Search Results

Search found 17192 results on 688 pages for 'geeks with blogs'.

Page 48/688 | < Previous Page | 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55  | Next Page >

• Agile Awakenings and the Rules of Agile

  - by Robert May

  For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all.  It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005.  I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it.  I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t.   I still didn’t understand the concept of a team.  I still wanted to tell the team what to do and how to get it done.  I still thought I was smarter than the team. After that job, I started work on another project and began helping that team.  The first few months were really rough.  We were implementing Scrum, which was relatively new to everyone on the team, and, quite frankly, I was doing a poor job of it.  I was trying to micro-manage every aspect of the teams work, and we were all miserable. The moment of change came when the senior architect bailed on the project.  His comment to me was: “This isn’t Agile.  Where are the stand-ups?  Where are the stories?”  He was dead on, and I finally woke up.  I finally realized that I was the problem!  I wasn’t trusting the team.  I wasn’t helping the team.  I was being a manager. Like many (most?), I was claiming to be Agile and use Scrum, but I wasn’t in fact following the rules Scrum.  Since then, I’ve done a lot of studying, hands on practice, coaching of many different teams, and other learning around Scrum, and I have discovered that Scrum has some rules that must be followed for success, even though the process is about continuous improvement. I’ve been practicing Scrum right for about 4 years now and have helped multiple teams implement it successfully, so what you’re about to get is based on experience, rather than just theory. The Rules of Scrum In my experience, what I’ve found is that most companies that claim to be doing Scrum or Agile are actually NOT doing either.  This stems largely because they think that they can “adopt the rules of Agile that fit their organization.”  Sadly, many of them think that this means they can adopt iterations (sprints) and not much else.  Either that, or they think they can do whatever they want, or were doing before, and call it Scrum.  This is simply not true. Here are some rules that must be followed for you to really be doing Scrum.  I’ll go into detail on each one of these posts in future blog posts and update links here.  My intent is that this will help other teams implementing scrum to see more success. Agile does not allow you to do whatever you want A Product Owner is required A ScrumMaster is required The team must function as a Team, and QA must be part of the team Support from upper management is required A prioritized product backlog is required A prioritized sprint backlog is required Release planning is required Complete spring planning is required Showcases are required Velocity must be measured Retrospectives are required Daily stand-ups are required Visibility is absolutely required For now, I think that’s enough, although I reserve the right to add more.  If you’re breaking any of these rules, you’re probably not doing Scrum.  There are exceptions to these rules, but until you have practiced Scrum for a while, you don’t know what those exceptions are. Breaking the Rules Many teams break these rules because they are the ones that expose the most pain.  Scrum is not Advil.  It’s not intended to mask the pain, its intended to cure it.  Let me explain that analogy a bit more.  Recently, my 7 year old son broke his arm, quite severely (see the X-Ray to the right).  That caused him a great deal of pain.  We went first to one doctor, and after viewing the X-Ray, they determined that there was no way that they’d cast the arm at their location.  It was simply too bad of a break for them to deal with.  They did, however, give him some Advil for the pain and put a splint on his arm to stabilize the broken bones.  Within minutes, he was feeling much better.  Had we been stupid, we could have gone home and he’d have been just as happy as ever . . . until the pain medication wore off or one of his siblings touched the splint.  Then, all of that pain would come right back to the top.  Sure, he could make it go away by just taking more Advil and moving the splint out of the way, but that wasn’t going to fix the problem permanently. We ended up in an emergency room with a doctor who could fix his arm.  However, we were warned that the fix was going to be VERY painful, and it was.  Even with heavy sedation (Propofol), my son was in enough pain that he squirmed and wiggled trying to get his arm away from the doctor.  He had to endure this pain in order to have a functional arm. But the setting wasn’t the end.  He had to have several casts, had to have it re-broken once, since the first setting didn’t take and finally was given a clean bill of health. Agile implementation is much like this story.  Agile was developed as a result of people recognizing that the development methodologies that were currently in place simply were ineffective.  However, the fix to the broken development that’s been festering for many years is not painless.  Many people start Agile thinking that things will be wonderful.  They won’t!  Agile is about visibility, and often, it brings great pain to surface.  It causes all of the missed deadlines, the cowboy coders, the coasters, the micro-managers, the lazy, and all of the other problems that are really part of your development process now to become painfully visible to EVERYONE.  Many people don’t like this exposure.  Agile will make the pain better, but not if you remove the cast (the rules above) prematurely and start breaking the rules that expose the most pain.  The healing will take time and is not instant (like Advil).  Figuring out what the true source of pain and fixing it is very valuable to you, your team, and your company.  Remember as you’re doing this that Agile isn’t the source of the pain, it’s really just exposing it.  Find the source. My recommendation is that ALL of these rules are followed for a minimum of six months, and preferably for an entire year, before you decide to break any of these rules.  Get a few good releases under your belt.  Figure out what your velocity is and start firing as a team.  Chances are, after you see agile really in action, you won’t want to break the rules because you’ll see their value. More Reading Jean Tabaka recently published a list of 78 Things I Have Learned in 6 Years of Agile Coaching.  Highly recommended. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Rules

  Read the article

• Build Explorer version 1.1 for Visual Studio Team Explorer is released

  - by terje

  Our free extension to Visual Studio , the folder based Build Explorer Version 1.1 has now been released, and uploaded to the Visual Studio Gallery and Codeplex. We have collected up a few changes and some bugs, as follows: Changes: Queue Default Builds can now be optionally fully enabled, fully disabled or enabled just for leaf nodes (=disabled for folders).  If you got a large number of builds it was pretty scary to be able to launch all of them with just one click.  However, it is nice to avoid having the dialog box up when you want to just run off a single build.  That’s the reasoning between the 3rd choice here. Auto fill-in of the builds at start up and refresh  This was a request that came up a lot, and which was also irritating to us.  When the Team Project is opened, the Build explorer will start by itself and fill up it’s tree. So you don’t need to click the node anymore. There was also quite a bit of flashing when the tree filled up, this has been reduced to just a single top level fill before it collapses the node. The speed of the buildup of the tree has also been increased. The “All Build Definitions” node is now shown on top of the list Login box appeared in certain cross domain situations. This was a fix for the TF30063 authentication problem we had in the beginning.  Hopefully the new code has that fixed properly so that both the login box and the TF30063 are gone forever.  Our testing so far seems to indicate it works.  If anyone gets a real problem here there are two workarounds: 1) Turn off the auto refresh to reduce the issue. If this doesn’t fix it, then 2) please reinstall the former version (go to the codeplex download site if you don’t have it anymore)  Write a comment to this blog post with a description of what happens, and I will send a temporary fix asap. Bug fixes: The folder name matching was case sensitive, so “Application.CI” and “application.CI” created two different folders.  View all builds not shown for leaf odes, and view builds didn’t work in all cases.  There was some inconsistencies here which have been fixed. Partly fixed:  The context menu to queue a new build for disabled builds should be removed, but that was a difficult one, and is still on the list, but the command will not do anything for a disabled build. Using the Queue Default Builds on a folder, and if it had some disabled builds below an error box appeared and ruined the whole experience. As a result of these fixes there has been introduced some new options, as shown below:   The two first settings, the Separator symbol and the options for how to handle Queuing of default builds are set per Team Project, and is stored in the TFS source control under the BuildProcessTemplates folder, with the name Inmeta.VisualStudio.BuildExplorer.Settings.xml The next two settings need some explanations.  They handle the behavior for the auto update of the build folders.  First, these are stored in the local registry per user, at the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software\Inmeta\BuildExplorer. The first option Use Timed Refresh at Startup, if turned off, you will need to click the node as it is done in Version 1.0.  The second option is a timed value, the time after the Build explorer node is created and until the scanning of the Build folders start.  It is assumed that this is enough, and the tests so far indicates this.  If you have very many builds and you see that the explorer don’t get them all, try to increase this value, and of course, notify me of your case, either here or on the Visual Gallery site.

  Read the article

• Silverlight for Windows Embedded tutorial (step 6)

  - by Valter Minute

  In this tutorial step we will develop a very simple clock application that may be used as a screensaver on our devices and will allow us to discover a new feature of Silverlight for Windows Embedded (transforms) and how to use an “old” feature of Windows CE (timers) inside a Silverlight for Windows Embedded application. Let’s start with some XAML, as usual: <UserControl xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Width="640" Height="480" FontSize="18" x:Name="Clock">   <Canvas x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="#FF000000"> <Grid Height="24" Width="150" Canvas.Left="320" Canvas.Top="234" x:Name="SecondsHand" Background="#FFFF0000"> <TextBlock Text="Seconds" TextWrapping="Wrap" Width="50" HorizontalAlignment="Right" VerticalAlignment="Center" x:Name="SecondsText" Foreground="#FFFFFFFF" TextAlignment="Right" Margin="2,2,2,2"/> </Grid> <Grid Height="24" x:Name="MinutesHand" Width="100" Background="#FF00FF00" Canvas.Left="320" Canvas.Top="234"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Right" x:Name="MinutesText" VerticalAlignment="Center" Width="50" Text="Minutes" TextWrapping="Wrap" Foreground="#FFFFFFFF" TextAlignment="Right" Margin="2,2,2,2"/> </Grid> <Grid Height="24" x:Name="HoursHand" Width="50" Background="#FF0000FF" Canvas.Left="320" Canvas.Top="234"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Right" x:Name="HoursText" VerticalAlignment="Center" Width="50" Text="Hours" TextWrapping="Wrap" Foreground="#FFFFFFFF" TextAlignment="Right" Margin="2,2,2,2"/> </Grid> </Canvas> </UserControl> This XAML file defines three grid panels, one for each hand of our clock (we are implementing an analog clock using one of the most advanced technologies of the digital world… how cool is that?). Inside each hand we put a TextBlock that will be used to display the current hour, minute, second inside the dial (you can’t do that on plain old analog clocks, but it looks nice). As usual we use XAML2CPP to generate the boring part of our code. We declare a class named “Clock” and derives from the TClock template that XAML2CPP has declared for us. class Clock : public TClock<Clock> { ... }; Our WinMain function is more or less the same we used in all the previous samples. It initializes the XAML runtime, create an instance of our class, initialize it and shows it as a dialog: int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPTSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow) { if (!XamlRuntimeInitialize()) return -1;   HRESULT retcode;   IXRApplicationPtr app; if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return -1; Clock clock;   if (FAILED(clock.Init(hInstance,app))) return -1;     UINT exitcode;   if (FAILED(clock.GetVisualHost()->StartDialog(&exitcode))) return -1;   return exitcode; } Silverlight for Windows Embedded provides a lot of features to implement our UI, but it does not provide timers. How we can update our clock if we don’t have a timer feature? We just use plain old Windows timers, as we do in “regular” Windows CE applications! To use a timer in WinCE we should declare an id for it: #define IDT_CLOCKUPDATE 0x12341234 We also need an HWND that will be used to receive WM_TIMER messages. Our Silverlight for Windows Embedded page is “hosted” inside a GWES Window and we can retrieve its handle using the GetContainerHWND function of our VisualHost object. Let’s see how this is implemented inside our Clock class’ Init method: HRESULT Init(HINSTANCE hInstance,IXRApplication* app) { HRESULT retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=TClock<Clock>::Init(hInstance,app))) return retcode;   // create the timer user to update the clock HWND clockhwnd;   if (FAILED(GetVisualHost()->GetContainerHWND(&clockhwnd))) return -1;   timer=SetTimer(clockhwnd,IDT_CLOCKUPDATE,1000,NULL); return 0; } We use SetTimer to create a new timer and GWES will send a WM_TIMER to our window every second, giving us a chance to update our clock. That sounds great… but how could we handle the WM_TIMER message if we didn’t implement a window procedure for our window? We have to move a step back and look how a visual host is created. This code is generated by XAML2CPP and is inside xaml2cppbase.h: virtual HRESULT CreateHost(HINSTANCE hInstance,IXRApplication* app) { HRESULT retcode; XRWindowCreateParams wp;   ZeroMemory(&wp, sizeof(XRWindowCreateParams)); InitWindowParms(&wp);   XRXamlSource xamlsrc;   SetXAMLSource(hInstance,&xamlsrc); if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateHostFromXaml(&xamlsrc, &wp, &vhost))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=vhost->GetRootElement(&root))) return retcode; return S_OK; } As you can see the CreateHostFromXaml function of IXRApplication accepts a structure named XRWindowCreateParams that control how the “plain old” GWES Window is created by the runtime. This structure is initialized inside the InitWindowParm method: // Initializes Windows parameters, can be overridden in the user class to change its appearance virtual void InitWindowParms(XRWindowCreateParams* wp) { wp->Style = WS_OVERLAPPED; wp->pTitle = windowtitle; wp->Left = 0; wp->Top = 0; } This method set up the window style, title and position. But the XRWindowCreateParams contains also other fields and, since the function is declared as virtual, we could initialize them inside our version of InitWindowParms: // add hook procedure to the standard windows creation parms virtual void InitWindowParms(XRWindowCreateParams* wp) { TClock<Clock>::InitWindowParms(wp);   wp->pHookProc=StaticHostHookProc; wp->pvUserParam=this; } This method calls the base class implementation (useful to not having to re-write some code, did I told you that I’m quite lazy?) and then initializes the pHookProc and pvUserParam members of the XRWindowsCreateParams structure. Those members will allow us to install a “hook” procedure that will be called each time the GWES window “hosting” our Silverlight for Windows Embedded UI receives a message. We can declare a hook procedure inside our Clock class: // static hook procedure static BOOL CALLBACK StaticHostHookProc(VOID* pv,HWND hwnd,UINT Msg,WPARAM wParam,LPARAM lParam,LRESULT* pRetVal) { ... } You should notice two things here. First that the function is declared as static. This is required because a non-static function has a “hidden” parameters, that is the “this” pointer of our object. Having an extra parameter is not allowed for the type defined for the pHookProc member of the XRWindowsCreateParams struct and so we should implement our hook procedure as static. But in a static procedure we will not have a this pointer. How could we access the data member of our class? Here’s the second thing to notice. We initialized also the pvUserParam of the XRWindowsCreateParams struct. We set it to our this pointer. This value will be passed as the first parameter of the hook procedure. In this way we can retrieve our this pointer and use it to call a non-static version of our hook procedure: // static hook procedure static BOOL CALLBACK StaticHostHookProc(VOID* pv,HWND hwnd,UINT Msg,WPARAM wParam,LPARAM lParam,LRESULT* pRetVal) { return ((Clock*)pv)->HostHookProc(hwnd,Msg,wParam,lParam,pRetVal); } Inside our non-static hook procedure we will have access to our this pointer and we will be able to update our clock: // hook procedure (handles timers) BOOL HostHookProc(HWND hwnd,UINT Msg,WPARAM wParam,LPARAM lParam,LRESULT* pRetVal) { switch (Msg) { case WM_TIMER: if (wParam==IDT_CLOCKUPDATE) UpdateClock(); *pRetVal=0; return TRUE; } return FALSE; } The UpdateClock member function will update the text inside our TextBlocks and rotate the hands to reflect current time: // udates Hands positions and labels HRESULT UpdateClock() { SYSTEMTIME time; HRESULT retcode;   GetLocalTime(&time);   //updates the text fields TCHAR timebuffer[32];   _itow(time.wSecond,timebuffer,10);   SecondsText->SetText(timebuffer);   _itow(time.wMinute,timebuffer,10);   MinutesText->SetText(timebuffer);   _itow(time.wHour,timebuffer,10);   HoursText->SetText(timebuffer);   if (FAILED(retcode=RotateHand(((float)time.wSecond)*6-90,SecondsHand))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=RotateHand(((float)time.wMinute)*6-90,MinutesHand))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=RotateHand(((float)(time.wHour%12))*30-90,HoursHand))) return retcode;   return S_OK; } The function retrieves current time, convert hours, minutes and seconds to strings and display those strings inside the three TextBlocks that we put inside our clock hands. Then it rotates the hands to position them at the right angle (angles are in degrees and we have to subtract 90 degrees because 0 degrees means horizontal on Silverlight for Windows Embedded and usually a clock 0 is in the top position of the dial. The code of the RotateHand function uses transforms to rotate our clock hands on the screen: // rotates a Hand HRESULT RotateHand(float angle,IXRFrameworkElement* Hand) { HRESULT retcode; IXRRotateTransformPtr rotatetransform; IXRApplicationPtr app;   if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateObject(IID_IXRRotateTransform,&rotatetransform))) return retcode;     if (FAILED(retcode=rotatetransform->SetAngle(angle))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=rotatetransform->SetCenterX(0.0))) return retcode;   float height;   if (FAILED(retcode==Hand->GetActualHeight(&height))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=rotatetransform->SetCenterY(height/2))) return retcode; if (FAILED(retcode=Hand->SetRenderTransform(rotatetransform))) return retcode;   return S_OK; } It creates a IXRotateTransform object, set its rotation angle and origin (the default origin is at the top-left corner of our Grid panel, we move it in the vertical center to keep the hand rotating around a single point in a more “clock like” way. Then we can apply the transform to our UI object using SetRenderTransform. Every UI element (derived from IXRFrameworkElement) can be rotated! And using different subclasses of IXRTransform also moved, scaled, skewed and distorted in many ways. You can also concatenate multiple transforms and apply them at once suing a IXRTransformGroup object. The XAML engine uses vector graphics and object will not look “pixelated” when they are rotated or scaled. As usual you can download the code here: http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/Clock.zip If you read up to (down to?) this point you seem to be interested in Silverlight for Windows Embedded. If you want me to discuss some specific topic, please feel free to point it out in the comments! Technorati Tags: Silverlight for Windows Embedded,Windows CE

  Read the article

• How Hard Can It Be?

  - by David Totzke

  I mean seriously.  Let’s imagine for a moment that by some stroke of luck or genius or cosmic accident that you come to be the owner of sex.com.  You’d think you had won the lottery.  That would be like having a license to print money.  I mean really.  Sex is the most searched term on the entire Internet.  Even without any SEO you’d think that your site would show up on the first page of results on Google. You would think that; and you’d be wrong.  At least in the case of the current owners of that domain name anyways.  The details can be found here but suffice it to say that Escom LLC has managed to fuck it up.  They’ve been forced into bankruptcy by their creditors.  Something doesn’t smell quite right with the whole thing.  Some guy named Mike Mann (please God, don’t let it be this Mike Mann) is an investor in all three creditors.  WTF? Seriously.  How hard can it be? Dave Just because I can…

  Read the article

• “Full House” at the ArcSig Ft. Lauderdale March meeting at the Microsoft Office!

  - by Rainer

  “Full House” at the ArcSig Ft. Lauderdale March meeting at the Microsoft Office! After all participants had the opportunity to get free pizza and soft drinks, Quent Herschelman gave an excellent presentation about Architecture Tools in Visual Studio 2010. He started with a brief introduction to the new MSDN subscriptions, the different versions of Visual Studio, and the full circle of application and solution integration for the new Team Foundation Server. I like the new structure of the MSDN subscriptions and the new options the Team Foundation Server offers! Quent continued his presentation with excellent information and demos of the Architecture Tools, focusing on Architecture Explorer and UML. INTERTECH donated a trainings certificate for $2495 for the first price and a Barnes & Noble Gift card in the amount of $50 for the second price to our monthly raffle! Congratulations to the two winners! Microsoft donated books, t-shirts and great info material for MSDN and Visual Studio 2010, as well as the pizza and soft drinks! Thank you very much to Quent Herschelman for the excellent presentation, to Intertech for the prizes, and to Microsoft for the hosting and food! Pre-Session Pizza Quent is ready to "go"! Quent at work! Thank you all for coming! Rainer Habermann ArcSig Fort Lauderdale Site Director

  Read the article

• Commercial Software Development – my presentation for DDD Scotland now available for download

  - by Liam Westley

  Thanks to everyone who voted me onto the DDD Scotland agenda, and for the fantastic audience some of whom you can see in Craig Murphy's photos of the event, http://www.flickr.com/photos/craigmurphy/4592461745/in/set-72157624025673156 http://www.flickr.com/photos/craigmurphy/4592467645/in/set-72157624025673156 I hope those who came enjoyed the session had a good time, and for them or those who were on one of the other tracks, or who couldn’t squeeze in; I’ve uploaded the presentation for you to download.  I created a more simple, and smaller, PowerPoint without all the fancy animations and video clips, which is available as a compressed ZIP file,   http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/dddscot/commercialsoftwaredev.zip I also printed the presentation with speaker notes (which contain most of the information I was talking about) using PDFCreator, which is available as an Adobe Acrobat PDF here,   http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/dddscot/commercialsoftwaredev.pdf ... and if PowerPoint presentations don't do it for you, also thanks to Craig Murphy, you can watch a video of the presentation that I gave at DDD8 in Microsoft TVP, Reading,  http://vimeo.com/9216563

  Read the article

• Force.com presents Database.com SQL Azure/Amazon RDS unfazed

  - by Sarang

  At the DreamForce 2010 event in San Francisco Force.com unveiled their next big thing in the Fat SaaS portfolio "Database.com".  I am still wondering how would they would've shelled out for that domain name. Now why would a already established SaaS player foray into a key building block like Database? Potentially allowing enterprises to build apps that do not utilize the Force.com stack! One key reason is being seen as the Fat SaaS player with evey trick in the SaaS space under his belt. You want CRM come hither, want a custom development PaaS like solution welcome home (VMForce), want all your apps to talk to a cloud DB and minimize latency by having it reside closer to you cloud apps? You've come to the right place sire! Other is potentially killing foray of smaller DB players like Oracle (Not surprisingly, the Database.com offering is a highly customized and scalable Oracle database) from entering the lucrative SaaS db marketplace. The feature set promised looks great out of the box for someone who likes to visualize cool new architectures. The ground realities are certainly going to be a lot different considering the SOAP/REST style access patterns in lieu of the comfortable old shoe of SQL. Microsoft suffered heavily with SDS (SQL Data Services) offering in early 2009 and had to pull the plug on the product only to reintroduce as a simple SQL Server in the cloud, SQL Windows Azure. Though MSFT is playing cool by providing OData semantics to work with SQL Windows Azure satisfying atleast some needs of the Web-Style to a DB. The other features like Social data models including Profiles, Status updates, feeds seem interesting as well. (Although I beleive social is just one of the aspects of large scale collaborative computing). All these features start "Free" for devs its a good news but the good news stops here. The overall pricing model of $ per Users per Transactions / Month is highly disproportionate compared to Amazon RDS (Based on MySQL) or SQL Windows Azure (Based on MSSQL). Roger Jennigs of Oakleaf did an interesting comparo based on 3, 10, 100, 500 users and it turns out that Database.com going by current understanding is way too expensive for the services on offer. The offering may not impact the decision for DotNet shops mulling their cloud stategy or even some Java/MySQL shops thinking about Amazon RDS, however for enterprises having already invested in other force.com offerings this could be a very important piece in the cloud strategy jigsaw. One which would address a key cloud DB issue of "Latency" for them at least it will help having the DB in the neighborhood. The tooling and "SQL like" access provider drivers (Think ODBC/JDBC) will be available later this year. Progress Software has already announced their JDBC driver stack for Database.com. It remains to be seen how effective the overall solutions proves to be in the longer run but for starts its a important decision towards consolidating Force.com's already strong positioning in the SaaS space. As always contrasting views are welcome! :)

  Read the article

• James Atkinson - New Blog Home

  - by jatkinson

  I'm migrating my blog that is currently hosted over at vbCity.com (which is an outstanding developer community!) to a new home at geekswithblogs.net. I truly appreciate the comradery of Serge B, Ged Mead, and the other team members at the "City". What you can expect to find here (my interests): Most .NET programming topics General computing Language examples in C#, VB.NET, and Boo WCF WPF Mathematical / GPS solutions F# (in progress... if you can say that much) Obsessed with code performance (speed) Some photography My background: Kansas State University Grad (Agriculture Technology Management) From Richmond, VA Self taught programmer (started with C# in VS2002) NOT a professional programmer (enables free thinking?!)  I'm no Jeff Atwood or Beth Massi, but you should expect to see some interesting stuff to follow.

  Read the article

• O&rsquo;Reilly Deal of the Day 7/August/2014 - Windows PowerShell for Developers

  - by TATWORTH

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2014/08/07/orsquoreilly-deal-of-the-day-7august2014---windows-powershell-for.aspxToday’s half-price Deal of the Day from O’Reilly at http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920024491.do?code=MSDEAL is Windows PowerShell for Developers. “Want to perform programming tasks better, faster, simpler, and make them repeatable? Take a deep dive into Windows PowerShell and discover what this distributed automation platform can do. Whether you’re a .NET developer or IT pro, this concise guide will show you how PowerShell’s scripting language can help you be more productive on everyday tasks.”

  Read the article

• Software Testing Humor

  - by mbcrump

  I usually don’t share these kind of things unless it really makes me laugh. At least, I can provide a link to a free eBook on the Pablo’s S.O.L.I.D principles eBook. S.O.L.I.D. is a collection of best-practice object-oriented design principles that you can apply to your design to accomplish various desirable goals like loose-coupling, higher maintainability, intuitive location of interesting code, etc You may also want to check out the Pablo’s 31 Days of Refactoring eBook as well.

  Read the article

• Revisiting ANTS Performance Profiler 7.4

  - by James Michael Hare

  Last year, I did a small review on the ANTS Performance Profiler 6.3, now that it’s a year later and a major version number higher, I thought I’d revisit the review and revise my last post. This post will take the same examples as the original post and update them to show what’s new in version 7.4 of the profiler. Background A performance profiler’s main job is to keep track of how much time is typically spent in each unit of code. This helps when we have a program that is not running at the performance we expect, and we want to know where the program is experiencing issues. There are many profilers out there of varying capabilities. Red Gate’s typically seem to be the very easy to “jump in” and get started with very little training required. So let’s dig into the Performance Profiler. I’ve constructed a very crude program with some obvious inefficiencies. It’s a simple program that generates random order numbers (or really could be any unique identifier), adds it to a list, sorts the list, then finds the max and min number in the list. Ignore the fact it’s very contrived and obviously inefficient, we just want to use it as an example to show off the tool: 1: // our test program 2: public static class Program 3: { 4: // the number of iterations to perform 5: private static int _iterations = 1000000; 6: 7: // The main method that controls it all 8: public static void Main() 9: { 10: var list = new List<string>(); 11: 12: for (int i = 0; i < _iterations; i++) 13: { 14: var x = GetNextId(); 15: 16: AddToList(list, x); 17: 18: var highLow = GetHighLow(list); 19: 20: if ((i % 1000) == 0) 21: { 22: Console.WriteLine("{0} - High: {1}, Low: {2}", i, highLow.Item1, highLow.Item2); 23: Console.Out.Flush(); 24: } 25: } 26: } 27: 28: // gets the next order id to process (random for us) 29: public static string GetNextId() 30: { 31: var random = new Random(); 32: var num = random.Next(1000000, 9999999); 33: return num.ToString(); 34: } 35: 36: // add it to our list - very inefficiently! 37: public static void AddToList(List<string> list, string item) 38: { 39: list.Add(item); 40: list.Sort(); 41: } 42: 43: // get high and low of order id range - very inefficiently! 44: public static Tuple<int,int> GetHighLow(List<string> list) 45: { 46: return Tuple.Create(list.Max(s => Convert.ToInt32(s)), list.Min(s => Convert.ToInt32(s))); 47: } 48: } So let’s run it through the profiler and see what happens! Visual Studio Integration First, let’s look at how the ANTS profilers integrate with Visual Studio’s menu system. Once you install the ANTS profilers, you will get an ANTS menu item with several options: Notice that you can either Profile Performance or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler. These sound similar but achieve two slightly different actions: Profile Performance: this immediately launches the profiler with all defaults selected to profile the active project in Visual Studio. Launch ANTS Performance Profiler: this launches the profiler much the same way as starting it from the Start Menu. The profiler will pre-populate the application and path information, but allow you to change the settings before beginning the profile run. So really, the main difference is that Profile Performance immediately begins profiling with the default selections, where Launch ANTS Performance Profiler allows you to change the defaults and attach to an already-running application. Let’s Fire it Up! So when you fire up ANTS either via Start Menu or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler menu in Visual Studio, you are presented with a very simple dialog to get you started: Notice you can choose from many different options for application type. You can profile executables, services, web applications, or just attach to a running process. In fact, in version 7.4 we see two new options added: ASP.NET Web Application (IIS Express) SharePoint web application (IIS) So this gives us an additional way to profile ASP.NET applications and the ability to profile SharePoint applications as well. You can also choose your level of detail in the Profiling Mode drop down. If you choose Line-Level and method-level timings detail, you will get a lot more detail on the method durations, but this will also slow down profiling somewhat. If you really need the profiler to be as unintrusive as possible, you can change it to Sample method-level timings. This is performing very light profiling, where basically the profiler collects timings of a method by examining the call-stack at given intervals. Which method you choose depends a lot on how much detail you need to find the issue and how sensitive your program issues are to timing. So for our example, let’s just go with the line and method timing detail. So, we check that all the options are correct (if you launch from VS2010, the executable and path are filled in already), and fire it up by clicking the [Start Profiling] button. Profiling the Application Once you start profiling the application, you will see a real-time graph of CPU usage that will indicate how much your application is using the CPU(s) on your system. During this time, you can select segments of the graph and bookmark them, giving them mnemonic names. This can be useful if you want to compare performance in one part of the run to another part of the run. Notice that once you select a block, it will give you the call tree breakdown for that selection only, and the relative performance of those calls. Once you feel you have collected enough information, you can click [Stop Profiling] to stop the application run and information collection and begin a more thorough analysis. Analyzing Method Timings So now that we’ve halted the run, we can look around the GUI and see what we can see. By default, the times are shown in terms of percentage of time of the total run of the application, though you can change it in the View menu item to milliseconds, ticks, or seconds as well. This won’t affect the percentages of methods, it only affects what units the times are shown. Notice also that the major hotspot seems to be in a method without source, ANTS Profiler will filter these out by default, but you can right-click on the line and remove the filter to see more detail. This proves especially handy when a bottleneck is due to a method in the BCL. So now that we’ve removed the filter, we see a bit more detail: In addition, ANTS Performance Profiler gives you the ability to decompile the methods without source so that you can dive even deeper, though typically this isn’t necessary for our purposes. When looking at timings, there are generally two types of timings for each method call: Time: This is the time spent ONLY in this method, not including calls this method makes to other methods. Time With Children: This is the total of time spent in both this method AND including calls this method makes to other methods. In other words, the Time tells you how much work is being done exclusively in this method, and the Time With Children tells you how much work is being done inclusively in this method and everything it calls. You can also choose to display the methods in a tree or in a grid. The tree view is the default and it shows the method calls arranged in terms of the tree representing all method calls and the parent method that called them, etc. This is useful for when you find a hot-spot method, you can see who is calling it to determine if the problem is the method itself, or if it is being called too many times. The grid method represents each method only once with its totals and is useful for quickly seeing what method is the trouble spot. In addition, you can choose to display Methods with source which are generally the methods you wrote (as opposed to native or BCL code), or Any Method which shows not only your methods, but also native calls, JIT overhead, synchronization waits, etc. So these are just two ways of viewing the same data, and you’re free to choose the organization that best suits what information you are after. Analyzing Method Source If we look at the timings above, we see that our AddToList() method (and in particular, it’s call to the List<T>.Sort() method in the BCL) is the hot-spot in this analysis. If ANTS sees a method that is consuming the most time, it will flag it as a hot-spot to help call out potential areas of concern. This doesn’t mean the other statistics aren’t meaningful, but that the hot-spot is most likely going to be your biggest bang-for-the-buck to concentrate on. So let’s select the AddToList() method, and see what it shows in the source window below: Notice the source breakout in the bottom pane when you select a method (from either tree or grid view). This shows you the timings in this method per line of code. This gives you a major indicator of where the trouble-spot in this method is. So in this case, we see that performing a Sort() on the List<T> after every Add() is killing our performance! Of course, this was a very contrived, duh moment, but you’d be surprised how many performance issues become duh moments. Note that this one line is taking up 86% of the execution time of this application! If we eliminate this bottleneck, we should see drastic improvement in the performance. So to fix this, if we still wanted to maintain the List<T> we’d have many options, including: delay Sort() until after all Add() methods, using a SortedSet, SortedList, or SortedDictionary depending on which is most appropriate, or forgoing the sorting all together and using a Dictionary. Rinse, Repeat! So let’s just change all instances of List<string> to SortedSet<string> and run this again through the profiler: Now we see the AddToList() method is no longer our hot-spot, but now the Max() and Min() calls are! This is good because we’ve eliminated one hot-spot and now we can try to correct this one as well. As before, we can then optimize this part of the code (possibly by taking advantage of the fact the list is now sorted and returning the first and last elements). We can then rinse and repeat this process until we have eliminated as many bottlenecks as possible. Calls by Web Request Another feature that was added recently is the ability to view .NET methods grouped by the HTTP requests that caused them to run. This can be helpful in determining which pages, web services, etc. are causing hot spots in your web applications. Summary If you like the other ANTS tools, you’ll like the ANTS Performance Profiler as well. It is extremely easy to use with very little product knowledge required to get up and running. There are profilers built into the higher product lines of Visual Studio, of course, which are also powerful and easy to use. But for quickly jumping in and finding hot spots rapidly, Red Gate’s Performance Profiler 7.4 is an excellent choice. Technorati Tags: Influencers,ANTS,Performance Profiler,Profiler

  Read the article

• Print SSRS Report / PDF automatically from SQL Server agent or Windows Service

  - by Jeremy Ramos

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/JeremyRamos/archive/2013/10/22/print-ssrs-report--pdf-from-sql-server-agent-or.aspxI have turned the Web upside-down to find a solution to this considering the least components and least maintenance as possible to achieve automated printing of an SSRS report. This is for the reason that we do not have a full software development team to maintain an app and we have to minimize the support overhead for the support team.Here is my setup:SQL Server 2008 R2 in Windows Server 2008 R2PDF format reports generated by SSRS Reports subscriptions to a Windows File ShareNetwork printerColoured reports with logo and brandingI have found and tested the following solutions to no avail:ProsConsCalling Adobe Acrobat Reader exe: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Reader 11.0\Reader\acroRd32.exe" /n /s /o /h /t "C:\temp\print.pdf" \\printserver\printername"Very simple optionAdobe Acrobat reader requires to launch the GUI to send a job to a printer. Hence, this option cannot be used when printing from a service.Calling Adobe Acrobat Reader exe as a process from a .NET console appA bit harder than above, but still a simple solutionSame as cons abovePowershell script(Start-Process -FilePath "C:\temp\print.pdf" -Verb Print)Very simple optionUses default PDF client in quiet mode to Print, but also requires an active session.    Foxit ReaderVery simple optionRequires GUI same as Adobe Acrobat Reader Using the Reporting Services Web service to run and stream the report to an image object and then passed to the printerQuite complexThis is what we're trying to avoid  After pulling my hair out for two days, testing and evaluating the above solutions, I ended up learning more about printers (more than ever in my entire life) and how printer drivers work with PostScripts. I then bumped on to a PostScript interpreter called GhostScript (http://www.ghostscript.com/) and then the solution starts to get clearer and clearer.I managed to achieve a solution (maybe not be the simplest but efficient enough to achieve the least-maintenance-least-components goal) in 3-simple steps:Install GhostScript (http://www.ghostscript.com/download/) - this is an open-source PostScript and PDF interpreter. Printing directly using GhostScript only produces grayscale prints using the laserjet generic driver unless you save as BMP image and then interpret the colours using the imageInstall GSView (http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/)- this is a GhostScript add-on to make it easier to directly print to a Windows printer. GSPrint automates the above  PDF -> BMP -> Printer Driver.Run the GSPrint command from SQL Server agent or Windows Service:"C:\Program Files\Ghostgum\gsview\gsprint.exe" -color -landscape -all -printer "printername" "C:\temp\print.pdf"Command line options are here: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/gsprint.htmAnother lesson learned is, since you are calling the script from the Service Account, it will not necessarily have the Printer mapped in its Windows profile (if it even has one). The workaround to this is by adding a local printer as you normally would and then map this printer to the network printer. Note that you may need to install the Printer Driver locally in the server.So, that's it! There are many ways to achieve a solution. The key thing is how you provide the smartest solution!

  Read the article

• Multiple Monitors

  - by mroberts

  At my workplace .Net developers get pretty much the same equipment. A decent Dell workstation / Desktop, mine is a Dell Precision 390. One dual core 2.40 GHz. Eight GB RAM. Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit. Two Dell 20.1 Monitors. I'm happy with this.  The machine is about 3 years old but still runs with some decent speed. New developers are getting a Dell workstation with dual quad processors. I just put in a request for myself and three other developers for an upgraded video card and two additional monitors, for a total of four monitors per person.  We suggested this card, BTW, mainly for the cost.  The move from one monitor to two was fantastic (one might even say life (or work) changing) and truly did increase productivity. Now what about going from 2 monitors to 4?  I'm sure the change is not as dramatic as one to two, but I can't help but to think four monitors is better than two.  But if four is better than two, should we have asked for six?!? Also what about mixing monitor types?  Right now my monitors are the older square type vs. wide-screen.  It's been rumored that we will be getting monitors out of current stock and they will be 22 inch wide-screens.  I understand this, recession and all.  2-20 inch square monitors with 2-22 inch wide-screen monitors...hmmmmm.  I'm thinking I'd rather get 2 additional 17 inch square monitors to put on each side of my 20's. Also, a question was raised about the layout of four monitors. By default, my thought was I'll just put them all on my desk, kinda in a line. I've heard others say they want to stack them in a 2 x 2 square. BTW, loving multi monitor support in Visual studio 2010! I’d love some comments on your experience with one, two, four, or however many monitors from a developers perspective.

  Read the article

• It&rsquo;s All About Expectation Management

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I saw this tweet from Gerald Weinberg today: I’d expand on this – its not just managers, its our clients as well. With so much focus on “agile” and reducing the amount of wasteful documentation created, those that typically consume traditional deliverables haven’t caught up. For many, there still is a correlation between seeing a mountain of paper, or a 30 page Word document, or a 40 slide PowerPoint, and feeling like some “work” was done. The “Value Driven Development” movement is still in its infancy, even with the adoption and success stories. So, we have two options – we can complain about it, or we can learn how to live with it while continuing to evangelize about the benefits of value over bloat. The reality is that perceived value is still value, so what’s important – especially in a situation as Gerald mentions where management or clients don’t understand the work – is to find out what the manager/client values and deliver to that. That doesn’t mean you don’t discuss it. That doesn’t mean that if you see risks being represented in what a manager/client is asking you don’t question it and provide alternatives. But it does mean that you don’t slam the door on it – you don’t just toss it aside and ignore what their perceived value is. The world isn’t perfect, primarily because its filled with imperfect people. The only way to get better is to engage and not dismiss each other, even if we disagree on value.

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for April 29, 2010 -- #851

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Carlos Figueira(-2-), Subodh Pushpak, Gergely Orosz, John Papa, Mike Snow(-2-), Rishi, Tim Heuer, Stefan Olson, and David Anson. Shoutouts: Josh Holmes blogged about a cool app the City of Miami has up: Miami 311: Built on Windows Azure Gergely Orosz reports on the state of a bug he found pre SL4: Silverlight 4 still displays large elements incorrectly Laura Foy and Charlie Kindel discuss WP7 on Channel 9: Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Refresh Announced Charlie Kindel has an announcement, good instructions, and what's new notes on the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh! Tim Heuer mentioned the workaround for this in his post (below), but I thought you might like to read Brandon Watson's debrief of what it's all about: Signed Assemblies Bug in the Windows Phone Tools CTP Refresh Laurent Bugnion posted about interrelations between versions of Blend and WP7 code... read it closely: Be careful when installing the Blend Windows Phone 7 Add-In From SilverlightCream.com: Consuming REST/POX services in Silverlight 4 Carlos Figueira has a pair of posts up about consuming services in Silverlight 4. This first one is about consuming REST/POX services. He provides a Service Contract that can be used with either and the full project code is available as well. Consuming REST/JSON services in Silverlight 4 In the second post, Carlos Figueira provides the code to allow WCF and Silverlight 4 to consume strongly-typed REST/JSON... and again, all the code is available. Silverlight and WCF caching Subodh Pushpak has a post up discussing caching in WCF, and has code demonstrating turning caching on at run-time. Detecting Silverlight Version Installed Gergely Orosz said it right when he said "Detecting the Silverlight version installed on a client machine isn’t entirely straightforward." ... and after reading this post, if you take the link to his ScottLogic blog, you'll get a full break-out of how it's done. Silverlight TV 22: Tim Heuer on Extending the SMF It's Thursday, and that means Silverlight TV! ... this week, John Papa has on Tim Heuer who has always been out there pushing media... and he's talking about SMF or Silverlight Media Framework for the uninitiated, and also extending it. Silverlight Tip of the Day #7 – Localized Resources Mike Snow has Tip Number 7 up and it's about localization... good end-to-end discussion and demonstration. Just thought I should use that to prove to my daughter that the tatoo she had put on the back of her neck actually reads "Eat More Broccoli" :) Silverlight Tip of the Day #8 – Detecting Alt, Shift, Control, Window & Apple Keys Combinations I just realized Mike Snow's site logo reads "Silverlight Tips of the Day" (bolding mine) ... that answers why I'm seeing more than one -- sorry Mike, couldn't pass it up :) ... Mike's second tip today and number 8 in the series is on detecting all the mouse button and ctl/alt/shift combinations in Silverlight. nRoute: More Wholesomeness, with SL 4 and .NET 4.0 Rishi has a post up announcing a new nRoute release for Silverlight 4 and .NET 4.0 He's tweaked the code to take advantages of enhancements in the new platforms, so check it out. Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools April 2010 Refresh Booya... Tim Heuer announced the release of the next drop in the WP7 tools ... dang wish I was at home today :) ... be sure to read the post for info such as the notes about Authenticode Assemblies and the release notes. Updates to Silverlight Multi-binding support Stefan Olson points up a SL4 change to Multi-binding support that he had previously blogged about. He shows the previous non-working example, and what you have to do to make it work now. Using XAML to create a custom wallpaper image for your mobile device David Anson has a solution for those pesky lost devices, and let me go on the record right now saying if anyone finds a WP7 phone laying around, just call me, it's mine :) [think that'd work??] ... ok, David's solution is a WPF app "MobileDeviceHomeScreenMaker" that you get the info set and it produces a png you then put on your device. But seriously about that lost phone... Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

  Read the article

• How to: Check which table is the biggest, in SQL Server

  - by AngelEyes

  The company I work with had it's DB double its size lately, so I needed to find out which tables were the biggest. I found this on the web, and decided it's worth remembering! Taken from http://www.sqlteam.com/article/finding-the-biggest-tables-in-a-database, the code is from http://www.sqlteam.com/downloads/BigTables.sql   /************************************************************************************** * *  BigTables.sql *  Bill Graziano (SQLTeam.com) *  [email protected] *  v1.1 * **************************************************************************************/ DECLARE @id INT DECLARE @type CHARACTER(2) DECLARE @pages INT DECLARE @dbname SYSNAME DECLARE @dbsize DEC(15, 0) DECLARE @bytesperpage DEC(15, 0) DECLARE @pagesperMB DEC(15, 0) CREATE TABLE #spt_space   (      objid    INT NULL,      ROWS     INT NULL,      reserved DEC(15) NULL,      data     DEC(15) NULL,      indexp   DEC(15) NULL,      unused   DEC(15) NULL   ) SET nocount ON -- Create a cursor to loop through the user tables DECLARE c_tables CURSOR FOR   SELECT id   FROM   sysobjects   WHERE  xtype = 'U' OPEN c_tables FETCH NEXT FROM c_tables INTO @id WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0   BEGIN       /* Code from sp_spaceused */       INSERT INTO #spt_space                   (objid,                    reserved)       SELECT objid = @id,              SUM(reserved)       FROM   sysindexes       WHERE  indid IN ( 0, 1, 255 )              AND id = @id       SELECT @pages = SUM(dpages)       FROM   sysindexes       WHERE  indid < 2              AND id = @id       SELECT @pages = @pages + Isnull(SUM(used), 0)       FROM   sysindexes       WHERE  indid = 255              AND id = @id       UPDATE #spt_space       SET    data = @pages       WHERE  objid = @id       /* index: sum(used) where indid in (0, 1, 255) - data */       UPDATE #spt_space       SET    indexp = (SELECT SUM(used)                        FROM   sysindexes                        WHERE  indid IN ( 0, 1, 255 )                               AND id = @id) - data       WHERE  objid = @id       /* unused: sum(reserved) - sum(used) where indid in (0, 1, 255) */       UPDATE #spt_space       SET    unused = reserved - (SELECT SUM(used)                                   FROM   sysindexes                                   WHERE  indid IN ( 0, 1, 255 )                                          AND id = @id)       WHERE  objid = @id       UPDATE #spt_space       SET    ROWS = i.ROWS       FROM   sysindexes i       WHERE  i.indid < 2              AND i.id = @id              AND objid = @id       FETCH NEXT FROM c_tables INTO @id   END SELECT TOP 25 table_name = (SELECT LEFT(name, 25)                             FROM   sysobjects                             WHERE  id = objid),               ROWS = CONVERT(CHAR(11), ROWS),               reserved_kb = Ltrim(Str(reserved * d.low / 1024., 15, 0) + ' ' + 'KB'),               data_kb = Ltrim(Str(data * d.low / 1024., 15, 0) + ' ' + 'KB'),               index_size_kb = Ltrim(Str(indexp * d.low / 1024., 15, 0) + ' ' + 'KB'),               unused_kb = Ltrim(Str(unused * d.low / 1024., 15, 0) + ' ' + 'KB') FROM   #spt_space,        MASTER.dbo.spt_values d WHERE  d.NUMBER = 1        AND d.TYPE = 'E' ORDER  BY reserved DESC DROP TABLE #spt_space CLOSE c_tables DEALLOCATE c_tables

  Read the article

• What Every Developer Should Know About MSI Components

  - by Alois Kraus

  Hopefully nothing. But if you have to do more than simple XCopy deployment and you need to support updates, upgrades and perhaps side by side scenarios there is no way around MSI. You can create Msi files with a Visual Studio Setup project which is severely limited or you can use the Windows Installer Toolset. I cannot talk about WIX with my German colleagues because WIX has a very special meaning. It is funny to always use the long name when I talk about deployment possibilities. Alternatively you can buy commercial tools which help you to author Msi files but I am not sure how good they are. Given enough pain with existing solutions you can also learn the MSI Apis and create your own packaging solution. If I were you I would use either a commercial visual tool when you do easy deployments or use the free Windows Installer Toolset. Once you know the WIX schema you can create well formed wix xml files easily with any editor. Then you can “compile” from the wxs files your Msi package. Recently I had the “pleasure” to get my hands dirty with C++ (again) and the MSI technology. Installation is a complex topic but after several month of digging into arcane MSI issues I can safely say that there should exist an easier way to install and update files as today. I am not alone with this statement as John Robbins (creator of the cool tool Paraffin) states: “.. It's a brittle and scary API in Windows …”. To help other people struggling with installation issues I present you the advice I (and others) found useful and what will happen if you ignore this advice. What is a MSI file? A MSI file is basically a database with tables which reference each other to control how your un/installation should work. The basic idea is that you declare via these tables what you want to install and MSI controls the how to get your stuff onto or off your machine. Your “stuff” consists usually of files, registry keys, shortcuts and environment variables. Therefore the most important tables are File, Registry, Environment and Shortcut table which define what will be un/installed. The key to master MSI is that every resource (file, registry key ,…) is associated with a MSI component. The actual payload consists of compressed files in the CAB format which can either be embedded into the MSI file or reside beside the MSI file or in a subdirectory below it. To examine MSI files you need Orca a free MSI editor provided by MS. There is also another free editor called Super Orca which does support diffs between MSI and it does not lock the MSI files. But since Orca comes with a shell extension I tend to use only Orca because it is so easy to right click on a MSI file and open it with this tool. How Do I Install It? Double click it. This does work for fresh installations as well as major upgrades. Updates need to be installed via the command line via msiexec /i <msi> REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=vomus   This tells the installer to reinstall all already installed features (new features will NOT be installed). The reinstallmode letters do force an overwrite of the old cached package in the %WINDIR%\Installer folder. All files, shortcuts and registry keys are redeployed if they are missing or need to be replaced with a newer version. When things did go really wrong and you want to overwrite everything unconditionally use REINSTALLMODE=vamus. How To Enable MSI Logs? You can download a MSI from Microsoft which installs some registry keys to enable full MSI logging. The log files can be found in your %TEMP% folder and are called MSIxxxx.log. Alternatively you can add to your msiexec command line the option msiexec …. /l*vx <LogFileName> Personally I find it rather strange that * does not mean full logging. To really get all logs I need to add v and x which is documented in the msiexec help but I still find this behavior unintuitive. What are MSI components? The whole MSI logic is bound to the concept of MSI components. Nearly every msi table has a Component column which binds an installable resource to a component. Below are the screenshots of the FeatureComponents and Component table of an example MSI. The Feature table defines basically the feature hierarchy.  To find out what belongs to a feature you need to look at the FeatureComponents table where for each feature the components are listed which will be installed when a feature is installed. The MSI components are defined in the  Component table. This table has as first column the component name and as second column the component id which is a GUID. All resources you want to install belong to a MSI component. Therefore nearly all MSI tables have a Component_ column which contains the component name. If you look e.g. a the File table you see that every file belongs to a component which is true for all other tables which install resources. The component table is the glue between all other tables which contain the resources you want to install. So far so easy. Why is MSI then so complex? Most MSI problems arise from the fact that you did violate a MSI component rule in one or the other way. When you install a feature the reference count for all components belonging to this feature will increase by one. If your component is installed by more than one feature it will get a higher refcount. When you uninstall a feature its refcount will drop by one. Interesting things happen if the component reference count reaches zero: Then all associated resources will be deleted. That looks like a reasonable thing and it is. What it makes complex are the strange component rules you have to follow. Below are some important component rules from the Tao of the Windows Installer … Rule 16: Follow Component Rules Components are a very important part of the Installer technology. They are the means whereby the Installer manages the resources that make up your application. The SDK provides the following guidelines for creating components in your package: Never create two components that install a resource under the same name and target location. If a resource must be duplicated in multiple components, change its name or target location in each component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Two components must not have the same key path file. This is a consequence of the previous rule. The key path value points to a particular file or folder belonging to the component that the installer uses to detect the component. If two components had the same key path file, the installer would be unable to distinguish which component is installed. Two components however may share a key path folder. Do not create a version of a component that is incompatible with all previous versions of the component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Do not create components containing resources that will need to be installed into more than one directory on the user’s system. The installer installs all of the resources in a component into the same directory. It is not possible to install some resources into subdirectories. Do not include more than one COM server per component. If a component contains a COM server, this must be the key path for the component. Do not specify more than one file per component as a target for the Start menu or a Desktop shortcut. … And these rules do not even talk about component ids, update packages and upgrades which you need to understand as well. Lets suppose you install two MSIs (MSI1 and MSI2) which have the same ComponentId but different component names. Both do install the same file. What will happen when you uninstall MSI2?   Hm the file should stay there. But the component names are different. Yes and yes. But MSI uses not use the component name as key for the refcount. Instead the ComponentId column of the Component table which contains a GUID is used as identifier under which the refcount is stored. The components Comp1 and Comp2 are identical from the MSI perspective. After the installation of both MSIs the Component with the Id {100000….} has a refcount of two. After uninstallation of one MSI there is still a refcount of one which drops to zero just as expected when we uninstall the last msi. Then the file which was the same for both MSIs is deleted. You should remember that MSI keeps a refcount across MSIs for components with the same component id. MSI does manage components not the resources you did install. The resources associated with a component are then and only then deleted when the refcount of the component reaches zero.   The dependencies between features, components and resources can be described as relations. m,k are numbers >= 1, n can be 0. Inside a MSI the following relations are valid Feature    1  –> n Components Component    1 –> m Features Component      1  –>  k Resources These relations express that one feature can install several components and features can share components between them. Every (meaningful) component will install at least one resource which means that its name (primary key to stay in database speak) does occur in some other table in the Component column as value which installs some resource. Lets make it clear with an example. We want to install with the feature MainFeature some files a registry key and a shortcut. We can then create components Comp1..3 which are referenced by the resources defined in the corresponding tables.   Feature Component Registry File Shortcuts MainFeature Comp1 RegistryKey1     MainFeature Comp2   File.txt   MainFeature Comp3   File2.txt Shortcut to File2.txt   It is illegal that the same resource is part of more than one component since this would break the refcount mechanism. Lets illustrate this:            Feature ComponentId Resource Reference Count Feature1 {1000-…} File1.txt 1 Feature2 {2000-….} File1.txt 1 The installation part works well but what happens when you uninstall Feature2? Component {20000…} gets a refcount of zero where MSI deletes all resources belonging to this component. In this case File1.txt will be deleted. But Feature1 still has another component {10000…} with a refcount of one which means that the file was deleted too early. You just have ruined your installation. To fix it you then need to click on the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs to let MSI reinstall any missing registry keys, files or shortcuts. The vigilant reader might has noticed that there is more in the Component table. Beside its name and GUID it has also an installation directory, attributes and a KeyPath. The KeyPath is a reference to a file or registry key which is used to detect if the component is already installed. This becomes important when you repair or uninstall a component. To find out if the component is already installed MSI checks if the registry key or file referenced by the KeyPath property does exist. When it does not exist it assumes that it was either already uninstalled (can lead to problems during uninstall) or that it is already installed and all is fine. Why is this detail so important? Lets put all files into one component. The KeyPath should be then one of the files of your component to check if it was installed or not. When your installation becomes corrupt because a file was deleted you cannot repair it with the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs because MSI checks the component integrity via the Resource referenced by its KeyPath. As long as you did not delete the KeyPath file MSI thinks all resources with your component are installed and never executes any repair action. You get even more trouble when you try to remove files during an upgrade (you cannot remove files during an update) from your super component which contains all files. The only way out and therefore best practice is to assign for every resource you want to install an extra component. This ensures painless updatability and repairs and you have much less effort to remove specific files during an upgrade. In effect you get this best practice relation Feature 1  –> n Components Component   1  –>  1 Resources MSI Component Rules Rule 1 – One component per resource Every resource you want to install (file, registry key, value, environment value, shortcut, directory, …) must get its own component which does never change between versions as long as the install location is the same. Penalty If you add more than one resources to a component you will break the repair capability of MSI because the KeyPath is used to check if the component needs repair. MSI ComponentId Files MSI 1.0 {1000} File1-5 MSI 2.0 {2000} File2-5 You want to remove File1 in version 2.0 of your MSI. Since you want to keep the other files you create a new component and add them there. MSI will delete all files if the component refcount of {1000} drops to zero. The files you want to keep are added to the new component {2000}. Ok that does work if your upgrade does uninstall the old MSI first. This will cause the refcount of all previously installed components to reach zero which means that all files present in version 1.0 are deleted. But there is a faster way to perform your upgrade by first installing your new MSI and then remove the old one.  If you choose this upgrade path then you will loose File1-5 after your upgrade and not only File1 as intended by your new component design.   Rule 2 – Only add, never remove resources from a component If you did follow rule 1 you will not need Rule 2. You can add in a patch more resources to one component. That is ok. But you can never remove anything from it. There are tricky ways around that but I do not want to encourage bad component design. Penalty Lets assume you have 2 MSI files which install under the same component one file   MSI1 MSI2 {1000} - ComponentId {1000} – ComponentId File1.txt File2.txt   When you install and uninstall both MSIs you will end up with an installation where either File1 or File2 will be left. Why? It seems that MSI does not store the resources associated with each component in its internal database. Instead Windows will simply query the MSI that is currently uninstalled for all resources belonging to this component. Since it will find only one file and not two it will only uninstall one file. That is the main reason why you never can remove resources from a component!   Rule 3 Never Remove A Component From an Update MSI. This is the same as if you change the GUID of a component by accident for your new update package. The resulting update package will not contain all components from the previously installed package. Penalty When you remove a component from a feature MSI will set the feature state during update to Advertised and log a warning message into its log file when you did enable MSI logging. SELMGR: ComponentId '{2DCEA1BA-3E27-E222-484C-D0D66AEA4F62}' is registered to feature 'xxxxxxx, but is not present in the Component table.  Removal of components from a feature is not supported! MSI (c) (24:44) [07:53:13:436]: SELMGR: Removal of a component from a feature is not supported Advertised means that MSI treats all components of this feature as not installed. As a consequence during uninstall nothing will be removed since it is not installed! This is not only bad because uninstall does no longer work but this feature will also not get the required patches. All other features which have followed component versioning rules for update packages will be updated but the one faulty feature will not. This results in very hard to find bugs why an update was only partially successful. Things got better with Windows Installer 4.5 but you cannot rely on that nobody will use an older installer. It is a good idea to add to your update msiexec call MSIENFORCEUPGRADECOMPONENTRULES=1 which will abort the installation if you did violate this rule.

  Read the article

• My Interview with Microsoft

  - by Victor Hurdugaci

  This post is for those who want to apply or have already applied (but not finished the interview) for a Microsoft Job. The recruitment process is quite similar for everyone and consists of a few steps. Application E-Mail Interview Phone Interview On Site Interview I will tell you my story and how I went through the four phases. 1. Application My blog's title (Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit) means "Nothing Comes Out of Nothing". You can't get a job at Microsoft by not doing anything - this is true for anything else. The first step you need to complete is the application process. For this, many options are available. You can... ... apply online on Microsoft's Careers website as I did ... send your CV to different e-mail addresses (there are some dedicated e-mails for different positions) ... apply through some 3rd party organization (job shop, campus recruitment, job agency, etc) On MS Careers you just have to post your CV and choose the job you want. That's all! No recommendation letter, no cover letter, no nothing. Of course, not every CV passes the selection process. Here are some tips for improving your resume (worked for me): Don't write it just before applying! Write a draft version, wait a few days and then review it. This way you will find a lot of mistakes and stupid things you wrote initially. If you review it immediately after writing, your mind will not be criticism oriented and will just ignore mistakes. Repeat the write-wait-review process as many times as necessary, until you find that the review revealed no mistakes. After you did the final review and the CV is bullet-proof, ask others to review it. They will definitely find inconsistencies and mistakes and this will make you feel stupid. This is good because will open your eyes will make you go into an 'I want to improve' mode. You'll try to correct everything. After you come up with a modified version go again through steps 1 and 2. Repeat this as many times as necessary. [Special thanks to Lucian Sasu, Nadia Comanici, Andrei Ciobanu, Monica Balan and Lavinia Tanase for reviewing my CV!] Make it short and give only relevant facts. Initially, I come up with a 5 pages CV because I wrote every single technology with which I worked. There were a lot irrelevant things, I wrote Windows Workflow Foundation just because I played with it for a few days. I added extensive descriptions for every project, made a personal details section (name, birth date, address, etc) of 1/2 page. Others suggested to cut everything that was not necessary. You don't need to give extensive descriptions, just add a few words. For example, I wrote "VS Image Visualizer - Visual Studio 2008 debug visualizer for images" and added a link to the project's page - you submit formatted andcan embed links. Add something that makes it different. I don't know if this makes a difference, but I added some lines to separate items just like in the picture below. Definitely Microsoft gets thousands of CVs per day. You need something special. Don't lie! Tell exactly what you did and what is the proficiency level of your skills. For example, don't write "Advanced" for UML if you don't know the difference between composition and aggregation. Be realistic and don't under/over estimate yourself. Use the spell chick. Make sure everything is written in correct English and there are no grammar/spelling mistakes. Noddy likes a WC with grammar mi takes. You mght fail just because of that. Once you completed your CV, choose the job that suits best your needs, apply and wait... The waiting is a problem because all these big companies like Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple, etc. will contact you only if they find something interesting in your application. If you're not suitable, then no rejection is sent. I applied for an Intern Software Development Engineer position at Microsoft Redmond. I cannot apply for a full time position because I want to finish the master program on time, in the next summer - an internship is just what I need. 2. E-Mail Interview January 20, 2010. Two months since I submitted the CV. I wasn't hoping anymore that MS will contact me, when I got an e-mail titled: "Victor Hurdugaci ES DK" from Holly Peterson saying: Read more >>

  Read the article

• Resolving TFS_SCHEMA_VERSION Errors In Team Foundation Server 2010 Collection Databases

  - by Jeff Ferguson

  I recently backed up a Team Foundation Server 2010 project collection database and restored it onto another server. All of that went well, until I tried to use the restored database on the new server. As it turns out, the old server was running the Release Candidate of TFS 2010 and the new server is running the RTM version of TFS 2010. I ended up with an error message shown on the new server's Team Web Access site about the project collection's TFS_SCHEMA_VERSION property not containing the appropriate value. As it turns out, TFS_SCHEMA_VERSION is an extended property on the project collection database. I ran the following SQL script against the project collection database restored onto the new server: EXEC [Tfs_DefaultCollection].sys.sp_dropextendedproperty @name=N'TFS_PRODUCT_VERSION' GO EXEC [Tfs_DefaultCollection].sys.sp_addextendedproperty @name=N'TFS_PRODUCT_VERSION', @value=N'10.0.30319.1' GO EXEC [Tfs_DefaultCollection].sys.sp_dropextendedproperty @name=N'TFS_SCHEMA_VERSION' GO EXEC [Tfs_DefaultCollection].sys.sp_addextendedproperty @name=N'TFS_SCHEMA_VERSION', @value=N'Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 (RTM)' GO Now, all is well. I can now navigate to http://newserver:8080/tfs/ and see the restored project collection and its contents.

  Read the article

• BizTalk Cross Reference Data Management Strategy

  - by charlie.mott

  Article Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/charliemott This article describes an approach to the management of cross reference data for BizTalk.  Some articles about the BizTalk Cross Referencing features can be found here: http://home.comcast.net/~sdwoodgate/xrefseed.zip http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2006/12/24/101995.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/charliemott/archive/2009/04/20/value-vs.id-cross-referencing-in-biztalk.aspx Options Current options to managing this data include: Maintaining xml files in the format that can be used by the out-of-the-box BTSXRefImport.exe utility. Use of user interfaces that have been developed to manage this data: BizTalk Cross Referencing Tool XRef XML Creation Tool However, there are the following issues with the above options: The 'BizTalk Cross Referencing Tool' requires a separate database to manage.  The 'XRef XML Creation' tool has no means of persisting the data settings. The 'BizTalk Cross Referencing tool' generates integers in the common id field. I prefer to use a string (e.g. acme.country.uk). This is more readable. (see naming conventions below). Both UI tools continue to use BTSXRefImport.exe.  This utility replaces all xref data. This can be a problem in continuous integration environments that support multiple clients or BizTalk target instances.  If you upload the data for one client it would destroy the data for another client.  Yet in TFS where builds run concurrently, this would break unit tests. Alternative Approach In response to these issues, I instead use simple SQL scripts to directly populate the BizTalkMgmtDb xref tables combined with a data namepacing strategy to isolate client data. Naming Conventions All data keys use namespace prefixing.  The pattern will be <companyName>.<data Type>.  The naming conventions will be to use lower casing for all items.  The data must follow this pattern to isolate it from other company cross-reference data.  The table below shows some sample data. (Note: this data uses the 'ID' cross-reference tables.  the same principles apply for the 'value' cross-referencing tables). Table.Field Description Sample Data xref_AppType.appType Application Types acme.erp acme.portal acme.assetmanagement xref_AppInstance.appInstance Application Instances (each will have a corresponding application type). acme.dynamics.ax acme.dynamics.crm acme.sharepoint acme.maximo xref_IDXRef.idXRef Holds the cross reference data types. acme.taxcode acme.country xref_IDXRefData.CommonID Holds each cross reference type value used by the canonical schemas. acme.vatcode.exmpt acme.vatcode.std acme.country.usa acme.country.uk xref_IDXRefData.AppID This holds the value for each application instance and each xref type. GBP USD SQL Scripts The data to be stored in the BizTalkMgmtDb xref tables will be managed by SQL scripts stored in a database project in the visual studio solution. File(s) Description Build.cmd A sqlcmd script to deploy data by running the SQL scripts below.  (This can be run as part of the MSBuild process).   acme.purgexref.sql SQL script to clear acme.* data from the xref tables.  As such, this will not impact data for any other company. acme.applicationInstances.sql   SQL script to insert application type and application instance data.   acme.vatcode.sql acme.country.sql etc ...  There will be a separate SQL script to insert each cross-reference data type and application specific values for these types.

  Read the article

• Building services with the .NET framework Cont’d

  - by Allan Rwakatungu

  In my previous blog I wrote an introductory post on services and how you can build services using the .NET frameworks Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) In this post I will show how to develop a real world application using WCF The problem During the last meeting we realized developers in Uganda are not so cool – they don’t use twitter so may not get the latest news and updates from the technology world. We also noticed they mostly use kabiriti phones (jokes). With their kabiriti phones they are unable to access the twitter web client or alternative twitter mobile clients like tweetdeck , twirl or tweetie. However, the kabiriti phones support SMS (Yeeeeeeei). So what we going to do to make these developers cool and keep them updated is by enabling them to receive tweets via SMS. We shall also enable them to develop their own applications that can extend this functionality Analysis Thanks to services and open API’s solving our problem is going to be easy.  1. To get tweets we can use the twitter service for FREE 2. To send SMS we shall use www.clickatell.com/ as they can send SMS to any country in the world. Besides we could not find any local service that offers API's for sending SMS :(. 3. To enable developers to integrate with our application so that they can extend it and build even cooler applications we use WCF. In addittion , because connectivity might be an issue we decided to use WCF because if has a inbuilt queing features. We also choose WCF because this is a post about .NET and WCF :). The Code Accessing the tweets To consume twitters REST API we shall use the WCF REST starter kit. Like it name indicates , the REST starter kit is a set of .NET framework classes that enable developers to create and access REST style services ( like the twitter service). Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Http; using System.Net; using System.Xml.Linq;   namespace UG.Demo {     public class TwitterService     {         public IList<TwitterStatus> SomeMethodName()         {             //Connect to the twitter service (HttpClient is part of the REST startkit classes)             HttpClient cl = new HttpClient("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends_timeline.xml");             //Supply your basic authentication credentials             cl.TransportSettings.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("ourusername", "ourpassword");             //issue an http             HttpResponseMessage resp = cl.Get();             //ensure we got reponse 200             resp.EnsureStatusIsSuccessful();             //use XLinq to parse the REST XML             var statuses = from r in resp.Content.ReadAsXElement().Descendants("status")                            select new TwitterStatus                            {                                User = r.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value,                                Status = r.Element("text").Value                            };             return statuses.ToList();         }     }     public class TwitterStatus     {         public string User { get; set; }         public string Status { get; set; }     } }  Sending SMS Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} public class SMSService     {         public void Send(string phone, string message)         {                         HttpClient cl1 = new HttpClient();              //the clickatell XML format for sending SMS             string xml = String.Format("<clickAPI><sendMsg><api_id>3239621</api_id><user>ourusername</user><password>ourpassword</password><to>{0}</to><text>{1}</text></sendMsg></clickAPI>",phone,message);             //Post form data             HttpUrlEncodedForm form = new HttpUrlEncodedForm();             form.Add("data", xml);             System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false;             string uri = @"http://api.clickatell.com/xml/xml";             HttpResponseMessage resp = cl1.Post(uri, form.CreateHttpContent());             resp.EnsureStatusIsSuccessful();         }     }

  Read the article

• Using CMS for App Configuration - Part 1, Deploying Umbraco

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2014/06/04/using-cms-for-app-configurationndashpart-1-deploy-umbraco.aspxSince my last post on using CMS for semi-static API content, How about a new platform for your next API… a CMS?, I’ve been using the idea for centralized app configuration, and this post is the first in a series that will walk through how to do that, step-by-step. The approach gives you a platform-independent, easily configurable way to specify your application configuration for different environments, with a built-in approval workflow, change auditing and the ability to easily rollback to previous settings. It’s like Azure Web and Worker Roles where you can specify settings that change at runtime, but it's not specific to Azure - you can use it for any app that needs changeable config, provided it can access the Internet. The series breaks down into four posts: Deploying Umbraco – the CMS that will store your configurable settings and the current values; Publishing your config – create a document type that encapsulates your settings and a template to expose them as JSON; Consuming your config – in .NET, a simple client that uses dynamic objects to access settings; Config lifecycle management – how to publish, audit, and rollback settings. Let’s get started. Deploying Umbraco There’s an Umbraco package on Azure Websites, so deploying your own instance is easy – but there are a couple of things to watch out for, so this step-by-step will put you in a good place. Create From Gallery The easiest way to get started is with an Azure subscription, navigate to add a new Website and then Create From Gallery. Under CMS, you’ll see an Umbraco package (currently at version 7.1.3): Configure Your App For high availability and scale, you’ll want your CMS on separate kit from anything else you have in Azure, so in the configuration of Umbraco I’d create a new SQL Azure database – which Umbraco will use to store all its content: You can use the free 20mb database option if you don’t have demanding NFRs, or if you’re just experimenting. You’ll need to specify a password for a SQL Server account which the Umbraco service will use, and changing from the default username umbracouser is probably wise. Specify Database Settings You can create a new database on an existing server if you have one, or create new. If you create a new server *do not* use the same username for the database server login as you used for the Umbraco account. If you do, the deployment will fail later. Think of this as the SQL Admin account that you can use for managing the db, the previous account was the service account Umbraco uses to connect. Make Tea If you have a fast kettle. It takes about two minutes for Azure to create and provision the website and the database. Install Umbraco So far we’ve deployed an empty instance of Umbraco using the Azure package, and now we need to browse to the site and complete installation. My Website was called my-app-config, so to complete installation I browse to http://my-app-config.azurewebsites.net:   Enter the credentials you want to use to login – this account will have full admin rights to the Umbraco instance. Note that between deploying your new Umbraco instance and completing installation in this step, anyone can browse to your website and complete the installation themselves with their own credentials, if they know the URL. Remote possibility, but it’s there. From this page *do not* click the big green Install button. If you do, Umbraco will configure itself with a local SQL Server CE database (.sdf file on the Web server), and ignore the SQL Azure database you’ve carefully provisioned and may be paying for. Instead, click on the Customize link and: Configure Your Database You need to enter your SQL Azure database details here, so you’ll have to get the server name from the Azure Management Console. You don’t need to explicitly grant access to your Umbraco website for the database though. Click Continue and you’ll be offered a “starter” website to install: If you don’t know Umbraco at all (but you are familiar with ASP.NET MVC) then a starter website is worthwhile to see how it all hangs together. But after a while you’ll have a bunch of artifacts in your CMS that you don’t want and you’ll have to work out which you can safely delete. So I’d click “No thanks, I do not want to install a starter website” and give yourself a clean Umbraco install. When it completes, the installation will log you in to the welcome screen for managing Umbraco – which you can access from http://my-app-config.azurewebsites.net/umbraco: That’s It Easy. Umbraco is installed, using a dedicated SQL Azure instance that you can separately scale, sync and backup, and ready for your content. In the next post, we’ll define what our app config looks like, and publish some settings for the dev environment.

  Read the article

• Easily use google maps, openstreet maps etc offline.

  - by samkea

  I did it and i am going to explain step by step. The explanatination may appear long but its simple if you follow. Note: All the softwares i have used are the latest and i have packaged them and provided them in the link below. I use Nokia N96 1) RootSign smartComGPS and install it on your phone(i havent provided the signer so that u wuld do some little work. i used Secman' rootsign). 2) Install Universal Maps Downloader, SmartCom OGF2 converter and OziExplorer 3.95.4s on my PC. a) UMD is used to download map tiles from any map source like googlemaps,opensourcemaps etc... and also combine the tiles into an image file like png,jpg,bmp etc... b) SmartCom OGF2 converter is used to convert the image file into a format usable on your mobile phone. c) OziExplorer will help you to calibrate the usable map file so that it can be used with GPS on your mobile phone without the use of internet. 3) Go to google maps or where u pick your maps and pan to the area of your interest. Zoom the map to at least 15 or 16 zoom level where you can see your area clearly and the streets. 4) copy this script in a notepad file and save it on your desktop: javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().ge tCenter())); 5) Open the universal maps downloader. You will notice that you are required to add the: left longitude, right longitude,top latitude, bottom latitude. 6) On your map in google maps, doubleclick on the your prefered to most middle point. you will notice that the map will center in that area. 7) copy the script and paste it in the address bar then press enter. You will notice that a dialog with your (top latitude) and longitude respectively pops up. 8) copy the top latitude ONLY and paste it in the corresponding textbox in the UMD. 9) repeat steps 6-7 for the botton latitude. 10)repeat steps 6-7 for left longitude and right longitude too, but u have to copy the longitudes here. (***BTW record these points in the text file as they may be needed later in calibration) 11) Give the zoom level to the same zoom level that you prefered in google maps. 12) Dont forget to choose a path to save your files and under options set the proxy connection settings in UMD if you are using so. 13) Click on start and bingo! there you have your image tiles and a file with an extension .umd will be saved in the same folder. 14) On the UMD, go to tools, click on MapViewer and choose the .umd file. you will now see your map in one piece....and you will smile! 15) Still go to tools and click on map combiner. A dialog will popup for you to choose the .umd file and to enter the IMAGE file name. u can use another extension for the image file like png, jpg etc...i usually use png. 16) Combine.....bingo! there u go! u have an IMAGE file for your map. *I SUGGEST THAT CREATE A .BMP FILE and A .PNG file* 17) Close UMD and open SmartCom OGF2 converter. 18) Choose your .png image and create an ogf2 file. 19) Connect your phone to your PC in Mass Memory mode and transfer the file to the smartComGPS\Maps folder. 20) Now disconnect your phone and load smartComGPS. it will load the map and propt you to add a calibration point. Go ahead and add one calibration point with dummy coordinates. You will notice that it will add another file with extension .map in the smartComGPS\Maps folder. 21) Connect yiur ohone and copy that file and paste it in your working folder on your PC. Delete that .map file from the phone too because you are going to edit it from your PC and put it back. 22) Now Open the OziExplorer, go to file-->Load and Calibrate Map Image. 23) Choose the .bmp image and bingo! it will load with your map in the same zoom level. 24) Now you are going to calibrate. Use the MapView window and take the small box locater to all the 4 cornners of the map. You will notice that the map in the back ground moves to that area too. 25)On the right side, select the Point1 tab. Now you are in calibration mode. Now move the red box in mapview in the left upper corner to calibrate point1. 26) out of mapview go to the the left upper corner of the background map and choose poit (0,0) and your 1st calibration point. You will notice that these X,Y cordinated will be reflected in the Point1 image cordinates. 27) now go back to the text file where you saved your coordibates and enter the top latitude and the left longitude in the corresponding places. 28) Repeat steps 25-27 for point2,point3,point4 and click on save. Thats it, you have calibrated your image and you are about to finish. 29) Go to save and a dilaog which prompts you to save a .map file will poop up. Do save the map file in your working folder. 30) Right click that .map file and edit the filename in the .map file to remove the pc's directory structure. Eg. Change C\OziExplorer\data\Kampala.bmp to Kampala.ogf2. 31) Save the .map file in the smartComGPS\Maps folder on your phone. 32) now open smartComGPS on your phone and bingo! there is your map with GPS capability and in the same zoom level. 33) In smartComGPS options, choose connect and simulate. By now you should be smiling. Whoa! Hope i was of help. i case you get a problem, please inform me Below is the link to the software. regards. http://rapidshare.com/files/230296037/Utilities_Used.rar.html Ok, the Rapidshare files i posted are gone, so you will have to download as described in the solution. If you need more help, go here: http://www.dotsis.com/mobile_phone/sitemap/t-160491.html Some months later, someone else gave almost the same kind of solution here. http://www.dotsis.com/mobile_phone/sitemap/t-180123.html Note: the solutions were mean't to help view maps on Symbian phones, but i think now they ca even do for Windows Phones, iphones and others so read, extract what you want and use it. Hope it helps. Sam Kea

  Read the article

• West Palm Beach .Net User Group Meeting - April 27th 2010 - Ted Neward - MVP & INETA Speaker

  - by Sam Abraham

  Ted Neward, MVP & INETA Speaker spoke to us at the West Palm Beach .Net User Group meeting at CompTec about Microsoft OSLO and DSLs on Tuesday April 27th 2010. Ted kept the audience well engaged throughout his presentation and shared his experience with DSLs in a humorous and fun setting. At the conclusion of the talk, we had our free raffle and concluded the evening with networking while enjoying the pizza and soda brought to us by Sherlock Technology (www.sherstaff.com) This meeting was also Vishal Shukla's last appearance at the West Palm Beach .Net User Group as he will be leaving for India in mid-May. Vishal has worked hard side-by-side with the Fladotnet leadership to run the West Palm Beach Group and will sure be missed by all of us. On behalf of the group, I would like to wish Vishal best of luck on his future endeavors and we are all looking forward to seeing him again soon. Thank you Ted for making such a long trip from Redmond to FL to share with us your expertise and knowledge of DSLs and thank you INETA for making this happen with your support of user groups. You can get in touch with Ted through his website (www.tedneward.com)

  Read the article

• Remote Desktop to Your Azure Virtual Machine

  - by Shaun

  The Windows Azure Team had just published their new development portal this week and the SDK 1.3. Within this new release there are a lot of cool feature available. The one I’m looking forward to is Remote Desktop Access to your running Windows Azure Virtual Machine.   Configuration Remote Desktop Access It would be very simple to make the azure service enable the remote desktop access. First of all let’s create a new windows azure project from the Visual Studio. In this example I just created a normal MVC 2 web role without any modifications. Then we right-click the azure project node in the solution explorer window and select “Publish”. Then let’s select the “Deploy your Windows Azure project to Windows Azure” on the top radio button. And then select the credential, deployment service/slot, storage and label as susal. You must have the Management API Certificates uploaded to your Windows Azure account, and install the certification on you machine before in order to use this one-click deployment feature. If you are familiar with this dialog you will notice that there’s a linkage named “Configure Remote Desktop connections”. Here is where you need to make this service enable the remote desktop feature. After clicked this link we will set the configuration of the remote desktop access authorization information. There are 4 steps we need to do to configure our access. Certificates: We need either create or select a certificate file in order to encypt the access cerdenticals. In this example I will use the certificate file for my Management API. Username: The remote desktop user name to access the virtual machine. Password: The password for the access. Expiration: The access cerdentals would be expired after 1 month by default but we can amend here. After that we clicked the OK button to back to the publish dialog.   The next step is to back to the new windows azure portal and navigate to the hosted services list. I created a new hosted service and upload the certificate file onto this service. The user name and password access to the azure machine must be encrypted from the local machine, and then send to the windows azure platform, then decrypted on the azure side by the same file. This is why we need to upload the certificate file onto azure. We navigated to the “Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN"” from the left panel and created a new hosted service named “SDK13” and selected the “Certificates” node. Then we clicked the “Add Certificates” button. Then we select the local certificate file and the password to install it into this azure service.   The final step would be back to our Visual Studio and in the pulish dialog just click the OK button. The Visual Studio will upload our package and the configuration into our service with the remote desktop settings.   Remote Desktop Access to Azure Virtual Machine All things had been done, let’s have a look back on the Windows Azure Development Portal. If I selected the web role that I had just published we can see on the toolbar there’s a section named “Remote Access”. In this section the Enable checkbox had been checked which means this role has the Remote Desktop Access feature enabled. If we want to modify the access cerdentals we can simply click the Configure button. Then we can update the user name, password, certificates and the expiration date.   Let’s select the instance node under the web role. In this case I just created one instance for demo. We can see that when we selected the instance node, the Connect button turned enabled. After clicked this button there will be a RDP file downloaded. This is a Remote Desctop configuration file that we can use to access to our azure virtual machine. Let’s download it to our local machine and execute. We input the user name and password we specified when we published our application to azure and then click OK. There might be some certificates warning dislog appeared. This is because the certificates we use to encryption is not signed by a trusted provider. Just select OK in these cases as we know the certificate is safty to us. Finally, the virtual machine of Windows Azure appeared.   A Quick Look into the Azure Virtual Machine Let’s just have a very quick look into our virtual machine. There are 3 disks available for us: C, D and E. Disk C: Store the local resource, diagnosis information, etc. Disk D: System disk which contains the OS, IIS, .NET Frameworks, etc. Disk E: Sotre our application code. The IIS which hosting our webiste on Azure. The IP configuration of the azure virtual machine.   Summary In this post I covered one of the new feature of the Azure SDK 1.3 – Remote Desktop Access. We can set the access per service and all of the instances of this service could be accessed through the remote desktop tool. With this feature we can deep into the virtual machines of our instances to see the inner information such as the system event, IIS log, system information, etc. But we should pay attention to modify the system settings. 2 reasons from what I know for now: 1. If we have more than one instances against our service we should ensure that all system settings we modifed are applied to all instances/virtual machines. Otherwise, as the machines are under the azure load balance proxy our application process may doesn’t work due to the defferent settings between the instances. 2. When the virtual machine encounted some problem and need to be translated to another physical machine all settings we made would be disappeared.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55  | Next Page >