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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 >>

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SSAS Compare: an intern’s journey

- by Red Gate Software BI Tools Team

About a month ago, David mentioned an intern working in the BI Tools Team. That intern happens to be me! In five weeks’ time, I’ll start my second year of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge and be a full-time student again, but for the past eight weeks, I’ve been living a completely different life. As Jon mentioned before, the teams here at Red Gate are small and everyone (including the interns!) is responsible for the product as a whole. I’ve attended planning sessions, UX tests, daily meetings, and everything else a full-time member of the team would; I had as much say in where we would go next with the product as anyone; I was able to see that what I was doing was an important part of the product from the feedback we got in the UX tests. All these things almost made me forget that this is just an internship and not my full-time job. First steps at Red Gate Being based in Cambridge, Red Gate has many Cambridge university graduates working for them. They also hire some Cambridge undergraduates for internships each summer. With its popularity with university graduates and its great working environment, Red Gate has managed to build up a great reputation. When I thought of doing an internship here in Cambridge, Red Gate just seemed to be the obvious choice for my first real work experience. On my first day at Red Gate, David, the lead developer for SSAS Compare, helped me settle in and explained what I’d be doing. My task was to improve the user experience of displaying differences between MDX scripts by syntax highlighting, script formatting, and improving the difference identification in the first place. David suggested how I should approach the problem, but left all the details and design decisions to me. That was when I realised how much independence and responsibility I’d have. What I’ve done If you launch the latest version of SSAS Compare and drill down to an MDX script difference, you can see the changes that have been made. In earlier versions, you could only see the scripts in plain text on both sides — either in black or grey, depending on whether they were the same or not. However, you couldn’t see exactly where the scripts were different, which was especially annoying when the two scripts were large – as they often are. Furthermore, if parts of the two scripts were formatted differently, they seemed to be different but were actually the same, which caused even more confusion and made it difficult to see where the differences were. All these issues have been fixed now. The two scripts are automatically formatted by the tool so that if two things are syntactically equivalent, they look the same – including case differences in keywords! The actual difference is highlighted in grey, which makes them easy to spot. The difference identification has been improved as well, so two scripts aren’t identified as different if there’s just a difference in meaningless whitespace characters, or when you have “select” on one side and “SELECT” on the other. We also have syntax highlighting, which makes it easier to read the scripts. How I did it In order to do the formatting properly, we decided to parse the MDX scripts. After some investigation into parser builders, I decided to go with the GOLD Parser builder and the bsn-goldparser .NET engine. GOLD Parser builder provides a fairly nice GUI to write, build, and test grammar in. We also liked the idea of separating the grammar building from parsing a text. The bsn-goldparser is one of many .NET engines for GOLD, and although it doesn’t support the newest features of GOLD Parser, it has “the ability to map semantic action classes to terminals or reduction rules, so that a completely functional semantic AST can be created directly without intermediate token AST representation, and without the need for glue code.” That makes it much easier for us to change the implementation in our program when we change the grammar. As bsn-goldparser is open source, and I wanted some more features in it, I contributed two new features which have now been merged to the project. Unfortunately, there wasn’t an MDX grammar written for GOLD already, so I had to write it myself. I was referencing MSDN to get the formal grammar specification, but the specification was all over the place, so it wasn’t that easy to implement and find. We’re aware that we don’t yet fully support all valid MDX, so sometimes you’ll just see the MDX script difference displayed the old way. In that case, there is some grammar construct we don’t yet recognise. If you come across something SSAS Compare doesn’t recognise, we’d love to hear about it so we can add it to our grammar. When some MDX script gets parsed, a tree is produced. That tree can then be processed into a list of inlines which deal with the correct formatting and can be outputted to the screen. Doing all this has led me to many new technologies and projects I haven’t worked with before. This was my first experience with C# and Visual Studio, although I have done things in Java before. I have learnt how to unit test with NUnit, how to do dependency injection with Ninject, how to source-control code with SVN and Mercurial, how to build with TeamCity, how to use GOLD, and many other things. What’s coming next Sadly, my internship comes to an end this week, so there will be less development on MDX difference view for a while. But the team is going to work on marking the differences better and making it consistent with difference indication in the top part of comparison window, and will keep adding support for more MDX grammar so you can see the differences easily in every comparison you make. So long! And maybe I’ll see you next summer!

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Nerdstock 2012: A photo review of Microsoft TechEd North America 2012

- by The Un-T Guy

Not only could I not fathom that I would ever be attending a tech event of the magnitude of TechEd, neither could any of my co-workers. As the least technical person in the history of Information Technology ever, I felt as though I were walking into the belly of the beast, fearing I’d not be allowed out until I could write SSIS packages, program in Visual Basic, or at least arm wrestle a DBA. Most of my fears were unrealized. But I made it. I was here. I even got to wear the Mark of the Geek neck package with schedule, eyeglass cleaners, name badge (company name obfuscated so they don’t fire me), and a pen. The name badge was seemingly the key element, as every vendor in the place wanted to scan it to capture name, email address, and numbers to show their bosses back home. It also let me eat the food and drink the coffee so that’s a fair trade. A recurring theme throughout the presentations and vendor demos was “the Cloud” and BYOD (bring your own device). The below was a common site throughout the week, as attendees from all over the world brought their own devices and were able to (seemingly) seamlessly connect to the Worldwide Innerwebs. Apparently proof that Microsoft and the event organizers were practicing what they were preaching. “Cavernous” is one way to describe the downstairs facility itself. “Freaking cavernous” might be more accurate. Work sessions were held in classrooms on the second and third floors but the real action was happening downstairs. Microsoft bookstore, blogger hub (shoutout to Geekswithblogs.net), The Wall (sans Pink Floyd, sadly), couches, recharging stations… …a game zone with pool and air hockey tables, pinball machines, foosball… …vintage video games… …and a even giant chess board. Looked like this guy was opening with the Kaspersky parry. The blend of technology and fantasy even went so far as to bring childhood favorites to life. Assuming, of course, your childhood was pre-video games (like mine) and you were stuck with electric football and Rock ‘em Sock ‘em robots: And, lest the “combatants” become unruly or – God forbid – afternoon snacks were late, Orange County’s finest was on the scene to keep the peace. On a high-tech mode of transport, of course. She wasn’t the only one to think this was a swell way to transition from one concourse to the next. Given the level of support provided by the entire Orange County Convention Center staff, I knew they had to have some secret. Here’s one entrance to the vendor zone/”Technical Learning Center.” Couldn’t help but think of them as the remora attached to the Whale Shark that is Microsoft… …or perhaps planets orbiting the sun. Microsoft is just that huge and it seemed like every vendor in the industry looks forward to partnering with the tech behemoth. Aside from the free stuff from the vendors, probably the most popular place in the house was the dining area. Amazing spreads every day, multiple times a day. While no attendance numbers were available at press time, literally thousands of attendees were fed, and fed well, every day. And lest you think my post from earlier in the week exaggerated about the backpacks… …or that I’m exaggerating about the lunch crowds. This represents only about between 25-30% of the lunch crowd – it was all my camera could capture at once. No one went away hungry. The only thing missing was a a vat of Red Bull but apparently organizers went old school, with probably 100 urns of the original energy drink – coffee – all around the venue. Of course, following lunch and afternoon sessions, some preferred the even older school method of re-energizing. There were rumors that Microsoft was serving graham crackers and milk in this area. But they were only rumors. Cannot overstate the wonderful service provided by the Orange County Convention Center staff. Coffee, soft drinks, juice, and water were available always. Buffet meals were delicious with a wide range of healthy options available, in addition to hundreds (at least) special meal requests supported every day. Ever tried to keep up with an estimated 9,000 hungry and thirsty IT-ers? These folks did. Kudos to all of the staff and many thanks! And while I occasionally poke fun at the Whale Shark, if nothing else this experience convinced me of one thing: Microsoft knows how to put on a professional event. Hundreds of informative, professionally delivered sessions, covering a wide range of topics set at varying levels of expertise (some that even I was able to follow), social activities, vendor partnerships…they brought everything you could ask for to inform, educate, and inspire an entire IT industry. So as I depart the belly of the beast, I can both take pride in the fact that I survived the week and marvel at the brilliance surrounding me. The IT industry – or at least the segment associated with Microsoft – is in good, professional hands. And what won’t fit in their hands can be toted in the Microsoft provided backpacks. Win-win. Until New Orleans…

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C# 4.0: Named And Optional Arguments

- by Paulo Morgado

As part of the co-evolution effort of C# and Visual Basic, C# 4.0 introduces Named and Optional Arguments. First of all, let’s clarify what are arguments and parameters: Method definition parameters are the input variables of the method. Method call arguments are the values provided to the method parameters. In fact, the C# Language Specification states the following on §7.5: The argument list (§7.5.1) of a function member invocation provides actual values or variable references for the parameters of the function member. Given the above definitions, we can state that: Parameters have always been named and still are. Parameters have never been optional and still aren’t. Named Arguments Until now, the way the C# compiler matched method call definition arguments with method parameters was by position. The first argument provides the value for the first parameter, the second argument provides the value for the second parameter, and so on and so on, regardless of the name of the parameters. If a parameter was missing a corresponding argument to provide its value, the compiler would emit a compilation error. For this call: Greeting("Mr.", "Morgado", 42); this method: public void Greeting(string title, string name, int age) will receive as parameters: title: “Mr.” name: “Morgado” age: 42 What this new feature allows is to use the names of the parameters to identify the corresponding arguments in the form: name:value Not all arguments in the argument list must be named. However, all named arguments must be at the end of the argument list. The matching between arguments (and the evaluation of its value) and parameters will be done first by name for the named arguments and than by position for the unnamed arguments. This means that, for this method definition: public static void Method(int first, int second, int third) this call declaration: int i = 0; Method(i, third: i++, second: ++i); will have this code generated by the compiler: int i = 0; int CS$0$0000 = i++; int CS$0$0001 = ++i; Method(i, CS$0$0001, CS$0$0000); which will give the method the following parameter values: first: 2 second: 2 third: 0 Notice the variable names. Although invalid being invalid C# identifiers, they are valid .NET identifiers and thus avoiding collision between user written and compiler generated code. Besides allowing to re-order of the argument list, this feature is very useful for auto-documenting the code, for example, when the argument list is very long or not clear, from the call site, what the arguments are. Optional Arguments Parameters can now have default values: public static void Method(int first, int second = 2, int third = 3) Parameters with default values must be the last in the parameter list and its value is used as the value of the parameter if the corresponding argument is missing from the method call declaration. For this call declaration: int i = 0; Method(i, third: ++i); will have this code generated by the compiler: int i = 0; int CS$0$0000 = ++i; Method(i, 2, CS$0$0000); which will give the method the following parameter values: first: 1 second: 2 third: 1 Because, when method parameters have default values, arguments can be omitted from the call declaration, this might seem like method overloading or a good replacement for it, but it isn’t. Although methods like this: public static StreamReader OpenTextFile( string path, Encoding encoding = null, bool detectEncoding = true, int bufferSize = 1024) allow to have its calls written like this: OpenTextFile("foo.txt", Encoding.UTF8); OpenTextFile("foo.txt", Encoding.UTF8, bufferSize: 4096); OpenTextFile( bufferSize: 4096, path: "foo.txt", detectEncoding: false); The complier handles default values like constant fields taking the value and useing it instead of a reference to the value. So, like with constant fields, methods with parameters with default values are exposed publicly (and remember that internal members might be publicly accessible – InternalsVisibleToAttribute). If such methods are publicly accessible and used by another assembly, those values will be hard coded in the calling code and, if the called assembly has its default values changed, they won’t be assumed by already compiled code. At the first glance, I though that using optional arguments for “bad” written code was great, but the ability to write code like that was just pure evil. But than I realized that, since I use private constant fields, it’s OK to use default parameter values on privately accessed methods.

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Top 10 Tips & Tricks for Oracle SQL Developer

- by thatjeffsmith

Being a short week due to the holiday, and with everyone enjoying their Summer vacations (apologies Southern Hemispherians), I reckoned it was a great time to do one of those lazy recap-Top 10-Reader’s Digest type posts. I’ve been sharing 1-3 tips or ‘tricks’ a week since I started blogging about SQL Developer, and I have more than enough content to write a book. But since I’m lazy, I’m just going to compile a list of my favorite ‘must know’ tips instead. I always have to leave out a few tips when I do my presentations, so now I can refer back to this list to make sure I’m not forgetting anything. So without further ado… 1. Configure Your Preferences Yes, there are a LOT of options. But you don’t need to worry about all of them just yet. I do recommend you take a quick look at these ones in particular. Whether you’re new to the tool or have been using it for 5 years, don’t overlook these settings! 2. Disable Extensions You Aren’t Using If you’re not using Data Miner, or if you’re not working on a Migration – disable those extensions! SQL Developer will run leaner & meaner, plus the user interface will be a bit more simplified making the tool easier to navigate as well. 3. SQL Recall via Keyboard Access your history via the keyboard! Cycle through your recent SQL statements just using these magic key strokes! Ctrl+Up or Ctrl+Down. 4. Format Your Query Output Directly to CSV, XML, HTML, etc Have the query results pre-formatted in the format of your choice! Too lazy to run the Export wizard for your query result sets? Just add the SQL Developer output hints to your statement and have the output auto-magically formatted to the style of your choice! 5. Drag & Drop Multiple Tables to the Worksheet SQL Developer will auto-join the related objects. You can then toggle over to the Query Builder to toggle off the columns you don’t want to query. I guarantee this tip will save you time if you’re joining 3 or more tables! 6. Drag & Drop Multiple Tables to a Relational Model A pretty picture is worth a few dozen DDL scripts? SQL Developer does data modeling! If you ctrl-drag a table to a model, it will take that table and any related tables and reverse engineer them to a relational model! You can then print it out or export it to HTML, PDF, etc. 7. View Your PL/SQL Execution Output Automatically Function returns a refcursor? Procedure had 3 out parameters? When you run these programs via the Procedure Editor, we automatically capture the output and place them into one or more data grids for you to browse. 8. Disable Automatic Code Insight and Use It On-Demand Code Editor – Completion Insight – Enable Completion Auto-Popup (Keyword being Auto) Some folks really don’t like it when their IDEs or word-processors try to do ‘too much’ for them. Thankfully SQL Developer allows you to either increase the delay before it attempts to auto-complete your text OR to disable the automatic bit. Instead, you can invoke it on-demand. 9. Interactive Debugging – Change Your Variable Values as You Step Through Your PLSQL Watches aren’t just for watching. You can actually interact with your programs and ‘see what happens’ when X = 256 instead of 1. 10. Ditch the Tree View for the Schema Browser There’s nothing wrong with the Connection tree for browsing your database objects. But some folks just can’t seem to get comfortable with it. So, we built them a Schema Browser that uses a drop down control instead for changing up your schema and object types. Already Know This Stuff, Want More? Just check out my SQL Developer resource page, it’s one of the main links on the top of this page. Or if you can’t find something, just drop me a note in the form of a comment on this page and I’ll do my best to find it or write it for you.

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Handy ASP.NET MVC 2 Extension Methods – Where am I?

- by Bobby Diaz

Have you ever needed to detect what part of the application is currently being viewed? This might be a bigger issue if you write a lot of shared/partial views or custom display or editor templates. Another scenario, which is the one I encountered when I first started down this path, is when you have some type of menu and you’d like to be able to determine which item represents the current page so you can highlight it in some way. A simple example is the menu that is created as part of the default ASP.NET MVC 2 Application template. <div id="menucontainer"> <ul id="menu"> <li><%= Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home") %></li> <li><%= Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home") %></li> </ul> </div> The part that got me at first, however, was the following entry in the default style sheet (Site.css): ul#menu li.selected a { background-color: #fff; color: #000; } I assumed that the .selected class would automatically get applied to the active menu item. After trying a few different things, including the MvcContrib MenuBuilder, I decided to write my own extension methods so I would have more control over the output. First, I needed a way to determine what view the user has navigated to based on the requested URL and route configuration. Now, I am sure there are many ways to do this, but this is what I came up with: public static class RequestExtensions { public static bool IsCurrentRoute(this RequestContext context, String areaName, String controllerName, params String[] actionNames) { var routeData = context.RouteData; var routeArea = routeData.DataTokens["area"] as String; var current = false; if ( ((String.IsNullOrEmpty(routeArea) && String.IsNullOrEmpty(areaName)) || (routeArea == areaName)) && ((String.IsNullOrEmpty(controllerName)) || (routeData.GetRequiredString("controller") == controllerName)) && ((actionNames == null) || actionNames.Contains(routeData.GetRequiredString("action"))) ) { current = true; } return current; } // additional overloads omitted... } With that in place, I was able to write several UrlHelper methods that check if the supplied values map to the current view. public static class UrlExtensions { public static bool IsCurrent(this UrlHelper urlHelper, String areaName, String controllerName, params String[] actionNames) { return urlHelper.RequestContext.IsCurrentRoute(areaName, controllerName, actionNames); } public static string Selected(this UrlHelper urlHelper, String areaName, String controllerName, params String[] actionNames) { return urlHelper.IsCurrent(areaName, controllerName, actionNames) ? "selected" : String.Empty; } // additional overloads omitted... } Now I can re-work the original menu to utilize these new methods. Note: be sure to import the proper namespace so the extension methods become available inside your views! <div id="menucontainer"> <ul id="menu"> <li class="<%= Url.Selected(null, "Home", "Index") %>"> <%= Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")%></li> <li class="<%= Url.Selected(null, "Home", "About") %>"> <%= Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")%></li> </ul> </div> If we take it one step further, we can clean up the markup even more. Check out the Html.ActionMenuItem() extension method and the refined menu: public static class HtmlExtensions { public static MvcHtmlString ActionMenuItem(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper, String linkText, String actionName, String controllerName) { var html = new StringBuilder("<li"); if ( htmlHelper.ViewContext.RequestContext .IsCurrentRoute(null, controllerName, actionName) ) { html.Append(" class=\"selected\""); } html.Append(">") .Append(htmlHelper.ActionLink(linkText, actionName, controllerName)) .Append("</li>"); return MvcHtmlString.Create(html.ToString()); } // additional overloads omitted... } <div id="menucontainer"> <ul id="menu"> <%= Html.ActionMenuItem("Home", "Index", "Home") %> <%= Html.ActionMenuItem("About", "About", "Home") %> </ul> </div> Which generates the following HTML: <div id="menucontainer"> <ul id="menu"> <li class="selected"><a href="/">Home</a></li> <li><a href="/Home/About">About</a></li> </ul> </div> I have created a codepaste of these extension methods if you are interested in using them in your own projects. Enjoy!

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Social Network Updates: While You Were Busy Marketing 2

- by Mike Stiles

Since social moves at the speed of data, it’s already time for another update, as we did back in April, on the changes the various social networks have made or gone through while you were busy marketing. Facebook There’s a lot of talk Facebook’s developing a mobile product to act like Flipboard and surface news, from both users and media outlets. The biggest news was Facebook/Instagram’s introduction of 15-second videos, enhanced with with filters, to take some of Vine’s candy. You can also delete parts of videos and rerecord them, and there’s image stabilization. Facebook’s ad revenue is coming along just fine, thank you very much. 35% quarter-to-quarter growth in Q2. And it looks like new formats like Mobile App Install Ads and Unpublished Page Posts are adding to the mix. If you don’t already, you’ll soon see a little camera in comment boxes letting you insert photos right into the comments you make. The drive toward “more visual” continues. The other big news is Facebook’s adoption of our Twitter friend, the hashtag. Adding # sets apart the post topic so it can be easily found or discovered. It’s also being added to Google Plus, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Twitter Want to send someone a promoted tweet when they’re in range of your store? That could be happening by the end of this year. Some users have been seeing automatic in-stream previews of images on Twitter.com. Right now it’s images in your own tweets, but we can assume all tweets are next. Get your followers organized! Twitter raised the limit on the number of lists you can create from 20 to 1,000. They also raised the number of accounts you can have in a list from 500 to 5,000. Twitter started notifying you when someone favorites a tweet you’re mentioned in or re-tweets a tweet you re-tweeted. Anyway, it’s the first time Twitter’s notified you about indirect interactions like that. Who’s afraid of Instagram? A study shows 6-second Vine videos are being posted to Twitter at the rate of 9/second, up from 5/second 2 months ago. Vine has over 13 million users and branded Vines are 4x more likely to be shared than video ads. Google Plus Now featuring a 3-column redesigned stream, and images that take up a whole column. And photo filters Auto Highlight and Auto Awesome work to turn your photos into a real show. Google Hangouts is the workhorse for all Google messaging now, it’s not just an online chat with 9 people anymore. Google Plus Dashboard improves the connection between your company’s Google Plus business page and your Google Plus Local. Updates go out across all Google properties and you can do your managing from the dashboard. With Google Plus’ authorship system, you can build “Author Rank” based on what you write and put on the web. If your stuff is +1’ed and shared a lot, you’re the real deal and there are search result benefits. LinkedIn "Who's Viewed Your Updates" shows you what you’ve shared recently, who saw it and what they did about it in real-time. “Influencers” is, well, influential. Traffic to all LI news products has gone up 8x since it was introduced. LinkedIn is quickly figuring out how to get users to stick around awhile. You and your brand can post images and documents in status updates now. In fact, that whole “document posting” thing is making some analysts wonder if LinkedIn will drift on over to the Dropboxes and YouSendIts of the world. C’mon, admit it. Your favorite part of LinkedIn is being able to see who’s viewed your profile. Now you’ve got even more info and can see what/who you have in common. Premium users get even deeper insights about how people are finding them. If you’re a big fan of security, you’ll love that LinkedIn started offering two-factor authentication (2FA). It’s optional, but step 2 is a one-time code texted to your registered mobile. Pinterest A study showed pins have a looong shelf life compared to other social net posts. “Clicks kept coming for 30 days and beyond.” Most pins are timeless, and the infinite scroll causes people to see older pins. Is it a keeper? Pinterest jumped 82% to 54 million users in the past year. It’s valued at $2.5 billion and is one of the biggest sources of referral traffic there is. That said, CEO Ben Silbermann adds, "Right now, we don't make money." A new search feature stops you from having to endlessly scroll through your own pins looking for that waterfall picture you posted. Simply select “just my pins” in the search bar. New "Rich Pins" lets brands add info like price and availability to pins that can be updated daily via a data feed from your merchant site. Not so fast, you have to apply to Pinterest for it first. Like other social nets, Pinterest does not allow sexual content, nudity, or even partial nudity. However…some art contains nudity, and Pinterest wants to allow art. What constitutes “art” will be judged by…what we have to assume are Pinterest employees who love their job. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng, Tim Marmon

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Programmatically use a server as the Build Server for multiple Project Collections

Important: With this post you create an unsupported scenario by Microsoft. It will break your support for this server with Microsoft. So handle with care. I am the administrator an a TFS environment with a lot of Project Collections. In the supported configuration of Microsoft 2010 you need one Build Controller per Project Collection, and it is not supported to have multiple Build Controllers installed. Jim Lamb created a post how you can modify your system to change this behaviour. But since I have so many Project Collections, I automated this with the API of TFS. When you install a new build server via the UI, you do the following steps Register the build service (with this you hook the windows server into the build server environment) Add a new build controller Add a new build agent So in pseudo code, the code would look like foreach (projectCollection in GetAllProjectCollections) { CreateNewWindowsService(); RegisterService(); AddNewController(); AddNewAgent(); } The following code fragements show you the most important parts of the method implementations. Attached is the full project. CreateNewWindowsService We create a new windows service with the SC command via the Diagnostics.Process class: var pi = new ProcessStartInfo("sc.exe") { Arguments = string.Format( "create \"{0}\" start= auto binpath= \"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\\Tools\\TfsBuildServiceHost.exe /NamedInstance:{0}\" DisplayName= \"Visual Studio Team Foundation Build Service Host ({1})\"", serviceHostName, tpcName) }; Process.Start(pi); pi.Arguments = string.Format("failure {0} reset= 86400 actions= restart/60000", serviceHostName); Process.Start(pi); RegisterService The trick in this method is that we set the NamedInstance static property. This property is Internal, so we need to set it through reflection. To get information on these you need nice Microsoft friends and the .Net reflector . // Indicate which build service host instance we are using typeof(BuildServiceHostUtilities).Assembly.GetType("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Config.BuildServiceHostProcess").InvokeMember("NamedInstance", System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.SetProperty | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Static, null, null, new object[] { serviceName }); // Create the build service host serviceHost = buildServer.CreateBuildServiceHost(serviceName, endPoint); serviceHost.Save(); // Register the build service host BuildServiceHostUtilities.Register(serviceHost, user, password); AddNewController and AddNewAgent Once you have the BuildServerHost, the rest is pretty straightforward. There are methods on the BuildServerHost to modify the controllers and the agents controller = serviceHost.CreateBuildController(controllerName); agent = controller.ServiceHost.CreateBuildAgent(agentName, buildDirectory, controller); controller.AddBuildAgent(agent); You have now seen the highlights of the application. If you need it and want to have sample information when you work in this area, download the app TFS2010_RegisterBuildServerToTPCs

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RSS Feeds currently on Simple-Talk

- by Andrew Clarke

There are a number of news-feeds for the Simple-Talk site, but for some reason they are well hidden. Whilst we set about reorganizing them, I thought it would be a good idea to list some of the more important ones. The most important one for almost all purposes is the Homepage RSS feed which represents the blogs and articles that are placed on the homepage. Main Site Feed representing the Homepage ..which is good for most purposes but won't always have all the blogs, or maybe it will occasionally miss an article. If you aren't interested in all the content, you can just use the RSS feeds that are more relevant to your interests. (We'll be increasing these categories soon) The newsfeed for SQL articles The .NET section newsfeed The newsfeed for Red Gate books The newsfeed for Opinion articles The SysAdmin section newsfeed if you want to get a more refined feed, then you can pick and choose from these feeds for each category so as to make up your custom news-feed in the SQL section, SQL Training Learn SQL Server Database Administration TSQL Programming SQL Server Performance Backup and Recovery SQL Tools SSIS SSRS (Reporting Services) in .NET there are... ASP.NET Windows Forms .NET Framework ,NET Performance Visual Studio .NET tools in Sysadmin there are Exchange General Virtualisation Unified Messaging Powershell in opinion, there is... Geek of the Week Opinion Pieces in Books, there is .NET Books SQL Books SysAdmin Books And all the blogs have got feeds. So although you can get all the blogs from here.. Main Blog Feed You can get individual RSS feeds.. AdamRG's Blog Alex.Davies's Blog AliceE's Blog Andrew Clarke's Blog Andrew Hunter's Blog Bart Read's Blog Ben Adderson's Blog BobCram's Blog bradmcgehee's Blog Brian Donahue's Blog Charles Brown's Blog Chris Massey's Blog CliveT's Blog Damon's Blog David Atkinson's Blog David Connell's Blog Dr Dionysus's Blog drsql's Blog FatherJack's Blog Flibble's Blog Gareth Marlow's Blog Helen Joyce's Blog James's Blog Jason Crease's Blog John Magnabosco's Blog Laila's Blog Lionel's Blog Matt Lee's Blog mikef's Blog Neil Davidson's Blog Nigel Morse's Blog Phil Factor's Blog red@work's Blog reka.burmeister's Blog Richard Mitchell's Blog RobbieT's Blog RobertChipperfield's Blog Rodney's Blog Roger Hart's Blog Simon Cooper's Blog Simon Galbraith's Blog TheFutureOfMonitoring's Blog Tim Ford's Blog Tom Crossman's Blog Tony Davis's Blog As well as these blogs, you also have the forums.... SQL Server for Beginners Forum Programming SQL Server Forum Administering SQL Server Forum .NET framework Forum .Windows Forms Forum ASP.NET Forum ADO.NET Forum

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Building the Elusive Windows Phone Panorama Control

When the Windows Phone 7 Developer SDK was released a couple of weeks ago at MIX10 many people noticed the SDK doesnt include a template for a Panorama control. Here at Clarity we decided to build our own Panorama control for use in some of our prototypes and I figured I would share what we came up with. There have been a couple of implementations of the Panorama control making their way through the interwebs, but I didnt think any of them really nailed the experience that is shown in the simulation videos. One of the key design principals in the UX Guide for Windows Phone 7 is the use of motion. The WP7 OS is fairly stripped of extraneous design elements and makes heavy use of typography and motion to give users the necessary visual cues. Subtle animations and wide layouts help give the user a sense of fluidity and consistency across the phone experience. When building the panorama control I was fairly meticulous in recreating the motion as shown in the videos. The effect that is shown in the application hubs of the phone is known as a Parallax Scrolling effect. This this pseudo-3D technique has been around in the computer graphics world for quite some time. In essence, the background images move slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in 2D. Here is an example of the traditional use: http://www.mauriciostudio.com/. One of the animation gems I've learned while building interactive software is the follow animation. The premise is straightforward: instead of translating content 1:1 with the interaction point, let the content catch up to the mouse or finger. The difference is subtle, but the impact on the smoothness of the interaction is huge. That said, it became the foundation of how I achieved the effect shown below. Source Code Available HERE Before I briefly describe the approach I took in creating this control..and Ill add some **asterisks ** to the code below as my coding skills arent up to snuff with the rest of my colleagues. This code is meant to be an interpretation of the WP7 panorama control and is not intended to be used in a production application. 1. Layout the XAML The UI consists of three main components : The background image, the Title, and the Content. You can imagine each these UI Elements existing on their own plane with a corresponding Translate Transform to create the Parallax effect. 2. Storyboards + Procedural Animations = Sexy As I mentioned above, creating a fluid experience was at the top of my priorities while building this control. To recreate the smooth scroll effect shown in the video we need to add some place holder storyboards that we can manipulate in code to simulate the inertia and snapping. Using the easing functions built into Silverlight helps create a very pleasant interaction. 3. Handle the Manipulation Events With Silverlight 3 we have some new touch event handlers. The new Manipulation events makes handling the interactivity pretty straight forward. There are two event handlers that need to be hooked up to enable the dragging and motion effects: the ManipulationDelta event : (the most relevant code is highlighted in pink) Here we are doing some simple math with the Manipulation Deltas and setting the TO values of the animations appropriately. Modifying the storyboards dynamically in code helps to create a natural feel.something that cant easily be done with storyboards alone. And secondly, the ManipulationCompleted event: Here we take the Final Velocities from the Manipulation Completed Event and apply them to the Storyboards to create the snapping and scrolling effects. Most of this code is determining what the next position of the viewport will be. The interesting part (shown in pink) is determining the duration of the animation based on the calculated velocity of the flick gesture. By using velocity as a variable in determining the duration of the animation we can produce a slow animation for a soft flick and a fast animation for a strong flick. Challenges to the Reader There are a couple of things I didnt have time to implement into this control. And I would love to see other WPF/Silverlight approaches. 1. A good mechanism for deciphering when the user is manipulating the content within the panorama control and the panorama itself. In other words, being able to accurately determine what is a flick and what is click. 2. Dynamically Sizing the panorama control based on the width of its content. Right now each control panel is 400px, ideally the Panel items would be measured and then panorama control would update its size accordingly. 3. Background and content wrapping. The WP7 UX guidelines specify that the content and background should wrap at the end of the list. In my code I restrict the drag at the ends of the list (like the iPhone). It would be interesting to see how this would effect the scroll experience. Well, Its been fun building this control and if you use it Id love to know what you think. You can download the Source HERE or from the Expression Gallery Erik Klimczak | [email protected] | twitter.com/eklimczDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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What’s Your Tax Strategy? Automate the Tax Transfer Pricing Process!

- by tobyehatch

Does your business operate in multiple countries? Well, whether you like it or not, many local and international tax authorities inspect your tax strategy. Legal, effective tax planning is perceived as a “moral” issue. CEOs are being asked to testify on their process of tax transfer pricing between multinational legal entities. Marc Seewald, Senior Director of Product Management for EPM Applications specializing in all tax subjects and Product Manager for Oracle Hyperion Tax Provisioning, and Bart Stoehr, Senior Director of Product Strategy for Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management joined me for a discussion/podcast on this interesting subject. So what exactly is “tax transfer pricing”? Marc defined it this way. “Tax transfer pricing is a profit allocation methodology required to be used by multinational corporations. Specifically, the ultimate goal of the transfer pricing is to ensure that the global multinational pays their fair share of income tax in each of their local markets. Specifically, it prevents companies from unfairly moving profit from ‘high tax’ countries to ‘low tax’ countries.” According to Marc, in today’s global economy, profitability can be significantly impacted by goods and services exchanged between the related divisions within a single multinational company. To ensure that these cost allocations are done fairly, there are rules that govern the process. These rules ensure that intercompany allocations fairly represent the actual nature of the businesses activity- as if two divisions were unrelated - and provide a clear audit trail of how the costs have been allocated to prove that allocations fall within reasonable ranges. What are the repercussions of improper tax transfer pricing? How important is it? Tax transfer pricing allocations can materially impact the amount of overall corporate income taxes paid by a company worldwide, in some cases by hundreds of millions of dollars! Since so much tax revenue is at stake, revenue agencies like the IRS, and international regulatory bodies like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are pushing to reform and clarify reporting for tax transfer pricing. Most recently the OECD announced an “Action Plan for Base Erosion and Profit Shifting”. As Marc explained, the times are changing and companies need to be responsive to this issue. “It feels like every other week there is another company being accused of avoiding taxes,” said Marc. Most recently, Caterpillar was accused of avoiding billions of dollars in taxes. In the last couple of years, Apple, GE, Ikea, and Starbucks, have all been accused of tax avoidance. It’s imperative that companies like these have a clear and auditable tax transfer process that enables them to justify tax transfer pricing allocations and avoid steep penalties and bad publicity. Transparency and efficiency are what is needed when it comes to the tax transfer pricing process. Bart explained that tax transfer pricing is driving a deeper inspection of profit recognition specifically focused on the tax element of profit. However, allocations needed to support tax profitability are nearly identical in process to allocations taking place in other parts of the finance organization. For example, the methods and processes necessary to arrive at tax profitability by legal entity are no different than those used to arrive at fully loaded profitability for a product line. In fact, there is a great opportunity for alignment across these two different functions.So it seems that tax transfer pricing should be reflected in profitability in general. Bart agreed and told us more about some of the critical sub-processes of an overall tax transfer pricing process within the Oracle solution for tax transfer pricing. “First, there is a ton of data preparation, enrichment and pre-allocation data analysis that is managed in the Oracle Hyperion solution. This serves as the “data staging” to the next, critical sub-processes. From here, we leverage the Oracle EPM platform’s ability to re-use dimensions and legal entity driver data and financial data with Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM). Within HPCM, we manage the driver data, define the legal entity to legal entity allocation rules (like cost plus), and have the option to test out multiple, simultaneous tax transfer pricing what-if scenarios. Once processed, a tax expert can evaluate the effectiveness of any one scenario result versus another via a variance analysis configured with HPCM’s pre-packaged reporting capability known as Oracle Hyperion SmartView for Office.” Further, Bart explained that the ability to visibly demonstrate how a cost or revenue has been allocated is really helpful and auditable. “HPCM’s Traceability Maps are that visual representation of all allocation flows that have been executed and is the tax transfer analyst’s best friend in maintaining clear documentation for tax transfer pricing audits. Simply click and drill as you inspect the chain of allocation definitions and results. Once final, the post-allocated tax data can be compared to the GL to create invoices and journal entries for posting to your GL system of choice. Of course, there is a framework for overall governance of the journal entries, allocation percentages, and reporting to include necessary approvals.” Lastly, Marc explained that the key value in using the Oracle Hyperion solution for tax transfer pricing is that it keeps everything in alignment in one single place. Specifically, Oracle Hyperion effectively becomes the single book of record for the GAAP, management, and the tax set of books. There are many benefits to having one source of the truth. These include EFFICIENCY, CONTROLS and TRANSPARENCY.So, what’s your tax strategy? Why not automate the tax transfer pricing process!To listen to the entire podcast, click here.To learn more about Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM), click here.

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Review of Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7

- by mbcrump

I recently acquired a Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7 device from AT&T and wanted to share what I thought of it as an end-user. Before I get started, here are several of my write-ups for the Windows Phone 7. You may want to check out the second article titled: Hands-on WP7 Review of Prototype Hardware. From start to finish with the final version of Visual Studio Tools for Windows Phone 7 Hands-on : Windows Phone 7 Review on Prototype Hardware. Deploying your Windows Phone 7 Application to the actual hardware. Profile your Windows Phone 7 Application for Free Submitting a Windows Phone 7 Application to the Market. Samsung Focus i917 Phone Size: Perfect! I have been carrying around a Dell Streak (Android) and it is about half the size. It is really nice to have a phone that fits in your pocket without a lot of extra bulk. I bought a case for the Focus and it is still a perfect size. The phone just feels right. Screen: It has a beautiful Super AMOLED 480x800 screen. I only wish it supported a higher resolution. The colors are beautiful especially in an Xbox Live Game. 3G: I use AT&T and I've had spotty reception. This really can't be blamed on the phone as much as the actual carrier. Battery: I've had excellent battery life compared to my iPhone and Android devices. I usually use my phone throughout the day on and off and still have a charge at the end of the day. Camera/Video: I'm still looking for the option to send the video to YouTube or the Image to Twitter. The images look good, but the phone needs a forward facing camera. I like the iPhone/Android (Dell Streak) camera better. Built-in Speaker: Sounds great. It’s not a wimpy speaker that you cannot hear. CPU: Very smooth transitioning from one screen to another. The prototype Windows Phone 7 that I had, was no where near as smooth. (It was also running a slower processor though). OS: I actually like the OS but a few things could be better. CONS: Copy and Paste (Supposed to come in the next update) We need more apps (Pandora missing was a big one for me and Slacker’s advertisement sucks!). As time passes, and more developers get on board then this will be fixed. The browser needs some major work. I have tried to make cross-platform (WP7, Android, iPhone and iPad) web apps and the browser that ships with WP7 just can’t handle it. Apps need to be organized better. Instead of throw them all on one screen, it would help to allow the user to create categories. PROS: Hands down the best gaming experience on a phone. I have all three major phones (iphone, android and wp7). Nothing compares to the gaming experience on the WP7. The phone just works. I’ve had a LOT of glitches with my Android device. I’ve had maybe 2 with my WP7 device. Exchange and Office support are great. Nice integration with Twitter/Facebook and social media. Easy to navigate and find the information you need on one screen. Let’s look at a few pictures and we will wrap up with my final thoughts on the phone. WP7 Home Screen. Back of the phone is as stylish. It is hard to see due to the shadow but it is a very thin phone. What’s included? Manuals Ear buds Data Cable plus Power Adapter Phone Click a picture to enlarge So, what are my final thoughts on the Phone/OS? I love the Samsung Focus and would recommend it to anyone looking for a WP7 device. Like any first generation product, you need to give it a little while to mature. Right now the phone is missing several features that we are all used to using. That doesn’t mean a year from now it will be in the same situation. (I sure hope we won’t). If you are looking to get into mobile development, I believe WP7 is the easiest platform to develop from. This is especially true if you have a background in Silverlight or WPF. Subscribe to my feed

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LLBLGen Pro v3.5 has been released!

- by FransBouma

Last weekend we released LLBLGen Pro v3.5! Below the list of what's new in this release. Of course, not everything is on this list, like the large amount of work we put in refactoring the runtime framework. The refactoring was necessary because our framework has two paradigms which are added to the framework at a different time, and from a design perspective in the wrong order (the paradigm we added first, SelfServicing, should have been built on top of Adapter, the other paradigm, which was added more than a year after the first released version). The refactoring made sure the framework re-uses more code across the two paradigms (they already shared a lot of code) and is better prepared for the future. We're not done yet, but refactoring a massive framework like ours without breaking interfaces and existing applications is ... a bit of a challenge ;) To celebrate the release of v3.5, we give every customer a 30% discount! Use the coupon code NR1ORM with your order :) The full list of what's new: Designer Rule based .NET Attribute definitions. It's now possible to specify a rule using fine-grained expressions with an attribute definition to define which elements of a given type will receive the attribute definition. Rules can be assigned to attribute definitions on the project level, to make it even easier to define attribute definitions in bulk for many elements in the project. More information... Revamped Project Settings dialog. Multiple project related properties and settings dialogs have been merged into a single dialog called Project Settings, which makes it easier to configure the various settings related to project elements. It also makes it easier to find features previously not used by many (e.g. type conversions) More information... Home tab with Quick Start Guides. To make new users feel right at home, we added a home tab with quick start guides which guide you through four main use cases of the designer. System Type Converters. Many common conversions have been implemented by default in system type converters so users don't have to develop their own type converters anymore for these type conversions. Bulk Element Setting Manipulator. To change setting values for multiple project elements, it was a little cumbersome to do that without a lot of clicking and opening various editors. This dialog makes changing settings for multiple elements very easy. EDMX Importer. It's now possible to import entity model data information from an existing Entity Framework EDMX file. Other changes and fixes See for the full list of changes and fixes the online documentation. LLBLGen Pro Runtime Framework WCF Data Services (OData) support has been added. It's now possible to use your LLBLGen Pro runtime framework powered domain layer in a WCF Data Services application using the VS.NET tools for WCF Data Services. WCF Data Services is a Microsoft technology for .NET 4 to expose your domain model using OData. More information... New query specification and execution API: QuerySpec. QuerySpec is our new query specification and execution API as an alternative to Linq and our more low-level API. It's build, like our Linq provider, on top of our lower-level API. More information... SQL Server 2012 support. The SQL Server DQE allows paging using the new SQL Server 2012 style. More information... System Type converters. For a common set of types the LLBLGen Pro runtime framework contains built-in type conversions so you don't need to write your own type converters anymore. Public/NonPublic property support. It's now possible to mark a field / navigator as non-public which is reflected in the runtime framework as an internal/friend property instead of a public property. This way you can hide properties from the public interface of a generated class and still access it through code added to the generated code base. FULL JOIN support. It's now possible to perform FULL JOIN joins using the native query api and QuerySpec. It's left to the developer to check whether the used target database supports FULL (OUTER) JOINs. Using a FULL JOIN with entity fetches is not recommended, and should only be used when both participants in the join aren't the target of the fetch. Dependency Injection Tracing. It's now possible to enable tracing on dependency injection. Enable tracing at level '4' on the traceswitch 'ORMGeneral'. This will emit trace information about which instance of which type got an instance of type T injected into property P. Entity Instances in projections in Linq. It's now possible to return an entity instance in a custom Linq projection. It's now also possible to pass this instance to a method inside the query projection. Inheritance fully supported in this construct. Entity Framework support The Entity Framework has been updated in the recent year with code-first support and a new simpler context api: DbContext (with DbSet). The amount of code to generate is smaller and the context simpler. LLBLGen Pro v3.5 comes with support for DbContext and DbSet and generates code which utilizes these new classes. NHibernate support NHibernate v3.2+ built-in proxy factory factory support. By default the built-in ProxyFactoryFactory is selected. FluentNHibernate Session Manager uses 1.2 syntax. Fluent NHibernate mappings generate a SessionManager which uses the v1.2 syntax for the ProxyFactoryFactory location Optionally emit schema / catalog name in mappings Two settings have been added which allow the user to control whether the catalog name and/or schema name as known in the project in the designer is emitted into the mappings.

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Logical Domain Modeling Made Simple

- by Knut Vatsendvik

How can logical domain modeling be made simple and collaborative? Many non-technical end-users, managers and business domain experts find it difficult to understand the visual models offered by many UML tools. This creates trouble in capturing and verifying the information that goes into a logical domain model. The tools are also too advanced and complex for a non-technical user to learn and use. We have therefore, in our current project, ended up with using Confluence as tool for designing the logical domain model with the help of a few very useful plugins. Big thanks to Ole Nymoen and Per Spilling for their expertise in this field that made this posting possible. Confluence Plugins Here is a list of Confluence plugins used in this solution. Install these before trying out the macros used below. Plugin Description Copy Space Allows a space administrator to copy a space, including the pages within the space Metadata Supports adding metadata to Wiki pages Label Manages labeling of pages Linking Contains macros for linking to templates, the dashboard and other Table Enhances the table capability in Confluence Creating a Confluence Space First we need to create a new confluence space for the domain model. Click the link Create a Space located below the list of spaces on the Dashboard. Please contact your Confluence administrator is you do not have permissions to do this. For illustrative purpose all attributes and entities in this posting are based on my imaginary project manager domain model. When a logical domain model is good enough for being implemented, do a copy of the Confluence Space (see Copy Space plugin). In this way you create a stable version of the logical domain model while further design can continue with the new copied space. Typical will the implementation phase result in a database design and/or a XSD schema design. Add Space Templates Go to the Home page of your Confluence Space. Navigate to the Browse drop-down menu and click on Advanced. Then click the Templates option in the left navigation panel. Click Add New Space Template to add the following three templates. Name: attribute {metadata-list} || Name | | || Type | | || Format | | || Description | | {metadata-list} {add-label:attribute} Name: primary-type {metadata-list} || Name | || || Type | || || Format | || || Description | || {metadata-list} {add-label:primary-type} Name: complex-type {metadata-list} || Name | || || Description | || {metadata-list} h3. Attributes || Name || Type || Format || Description || | [name] | {metadata-from:name|Type} | {metadata-from:name|Format} | {metadata-from:name|Description} | {add-label:complex-type,entity} The metadata-list macro (see Metadata plugin) will save a list of metadata values to the page. The add-label macro (see Label plugin) will automatically label the page. Primary Types Page Our first page to add will act as container for our primary types. Switch to Wiki markup when adding the following content to the page. | (+) {add-page:template=primary-type|parent=@self}Add new primary type{add-page} | {metadata-report:Name,Type,Format,Description|sort=Name|root=@self|pages=@descendents} Once the page is created, click the Add new primary type (create-page macro) to start creating a new pages. Here is an example of input to the LocalDate page. Embrace the LocalDate with square brackets [] to make the page linkable. Again switch to Wiki markup before editing. {metadata-list} || Name | [LocalDate] || || Type | Date || || Format | YYYY-MM-DD || || Description | Date in local time zone. YYYY = year, MM = month and DD = day || {metadata-list} {add-label:primary-type} The metadata-report macro will show a tabular report of all child pages. Attributes Page The next page will act as container for all of our attributes. | (+) {add-page:template=attribute|parent=@self|title=attribute}Add new attribute{add-page} | {metadata-report:Name,Type,Format,Description|sort=Name|pages=@descendants} Here is an example of input to the startDate page. {metadata-list} || Name | [startDate] || || Type | [LocalDate] || || Format | {metadata-from:LocalDate|Format} || || Description | The projects start date || {metadata-list} {add-label:attribute} Using the metadata-from macro we fetch the text from the previously created LocalDate page. Complex Types Page The last page in this example shows how attributes can be combined together to form more complex types. h3. Intro Overview of complex types in the domain model. | (+) {add-page:template=complex-type|parent=@self}Add a new complex type{add-page}\\ | {metadata-report:Name,Description|sort=Name|root=@self|pages=@descendents} Here is an example of input to the ProjectType page. {metadata-list} || Name | [ProjectType] || || Description | Represents a project || {metadata-list} h3. Attributes || Name || Type || Format || Description || | [projectId] | {metadata-from:projectId|Type} | {metadata-from:projectId|Format} | {metadata-from:projectId|Description} | | [name] | {metadata-from:name|Type} | {metadata-from:name|Format} | {metadata-from:name|Description} | | [description] | {metadata-from:description|Type} | {metadata-from:description|Format} | {metadata-from:description|Description} | | [startDate] | {metadata-from:startDate|Type} | {metadata-from:startDate|Format} | {metadata-from:startDate|Description} | {add-label:complex-type,entity} Gives us this Conclusion Using a web-based corporate Wiki like Confluence to create a logical domain model increases the collaboration between people with different roles in the enterprise. It’s my believe that this helps the domain model to be more accurate, and better documented. In our real project we have more pages than illustrated here to complete the documentation. We do also still use UML tools to create different types of diagrams that Confluence do not support. As a last tip, an ImageMap plugin can make those diagrams clickable when used in pages. Enjoy!

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Performance considerations for common SQL queries

- by Jim Giercyk

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/NibblesAndBits/archive/2013/10/16/performance-considerations-for-common-sql-queries.aspxSQL offers many different methods to produce the same results. There is a never-ending debate between SQL developers as to the “best way” or the “most efficient way” to render a result set. Sometimes these disputes even come to blows….well, I am a lover, not a fighter, so I decided to collect some data that will prove which way is the best and most efficient. For the queries below, I downloaded the test database from SQLSkills: http://www.sqlskills.com/sql-server-resources/sql-server-demos/. There isn’t a lot of data, but enough to prove my point: dbo.member has 10,000 records, and dbo.payment has 15,554. Our result set contains 6,706 records. The following queries produce an identical result set; the result set contains aggregate payment information for each member who has made more than 1 payment from the dbo.payment table and the first and last name of the member from the dbo.member table. /*************/ /* Sub Query */ /*************/ SELECT a.[Member Number] , m.lastname , m.firstname , a.[Number Of Payments] , a.[Average Payment] , a.[Total Paid] FROM ( SELECT member_no 'Member Number' , AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' , SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' , COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments' FROM dbo.payment GROUP BY member_no HAVING COUNT(Payment_No) > 1 ) a JOIN dbo.member m ON a.[Member Number] = m.member_no /***************/ /* Cross Apply */ /***************/ SELECT ca.[Member Number] , m.lastname , m.firstname , ca.[Number Of Payments] , ca.[Average Payment] , ca.[Total Paid] FROM dbo.member m CROSS APPLY ( SELECT member_no 'Member Number' , AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' , SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' , COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments' FROM dbo.payment WHERE member_no = m.member_no GROUP BY member_no HAVING COUNT(Payment_No) > 1 ) ca /********/ /* CTEs */ /********/ ; WITH Payments AS ( SELECT member_no 'Member Number' , AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' , SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' , COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments' FROM dbo.payment GROUP BY member_no HAVING COUNT(Payment_No) > 1 ), MemberInfo AS ( SELECT p.[Member Number] , m.lastname , m.firstname , p.[Number Of Payments] , p.[Average Payment] , p.[Total Paid] FROM dbo.member m JOIN Payments p ON m.member_no = p.[Member Number] ) SELECT * FROM MemberInfo /************************/ /* SELECT with Grouping */ /************************/ SELECT p.member_no 'Member Number' , m.lastname , m.firstname , COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments' , AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' , SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' FROM dbo.payment p JOIN dbo.member m ON m.member_no = p.member_no GROUP BY p.member_no , m.lastname , m.firstname HAVING COUNT(Payment_No) > 1 We can see what is going on in SQL’s brain by looking at the execution plan. The Execution Plan will demonstrate which steps and in what order SQL executes those steps, and what percentage of batch time each query takes. SO….if I execute all 4 of these queries in a single batch, I will get an idea of the relative time SQL takes to execute them, and how it renders the Execution Plan. We can settle this once and for all. Here is what SQL did with these queries: Not only did the queries take the same amount of time to execute, SQL generated the same Execution Plan for each of them. Everybody is right…..I guess we can all finally go to lunch together! But wait a second, I may not be a fighter, but I AM an instigator. Let’s see how a table variable stacks up. Here is the code I executed: /********************/ /* Table Variable */ /********************/ DECLARE @AggregateTable TABLE ( member_no INT , AveragePayment MONEY , TotalPaid MONEY , NumberOfPayments MONEY ) INSERT @AggregateTable SELECT member_no 'Member Number' , AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' , SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' , COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments' FROM dbo.payment GROUP BY member_no HAVING COUNT(Payment_No) > 1 SELECT at.member_no 'Member Number' , m.lastname , m.firstname , at.NumberOfPayments 'Number Of Payments' , at.AveragePayment 'Average Payment' , at.TotalPaid 'Total Paid' FROM @AggregateTable at JOIN dbo.member m ON m.member_no = at.member_no In the interest of keeping things in groupings of 4, I removed the last query from the previous batch and added the table variable query. Here’s what I got: Since we first insert into the table variable, then we read from it, the Execution Plan renders 2 steps. BUT, the combination of the 2 steps is only 22% of the batch. It is actually faster than the other methods even though it is treated as 2 separate queries in the Execution Plan. The argument I often hear against Table Variables is that SQL only estimates 1 row for the table size in the Execution Plan. While this is true, the estimate does not come in to play until you read from the table variable. In this case, the table variable had 6,706 rows, but it still outperformed the other queries. People argue that table variables should only be used for hash or lookup tables. The fact is, you have control of what you put IN to the variable, so as long as you keep it within reason, these results suggest that a table variable is a viable alternative to sub-queries. If anyone does volume testing on this theory, I would be interested in the results. My suspicion is that there is a breaking point where efficiency goes down the tubes immediately, and it would be interesting to see where the threshold is. Coding SQL is a matter of style. If you’ve been around since they introduced DB2, you were probably taught a little differently than a recent computer science graduate. If you have a company standard, I strongly recommend you follow it. If you do not have a standard, generally speaking, there is no right or wrong answer when talking about the efficiency of these types of queries, and certainly no hard-and-fast rule. Volume and infrastructure will dictate a lot when it comes to performance, so your results may vary in your environment. Download the database and try it!

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Tweaking a few URL validation settings on ASP.NET v4.0

- by Carlyle Dacosta

ASP.NET has a few default settings for URLs out of the box. These can be configured quite easily in the web.config file within the <system.web>/<httpRuntime> configuration section. Some of these are: <httpRuntime maxUrlLength=”<number here>” This number should be an integer value (defaults to 260 characters). The value must be greater than or equal to zero, though obviously small values will lead to an un-useable website. This attribute gates the length of the Url without query string. <httpRuntime maxQueryStringLength=”<number here>”. This number should be an integer value (defaults to 2048 characters). The value must be greater than or equal to zero, though obviously small values will lead to an un-useable website. <httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters=”List of characters you need included in ASP.NETs validation checks” /> By default the characters are “<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?”. However once can easily change this by setting by modifying web.config. Remember, these characters can be specified in a variety of formats. For example, I want the character ‘!’ to be included in ASP.NETs URL validation logic. So I set the following: <httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters=”<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?,!”. A character could also be specified in its xml encoded form. ‘<;’ would mean the ‘<’ sign). I could specify the ‘!’ in its xml encoded unicode format such as requestPathInvalidCharacters=”<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?,$#x0021;” or I could specify it in its unicode encoded form or in the “<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?,%u0021” format. The following settings can be applied at Root Web.Config level, App Web.config level, Folder level or within a location tag: <location path="some path here"> <system.web> <httpRuntime maxUrlLength="" maxQueryStringLength="" requestPathInvalidChars="" /> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If any of the above settings fail request validation, an Http 400 “Bad Request” HttpException is thrown. These can be easily handled on the Application_Error handler on Global.asax. Also, a new attribute in <httpRuntime /> called “relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping” has been added with a default of false. <httpRuntime … relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping="true|false" /> When the relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping attribute is set to false inbound Urls still need to be valid NTFS file paths. For example Urls (sans query string) need to be less than 260 characters; no path segment within a Url can use old-style DOS device names (LPT1, COM1, etc…); Urls must be valid Windows file paths. A url like “http://digg.com/http://cnn.com” should work with this attribute set to true (of course a few characters will need to be unblocked by removing them from requestPathInvalidCharacters="" above). Managed configuration for non-NTFS-compliant Urls is determined from the first valid configuration path found when walking up the path segments of the Url. For example, if the request Url is "/foo/bar/baz/<blah>data</blah>", and there is a web.config in the "/foo/bar" directory, then the managed configuration for the request comes from merging the configuration hierarchy to include the web.config from "/foo/bar". The value of the public property HttpRequest.PhysicalPath is set to [physical file path of the application root] + "REQUEST_URL_IS_NOT_A_VALID_FILESYSTEM_PATH". For example, given a request Url like "/foo/bar/baz/<blah>data</blah>", where the application root is "/foo/bar" and the physical file path for that root is "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\foo\bar", then PhysicalPath would be "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\foo\bar\ REQUEST_URL_IS_NOT_A_VALID_FILESYSTEM_PATH".

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CQRS – Questions and Concerns

- by Dylan Smith

I’ve been doing a lot of learning on CQRS and Event Sourcing over the last little while and I have a number of questions that I haven’t been able to answer. 1. What is the benefit of CQRS when compared to a typical DDD architecture that uses Event Sourcing and properly captures intent and behavior via verb-based commands? (other than Scalability) 2. When using CQRS what do you do with complex query-based logic? I’m going to elaborate on #1 in this blog post and I’ll do a follow-up post on #2. I watched through Greg Young’s video on the business benefits of CQRS + Event Sourcing and first let me say that I thought it was an excellent presentation that really drives home a lot of the benefits to this approach to architecture (I watched it twice in a row I enjoyed it so much!). But it didn’t answer some of my questions fully (I wish I had been there to ask these of Greg in person!). So let me pick apart some of the points he makes and how they relate to my first question above. I’m completely sold on the idea of event sourcing and have a clear understanding of the benefits that it brings to the table, so I’m not going to question that. But you can use event sourcing without going to a CQRS architecture, so my main question is around the benefits of CQRS + Event Sourcing vs Event Sourcing + Typical DDD architecture Architecture with Event Sourcing + Commands on Left, CQRS on Right Greg talks about how the stereotypical architecture doesn’t support DDD, but is that only because his diagram shows DTO’s coming up from the client. If we use the same diagram but allow the client to send commands doesn’t that remove a lot of the arguments that Greg makes against the stereotypical architecture? We can now introduce verbs into the system. We can capture intent now (storing it still requires event sourcing, but you can implement event sourcing without doing CQRS) We can create a rich domain model (as opposed to an anemic domain model) Scalability is obviously a benefit that CQRS brings to the table, but like Greg says, very few of the systems we create truly need significant scalability Greg talks about the ability to scale your development efforts. He says CQRS allows you to split the system into 3 parts (Client, Domain/Commands, Reads) and assign 3 teams of developers to work on them in parallel; letting you scale your development efforts by 3x with nearly linear gains. But in the stereotypical architecture don’t you already have 2 separate modules that you can split your dev efforts between: The client that sends commands/queries and receives DTO’s, and the Domain which accepts commands/queries, and generates events/DTO’s. If this is true it’s not really a 3x scaling you achieve with CQRS but merely a 1.5x scaling which while great doesn’t sound nearly as dramatic (“I can do it with 10 devs in 12 months – let me hire 5 more and we can have it done in 8 months”). Making the Query side “stupid simple” such that you can assign junior developers (or even outsource it) sounds like a valid benefit, but I have some concerns over what you do with complex query-based logic/behavior. I’m going to go into more detail on this in a follow-up blog post shortly. He also seemed to focus on how “stupid-simple” it is doing queries against the de-normalized data store, but I imagine there is still significant complexity in the event handlers that interpret the events and apply them to the de-normalized tables. It sounds like Greg suggests that because we’re doing CQRS that allows us to apply Event Sourcing when we otherwise wouldn’t be able to (~33:30 in the video). I don’t believe this is true. I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to apply Event Sourcing without separating out the Commands and Queries. The queries would just operate against the domain model instead of the database. But you’d still get the benefits of Event Sourcing. Without CQRS the queries would only be able to operate against the current state rather than the event history, but even in CQRS the domain behaviors can only operate against the current state and I don’t see that being a big limiting factor. If some query needs to operate against something that is not captured by the current state you would just have to update the domain model to capture that information (no different than if that statement were made about a Command under CQRS). Some of the benefits I do see being applicable are that your domain model might end up being simpler/smaller since it only needs to represent the state needed to process commands and not worry about the reads (like the Deactivate Inventory Item and associated comment example that Greg provides). And also commands that can be handled in a Transaction Script style manner by the command handler simply generating events and not touching the domain model. It also makes it easier for your senior developers to focus on the command behavior and ignore the queries, which is usually going to be a better use of their time. And of course scalability. If anybody out there has any thoughts on this and can help educate me further, please either leave a comment or feel free to get in touch with me via email:

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Parallelism in .NET – Part 8, PLINQ’s ForAll Method

- by Reed

Parallel LINQ extends LINQ to Objects, and is typically very similar. However, as I previously discussed, there are some differences. Although the standard way to handle simple Data Parellelism is via Parallel.ForEach, it’s possible to do the same thing via PLINQ. PLINQ adds a new method unavailable in standard LINQ which provides new functionality… LINQ is designed to provide a much simpler way of handling querying, including filtering, ordering, grouping, and many other benefits. Reading the description in LINQ to Objects on MSDN, it becomes clear that the thinking behind LINQ deals with retrieval of data. LINQ works by adding a functional programming style on top of .NET, allowing us to express filters in terms of predicate functions, for example. PLINQ is, generally, very similar. Typically, when using PLINQ, we write declarative statements to filter a dataset or perform an aggregation. However, PLINQ adds one new method, which provides a very different purpose: ForAll. The ForAll method is defined on ParallelEnumerable, and will work upon any ParallelQuery<T>. Unlike the sequence operators in LINQ and PLINQ, ForAll is intended to cause side effects. It does not filter a collection, but rather invokes an action on each element of the collection. At first glance, this seems like a bad idea. For example, Eric Lippert clearly explained two philosophical objections to providing an IEnumerable<T>.ForEach extension method, one of which still applies when parallelized. The sole purpose of this method is to cause side effects, and as such, I agree that the ForAll method “violates the functional programming principles that all the other sequence operators are based upon”, in exactly the same manner an IEnumerable<T>.ForEach extension method would violate these principles. Eric Lippert’s second reason for disliking a ForEach extension method does not necessarily apply to ForAll – replacing ForAll with a call to Parallel.ForEach has the same closure semantics, so there is no loss there. Although ForAll may have philosophical issues, there is a pragmatic reason to include this method. Without ForAll, we would take a fairly serious performance hit in many situations. Often, we need to perform some filtering or grouping, then perform an action using the results of our filter. Using a standard foreach statement to perform our action would avoid this philosophical issue: // Filter our collection var filteredItems = collection.AsParallel().Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ); // Now perform an action foreach (var item in filteredItems) { // These will now run serially item.DoSomething(); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This would cause a loss in performance, since we lose any parallelism in place, and cause all of our actions to be run serially. We could easily use a Parallel.ForEach instead, which adds parallelism to the actions: // Filter our collection var filteredItems = collection.AsParallel().Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ); // Now perform an action once the filter completes Parallel.ForEach(filteredItems, item => { // These will now run in parallel item.DoSomething(); }); This is a noticeable improvement, since both our filtering and our actions run parallelized. However, there is still a large bottleneck in place here. The problem lies with my comment “perform an action once the filter completes”. Here, we’re parallelizing the filter, then collecting all of the results, blocking until the filter completes. Once the filtering of every element is completed, we then repartition the results of the filter, reschedule into multiple threads, and perform the action on each element. By moving this into two separate statements, we potentially double our parallelization overhead, since we’re forcing the work to be partitioned and scheduled twice as many times. This is where the pragmatism comes into play. By violating our functional principles, we gain the ability to avoid the overhead and cost of rescheduling the work: // Perform an action on the results of our filter collection .AsParallel() .Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ) .ForAll( i => i.DoSomething() ); The ability to avoid the scheduling overhead is a compelling reason to use ForAll. This really goes back to one of the key points I discussed in data parallelism: Partition your problem in a way to place the most work possible into each task. Here, this means leaving the statement attached to the expression, even though it causes side effects and is not standard usage for LINQ. This leads to my one guideline for using ForAll: The ForAll extension method should only be used to process the results of a parallel query, as returned by a PLINQ expression. Any other usage scenario should use Parallel.ForEach, instead.

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Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC Review

- by Ben Griswold

A few years back I started dallying with test-driven development, but I never fully committed to the practice. This wasn’t because I didn’t believe in the value of TDD; it was more a matter of not completely understanding how to incorporate “test first” into my everyday development. Back in my web forms days, I could point fingers at the framework for my ignorance and laziness. After all, web forms weren’t exactly designed for testability so who could blame me for not embracing TDD in those conditions, right? But when I switched to ASP.NET MVC and quickly found myself fresh out of excuses and it became instantly clear that it was time to get my head around red-green-refactor once and for all or I would regretfully miss out on one of the biggest selling points the new framework had to offer. I have previously written about how I learned ASP.NET MVC. It was primarily hands on learning but I did read a couple of ASP.NET MVC books along the way. The books I read dedicated a chapter or two to TDD and they certainly addressed the benefits of TDD and how MVC was designed with testability in mind, but TDD was merely an afterthought compared to, well, teaching one how to code the model, view and controller. This approach made some sense, and I learned a bunch about MVC from those books, but when it came to TDD the books were just a teaser and an opportunity missed. But then I got lucky – Jonathan McCracken contacted me and asked if I’d review his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, and it was just what I needed to get over the TDD hump. As the title suggests, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC takes a different approach to learning MVC as it focuses on testing right from the very start. McCracken wastes no time and swiftly familiarizes us with the framework by building out a trivial Quote-O-Matic application and then dedicates the better part of his book to testing first – first by explaining TDD and then coding a full-featured Getting Organized application inspired by David Allen’s popular book, Getting Things Done. If you are a learn-by-example kind of coder (like me), you will instantly appreciate and enjoy McCracken’s style – its fast-moving, pragmatic and focused on only the most relevant information required to get you going with ASP.NET MVC and TDD. The book continues with the test-first theme but McCracken moves away from the sample application and incorporates other practical skills like persisting models with NHibernate, leveraging Inversion of Control with the IControllerFactory and building a RESTful web service. What I most appreciated about this section was McCracken’s use of and praise for open source libraries like Rhino Mocks, SQLite and StructureMap (to name just a few) and productivity tools like ReSharper, Web Platform Installer and ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard. McCracken’s emphasis on real world, pragmatic development was clearly demonstrated in every tool choice, straight-forward code block and developer tip. Whether one is already familiar with the tools/tips or not, McCracken’s thought process is easily understood and appreciated. The final section of the book walks the reader through security and deployment – everything from error handling and logging with ELMAH, to ASP.NET Health Monitoring, to using MSBuild with automated builds, to the deployment of ASP.NET MVC to various web environments. These chapters, like those prior, offer enough information and explanation to simply help you get the job done. Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will turn you into an expert MVC developer overnight? Well, no. I don’t think any book can make that claim. If that were possible, I think book list prices would skyrocket! That said, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC provides a solid foundation and a unique (and dare I say necessary) approach to learning ASP.NET MVC. Along the way McCracken shares loads of very practical software development tips and references numerous tools and libraries. The bottom line is it’s a great ASP.NET MVC primer – if you’re new to ASP.NET MVC it’s just what you need to get started. Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will give you everything you need to start employing TDD in your everyday development? Well, I used to think that learning TDD required a lot of practice and, if you’re lucky enough, the guidance of a mentor or coach. I used to think that one couldn’t learn TDD from a book alone. Well, I’m still no pro, but I’m testing first now and Jonathan McCracken and his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, played a big part in making this happen. If you are an MVC developer and a TDD newb, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC is just the book for you.

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XNA Notes 004

- by George Clingerman

The XNA community has been crazy busy again. It always make me fee like such a slacker collecting all of these notes as I see the tremendous output from people all over the world and it’s incredible and humbling. There are some amazingly skilled people working with XNA. On another not, I’m going to take a minute to get on my soapbox and say, if you are developing ANYTHING and are not using some sort of source/revision control, START IMMEDIATELY. This applies to teams of one. Projects for fun. And “I back up my hard drive” or “I use dropbox!” does NOT count as using source control. You’ll be doing yourself a HUGE favor if you find one, learn to use it and integrate it into your everyday workflow. I personally use Subversion. It’s hosted offsite at xp.dev.com and I use TortoiseSVN as my front end to interface with the repository. It’s simple and easy to use and has saved me from myself so many time. Honestly, get setup with some type of source control immediately. If you don’t understand how, grab another developer that does and have them walk you through setup and the basics of using it. Ok, I’m done. On to the notes… The XNA Team Only 14 days left to Submit XNA GS 3.1 Games! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/24/14-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-on-app-hub.aspx Shawn Hargreaves shares some great information on Exception Handling best practices on the XNA forums http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73333/448556.aspx#448556 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/10/vexing-exceptions.aspx XNA MVPs @CatalinZima gives us a peek at Chicken’s Can’t Fly http://www.amusedsloth.com/games/chickens-cant-fly/ Screen-space deformations in XNA for WP7 from Catalin Zima http://twitter.com/CatalinZima/statuses/30313083767357440 http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/01/screen-space-deformations-in-xna-for-windows-phone-7/ XNA Developers Going to GDC? Don’t miss the XNA panel hosted by a plethora of well known XNA community names! http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73576/448842.aspx#448842 MasterBlud does an interview with @Xalterax http://twitter.com/MasterBlud/statuses/28510774812999680 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=7102 Luke Schneider of Radiangames posts about The Radiangames Style http://radiangames.com/?p=532 Holmade Games had a “vote for the new playable character” poll going on for Hurdle Turtle this past week http://holmadegames.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-level-pack-vote-for-your-favorite.html IGF v0.1.0.0 release post mortem http://indiefreaks.com/2011/01/24/v0-1-0-0-release-post-mortem/ James an Super Dunner post Good Morning Gato #46 and a look at the Vampire Smile box art http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/01/21/good-morning-gato-46/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/01/20/vampire-smiles-digital-box-art/ Alfredo Di Napoli creates Cow Pong using XNA and F#! http://alfredodinapoli.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/cow-pong-a-simple-xna-game-in-f/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games Signed In Podcast posts Episode #61 http://www.signedinpodcast.com/?p=559 Gamergeddon posts the January 23rd edition of XBLIG Round Up http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/01/23/xbox-indie-games-round-up-january-23rd/ Indie Asylum posts Antipole Review http://www.indieasylum.com/reviews/38-xblig/112-antipole.html 1UPOrPosion Reviews OSR Unhinged http://www.1uporpoison.com/xblig/osr-unhinged/ DarkstarMatryx review Warbirds at Work http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=185 Review of Aban Hawkins and the 1000 Spikes http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/24/xbox-indie-review-aban-hawkins-the-1000-spikes/ XboxHornet reviews Corrupted http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=7123 XBLIG 2010: The Best And The Worst http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JamieMann/20110121/6840/ Xbox LIVE Arcade Sales Analysis - an interesting read for XBLIG developers wondering how they’re doing compared to arcade.. http://www.gamerbytes.com/2011/01/xbla_sales_analysis_dec_2010.php Best of Indies for January 25th http://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk/articles/games/best-of-the-indies-25th-january-2011 Decimation X3 appears as an arcade machine in the wild! http://twitter.com/mdoucette/statuses/29605562484260864 XNA Game Development Guiseppe De Francesco (@PinoEire) announced Torque X 4.0 CEV is now in RC phase! http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/20779 DrMistry of mstargames shares his struggle (and mistakes) with learning to use the Content Pipeline http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/181-pontent-cipeline-more-like-it.html New Tutorial posted XNA 2D Basic Collision Detection with Rotation from Ioannis Panagopoulos http://www.progware.org/Blog/post/XNA-2D-Basic-Collision-Detection-with-Rotation.aspx Sgt. Conker roars to life! Doing a much better (and prettier) job of collecting XNA news from around the interwebs. http://www.sgtconker.com/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/dedication-for-captain-boki/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/screen-space-deformations-in-xna-for-windows-phone-7/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/xna-4-0-light-pre-pass-2/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/indiefreaks-game-framework-0-1-0-0-released/ Offering a little free publicity for XBLIGs http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73465/448321.aspx#448321 Ben Kane writes about building loot tables from Excel using the Content Pipeline http://benkane.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/building-loot-tables-from-excel-using-the-content-pipeline/ Good tips on attracting a game artist AND an offer to create your cover art for FREE http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/72998.aspx If you’re an XBLIG developer keeping your eye on places to release on the PC, might want to be watching the IndieCity blog. Seems like these guys are well on their way to constructing something worth watching. http://www.indiecity.com/blog/ DVMGames spotted a new crowd-funding site for Indies http://twitter.com/DVMGames/statuses/29947274767372289 http://www.8bitfunding.com/ Transmute continues to make progress and there’s a nice dev blog to follow along here http://forgottenstarstudios.com/blog/

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Inserting and Deleting Sub Rows in GridView

- by Vincent Maverick Durano

A user in the forums (http://forums.asp.net) is asking how to insert sub rows in GridView and also add delete functionality for the inserted sub rows. In this post I'm going to demonstrate how to this in ASP.NET WebForms. The basic idea to achieve this is we just need to insert row data in the DataSource that is being used in GridView since the GridView rows will be generated based on the DataSource data. To make it more clear then let's build up a sample application. To start fire up Visual Studio and create a WebSite or Web Application project and then add a new WebForm. In the WebForm ASPX page add this GridView markup below: 1: <asp:gridview ID="GridView1" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" onrowdatabound="GridView1_RowDataBound"> 2: <Columns> 3: <asp:BoundField DataField="RowNumber" HeaderText="Row Number" /> 4: <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Header 1"> 5: <ItemTemplate> 6: <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> 7: </ItemTemplate> 8: </asp:TemplateField> 9: <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Header 2"> 10: <ItemTemplate> 11: <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox2" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> 12: </ItemTemplate> 13: </asp:TemplateField> 14: <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Header 3"> 15: <ItemTemplate> 16: <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox3" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> 17: </ItemTemplate> 18: </asp:TemplateField> 19: <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Action"> 20: <ItemTemplate> 21: <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton1" runat="server" onclick="LinkButton1_Click" Text="Insert"></asp:LinkButton> 22: </ItemTemplate> 23: </asp:TemplateField> 24: </Columns> 25: </asp:gridview> Then at the code behind source of ASPX page you can add this codes below: 1: private DataTable FillData() { 2: 3: DataTable dt = new DataTable(); 4: DataRow dr = null; 5: 6: //Create DataTable columns 7: dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("RowNumber", typeof(string))); 8: 9: //Create Row for each columns 10: dr = dt.NewRow(); 11: dr["RowNumber"] = 1; 12: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 13: 14: dr = dt.NewRow(); 15: dr["RowNumber"] = 2; 16: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 17: 18: dr = dt.NewRow(); 19: dr["RowNumber"] = 3; 20: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 21: 22: dr = dt.NewRow(); 23: dr["RowNumber"] = 4; 24: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 25: 26: dr = dt.NewRow(); 27: dr["RowNumber"] = 5; 28: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 29: 30: //Store the DataTable in ViewState for future reference 31: ViewState["CurrentTable"] = dt; 32: 33: return dt; 34: 35: } 36: 37: private void BindGridView(DataTable dtSource) { 38: GridView1.DataSource = dtSource; 39: GridView1.DataBind(); 40: } 41: 42: private DataRow InsertRow(DataTable dtSource, string value) { 43: DataRow dr = dtSource.NewRow(); 44: dr["RowNumber"] = value; 45: return dr; 46: } 47: //private DataRow DeleteRow(DataTable dtSource, 48: 49: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { 50: if (!IsPostBack) { 51: BindGridView(FillData()); 52: } 53: } 54: 55: protected void LinkButton1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { 56: LinkButton lb = (LinkButton)sender; 57: GridViewRow row = (GridViewRow)lb.NamingContainer; 58: DataTable dtCurrentData = (DataTable)ViewState["CurrentTable"]; 59: if (lb.Text == "Insert") { 60: //Insert new row below the selected row 61: dtCurrentData.Rows.InsertAt(InsertRow(dtCurrentData, row.Cells[0].Text + "-sub"), row.RowIndex + 1); 62: 63: } 64: else { 65: //Delete selected sub row 66: dtCurrentData.Rows.RemoveAt(row.RowIndex); 67: } 68: 69: BindGridView(dtCurrentData); 70: ViewState["CurrentTable"] = dtCurrentData; 71: } 72: 73: protected void GridView1_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { 74: if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow) { 75: if (e.Row.Cells[0].Text.Contains("-sub")) { 76: ((LinkButton)e.Row.FindControl("LinkButton1")).Text = "Delete"; 77: } 78: } 79: } As you can see the code above is pretty straight forward and self explainatory but just to give you a short explaination the code above is composed of three (3) private methods which are the FillData(), BindGridView and InsertRow(). The FillData() method is a method that returns a DataTable and basically creates a dummy data in the DataTable to be used as the GridView DataSource. You can replace the code in that method if you want to use actual data from database but for the purpose of this example I just fill the DataTable with a dummy data on it. The BindGridVew is a method that handles the actual binding of GridVew. The InsertRow() is a method that returns a DataRow. This method handles the insertion of the sub row. Now in the LinkButton OnClick event, we casted the sender to a LinkButton to determine the specific object that fires up the event and get the row values. We then reference the Data from ViewState to get the current data that is being used in the GridView. If the LinkButton text is "Insert" then we will insert new row to the DataSource ( in this case the DataTable) based on the rowIndex if not then Delete the sub row that was added. Here are some screen shots of the output below: On initial load: After inserting a sub row: That's it! I hope someone find this post useful! Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,C#,GridView

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Finding the problem on a partially succeeded build

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Now that I have the Build failing because of a genuine bug and not just because of a test framework failure, lets see if we can trace through to finding why the first test in our new application failed. Lets look at the build and see if we can see why there is a red cross on it. First, lets open that build list. On Team Explorer Expand your Team Project Collection | Team Project and then Builds. Double click the offending build. Figure: Opening the Build list is a key way to see what the current state of your software is. Figure: A test is failing, but we can now view the Test Results to find the problem Figure: You can quite clearly see that the test has failed with “The device is not ready”. To me the “The Device is not ready” smacks of a System.IO exception, but it passed on my local computer, so why not on the build server? Its a FaultException so it is most likely coming from the Service and not the client, so lets take a look at the client method that the test is calling: bool IProfileService.SaveDefaultProjectFile(string strComputerName) { ProjectFile file = new ProjectFile() { ProjectFileName = strComputerName + "_" + System.DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMddhhmmsss") + ".xml", ConnectionString = "persist security info=False; pooling=False; data source=(local); application name=SSW.SQLDeploy.vshost.exe; integrated security=SSPI; initial catalog=SSWSQLDeployNorthwindSample", DateCreated = System.DateTime.Now, DateUpdated = System.DateTime.Now, FolderPath = @"C:\Program Files\SSW SQL Deploy\SampleData\", IsComplete=false, Version = "1.3", NewDatabase = true, TimeOut = 5, TurnOnMSDE = false, Mode="AutomaticMode" }; string strFolderPath = "D:\\"; //LocalSettings.ProjectFileBasePath; string strFileName = strFolderPath + file.ProjectFileName; try { using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(strFileName, FileMode.Create)) { DataContractSerializer serializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(ProjectFile)); using (XmlDictionaryWriter writer = XmlDictionaryWriter.CreateTextWriter(fs)) { serializer.WriteObject(writer, file); } } } catch (Exception ex) { //TODO: Log the exception throw ex; return false; } return true; } Figure: You can see on lines 9 and 18 that there are calls being made to specific folders and disks. What is wrong with this code? What assumptions mistakes could the developer have made to make this look OK: That every install would be to “C:\Program Files\SSW SQL Deploy” That every computer would have a “D:\\” That checking in code at 6pm because the had to go home was a good idea. lets solve each of these problems: We are in a web service… lets store data within the web root. So we can call “Server.MapPath(“~/App_Data/SSW SQL Deploy\SampleData”) instead. Never reference an explicit path. If you need some storage for your application use IsolatedStorage. Shelve your code instead. What else could have been done? Code review before check-in – The developer should have shelved their code and asked another dev to look at it. Use Defensive programming – Make sure that any code that has the possibility of failing has checks. Any more options? Let me know and I will add them. What do we do? The correct things to do is to add a Bug to the backlog, but as this is probably going to be fixed in sprint, I will add it directly to the sprint backlog. Right click on the failing test Select “Create Work Item | Bug” Figure: Create an associated bug to add to the backlog. Set the values for the Bug making sure that it goes into the right sprint and Area. Make your steps to reproduce as explicit as possible, but “See test” is valid under these circumstances. Figure: Add it to the correct Area and set the Iteration to the Area name or the Sprint if you think it will be fixed in Sprint and make sure you bring it up at the next Scrum Meeting. Note: make sure you leave the “Assigned To” field blank as in Scrum team members sign up for work, you do not give it to them. The developer who broke the test will most likely either sign up for the bug, or say that they are stuck and need help. Note: Visual Studio has taken care of associating the failing test with the Bug. Save… Technorati Tags: WCF,MSTest,MSBuild,Team Build 2010,Team Test 2010,Team Build,Team Test

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JavaScript Intellisense with Telerik in ASP.NET Master Page Project with VS 2010

- by Otto Neff

Today I was looking for a solution to get finally the JScript/Javascript/jQuery Intellisense Featureworking with my ASP.Net Webform Project to work. I found some good articles: - JScript IntelliSense Overview- JScript IntelliSense: A Reference for the “Reference” Tag- Enabling JavaScript intellisense in VS.NET 2010 to work with SharePoint 2010- Rich IntelliSense for jQueryBUT, all of suggested solutions did not work right with my Master Page based Visual Studio 2010 Solution.Only with physical Javascript Files (Telerik includes certain Javascript Files like jQuery as Ressource) or/andconfigure always a new ASP.NET Scriptmanager / RadScriptManager on every page derived from the Master Page, wasn't exactly what I was looking for. So I came up with the following simple Solution, to Trick VS2010and still have the Project running with multiple runat="server" Scriptmanagers. In short:- New ASP.NET control derived from ScriptManager with emtpy overwritten OnInit() to use it as emtpy wrapper for VS2010. In detail:New RadScriptManager Classusing System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using Telerik.Web.UI; namespace IntellisenseJavascript.Controls { public class IntelliJS : RadScriptManager { protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { } protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e) { } protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e) { } protected override void Render(System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer) { } public override void RenderControl(System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer) { } } } web.config<configuration> ... <system.web> ... <pages> <controls> <add tagPrefix="telerik" namespace="Telerik.Web.UI" assembly="Telerik.Web.UI, Version=2011.3.1115.40, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=121fae78165ba3d4"/> <add tagPrefix="VSFix" namespace="IntellisenseJavascript.Controls" assembly="IntellisenseJavascript"/> </controls> </pages> ... Master Page<%@ Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Site.master.cs" Inherits="IntellisenseJavascript.Site" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html > <head id="head" runat="server"> <title></title> <telerik:RadStyleSheetManager ID="radStyleSheetManager" runat="server" /> </head> <body> <form id="form" runat="server"> <telerik:RadScriptManager ID="radScriptManager" runat="server"> <Scripts> <asp:ScriptReference Assembly="Telerik.Web.UI, Version=2011.3.1115.40, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=121fae78165ba3d4" Name="Telerik.Web.UI.Common.Core.js" /> <asp:ScriptReference Assembly="Telerik.Web.UI, Version=2011.3.1115.40, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=121fae78165ba3d4" Name="Telerik.Web.UI.Common.jQuery.js" /> <asp:ScriptReference Assembly="Telerik.Web.UI, Version=2011.3.1115.40, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=121fae78165ba3d4" Name="Telerik.Web.UI.Common.jQueryInclude.js" /> </Scripts> </telerik:RadScriptManager> <telerik:RadAjaxManager ID="radAjaxManager" runat="server"> </telerik:RadAjaxManager> <div> #MASTER CONTENT# <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="contentPlaceHolder" runat="server"> </asp:ContentPlaceHolder> </div> </form> <script type="text/javascript"> $(function () { // Masterpage ready $('body').css('margin', '50px'); }); </script> </body> </html> ASPX Page<%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Site.Master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="IntellisenseJavascript.Default" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="contentPlaceHolder" runat="server"> <VSFix:IntelliJS runat="server" ID="intelliJS"> <Scripts> <asp:ScriptReference Assembly="Telerik.Web.UI, Version=2011.3.1115.40, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=121fae78165ba3d4" Name="Telerik.Web.UI.Common.Core.js" /> <asp:ScriptReference Assembly="Telerik.Web.UI, Version=2011.3.1115.40, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=121fae78165ba3d4" Name="Telerik.Web.UI.Common.jQuery.js" /> <asp:ScriptReference Assembly="Telerik.Web.UI, Version=2011.3.1115.40, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=121fae78165ba3d4" Name="Telerik.Web.UI.Common.jQueryInclude.js" /> </Scripts> </VSFix:IntelliJS> <div style="border: 5px solid #FF9900;"> #PAGE CONTENT# </div> <script type="text/javascript"> $(function () { // Page ready $('body').css('border', '5px solid #888'); }); </script> </asp:Content> The Result I know, this is not the way it meant to be... but now at least you can have a Main ScriptManager for all Common Scripts and Settings, inject page specific Javascripts in PageLoad Event in normal ASPX Files and have JavaScript Intellisense for defined Scripts from JS Files or Assembly Ressouce in your Content Maybe, vNext will fix this.

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Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

- by Chris George

Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1: Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing. Day 2 – Coming soon…

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ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: ASP.NET MVC 3 First Look

- by mbridge

MVC 3 View Enhancements MVC 3 introduces two improvements to the MVC view engine: - Ability to select the view engine to use. MVC 3 allows you to select from any of your installed view engines from Visual Studio by selecting Add > View (including the newly introduced ASP.NET “Razor” engine”): - Support for the next ASP.NET “Razor” syntax. The newly previewed Razor syntax is a concise lightweight syntax. MVC 3 Control Enhancements - Global Filters: ASP.NET MVC 3 allows you to specify that a filter which applies globally to all Controllers within an app by adding it to the GlobalFilters collection. The RegisterGlobalFilters() method is now included in the default Global.asax class template and so provides a convenient place to do this since is will then be called by the Application_Start() method: void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters) { filters.Add(new HandleLoggingAttribute()); filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute()); } void Application_Start() { RegisterGlobalFilters (GlobalFilters.Filters); } - Dynamic ViewModel Property : MVC 3 augments the ViewData API with a new “ViewModel” property on Controller which is of type “dynamic” – and therefore enables you to use the new dynamic language support in C# and VB pass ViewData items using a cleaner syntax than the current dictionary API. Public ActionResult Index() { ViewModel.Message = "Hello World"; return View(); } - New ActionResult Types : MVC 3 includes three new ActionResult types and helper methods: 1. HttpNotFoundResult – indicates that a resource which was requested by the current URL was not found. HttpNotFoundResult will return a 404 HTTP status code to the calling client. 2. PermanentRedirects – The HttpRedirectResult class contains a new Boolean “Permanent” property which is used to indicate that a permanent redirect should be done. Permanent redirects use a HTTP 301 status code. The Controller class includes three new methods for performing these permanent redirects: RedirectPermanent(), RedirectToRoutePermanent(), andRedirectToActionPermanent(). All of these methods will return an instance of the HttpRedirectResult object with the Permanent property set to true. 3. HttpStatusCodeResult – used for setting an explicit response status code and its associated description. MVC 3 AJAX and JavaScript Enhancements MVC 3 ships with built-in JSON binding support which enables action methods to receive JSON-encoded data and then model-bind it to action method parameters. For example a jQuery client-side JavaScript could define a “save” event handler which will be invoked when the save button is clicked on the client. The code in the event handler then constructs a client-side JavaScript “product” object with 3 fields with their values retrieved from HTML input elements. Finally, it uses jQuery’s .ajax() method to POST a JSON based request which contains the product to a /theStore/UpdateProduct URL on the server: $('#save').click(function () { var product = { ProdName: $('#Name').val() Price: $('#Price').val(), } $.ajax({ url: '/theStore/UpdateProduct', type: "POST"; data: JSON.stringify(widget), datatype: "json", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", success: function () { $('#message').html('Saved').fadeIn(), }, error: function () { $('#message').html('Error').fadeIn(), } }); return false; }); MVC will allow you to implement the /theStore/UpdateProduct URL on the server by using an action method as below. The UpdateProduct() action method will accept a strongly-typed Product object for a parameter. MVC 3 can now automatically bind an incoming JSON post value to the .NET Product type on the server without having to write any custom binding. [HttpPost] public ActionResult UpdateProduct(Product product) { // save logic here return null } MVC 3 Model Validation Enhancements MVC 3 builds on the MVC 2 model validation improvements by adding support for several of the new validation features within the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in .NET 4.0: - Support for the new DataAnnotations metadata attributes like DisplayAttribute. - Support for the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class which now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more info on the current validation context, like what object is being validated. - Support for the new IValidatableObject interface which enables you to perform model-level validation and also provide validation error messages which are specific to the state of the overall model. MVC 3 Dependency Injection Enhancements MVC 3 includes better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and also integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers. Currently MVC 3 Preview 1 has support for DI in the below places: - Controllers (registering & injecting controller factories and injecting controllers) - Views (registering & injecting view engines, also for injecting dependencies into view pages) - Action Filters (locating and injecting filters) And this is another important blog about Microsoft .NET and technology: - Windows 2008 Blog - SharePoint 2010 Blog - .NET 4 Blog And you can visit here if you're looking for ASP.NET MVC 3 hosting

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