journey into BPM! Some tips: Start Projects smoothly, with initial processes being not overly complex and not using the more esoteric areas of BPMN, to manage the learning path and to stay successful with each iteration. Verify non functional requirements by conducting performance and load tests early. As mentioned above, separate all technical integration logic into SOA Suite or Oracle Service Bus. And - share your experience!” Hajo Normann, SOA Architect - Oracle ACE Director - Co-Leader DOAG SIG SOA   "Reuse of components across the Oracle 11G Fusion Middleware stack, like for instance a Database Adapter, is essential. It improves stability and predictability of the solution. BPM just is one of the components plugging into the stack and reuses all other components." Mr. Leon Smiers, Oracle Solution Architect, Capgemini   “I had the opportunity to follow a hands-on workshop held by Clemens for Oracle partners and I was really impressed of the overall offering of BPM11g. BPM11g allows the execution of BPMN 2.0 processes, without having to transform/translate them first to BPEL in order to be executable. The fact that BPMN uses the same underlying service infrastructure of SOA Suite 11g has a lot of benefits for us already familiar with SOA Suite 11g. BPMN is just another SCA component within a SCA composite and can (re)use all the existing components like Rules, Human Workflow, Adapters and Mediator. I also like the fact that BPMN runs on the same service engine as BPEL. By that all known best practices for making a BPEL  process reliable are valid for BPMN processes as well. Last but not least, BPMN is integrated into the superior end-to-end tracing of SOA Suite 11g. With BPM11g, Oracle offers a very competitive product which will have a big effect on the IT market. Clemens and Jürgen: Thanks for the great workshop! I’m really looking forward to my first project using Oracle BPM11g!” Guido Schmutz, Technology Manager / Oracle ACE Director for Fusion Middleware and SOA, Company:  Trivadis Some earlier feedback were summarized in this post.

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• Do Not Optimize Without Measuring

  - by Alois Kraus

  Recently I had to do some performance work which included reading a lot of code. It is fascinating with what ideas people come up to solve a problem. Especially when there is no problem. When you look at other peoples code you will not be able to tell if it is well performing or not by reading it. You need to execute it with some sort of tracing or even better under a profiler. The first rule of the performance club is not to think and then to optimize but to measure, think and then optimize. The second rule is to do this do this in a loop to prevent slipping in bad things for too long into your code base. If you skip for some reason the measure step and optimize directly it is like changing the wave function in quantum mechanics. This has no observable effect in our world since it does represent only a probability distribution of all possible values. In quantum mechanics you need to let the wave function collapse to a single value. A collapsed wave function has therefore not many but one distinct value. This is what we physicists call a measurement. If you optimize your application without measuring it you are just changing the probability distribution of your potential performance values. Which performance your application actually has is still unknown. You only know that it will be within a specific range with a certain probability. As usual there are unlikely values within your distribution like a startup time of 20 minutes which should only happen once in 100 000 years. 100 000 years are a very short time when the first customer tries your heavily distributed networking application to run over a slow WIFI network… What is the point of this? Every programmer/architect has a mental performance model in his head. A model has always a set of explicit preconditions and a lot more implicit assumptions baked into it. When the model is good it will help you to think of good designs but it can also be the source of problems. In real world systems not all assumptions of your performance model (implicit or explicit) hold true any longer. The only way to connect your performance model and the real world is to measure it. In the WIFI example the model did assume a low latency high bandwidth LAN connection. If this assumption becomes wrong the system did have a drastic change in startup time. Lets look at a example. Lets assume we want to cache some expensive UI resource like fonts objects. For this undertaking we do create a Cache class with the UI themes we want to support. Since Fonts are expensive objects we do create it on demand the first time the theme is requested. A simple example of a Theme cache might look like this: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Drawing; struct Theme { public Color Color; public Font Font; } static class ThemeCache { static Dictionary<string, Theme> _Cache = new Dictionary<string, Theme> { {"Default", new Theme { Color = Color.AliceBlue }}, {"Theme12", new Theme { Color = Color.Aqua }}, }; public static Theme Get(string theme) { Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } return cached; } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Theme item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); } } This cache does create font objects only once since on first retrieve of the Theme object the font is added to the Theme object. When we let the application run it should print “Creating new font” only once. Right? Wrong! The vigilant readers have spotted the issue already. The creator of this cache class wanted to get maximum performance. So he decided that the Theme object should be a value type (struct) to not put too much pressure on the garbage collector. The code Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } does work with a copy of the value stored in the dictionary. This means we do mutate a copy of the Theme object and return it to our caller. But the original Theme object in the dictionary will have always null for the Font field! The solution is to change the declaration of struct Theme to class Theme or to update the theme object in the dictionary. Our cache as it is currently is actually a non caching cache. The funny thing was that I found out with a profiler by looking at which objects where finalized. I found way too many font objects to be finalized. After a bit debugging I found the allocation source for Font objects was this cache. Since this cache was there for years it means that the cache was never needed since I found no perf issue due to the creation of font objects. the cache was never profiled if it did bring any performance gain. to make the cache beneficial it needs to be accessed much more often. That was the story of the non caching cache. Next time I will write something something about measuring.

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• top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – March 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/wlscommunity PeterPaul ? RT @JDeveloper: EJB 3 Deployment guide for WebLogic Server Version: 10.3.4.0 dlvr.it/1J5VcV Andrejus Baranovskis ?Open ADF PopUp on Page Load fb.me/1Rx9LP3oW Sten Vesterli ? RT @OracleBlogs: Using the Oracle E-Business Suite SDK for Java on ADF Applications ow.ly/1hVKbB <- Neat! No more WS calls Java Buddy ?JavaFX 2.0: Example of MediaPlay java-buddy.blogspot.com/2012/03/javafx… Georges Saab Build improvements coming to #openJDK for #jdk8 mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/buil… NetBeans Team Share your #Java experience! JavaOne 2012 India call for papers: ow.ly/9xYg0 GlassFish ? GlassFish 3.1.2 Screencasts & Videos – bit.ly/zmQjn2 chriscmuir ?G+: New blog post: ADF Runtimes vs WLS versions as of JDeveloper 11.1.1.6.0 – bit.ly/y8tkgJ Michael Heinrichs New article: Creating a Sprite Animation with JavaFX blog.netopyr.com/2012/03/09/cre… Oracle WebLogic ? #WebLogic Devcast Webinar Series for March: Enterprise Java Scale Out, JPA, Distributed Grid Data Cache bit.ly/zeUXEV #Coherence Andrejus Baranovskis ?Extending Application Module for ADF BC Proxy User DB Connection fb.me/Bj1hLUqm OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Fusion Middleware on JDK 7 | Mark Nelson bit.ly/w7IroZ OTNArchBeat ? Java Champion Jonas Bonér Explains the Akka Platform bit.ly/x2GbXm Adam Bien ? (Java) FX Experience Tools–Feels Like Native Mac App: FX Experience Tools application comes with a native Mac O… bit.ly/waHF3H GlassFish ? GlassFish new recruit and Eclipse integration progress – bit.ly/y5eEkk JDeveloper & ADF Prototyping ADF Libraries dlvr.it/1Hhnw0 Eric Elzinga ?Oracle Fusion Middleware on JDK 7, bit.ly/xkphFQ ADF EMG ? Working with ADF in Arabic, Hebrew or other right-to-left-written language? Oracle UX asks for your help. groups.google.com/forum/?fromgro… Java ? A simple #JavaFX Login Form with a TRON like effect ow.ly/9n9AG JDeveloper & ADF ? Logging in Oracle ADF Applications dlvr.it/1HZhcX OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Cloud Conference: dates and locations worldwide bit.ly/ywXydR UK Oracle User Group ? Simon Haslam, ACE Director present on #WebLogic for DBAs at #oug_ire2012 j.mp/zG6vz3 @oraclewebcenter @oracleace #dublin Steven Davelaar ? Working with ADF and not a member of ADF EMG? You miss lots of valuable info, join now! sites.google.com/site/oracleemg… Simon Haslam @MaciejGruszka: Oracle plans to provide Forms & Reports plug-in for OVAB next year to help deployment. #ukoug MW SIG GlassFish ? Introducing JSR 357: Social Media API – bit.ly/yC8vez JAX London ? Are you coming to Java EE workshops by @AdamBien at JAX Days? Save £100 by registering today. #jaxdays #javaee jaxdays.com WebLogic Community ?Welcome to our Munich WebLogic 12c Bootcamp in Munich! If you also want to attend a training register for the Community oracle.com/partners/goto/… chriscmuir ? My first webcast for Oracle! (be kind) Basing ADF Business Component View Objects on More that one Entity Object bit.ly/ArKija OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Weblogic Server 12c is available on Oracle Solaris 11 (SPARC and x86) bit.ly/xE3TLg JDeveloper & ADF ? Basing ADF Business Component View Objects on More that one Entity Object – YouTube dlvr.it/1H93Qr OTNArchBeat ? Application-Driven Virtualization with Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder | Ronen Kofman bit.ly/wF1C1N Oracle WebLogic ? Steve Button’s blog: WebLogic Server Singleton Services ow.ly/1hOu4U Barbara Ann May ?@oracledevtools: New update: #NetBeans IDE 7.1.1, with support for #GlassFish 3.1.2 bit.ly/mOLcQd #java #developer OTNArchBeat ? Using Coherence with JDeveloper: bit.ly/AkoEQb WebLogic Community ? WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter February 2012 wp.me/p1LMIb-f3 GlassFish ? GlassFish 3.1.2 – new Podcast episode : bit.ly/wc6oBE Frank Nimphius ?Cool! Open JDeveloper 11.1.1.5, go help–>check for updates. First thing shown is that 11.1.1.6 is available. Never miss a new release Adam Bien ?5 Minutes (Video) With Java EE …Or With NetBeans + GlassFish: This screencast covers a 5-minute development of a… bit.ly/xkOJMf WebLogic Community ? Free Oracle WebLogic Certification Application Grid Implementation Specialist wp.me/p1LMIb-eT OTNArchBeat ?Oracle Coherence: First Steps Using Clusters and Basic API Usage | Ricardo Ferreira bit.ly/yYQ3Wz GlassFish ? JMS 2.0 Early Draft is here – bit.ly/ygT1VN OTNArchBeat ? Exalogic Networking Part 2 | The Old Toxophilist bit.ly/xuYMIi OTNArchBeat ?New Release: GlassFish Server 3.1.2. Read All About It! | Paul Davies bit.ly/AtlGxo Oracle WebLogic ?OTN Virtual Developer Day: #WebLogic 12c & #Coherence ost-conference on-demand page live with bonus #Virtualbox lab – bit.ly/xUy6BJ Oracle WebLogic ? Steve Button’s blog: WebLogic Server 11g (10.3.6) Documentation ow.ly/1hJgUB Lucas Jellema ? Just published an article on the AMIS blog: technology.amis.nl/2012/03/adf-11… ADF 11g – programmatically sorting rich table columns. Java Certification ? New Course! Learn how to create mobile applications using Java ME: bit.ly/xZj1Jh Simon Haslam ? @MaciejGruszka WebLogic 12c can run against 11g domain config without changes …and can rollback to 11. #ukoug MW SIG Justin Kestelyn ? Learn Advanced ADF, free and online bit.ly/wEKSRc WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,OPN,Oracle,Jürgen Kress,WebLogic 12c

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• Getting to grips with the stack in nasm

  - by MarkPearl

  Today I spent a good part of my day getting to grips with the stack and nasm. After looking at my notes on nasm I think this is one area for the course I am doing they could focus more on… So here are some snippets I have put together that have helped me understand a little bit about the stack… Simplest example of the stack You will probably see examples like the following in circulation… these demonstrate the simplest use of the stack… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main main: push 42h push 43h push 44h mov ah,2h ;set to display characters pop dx    ;get the first value int 21h   ;and display it pop dx    ;get 2nd value int 21h   ;and display it pop dx    ;get 3rd value int 21h   ;and display it int 20h The output from above code would be… DCB Decoupling code using “call” and “ret” This is great, but it oversimplifies what I want to use the stack for… I do not know if this goes against the grain of assembly programmers or not, but I want to write loosely coupled assembly code – and I want to use the stack as a mechanism for passing values into my decoupled code. In nasm we have the call and return instructions, which provides a mechanism for decoupling code, for example the following could be done… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov ah,2h mov dx,41h int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: call displayChar int 20h   This would output the following to the console A So, it would seem that call and ret allow us to jump to segments of our code and then return back to the calling position – a form of segmenting the code into what we would called in higher order languages “functions” or “methods”. The only issue is, in higher order languages there is a way to pass parameters into the functions and return results. Because of the primitive nature of the call and ret instructions, this does not seem to be obvious. We could of course use the registers to pass values into the subroutine and set values coming out, but the problem with this is we… Have a limited number of registers Are threading our code with tight coupling (it would be hard to migrate methods outside of their intended use in a particular program to another one) With that in mind, I turn to the stack to provide a loosely coupled way of calling subroutines… First attempt with the Stack Initially I thought this would be simple… we could use code that looks as follows to achieve what I want… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov ah,2h pop dx int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: push 41h call displayChar int 20h   However running this application does not give the desired result, I want an ‘A’ to be returned, and I am getting something totally different (you will to). Reading up on the call and ret instructions a discovery is made… they are pushing and popping things onto and off the stack as well… When the call instruction is executed, the current value of IP (the address of the instruction to follow) is pushed onto the stack, when ret is called, the last value on the stack is popped off into the IP register. In effect what the above code is doing is as follows with the stack… push 41h push current value of ip pop current value of ip to dx pop 41h to ip This is not what I want, I need to access the 41h that I pushed onto the stack, but the call value (which is necessary) is putting something in my way. So, what to do? Remember we have other registers we can use as well as a thing called indirect addressing… So, after some reading around, I came up with the following approach using indirect addressing… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov bp,sp mov ah,2h mov dx,[bp+2] int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: push 41h call displayChar int 20h In essence, what I have done here is used a trick with the stack pointer… it goes as follows… Push 41 onto the stack Make the call to the function, which will push the IP register onto the stack and then jump to the displayChar label Move the value in the stack point to the bp register (sp currently points at IP register) Move the at the location of bp minus 2 bytes to dx (this is now the value 41h) display it, execute the ret instruction, which pops the ip value off the stack and goes back to the calling point This approach is still very raw, some further reading around shows that I should be pushing the value of bp onto the stack before replacing it with sp, but it is the starting thread to getting loosely coupled subroutines. Let’s see if you get what the following output would be? org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov bp,sp mov ah,2h mov dx,[bp+4] int 21h mov dx,[bp+2] int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: push 41h push 42h call displayChar int 20h The output is… AB Where to from here? If by any luck some assembly programmer comes along and see this code and notices that I have made some fundamental flaw in my logic… I would like to know, so please leave a comment… appreciate any feedback!

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• SQL SERVER – The Story of a Lesser Known Startup Parameter in SQL Server – Guest Post by Balmukund Lakhani

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is a fantastic blog post from my dear friend Balmukund ( blog | twitter | facebook ). He had presented a fantastic session in our last UG and there were lots of requests from attendees that he blogs about it. Well, here is the blog post about the same very popular UG session. Let us read the entire blog post in the voice of the Balmukund himself. During my last session in SQL Bangalore User Group (Facebook) meeting, I was lucky enough to deliver a session on SQL Server Startup issue. The name of the session was “SQL Engine Starting Trouble – How to start?” From the feedback, I realized that one of the “not well known” startup parameter is “-m”. Okay, you might say “I know that this is used to start the SQL in single user mode”. But what you might not know is that you can pass a string with -m which has special meaning and use. I have used this parameter in my blog here but looks like not many of you have seen that. It happens most of the time when we want to start SQL Server in single user mode, someone else makes connection before you can. The only choice you have is to repeat same process again till you succeed. Some smart DBAs may disable the remote network protocols (TCP/IP and Named Pipes) of SQL Instance and allow only local connections to SQL. Once the activity is complete, our dear smart DBA has to remember to re-enable network protocols. Sometimes, it may be a local service or application getting connection to SQL before we can. There is a better way to deal with it. Yes, you have guessed it correctly: -m parameter which a string. Since I work with SQL Product Support team, I may know little more undocumented commands and parameters, but this is not an undocumented stuff. It’s already documented in books online. So in this blog, I am going to show a demo of its usage. As documentation shows, “Do not use this option as a security feature.” So please read this blog as knowledge enhancer and troubleshooting issues not security feature. In my laptop, I have a default instance of SQL Server 2012 and here is what we would in the configuration manager. Now, I would go ahead and stop SQL Service by selecting SQL Server (MSSQLServer) > Right Click > Stop. There are multiple ways to start SQL with startup parameter. 1) Use Net Start Command from command prompt Net Start MSSQLServer /mSQLCMD The above command is the simplest way to add startup parameter to SQL. This parameter would be cleared once we stop and start SQL. 2) Add Startup Parameter via configuration manager. Step is already listed here. We need to add -mSQLCMD If we compare 1 and 2, it’s clear that unless we modify startup parameter and remove -m, it would be in effect. 3) Start SQL Service via command line SQLServr.exe –mSQLCMD –s<InstanceName> Wait, what does SQLCMD mean with /m? It’s the instruction to SQL that start SQL Server in Single User Mode and allow only the application which is SQLCMD. Any other application would fail with Login Failed for User Error message. It would be important to note that string is case sensitive. This value should be picked up from application_name column from sys.dm_exec_sessions. I have made a connection using SQLCMD and as we can see it comes as upper case “SQLCMD”. If we want only management studio query windows to connect then we need to give -m” Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio – Query” as startup parameter. In below example, I have given it as SQLCMd (lower case d at the end) and we would notice that we would not be able to connect to SQL Instance. Above proves that parameter works as expected and it’s case sensitive. Error Log would show below information. How to get error log location? I have already blogged about it. Hope you have learned something new. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• problems with my slotgame [delphi]

  - by Raiden2k

  hey guys im coding at the moment on a slotgame for the learning effect. here is the source code. my questions are below: unit Unit1; {$mode objfpc}{$H+} interface uses Classes, SysUtils, Windows, FileUtil, Forms, Controls, Graphics, Dialogs, StdCtrls, ExtCtrls, ComCtrls, Menus, ActnList, Spin, FileCtrl; type { TForm1 } TForm1 = class(TForm) FloatSpinEdit1: TFloatSpinEdit; Guthabenlb: TLabel; s4: TLabel; s5: TLabel; s6: TLabel; s7: TLabel; s8: TLabel; s9: TLabel; Timer3: TTimer; Winlb: TLabel; Loselb: TLabel; slotbn: TButton; s1: TLabel; s2: TLabel; s3: TLabel; Timer1: TTimer; Timer2: TTimer; procedure FormCreate(Sender: TObject); procedure slotbnClick(Sender: TObject); procedure Timer1Timer(Sender: TObject); procedure Timer2Timer(Sender: TObject); procedure Timer3Timer(Sender: TObject); private { private declarations } FRollen : array [0..2, 0..9] of String; public { public declarations } end; var Form1: TForm1; wins,loses : Integer; guthaben : Double = 10; implementation {$R *.lfm} { TForm1 } procedure TForm1.slotbnClick(Sender: TObject); begin Guthaben := Guthaben - 1.00; Guthabenlb.Caption := FloatToStr(guthaben) + (' €'); Timer1.Enabled := True; Timer2.Enabled := True; slotbn.Enabled := false; end; procedure TForm1.FormCreate(Sender: TObject); var i: integer; j: integer; n: integer; digits: TStringlist; begin Digits := TStringList.Create; try for i := low(FRollen) to high(FRollen) do begin for j := low(FRollen[i]) to high(FRollen[i]) do Digits.Add(IntToStr(j)); for j := low(FRollen[i]) to high(FRollen[i]) do begin n := Random(Digits.Count); FRollen[i, j] := Digits[n]; Digits.Delete(n); end; end finally Digits.Free; end; for i:=low(FRollen) to high(FRollen) do begin end; end; //==================================================================================================\\ // Drehen der Slots im Zufallsmodus //==================================================================================================// procedure TForm1.Timer1Timer(Sender: TObject); begin s1.Caption := IntToStr(Random(9)); s2.Caption := IntToStr(Random(9)); s3.Caption := IntToStr(Random(9)); s4.Caption := IntToStr(Random(9)); s5.Caption := IntToStr(Random(9)); s6.Caption := IntToStr(Random(9)); s7.Caption := IntToStr(Random(9)); s8.Caption := IntToStr(Random(9)); s9.Caption := IntToStr(Random(9)); end; //==================================================================================================// //===================================================================================================\\ // Gewonnen / Verloren abfrage //===================================================================================================// procedure TForm1.Timer2Timer(Sender: TObject); begin Timer1.Enabled := False; Timer2.Enabled := false; if (s1.Caption = s5.Caption) and (s1.Caption = s9.Caption) then begin Guthaben := Guthaben + 5.00; Inc(wins); end else if (s1.Caption = s4.Caption) and (s1.Caption = s7.Caption) then begin Guthaben := Guthaben + 5.00; Inc(wins); end else if (s2.Caption = s5.Caption) and (s2.Caption = s8.Caption) then begin Guthaben := Guthaben + 5.00; Inc(wins); end else if (s3.Caption = s6.Caption) and (s3.Caption = s9.Caption) then begin Guthaben := Guthaben + 5.00; Inc(wins); end else if (s3.Caption = s5.Caption) and (s3.Caption = s7.Caption) then begin Guthaben := Guthaben + 5.00; Inc(wins); end else Inc(loses); slotbn.Enabled := True; Loselb.Caption := 'Loses: ' + IntToStr(loses); Winlb.Caption := 'Wins: ' + IntTostr(Wins); end; procedure TForm1.Timer3Timer(Sender: TObject); begin if (guthaben = 0) or (guthaben < 0) then begin Timer3.Enabled := False; MessageBox(handle,'Du hast verloren!','Verlierer!',MB_OK); close(); end; end; //======================================================================================================\\ end. How can i replace the labels through icons 16 x 16 pixels? How can i adjust the winning sum according to the icons.(for example 3 crowns give you 40 € and 3 apples only 10 €) How can i adhust the winning sum with a sum for every round?

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• Why lock-free data structures just aren't lock-free enough

  - by Alex.Davies

  Today's post will explore why the current ways to communicate between threads don't scale, and show you a possible way to build scalable parallel programming on top of shared memory. The problem with shared memory Soon, we will have dozens, hundreds and then millions of cores in our computers. It's inevitable, because individual cores just can't get much faster. At some point, that's going to mean that we have to rethink our architecture entirely, as millions of cores can't all access a shared memory space efficiently. But millions of cores are still a long way off, and in the meantime we'll see machines with dozens of cores, struggling with shared memory. Alex's tip: The best way for an application to make use of that increasing parallel power is to use a concurrency model like actors, that deals with synchronisation issues for you. Then, the maintainer of the actors framework can find the most efficient way to coordinate access to shared memory to allow your actors to pass messages to each other efficiently. At the moment, NAct uses the .NET thread pool and a few locks to marshal messages. It works well on dual and quad core machines, but it won't scale to more cores. Every time we use a lock, our core performs an atomic memory operation (eg. CAS) on a cell of memory representing the lock, so it's sure that no other core can possibly have that lock. This is very fast when the lock isn't contended, but we need to notify all the other cores, in case they held the cell of memory in a cache. As the number of cores increases, the total cost of a lock increases linearly. A lot of work has been done on "lock-free" data structures, which avoid locks by using atomic memory operations directly. These give fairly dramatic performance improvements, particularly on systems with a few (2 to 4) cores. The .NET 4 concurrent collections in System.Collections.Concurrent are mostly lock-free. However, lock-free data structures still don't scale indefinitely, because any use of an atomic memory operation still involves every core in the system. A sync-free data structure Some concurrent data structures are possible to write in a completely synchronization-free way, without using any atomic memory operations. One useful example is a single producer, single consumer (SPSC) queue. It's easy to write a sync-free fixed size SPSC queue using a circular buffer*. Slightly trickier is a queue that grows as needed. You can use a linked list to represent the queue, but if you leave the nodes to be garbage collected once you're done with them, the GC will need to involve all the cores in collecting the finished nodes. Instead, I've implemented a proof of concept inspired by this intel article which reuses the nodes by putting them in a second queue to send back to the producer. * In all these cases, you need to use memory barriers correctly, but these are local to a core, so don't have the same scalability problems as atomic memory operations. Performance tests I tried benchmarking my SPSC queue against the .NET ConcurrentQueue, and against a standard Queue protected by locks. In some ways, this isn't a fair comparison, because both of these support multiple producers and multiple consumers, but I'll come to that later. I started on my dual-core laptop, running a simple test that had one thread producing 64 bit integers, and another consuming them, to measure the pure overhead of the queue. So, nothing very interesting here. Both concurrent collections perform better than the lock-based one as expected, but there's not a lot to choose between the ConcurrentQueue and my SPSC queue. I was a little disappointed, but then, the .NET Framework team spent a lot longer optimising it than I did. So I dug out a more powerful machine that Red Gate's DBA tools team had been using for testing. It is a 6 core Intel i7 machine with hyperthreading, adding up to 12 logical cores. Now the results get more interesting. As I increased the number of producer-consumer pairs to 6 (to saturate all 12 logical cores), the locking approach was slow, and got even slower, as you'd expect. What I didn't expect to be so clear was the drop-off in performance of the lock-free ConcurrentQueue. I could see the machine only using about 20% of available CPU cycles when it should have been saturated. My interpretation is that as all the cores used atomic memory operations to safely access the queue, they ended up spending most of the time notifying each other about cache lines that need invalidating. The sync-free approach scaled perfectly, despite still working via shared memory, which after all, should still be a bottleneck. I can't quite believe that the results are so clear, so if you can think of any other effects that might cause them, please comment! Obviously, this benchmark isn't realistic because we're only measuring the overhead of the queue. Any real workload, even on a machine with 12 cores, would dwarf the overhead, and there'd be no point worrying about this effect. But would that be true on a machine with 100 cores? Still to be solved. The trouble is, you can't build many concurrent algorithms using only an SPSC queue to communicate. In particular, I can't see a way to build something as general purpose as actors on top of just SPSC queues. Fundamentally, an actor needs to be able to receive messages from multiple other actors, which seems to need an MPSC queue. I've been thinking about ways to build a sync-free MPSC queue out of multiple SPSC queues and some kind of sign-up mechanism. Hopefully I'll have something to tell you about soon, but leave a comment if you have any ideas.

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• SQL SERVER – TechEd India 2012 – Content, Speakers and a Lots of Fun

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd is one event which every developers and IT professionals are looking forward to attend. It is opportunity of life time and no matter how many time one gets chance to engage with it, it is never enough. I still remember every single moment of every TechEd I have attended so far. We are less than 100 hours away from TechEd India 2012 event.This event is the one must attend event for every Technology Enthusiast. Fourth time in the row I am going to attend this event and I am equally excited as the first time of the event. There are going to be two very solid SQL Server track this time and I will be attending end of the end both the tracks. Here is my view on each of the 10 sessions. Each session is carefully crafted and leading exeprts from industry will present it. Day 1, March 21, 2012 T-SQL Rediscovered with SQL Server 2012 – This session is going to bring some of the lesser known enhancements that were brought with SQL Server 2012. When I learned that Jacob Sebastian is going to do this session my reaction to this is DEMO, DEMO and DEMO! Jacob spends hours and hours of his time preparing his session and this will be one of those session that I am confident will be delivered over and over through out the next many events. Catapult your data with SQL Server 2012 Integration Services – Praveen is expert story teller and one of the wizard when it is about SQL Server and business intelligence. He is surely going to mesmerize you with some interesting insights on SSIS performance too. Processing Big Data with SQL Server 2012 and Hadoop – There are three sessions on Big Data at TechEd India 2012. Stephen is going to deliver one of the session. Watching Stephen present is always joy and quite entertaining. He shares knowledge with his typical humor which captures ones attention. I wrote about what is BIG DATA in a blog post. SQL Server Misconceptions and Resolutions – I will be presenting this Session along with Vinod Kumar. READ MORE HERE. Securing with ContainedDB in SQL Server 2012 – Pranab is expert when it is about SQL Server and Security. I have seen him presenting and he is indeed very pleasant to watch. A dry subject like security, he makes it much lively. A Contained Database is a database which contains all the necessary settings and metadata, making database easily portable to another server. This database will contain all the necessary details and will not have to depend on any server where it is installed for anything. You can take this database and move it to another server without having any worries. Day 3, March 23, 2012 Peeling SQL Server like an Onion: Internals Demystified – Vinod Kumar has been writing about this extensively on his other blog post. In recent conversation he suggested that he will be creating very exclusive content for this presentation. I know Vinod for long time and have worked with him along many community activities. I am going to pay special attention to the details. I know Vinod has few give-away planned now for attending the session now only if he shares with us. Speed Up – Parallel Processes and unparalleled Performance – Performance tuning is my favorite subject. I will be discussing effect of parallelism on performance in this session. Here me out, there will be lots of quiz questions during this session and if you get the answers correct – you can win some really cool goodies – I Promise! READ MORE HERE. Keep your database available – AlwaysOn – Balmukund is like an army man. He is always ready to show and prove that he has coolest toys in terms of SQL Server and he knows how to keep them running AlwaysON. Availability groups, Listener, Clustering, Failover, Read-Only replica etc all will be demo’ed in this session. This is really heavy but very interesting content not to be missed. Lesser known facts about SQL Server Backup and Restore – Amit Banerjee – this name is known internationally for solving SQL Server problems in 140 characters. He has already blogged about this and this topic is going to be interesting. A successful restore strategy for applications is as good as their last good known backup. I have few difficult questions to ask to Amit and I am very sure that his unique style will entertain people. By the way, his one of the slide may give few in audience a funny heart attack. Top 5 reasons why you want SQL Server 2012 BI – Praveen plans to take a tour of some of the BI enhancements introduced in the new version. Business Insights with SQL Server is a critical building block and this version of SQL Server is no exception. For the matter of the fact, when I saw the demos he was going to show during this session, I felt like that I wish I can set up all of this on my machine. If you miss this session – you will miss one of the most informative session of the day. Also TechEd India 2012 has a Live streaming of some content and this can be watched here. The TechEd Team is planning to have some really good exclusive content in this channel as well. If you spot me, just do not hesitate to come by me and introduce yourself, I want to remember you! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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• Responsible BI for Excel, Even for Older Versions

  - by andrewbrust

  On Wednesday, I will have the honor of co-presenting, for both The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) and the New York Technology Council. on the subject of Excel and BI. My co-presenter will be none other than Bill Baker, who was a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and, essentially, the father of BI at that company.  Details on the events are here and here. We'll be talking about PowerPivot, of course, but that's not all. Probably even more important than any one product, will be our discussion of whether the usual characterization of Excel as the nemesis of IT, the guilty pleasure of business users and the antithesis of formal BI is really valid and/or hopelessly intractable. Without giving away our punchline, I'll tell you that we are much more optimistic than that. There are huge upsides to Excel and while there are real dangers to using it in the BI space, there are standards and practices you can employ to ensure Excel is used responsibly. And when those practices are followed, Excel becomes quite powerful indeed. One of the keys to this is using Excel as a data consumer rather than data storage mechanism. Caching data in Excel is OK, but only if that data is (a) not modified and (b) configured for automated periodic refresh. PowerPivot meets both criteria -- it stores a read-only copy of your data in the form of a model, and once workbook containing a PowerPivot model is published to SharePoint, it can be configured for scheduled data refresh, on the server, requiring no user intervention whatsoever. Data refresh is a bit like hard drive backup: it will only happen reliably if it's automated, and super-easy to configure. PowerPivot hits a real home run here (as does Windows Home Server for PC backup, but I digress). The thing about PowerPivot is that it's an add-in for Excel 2010. What if you're not planning to go to that new version for quite a while? What if you’ve just deployed Office 2007 in your organization? What if you're still on Office 2003, or an even earlier version? What can you do immediately to share data responsibly and easily? As it turns out, there's a feature in Excel that's been around for quite a while, that can help: Web Queries.  The Web Query feature was introduced, ostensibly, to allow Excel to pull data in from Internet Web pages…for example, data in a stock quote history table will come in nicely, as will any data in a Web page that is displayed in an HTML table.  To use the feature In Excel 2007 or 2010, click the Data Tab or the ribbon and click the “From Web” button towards the left; in older versions use the corresponding option in  the menu or  toolbars.  Next, paste a URL into the resulting dialog box and tap Enter or click the Go button.  A preview of the Web page will come up, and the dialog will allow you to select the specific table within the page whose data you’d like to import.  Here’s an example: Now just click the table, click the Import button, and the Import Data dialog appears.  You can simply click OK to bring in your data or you can first click the Properties… button and configure the data import to be refreshed at an interval in minutes that you select.  Now your data’s in the spreadsheet and ready to worked with: Your data may be vulnerable to modification, but if you’ve set up the data refresh, any accidental or malicious changes will be corrected in time anyway. The thing about this feature is that it’s most useful not for public Web pages, but for pages behind the firewall.  In effect, the Web Query feature provides an incredibly easy way to consume data in Excel that’s “published” from an application.  Users just need a URL.  They don’t need to know server and database names and since the data is read-only, providing credentials may be unnecessary, or can be handled using integrated security.  If that’s not good enough, the Web Query can be saved to a special .iqy file, which can be edited to provide POST parameter data. The only requirement is that the data must be provided in an HTML table, with the first row providing the column names.  From an ASP.NET project, it couldn’t be easier: a simple bound GridView control is totally compatible.  Use a data source control with it, and you don’t even have to write any code.  Users can link to pages that are part of an application’s UI, or developers can create pages that are specially designed for the purpose of providing an interface to the Web Query import feature.  And none of this is Microsoft- or .NET-specific.  You can create pages in any language you want (PHP comes to mind) that output the result set of a query in HTML table format, and then consume that data in a Web Query.  Then build PivotTables and charts on the data, and in Excel 2007 or 2010 you can use conditional formatting to create scorecards and dashboards. This strategy allows you to create pages that function quite similarly to the OData XML feeds rendered when .NET developers create an “Astoria” WCF Data Service.  And while it’s cool that PowerPivot and Excel 2010 can import such OData feeds, it’s good to know that older versions of Excel can function in a similar fashion, and can consume data produced by virtually any Web development platform. As a final matter, instead of just telling you that “older versions” of Excel support this feature, I’ll be more specific.  To discover what the first version of Excel was to support Web queries, go to http://bit.ly/OldSchoolXL.

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• So what are zones really?

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  There is a (not so) particular kind of shape in Orchard: zones. Functionally, zones are places where other shapes can render. There are top-level zones, the ones defined on Layout, where widgets typically go, and there are local zones that can be defined anywhere. These local zones are what you target in placement.info. Creating a zone is easy because it really is just an empty shape. Most themes include a helper for it: Func<dynamic, dynamic> Zone = x => Display(x); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } With this helper, you can create a zone by simply writing: @Zone(Model.Header) .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Let's deconstruct what's happening here with that weird Lambda. In the Layout template where we are working, the Model is the Layout shape itself, so Model.Header is really creating a new Header shape under Layout, or getting a reference to it if it already exists. The Zone function is then called on that object, which is equivalent to calling Display. In other words, you could have just written the following to get the exact same effect: @Display(Model.Header) The Zone helper function only exists to make the intent very explicit. Now here's something interesting: while this works in the Layout template, you can also make it work from any deeper-nested template and still create top-level zones. The difference is that wherever you are, Model is not the layout anymore so you need to access it in a different way: @Display(WorkContext.Layout.Header) This is still doing the exact same thing as above. One thing to know is that for top-level zones to be usable from the widget editing UI, you need one more thing, which is to specify it in the theme's manifest: Name: Contoso Author: The Orchard Team Description: A subtle and simple CMS themeVersion: 1.1 Tags: business, cms, modern, simple, subtle, product, service Website: http://www.orchardproject.net Zones: Header, Navigation, HomeFeaturedImage, HomeFeaturedHeadline, Messages, Content, ContentAside, TripelFirst, TripelSecond, TripelThird, Footer Local zones are just ordinary shapes like global zones, the only difference being that they are created on a deeper shape than layout. For example, in Content.cshtml, you can find our good old code fro creating a header zone: @Display(Model.Header) The difference here is that Model is no longer the Layout shape, so that zone will be local. The name of that local zone is what you specify in placement.info, for example: <Place Parts_Common_Metadata_Summary="Header:1"/> Now here's the really interesting part: zones do not even know that they are zones, and in fact any shape can be substituted. That means that if you want to add new shapes to the shape that some part has been emitting from its driver for example, you can absolutely do that. And because zones are so barebones as shapes go, they can be created the first time they are accessed. This is what enables us to add shapes into a zone before the code that you would think creates it has even run. For example, in the Layout.cshtml template in TheThemeMachine, the BadgeOfHonor shape is being injected into the Footer zone on line 47, even though that zone will really be "created" on line 168.

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• Timeout Considerations for Solicit Response – Part 2

  - by Michael Stephenson

  To follow up a previous article about timeouts and how they can affect your application I have extended the sample we were using to include WCF. I will execute some test scenarios and discuss the results. The sample We begin by consuming exactly the same web service which is sitting on a remote server. This time I have created a .net 3.5 application which will consume the web service using the basichttp binding. To show you the configuration for the consumption of this web service please refer to the below diagram. You can see like before we also have the connectionManagement element in the configuration file. I have added a WCF service reference (also using the asynchronous proxy methods) and have the below code sample in the application which will asynchronously make the web service calls and handle the responses on a call back method invoked by a delegate. If you have read the previous article you will notice that the code is almost the same.   Sample 1 – WCF with Default Timeouts In this test I set about recreating the same scenario as previous where we would run the test but this time using WCF as the messaging component. For the first test I would use the default configuration settings which WCF had setup when we added a reference to the web service. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client-side trace is as follows:   The server-side trace is as follows: Some observations on the results are as follows: The timeouts happened quicker than in the previous tests because some calls were timing out before they attempted to connect to the server The first few calls that timed out did actually connect to the server and did execute successfully on the server   Test 2 – Increase Open Connection Timeout & Send Timeout In this test I wanted to increase both the send and open timeout values to try and give everything a chance to go through. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service   Test Results The client side trace for this test was   The server-side trace for this test was: Some observations on this test are: This test proved if the timeouts are high enough everything will just go through   Test 3 – Increase just the Send Timeout In this test we wanted to increase just the send timeout. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service   Test Results The below is the client side trace The below is the server side trace Some observations on this test are: In this test from both the client and server perspective everything ran through fine The open connection timeout did not seem to have any effect   Test 4 – Increase Just the Open Connection Timeout In this test I wanted to validate the change to the open connection setting by increasing just this on its own. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client side trace was The server side trace was Some observations on this test are: In this test you can see that the open connection which relates to opening the channel timeout increase was not the thing which stopped the calls timing out It's the send of data which is timing out On the server you can see that the successful few calls were fine but there were also a few calls which hit the server but timed out on the client You can see that not all calls hit the server which was one of the problems with the WSE and ASMX options   Test 5 – Smaller Increase in Send Timeout In this test I wanted to make a smaller increase to the send timeout than previous just to prove that it was the key setting which was controlling what was timing out. The timeout values for this test are: openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:02:30"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client side trace was   The server side trace was Some observations on this test are: You can see that most of the calls got through fine On the client you can see that call 20 timed out but still hit the server and executed fine.   Summary At this point between the two articles we have quite a lot of scenarios showing the different way the timeout setting have played into our original performance issue, and now we can see how WCF could offer an improved way to handle the problem. To summarise the differences in the timeout properties for the three technology stacks: ASMX The timeout value only applies to the execution time of your request on the server. The timeout does not consider how long your code might be waiting client side to get a connection. WSE The timeout value includes both the time to obtain a connection and also the time to execute the request. A timeout will not be thrown as an error until an attempt to connect to the server is made. This means a 40 second timeout setting may not throw the error until 60 seconds when the connection to the server is made. If the connection to the server is made you should be aware that your message will be processed and you should design for this. WCF The WCF send timeout is the setting most equivalent to the settings we were looking at previously. Like WSE this setting the counter includes the time to get a connection as well as the time to execute on a server. Unlike WSE and ASMX an error will be thrown as soon as the send timeout from making your call from user code has elapsed regardless of whether we are waiting for a connection or have an open connection to the server. This may to a user appear to have better latency in getting an error response compared to WSE or ASMX.

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• How to nest transactions nicely - &quot;begin transaction&quot; vs &quot;save transaction&quot; and SQL Server

  - by Brian Biales

  Do you write stored procedures that might be used by others?  And those others may or may not have already started a transaction?  And your SP does several things, but if any of them fail, you have to undo them all and return with a code indicating it failed? Well, I have written such code, and it wasn’t working right until I finally figured out how to handle the case when we are already in a transaction, as well as the case where the caller did not start a transaction.  When a problem occurred, my “ROLLBACK TRANSACTION” would roll back not just my nested transaction, but the caller’s transaction as well.  So when I tested the procedure stand-alone, it seemed to work fine, but when others used it, it would cause a problem if it had to rollback.  When something went wrong in my procedure, their entire transaction was rolled back.  This was not appreciated. Now, I knew one could "nest" transactions, but the technical documentation was very confusing.  And I still have not found the approach below documented anywhere.  So here is a very brief description of how I got it to work, I hope you find this helpful. My example is a stored procedure that must figure out on its own if the caller has started a transaction or not.  This can be done in SQL Server by checking the @@TRANCOUNT value.  If no BEGIN TRANSACTION has occurred yet, this will have a value of 0.  Any number greater than zero means that a transaction is in progress.  If there is no current transaction, my SP begins a transaction. But if a transaction is already in progress, my SP uses SAVE TRANSACTION and gives it a name.  SAVE TRANSACTION creates a “save point”.  Note that creating a save point has no effect on @@TRANCOUNT.  So my SP starts with something like this: DECLARE @startingTranCount int SET @startingTranCount = @@TRANCOUNT IF @startingTranCount > 0 SAVE TRANSACTION mySavePointName ELSE BEGIN TRANSACTION -- … Then, when ready to commit the changes, you only need to commit if we started the transaction ourselves: IF @startingTranCount = 0 COMMIT TRANSACTION And finally, to roll back just your changes so far: -- Roll back changes... IF @startingTranCount > 0 ROLLBACK TRANSACTION MySavePointName ELSE ROLLBACK TRANSACTION Here is some code that you can try that will demonstrate how the save points work inside a transaction. This sample code creates a temporary table, then executes selects and updates, documenting what is going on, then deletes the temporary table. if running in SQL Management Studio, set Query Results to: Text for best readability of the results. -- Create a temporary table to test with, we'll drop it at the end. CREATE TABLE #ATable( [Column_A] [varchar](5) NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO SET NOCOUNT ON -- Ensure just one row - delete all rows, add one DELETE #ATable -- Insert just one row INSERT INTO #ATable VALUES('000') SELECT 'Before TRANSACTION starts, value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable SELECT @@trancount AS CurrentTrancount --insert into a values ('abc') UPDATE #ATable SET Column_A = 'abc' SELECT 'UPDATED without a TRANSACTION, value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable BEGIN TRANSACTION SELECT 'BEGIN TRANSACTION, trancount is now ' AS Note, @@TRANCOUNT AS TranCount UPDATE #ATable SET Column_A = '123' SELECT 'Row updated inside TRANSACTION, value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable SAVE TRANSACTION MySavepoint SELECT 'Save point MySavepoint created, transaction count now:' as Note, @@TRANCOUNT AS TranCount UPDATE #ATable SET Column_A = '456' SELECT 'Updated after MySavepoint created, value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable SAVE TRANSACTION point2 SELECT 'Save point point2 created, transaction count now:' as Note, @@TRANCOUNT AS TranCount UPDATE #ATable SET Column_A = '789' SELECT 'Updated after point2 savepoint created, value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable ROLLBACK TRANSACTION point2 SELECT 'Just rolled back savepoint "point2", value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable ROLLBACK TRANSACTION MySavepoint SELECT 'Just rolled back savepoint "MySavepoint", value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable SELECT 'Both save points were rolled back, transaction count still:' as Note, @@TRANCOUNT AS TranCount ROLLBACK TRANSACTION SELECT 'Just rolled back the entire transaction..., value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable DROP TABLE #ATable The output should look like this: Note                                           Column_A ---------------------------------------------- -------- Before TRANSACTION starts, value in table is:  000 CurrentTrancount ---------------- 0 Note                                               Column_A -------------------------------------------------- -------- UPDATED without a TRANSACTION, value in table is:  abc Note                                 TranCount ------------------------------------ ----------- BEGIN TRANSACTION, trancount is now  1 Note                                                Column_A --------------------------------------------------- -------- Row updated inside TRANSACTION, value in table is:  123 Note                                                   TranCount ------------------------------------------------------ ----------- Save point MySavepoint created, transaction count now: 1 Note                                                   Column_A ------------------------------------------------------ -------- Updated after MySavepoint created, value in table is:  456 Note                                              TranCount ------------------------------------------------- ----------- Save point point2 created, transaction count now: 1 Note                                                        Column_A ----------------------------------------------------------- -------- Updated after point2 savepoint created, value in table is:  789 Note                                                     Column_A -------------------------------------------------------- -------- Just rolled back savepoint "point2", value in table is:  456 Note                                                          Column_A ------------------------------------------------------------- -------- Just rolled back savepoint "MySavepoint", value in table is:  123 Note                                                        TranCount ----------------------------------------------------------- ----------- Both save points were rolled back, transaction count still: 1 Note                                                            Column_A --------------------------------------------------------------- -------- Just rolled back the entire transaction..., value in table is:  abc

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #006

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 This was my very first year of blogging so I was every day learning something new. As I have said many times, that blogging was never an intention. I had really not understood what exactly I am working on or beginning when I was beginning blogging in 2006. I had never knew that my life was going to change forever, once I started blogging. When I look back all of this year, I am happy that we are here together. 2007 IT Outsourcing to India – Top 10 Reasons Companies Outsource Outsourcing is about trust, collaboration and success. Helping other countries in need has been always the course of mankind, outsourcing is nothing different then that. With information technology and process improvements increasing the complexity, costs and skills required to accomplish routine tasks as well as challenging complex tasks, companies are outsourcing such tasks to providers who have the expertise to perform them at lower costs , with greater value and quality outcome. UDF – Remove Duplicate Chars From String This was a very interesting function I wrote in my early career. I am still using this function when I have to remove duplicate chars from strings. I have yet to come across a scenario where it does not work so I keep on using it till today. Please leave a comment if there is any better solution to this problem. FIX : Error : 3702 Cannot drop database because it is currently in use This is a very generic error when DROP Database is command is executed and the database is not dropped. The common mistake user is kept the connection open with this database and trying to drop the database. The database cannot be dropped if there is any other connection open along with it. It is always a good idea to take database in single user mode before dropping it. Here is the quick tutorial regarding how to bring the database in single user mode: Using T-SQL | Using SSMS. 2008 Install SQL Server 2008 – How to Upgrade to SQL Server 2008 – Installation Tutorial This was indeed one of the most popular articles in SQL Server 2008. Lots of people wanted to learn how to install SQL SErver 2008 but they were facing various issues while installation. I build this tutorial which becomes reference points for many. Default Collation of SQL Server 2008 What is the collation of SQL Server 2008 default installations? I often see this question confusing many experienced developers as well. Well the answer is in following image. Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group Meeting – November 2008 User group meetings are fun, now a days I am going to User Group meetings every week but there was a case when I have been just a beginner on this subject. The bug of the community was caught on me years ago when I started to present in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQ LServer User Groups. 2009 Validate an XML document in TSQL using XSD My friend Jacob Sebastian wrote an excellent article on the subject XML and XSD. Because of the ‘eXtensible’ nature of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), often there is a requirement to restrict and validate the content of an XML document to a pre-defined structure and values. XSD (XML Schema Definition Language) is the W3C recommended language for describing and validating XML documents. SQL Server implements XSD as XML Schema Collections. Star Join Query Optimization At present, when queries are sent to very large databases, millions of rows are returned. Also the users have to go through extended query response times when joining multiple tables are involved with such queries. ‘Star Join Query Optimization’ is a new feature of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. This mechanism uses bitmap filtering for improving the performance of some types of queries by the effective retrieval of rows from fact tables. 2010 These puzzles are very interesting and intriguing – there was lots of interest on this subject. If you have free time this weekend. You may want to try them out. SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint (Solution)  SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal (Solution)  SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists (Open)  Additionally, I had great fun presenting SQL Server Performance Tuning seminar at fantastic locations in Hyderabad. Installing AdventeWorks Database This has been the most popular request I have received on my blog. Here is the quick video about how one can install AdventureWorks. 2011 Effect of SET NOCOUNT on @@ROWCOUNT There was an interesting incident once while I was presenting a session. I wrote a code and suddenly 10 hands went up in the air.  This was a bit surprise to me as I do not know why they all got alerted. I assumed that there should be something wrong with either project, screen or my display. However the real reason was very interesting – I suggest you read the complete blog post to understand this interesting scenario. Error: Deleting Offline Database and Creating the Same Name This is very interesting because once a user deletes the offline database the MDF and LDF file still exists and if the user attempts to create a new database with the same name it will give error. I found this very interesting and the blog explains the concept very quickly. Have you ever faced a similar situation? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• The clock hands of the buffer cache

  - by Tony Davis

  Over a leisurely beer at our local pub, the Waggon and Horses, Phil Factor was holding forth on the esoteric, but strangely poetic, language of SQL Server internals, riddled as it is with 'sleeping threads', 'stolen pages', and 'memory sweeps'. Generally, I remain immune to any twinge of interest in the bowels of SQL Server, reasoning that there are certain things that I don't and shouldn't need to know about SQL Server in order to use it successfully. Suddenly, however, my attention was grabbed by his mention of the 'clock hands of the buffer cache'. Back at the office, I succumbed to a moment of weakness and opened up Google. He wasn't lying. SQL Server maintains various memory buffers, or caches. For example, the plan cache stores recently-used execution plans. The data cache in the buffer pool stores frequently-used pages, ensuring that they may be read from memory rather than via expensive physical disk reads. These memory stores are classic LRU (Least Recently Updated) buffers, meaning that, for example, the least frequently used pages in the data cache become candidates for eviction (after first writing the page to disk if it has changed since being read into the cache). SQL Server clearly needs some mechanism to track which pages are candidates for being cleared out of a given cache, when it is getting too large, and it is this mechanism that is somewhat more labyrinthine than I previously imagined. Each page that is loaded into the cache has a counter, a miniature "wristwatch", which records how recently it was last used. This wristwatch gets reset to "present time", each time a page gets updated and then as the page 'ages' it clicks down towards zero, at which point the page can be removed from the cache. But what is SQL Server is suffering memory pressure and urgently needs to free up more space than is represented by zero-counter pages (or plans etc.)? This is where our 'clock hands' come in. Each cache has associated with it a "memory clock". Like most conventional clocks, it has two hands; one "external" clock hand, and one "internal". Slava Oks is very particular in stressing that these names have "nothing to do with the equivalent types of memory pressure". He's right, but the names do, in that peculiar Microsoft tradition, seem designed to confuse. The hands do relate to memory pressure; the cache "eviction policy" is determined by both global and local memory pressures on SQL Server. The "external" clock hand responds to global memory pressure, in other words pressure on SQL Server to reduce the size of its memory caches as a whole. Global memory pressure – which just to confuse things further seems sometimes to be referred to as physical memory pressure – can be either external (from the OS) or internal (from the process itself, e.g. due to limited virtual address space). The internal clock hand responds to local memory pressure, in other words the need to reduce the size of a single, specific cache. So, for example, if a particular cache, such as the plan cache, reaches a defined "pressure limit" the internal clock hand will start to turn and a memory sweep will be performed on that cache in order to remove plans from the memory store. During each sweep of the hands, the usage counter on the cache entry is reduced in value, effectively moving its "last used" time to further in the past (in effect, setting back the wrist watch on the page a couple of hours) and increasing the likelihood that it can be aged out of the cache. There is even a special Dynamic Management View, sys.dm_os_memory_cache_clock_hands, which allows you to interrogate the passage of the clock hands. Frequently turning hands equates to excessive memory pressure, which will lead to performance problems. Two hours later, I emerged from this rather frightening journey into the heart of SQL Server memory management, fascinated but still unsure if I'd learned anything that I'd put to any practical use. However, I certainly began to agree that there is something almost Tolkeinian in the language of the deep recesses of SQL Server. Cheers, Tony.

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• The first day of JavaOne is already over!

  - by delabassee

  In the past Sunday used to be a more relaxing day with ‘just’ some JavaOne activities going on. Sunday used to be a soft day to prepare yourself for an exhausting week. This is now over as JavaOne is expanding; Sunday is now an integral part of the conference. One of the side effect of this extra day is that some activities related to JavaOne and OpenWorld such as MySQL Connect are being push to start a day earlier on Saturday (can you spot the pattern here?). On the GlassFish front, Sunday was a very busy day! It started at the Moscone Center with the annual GlassFish Community Event where the Java EE 7 and GF 4 roadmaps were presented and discussed. During the event, different GlassFish users such as ZeroTurnaround (the JRebel guys), Grupo RBS and IDR Solutions shared their views on GF, why they like GF but also what could be improved. The event was also a forum for the GF community to exchange with some of the key Java EE / GlassFish Oracle Executives and the different GF team members. The Strategy keynote and the Technical keynote were held in the Masonic Auditorium later in the after-noon. Oracle executives have presented the plans for Java SE, Java FX and Java EE. As on-demand replays will be available soon, I will not summarize several hours of content but here are some personal takeaways from those keynotes. Modularity Modularity is a big deal. We know by now that Project Jigsaw will not be ready for Java SE 8 but in any case, it is already possible (and encouraged) to test Jigsaw today. In the future, Java EE plan to rely on the modularity features provided by Java SE, so Project Jigsaw is also relevant for Java EE developers. Shorter term, to cover some of the modular requirements, Java SE will adopt the approach that was used for Java EE 6 and the notion of Profiles. This approach does not define a module system per say; Profiles is a way to clearly define different subsets of Java SE to fulfill different needs (e.g. the full JRE is not required for a headless application). The introduction of different Profiles, from the Base profile (10mb) to the Full Profile (+50mb), has been proposed for Java SE 8. Embedded Embedded is a strong theme going forward for the Java Plaform. There is now a dedicated program : Java Embedded @ JavaOne Java by nature (e.g. platform independence, built-in security, ability easily talks to any back-end systems, large set of skills available on the market, etc.) is probably the most suited platform for the Internet of Things. You can quickly be up-to-speed and develop services and applications for that space just by using your current Java skills. All you need to start developing on ARM is a 35$ Raspberry Pi ARM board (25$ if you are cheap and can live without an ethernet connection) and the recently released JDK for Linux/ARM. Obviously, GlassFish runs on Raspberry Pi. If you wan to go further in the embedded space, you should take a look Java SE Embedded, an optimized, low footprint, Java environment that support the major embedded architectures (ARM, PPC and x86). Finally, Oracle has recently introduced Java Embedded Suite, a new solution that brings modern middleware capabilities to the embedded space. Java Embedded Suite is an optimized solution that leverage Java SE Embedded but also GlassFish, Jersey and JavaDB to deploy advanced value added capabilities (eg. sensor data filtering and) deeper in the network, closer to the devices. JavaFX JavaFX is going strong! Starting from Java SE 7u6, JavaFX is bundled with the JDK. JavaFX is now available for all the major desktop platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X). JavaFX is now also available, in developer preview, for low end device running Linux/ARM. During the keynote, JavaFX was shown running on a Raspberry Pi! And as announced during the keynote, JavaFX should be fully open-sourced by the end of the year; contributions are welcome!. There is a strong momentum around JavaFX, it’s the ideal client solution for the Java platform. A client layer that works perfectly with GlassFish on the back-end. If you were not convince by JavaFX, it’s time to reconsider it! As an old Chinese proverb say “One tweet is worth a thousand words!” HTML5, Project Avatar and Java EE 7 HTML5 got a lot of airtime too, it was covered during the Java EE 7 section of the keynote. Some details about Project Avatar, Oracle’s incubator project for a TSA (Thin Server Architecture) solution, were diluted and shown during the keynote. On the tooling side, Project Easel running on NetBeans 7.3 beta was demo’ed, including a cool NetBeans debugging session running in Chrome! HTML 5, Project Avatar and Java EE 7 deserve separate posts... Feedback We need your feedback! There are many projects, JSRs and products cooking : GlassFish 4, Project Jigsaw, Concurrency Utilities for Java EE (JSR 236), OpenJFX, OpenJDK to name just a few. Those projects, those specifications will have a profound impact on the Java platform for the years to come! So if you have the opportunity, download, install, learn, tests them and give feedback! Remember, you can "Make the Future Java!" Finally, the traditional GlassFish Party at the Thirsty Bear concluded the first JavaOne day. This party is another place where the community can freely exchange with the GlassFish team in a more relaxed, more friendly (but sometime more noisy) atmosphere. Arun has posted a set of pictures to reflect the atmosphere of the keynotes and the GlassFish party. You can find more details on the others Java EE and GlassFish activities here.

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• IE9 not rendering box-shadow Elements inside of Table Cells

  - by Rick Strahl

  Ran into an annoying problem today with IE 9. Slowly updating some older sites with CSS 3 tags and for the most part IE9 does a reasonably decent job of working with the new CSS 3 features. Not all by a long shot but at least some of the more useful ones like border-radius and box-shadow are supported. Until today I was happy to see that IE supported box-shadow just fine, but I ran into a problem with some old markup that uses tables for its main layout sections. I found that inside of a table cell IE fails to render a box-shadow. Below are images from Chrome (left) and IE 9 (right) of the same content: The download and purchase images are rendered with: <a href="download.asp" style="display:block;margin: 10px;"><img src="../images/download.gif" class="boxshadow roundbox" /></a> where the .boxshadow and .roundbox styles look like this:.boxshadow { -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; } .roundbox { -moz-border-radius: 6px 6px 6px 6px; -webkit-border-radius: 6px; border-radius: 6px 6px 6px 6px; } And the Problem is… collapsed Table Borders Now normally these two styles work just fine in IE 9 when applied to elements. But the box-shadow doesn't work inside of this markup - because the parent container is a table cell.<td class="sidebar" style="border-collapse: collapse"> … <a href="download.asp" style="display:block;margin: 10px;"><img src="../images/download.gif" class="boxshadow roundbox" /></a> …</td> This HTML causes the image to not show a shadow. In actuality I'm not styling inline, but as part of my browser Reset I have the following in my master .css file:table { border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0; } which has the same effect as the inline style. border-collapse by default inherits from the parent and so the TD inherits from table and tr - so TD tags are effectively collapsed. You can check out a test document that demonstrates this behavior here in this CodePaste.net snippet or run it here. How to work around this Issue To get IE9 to render the shadows inside of the TD tag correctly, I can just change the style explicitly NOT to use border-collapse:<td class="sidebar" style="border-collapse: separate; border-width: 0;"> Or better yet (thanks to David's comment below), you can add the border-collapse: separate to the .boxshadow style like this:.boxshadow { -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; border-collapse: separate; } With either of these approaches IE renders the shadows correctly. Do you really need border-collapse? Should you bother with border-collapse? I think so! Collapsed borders render flat as a single fat line if a border-width and border-color are assigned, while separated borders render a thin line with a bunch of weird white space around it or worse render a old skool 3D raised border which is terribly ugly as well. So as a matter of course in any app my browser Reset includes the above code to make sure all tables with borders render the same flat borders. As you probably know, IE has all sorts of rendering issues in tables and on backgrounds (opacity backgrounds or image backgrounds) most of which is caused by the way that IE internally uses ActiveX filters to apply these effects. Apparently collapsed borders are yet one more item that causes problems with rendering. There you have it. Another crappy failure in IE we have to check for now, just one more reason to hate Internet Explorer. Luckily this one has a reasonably easy workaround. I hope this helps out somebody and saves them the hour I spent trying to figure out what caused this problem in the first place. Resources Sample HTML document that demonstrates the behavior Run the Sample© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in HTML  Internet Explorer   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Inside Red Gate - Project teams

  - by Simon Cooper

  Within each division in Red Gate, development effort is structured around one or more project teams; currently, each division contains 2-3 separate teams. These are self contained units responsible for a particular development project. Project team structure The typical size of a development team varies, but is normally around 4-7 people - one project manager, two developers, one or two testers, a technical author (who is responsible for the text within the application, website content, and help documentation) and a user experience designer (who designs and prototypes the UIs) . However, team sizes can vary from 3 up to 12, depending on the division and project. As an rule, all the team sits together in the same area of the office. (Again, this is my experience of what happens. I haven't worked in the DBA division, and SQL Tools might have changed completely since I moved to .NET. As I mentioned in my previous post, each division is free to structure itself as it sees fit.) Depending on the project, and the other needs in the division, the tech author and UX designer may be shared between several projects. Generally, developers and testers work on one project at a time. If the project is a simple point release, then it might not need a UX designer at all. However, if it's a brand new product, then a UX designer and tech author will be involved right from the start. Developers, testers, and the project manager will normally stay together in the same team as they work on different projects, unless there's a good reason to split or merge teams for a particular project. Technical authors and UX designers will normally go wherever they are needed in the division, depending on what each project needs at the time. In my case, I was working with more or less the same people for over 2 years, all the way through SQL Compare 7, 8, and Schema Compare for Oracle. This helped to build a great sense of camaraderie wihin the team, and helped to form and maintain a team identity. This, in turn, meant we worked very well together, and so the final result was that much better (as well as making the work more fun). How is a project started and run? The product manager within each division collates user feedback and ideas, does lots of research, throws in a few ideas from people within the company, and then comes up with a list of what the division should work on in the next few years. This is split up into projects, and after each project is greenlit (I'll be discussing this later on) it is then assigned to a project team, as and when they become available (I'm sure there's lots of discussions and meetings at this point that I'm not aware of!). From that point, it's entirely up to the project team. Just as divisions are autonomous, project teams are also given a high degree of autonomy. All the teams in Red Gate use some sort of vaguely agile methodology; most use some variations on SCRUM, some have experimented with Kanban. Some store the project progress on a whiteboard, some use our bug tracker, others use different methods. It all depends on what the team members think will work best for them to get the best result at the end. From that point, the project proceeds as you would expect; code gets written, tests pass and fail, discussions about how to resolve various problems are had and decided upon, and out pops a new product, new point release, new internal tool, or whatever the project's goal was. The project manager ensures that everyone works together without too much bloodshed and that thrown missiles are constrained to Nerf bullets, the developers write the code, the testers ensure it actually works, and the tech author and UX designer ensure that people will be able to use the final product to solve their problem (after all, developers make lousy UI designers and technical authors). Projects in Red Gate last a relatively short amount of time; most projects are less than 6 months. The longest was 18 months. This has evolved as the company has grown, and I suspect is a side effect of the type of software Red Gate produces. As an ISV, we sell packaged software; we only get revenue when customers purchase the ready-made tools. As a result, we only get a sellable piece of software right at the end of a project. Therefore, the longer the project lasts, the more time and money has to be invested by the company before we get any revenue from it, and the riskier the project becomes. This drives the average project time down. Small project teams are the core of how Red Gate produces software, and are what the whole development effort of the company is built around. In my next post, I'll be looking at the office itself, and how all 200 of us manage to fit on two floors of a small office building.

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