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• Smartassembly 5: it lives! Early Access builds now available

  - by Bart Read

  I'm pleased to announce that, late last week, we put out the first early access build for Smartassembly 5, Red Gate's fantastic code protection and error reporting tool, which we acquired last September. You can download it via: http://www.red-gate.com/messageboard/viewforum.php?f=116 It's obviously pretty early days, so please do not try to use this to protect a production application, but we've already done a lot of work in some key areas: We're simplifying and streamlining the licensing model (you won't see this yet, but a lot of the work on this has already been done). We've improved usability of the product, with a better menu, reordering of project settings, and better defaults. We've also fixed a load of bugs, which I'll let Alex blog about in more detail. On a slightly more trivial level, the curly braces are also no more. Over the coming weeks, we'll be adding more improvements, and starting usability tests. If you're interested in getting involved in the latter, please drop an email to [email protected].

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• Migrating from OCS 2007 R2 to Lync: Part 2

  In the story so far, Johan has described how to check that the migration from your OCS to Lync is supported and how to determine the requirements for the new installation This was followed by a walk-through of the preparation the Active Directory and installation of the first Lync Front End Server with a Mediation Server co-located. Now Johan tackles the merging the OCS configuration, and connection to the outsode world, followed by testing, performing and then validating the migration.

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• Cheating on Technical Debt

  - by Tony Davis

  One bad practice guaranteed to cause dismay amongst your colleagues is passing on technical debt without full disclosure. There could only be two reasons for this. Either the developer or DBA didn’t know the difference between good and bad practices, or concealed the debt. Neither reflects well on their professional competence. Technical debt, or code debt, is a convenient term to cover all the compromises between the ideal solution and the actual solution, reflecting the reality of the pressures of commercial coding. The one time you’re guaranteed to hear one developer, or DBA, pass judgment on another is when he or she inherits their project, and is surprised by the amount of technical debt left lying around in the form of inelegant architecture, incomplete tests, confusing interface design, no documentation, and so on. It is often expedient for a Project Manager to ignore the build-up of technical debt, the cut corners, not-quite-finished features and rushed designs that mean progress is satisfyingly rapid in the short term. It’s far less satisfying for the poor person who inherits the code. Nothing sends a colder chill down the spine than the dawning realization that you’ve inherited a system crippled with performance and functional issues that will take months of pain to fix before you can even begin to make progress on any of the planned new features. It’s often hard to justify this ‘debt paying’ time to the project owners and managers. It just looks as if you are making no progress, in marked contrast to your predecessor. There can be many good reasons for allowing technical debt to build up, at least in the short term. Often, rapid prototyping is essential, there is a temporary shortfall in test resources, or the domain knowledge is incomplete. It may be necessary to hit a specific deadline with a prototype, or proof-of-concept, to explore a possible market opportunity, with planned iterations and refactoring to follow later. However, it is a crime for a developer to build up technical debt without making this clear to the project participants. He or she needs to record it explicitly. A design compromise made in to order to hit a deadline, be it an outright hack, or a decision made without time for rigorous investigation and testing, needs to be documented with the same rigor that one tracks a bug. What’s the best way to do this? Ideally, we’d have some kind of objective assessment of the level of technical debt in a software project, although that smacks of Science Fiction even as I write it. I’d be interested of hear of any methods you’ve used, but I’m sure most teams have to rely simply on the integrity of their colleagues and the clear perceptions of the project manager… Cheers, Tony.

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• Getting baseline and performance stats - the easy way.

  - by fatherjack

  OK, pretty much any DBA worth their salt has read Brent Ozar's (Blog | Twitter) blog about getting a baseline of your server's performance counters and then getting the same counters at regular intervals afterwards so that you can track performance trends and evidence how you are making your servers faster or cope with extra load without costing your boss any money for hardware upgrades. No? well, go read it now. I can wait a while as there is a great video there too...http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2006/12/dba-101-using-perfmon-for-sql-performance-tuning/,...(read more)

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• Learn Many Languages

  - by Phil Factor

  Around twenty-five years ago, I was trying to solve the problem of recruiting suitable developers for a large business. I visited the local University (it was a Technical College then). My mission was to remind them that we were a large, local employer of technical people and to suggest that, as they were in the business of educating young people for a career in IT, we should work together. I anticipated a harmonious chat where we could suggest to them the idea of mentioning our name to some of their graduates. It didn’t go well. The academic staff displayed a degree of revulsion towards the whole topic of IT in the world of commerce that surprised me; tweed met charcoal-grey, trainers met black shoes. However, their antipathy to commerce was something we could have worked around, since few of their graduates were destined for a career as university lecturers. They asked me what sort of language skills we needed. I tried ducking the invidious task of naming computer languages, since I wanted recruits who were quick to adapt and learn, with a broad understanding of IT, including development methodologies, technologies, and data. However, they pressed the point and I ended up saying that we needed good working knowledge of C and BASIC, though FORTRAN and COBOL were, at the time, still useful. There was a ghastly silence. It was as if I’d recommended the beliefs and practices of the Bogomils of Bulgaria to a gathering of Cardinals. They stared at me severely, like owls, until the head of department broke the silence, informing me in clipped tones that they taught only Modula 2. Now, I wouldn’t blame you if at this point you hurriedly had to look up ‘Modula 2′ on Wikipedia. Based largely on Pascal, it was a specialist language for embedded systems, but I’ve never ever come across it in a commercial business application. Nevertheless, it was an excellent teaching language since it taught modules, scope control, multiprogramming and the advantages of encapsulating a set of related subprograms and data structures. As long as the course also taught how to transfer these skills to other, more useful languages, it was not necessarily a problem. I said as much, but they gleefully retorted that the biggest local employer, a defense contractor specializing in Radar and military technology, used nothing but Modula 2. “Why teach any other programming language when they will be using Modula 2 for all their working lives?” said a complacent lecturer. On hearing this, I made my excuses and left. There could be no meeting of minds. They were providing training in a specific computer language, not an education in IT. Twenty years later, I once more worked nearby and regularly passed the long-deserted ‘brownfield’ site of the erstwhile largest local employer; the end of the cold war had led to lean times for defense contractors. A digger was about to clear the rubble of the long demolished factory along with the accompanying growth of buddleia and thistles, in order to lay the infrastructure for ‘affordable housing’. Modula 2 was a distant memory. Either those employees had short working lives or they’d retrained in other languages. The University, by contrast, was thriving, but I wondered if their erstwhile graduates had ever cursed the narrow specialization of their training in IT, as they struggled with the unexpected variety of their subsequent careers.

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• Antenna Aligner part 2: Finding the right direction

  - by Chris George

  Last time I managed to get "my first app(tm)" built, published and running on my iPhone. This was really cool, a piece of my code running on my very own device. Ok, so I'm easily pleased! The next challenge was actually trying to determine what it was I wanted this app to do, and how to do it. Reverting back to good old paper and pen, I started sketching out designs for the app. I knew I wanted it to get a list of transmitters, then clicking on a transmitter would display a compass type view, with an arrow pointing the right way. I figured there would not be much point in continuing until I know I could do the graphical part of the project, i.e. the rotating compass, so armed with that reasoning (plus the fact I just wanted to get on and code!), I once again dived into visual studio. Using my friend (google) I found some example code for getting the compass data from the phone using the PhoneGap framework. // onSuccess: Get the current heading // function onSuccess(heading) {    alert('Heading: ' + heading); } navigator.compass.getCurrentHeading(onSuccess, onError); Using the ripple mobile emulator this showed that it was successfully getting the compass heading. But it didn't work when uploaded to my phone. It turns out that the examples I had been looking at were for PhoneGap 1.0, and Nomad uses PhoneGap 1.4.1. In 1.4.1, getCurrentHeading provides a compass object to onSuccess, not just a numeric value, so the code now looks like // onSuccess: Get the current magnetic heading // function onSuccess(heading) {    alert('Heading: ' + heading.magneticHeading); }; navigator.compass.getCurrentHeading(onSuccess, onError); So the lesson learnt from this... read the documentation for the version you are actually using! This does, however, lead to compatibility problems with ripple as it only supports 1.0 which is a real pain. I hope that the ripple system is updated sometime soon.

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• Exceptional PowerShell DBA Pt 3 - Collation and Fragmentation

  In this final look into his everyday essentials, Laerte Junior provides some useful scripts for the DBA that use an alternative way of error-logging. He shows how to use a PowerShell script to check and, if necessary, to defragment your indexes, write data to a SQL Server table, and change the collation for a table. Being an exceptional DBA just got a little easier.

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• Mission Critical: SQL Server 2008 Engine Post-Installation

  Even an experienced DBA finds it safer to double-check that all the tasks have been done, and in the right order. Buck Woody continues his series with another handy checklist, army-style.

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• Subterranean IL: Exception handling 1

  - by Simon Cooper

  Today, I'll be starting a look at the Structured Exception Handling mechanism within the CLR. Exception handling is quite a complicated business, and, as a result, the rules governing exception handling clauses in IL are quite strict; you need to be careful when writing exception clauses in IL. Exception handlers Exception handlers are specified using a .try clause within a method definition. .try <TryStartLabel> to <TryEndLabel> <HandlerType> handler <HandlerStartLabel> to <HandlerEndLabel> As an example, a basic try/catch block would be specified like so: TryBlockStart: // ... leave.s CatchBlockEndTryBlockEnd:CatchBlockStart: // at the start of a catch block, the exception thrown is on the stack callvirt instance string [mscorlib]System.Object::ToString() call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) leave.s CatchBlockEnd CatchBlockEnd: // method code continues... .try TryBlockStart to TryBlockEnd catch [mscorlib]System.Exception handler CatchBlockStart to CatchBlockEnd There are four different types of handler that can be specified: catch <TypeToken> This is the standard exception catch clause; you specify the object type that you want to catch (for example, [mscorlib]System.ArgumentException). Any object can be thrown as an exception, although Microsoft recommend that only classes derived from System.Exception are thrown as exceptions. filter <FilterLabel> A filter block allows you to provide custom logic to determine if a handler block should be run. This functionality is exposed in VB, but not in C#. finally A finally block executes when the try block exits, regardless of whether an exception was thrown or not. fault This is similar to a finally block, but a fault block executes only if an exception was thrown. This is not exposed in VB or C#. You can specify multiple catch or filter handling blocks in each .try, but fault and finally handlers must have their own .try clause. We'll look into why this is in later posts. Scoped exception handlers The .try syntax is quite tricky to use; it requires multiple labels, and you've got to be careful to keep separate the different exception handling sections. However, starting from .NET 2, IL allows you to use scope blocks to specify exception handlers instead. Using this syntax, the example above can be written like so: .try { // ... leave.s EndSEH}catch [mscorlib]System.Exception { callvirt instance string [mscorlib]System.Object::ToString() call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) leave.s EndSEH}EndSEH:// method code continues... As you can see, this is much easier to write (and read!) than a stand-alone .try clause. Next time, I'll be looking at some of the restrictions imposed by SEH on control flow, and how the C# compiler generated exception handling clauses.

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• Got that Friday feeling?

  - by Rebecca Amos

  Saturday is just around the corner, and we’re all starting to wrap up for the weekend. If you’re the DBA that ‘Friday feeling’ might be as much about checking and preparing your SQL Servers for the next two days, as about looking forward to spending time with friends and family. Whether you’re double-checking your disaster recovery strategy, or know that it’s your turn to be on-call this weekend, it’s likely you’re preparing for the worst, just in case. The fact that you’re making these checks, and caring about both your servers and your users, means that you might be an exceptional DBA. You’re already putting in that extra effort to make other people’s lives easier. So why not take some time for your professional development and enter the Exceptional DBA Awards? If you’re looking for some inspiration for your entry, download our Judges’ Top Tips poster for advice on what the judges are looking for from this year’s entrants. Not only will you be boosting your professional development, but you could win full conference registration for the 2011 PASS Summit in Seattle (where the awards ceremony will take place), four nights' hotel accommodation, and a copy of Red Gate’s SQL DBA Bundle. So take some time out for yourself this weekend and get started on your entry: www.exceptionaldba.com

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• New spreadsheet accompanying SmartAssembly 6.0 provides statistics for prioritizing bug fixes

  - by Jason Crease

  One problem developers face is how to prioritize the many voices providing input into software bugs. If there is something wrong with a function that is the darling of a particular user, he or she tends to want action - now! The developer's dilemma is how to ascertain that the problem is major or minor, and when it should be addressed. Now there is a new spreadsheet accompanying SmartAssembly that provides exactly that information in an objective manner. This might upset those used to getting their way by being the loudest or pushiest, but ultimately it will ensure that the biggest problems get the priority they deserve. Here's how it works: Feature Usage Reporting (FUR) in SmartAssembly 6.0 provides a wealth of data about how your software is used by its end-users, but in the SmartAssembly UI the data isn't mined to its full extent. The new Excel spreadsheet for FUR extracts statistics from that data and presents them in easy-to-understand forms. I developed the spreadsheet feature in Microsoft Excel, using a fair amount of VBA. The spreadsheet connects directly to the database which stores the feature-usage data, and shows a wide variety of statistics and tables extracted from that data.  You want to know what percentage of users have used the 'Export as XML' button?  No problem.  How popular is v5.3 is compared to v5.1?  There's graphs for that. You need to know whether you have more users in Russia or Brazil? There's a big pie chart for that. I recently witnessed the spreadsheet in use here at Red Gate Software. My bug is exposed as minor While testing new features in .NET Reflector, I found a usability bug in the Refresh button and filed it in the Red Gate bug-tracking system. The bug was labelled "V.NEXT MINOR," which means it would be fixed in the next point release. Although I'm a professional tester, I'm not much different than most software users when they discover a bug that affects them personally: I wanted it fixed immediately. There was an ulterior motive at play here, of course. I would get to see my colleagues put the spreadsheet to work. The Reflector team loaded up the spreadsheet to view the feature-usage statistics that SmartAssembly collected for the refresh button. The resulting statistics showed that only 8% of users have ever pressed the Refresh button, and only 2.6% of sessions involve pressing the button. When Refresh is used, it's only pressed on average 1.6 times a session, with a maximum of 8 times during a session. This was in stark contrast to what I was doing as a conscientious tester: pressing it dozens of times per session. The spreadsheet provides evidence that my bug was a minor one. On to more serious things Based on the solid evidence uncovered by the spreadsheet, the Reflector team concluded that my experience does not represent that of the vast majority of Reflector's recorded users. The Reflector team had ample data to send me back to my desk and keep the bug classified as "V.NEXT MINOR." The team then went back to fixing more serious bugs. If I'm in the shoes of the user, I might not be thoroughly happy, but I cannot deny that the evidence clearly placed me in a very small minority. Next time I'm hoping the spreadsheet will prove that my bug is more important. Find out more about Feature-Usage Reporting here. The spreadsheet is available for free download here.

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• Glimpse: Open Source Web Development

  - by Elizabeth Ayer

  We’re delighted to announce that Red Gate will be backing Glimpse! For those of you who aren’t familiar with the project, Glimpse is an open source tool which does for the server what Firebug does for the client. It’s been in beta for the last year, and we’re very excited to give Glimpse the support and dedicated effort needed to take it to a v1 and beyond. Glimpse’s founders (Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Hoorn) have joined Red Gate, and they’re just as excited as we are about the opportunities that active development of Glimpse will bring. They will continue to write code, support the community and drive the project forward (as they’ve done since its inception). With full-time attention on growing Glimpse and its community, users and developers can expect the project to accelerate, with frequent releases of new functionality. Red Gate is excited about its first major involvement with open source. You may well be wondering, though, why Red Gate is doing this. Glimpse dovetails beautifully with Red Gate’s .NET tools, which makes Glimpse an ideal framework for plugging in advanced, paid-for functionality (like performance analysis) the way web developers want to see it. As a means to this end, we will contribute to the Glimpse open source project in order to broaden its adoption and delight web developers. Since bringing in .NET Reflector in 2008, we’ve learnt sharp lessons from the community about the right and wrong ways to engage with developers, not to mention the enduring value of free. Glimpse further shows what the .NET community can achieve through open source collaboration, and we’re looking forward to working with the Glimpse community to make something enduring and awesome. Nik and Anthony, themselves passionate advocates of community-driven software, will continue to control the Glimpse project, steering it to best meet the needs of its users and contributors. If you have any questions or queries about Glimpse, or Red Gate’s involvement in the project, please tweet with the #glimpse hashtag, contact us at Red Gate on [email protected], or post to the Glimpse Development Forum on Google Groups.

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• ReSharper C# Live Template for Read-Only Dependency Property and Routed Event Boilerplate

  - by Bart Read

  Following on from my previous post, where I shared a Live Template for quickly declaring a normal read-write dependency property and its associated property change event boilerplate, here's an unsurprisingly similar template for creating a read-only dependency property.        #region $PROPNAME$ Read-Only Property and Property Change Routed Event        private static readonly DependencyPropertyKey $PROPNAME$PropertyKey =                                             DependencyProperty.RegisterReadOnly(             "$PROPNAME$", typeof ( $PROPTYPE$ ), typeof ( $DECLARING_TYPE$ ),             new PropertyMetadata( $DEF_VALUE$ , On$PROPNAME$Changed ) );       public static readonly DependencyProperty $PROPNAME$Property =                                           $PROPNAME$PropertyKey.DependencyProperty;        public $PROPTYPE$ $PROPNAME$         {             get { return ( $PROPTYPE$ ) GetValue( $PROPNAME$Property ); }             private set { SetValue( $PROPNAME$PropertyKey, value ); }         }       public static readonly RoutedEvent $PROPNAME$ChangedEvent   =                                           EventManager.RegisterRoutedEvent(           "$PROPNAME$Changed",           RoutingStrategy.$ROUTINGSTRATEGY$,           typeof( RoutedPropertyChangedEventHandler< $PROPTYPE$ > ),           typeof( $DECLARING_TYPE$ ) );       public event RoutedPropertyChangedEventHandler< $PROPTYPE$ > $PROPNAME$Changed       {           add { AddHandler( $PROPNAME$ChangedEvent, value ); }           remove { RemoveHandler( $PROPNAME$ChangedEvent, value ); }       }        private static void On$PROPNAME$Changed(           DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)         {             var $DECLARING_TYPE_var$ = d as $DECLARING_TYPE$;            var args = new RoutedPropertyChangedEventArgs< $PROPTYPE$ >(               ( $PROPTYPE$ ) e.OldValue,               ( $PROPTYPE$ ) e.NewValue );           args.RoutedEvent    = $DECLARING_TYPE$.$PROPNAME$ChangedEvent;           $DECLARING_TYPE_var$.RaiseEvent( args );$END$        }        #endregion The only real difference here is the addition of the DependencyPropertyKey, which allows your implementation to set the value of the dependency property without exposing the setter code to consumers of your type. You'll probably find that you create read-only dependency properties much less often than read-write properties, but this should still save you some typing when you do need to do so. Technorati Tags: resharper,live template,c#,dependency property,read-only,routed events,property change,boilerplate,wpf

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• Will HTML5 make Silverlight redundant?

  - by Laila

  One of the great features of Adobe AIR v2 that was launched this month was its support for some of the 2008 draft of HTML5. The HTML5 specification was started in 2004, but the full spec will probably not be approved by W3C until around 2022. One might have thought that it would take years yet from now to reach the point where any browsers were remotely HTML5-compliant, but enough of HTML5 is published and agreed to make a lot of it possible, and Safari and Adobe have got there thanks to Apple's open-source WebKit. The race for HTML 5 has been fuelled by the demand by Apple and Google for advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without having to rely on third party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash or Silverlight. There is good reason for this haste: Flash doesn't support touch-devices and has been slow in supporting hardware video decoders such as H.264. There is a strong requirement to do all that Flash can do in an open-standards way. Those with proprietary solutions remain sniffy. In AIR 2, Adobe pointedly disables the HTML5 and tags that allow basic playing of media content, saying that the specification is not final and there is still no standard for the supported formats, and adding that Safari implements a 'disjoint set' of codecs. Microsoft also has little interest in HTML 5 as it has so much invested in Silverlight. Google stands to gain by the Adobe AIR for Android as it will allow a lot of applications to be migrated easily to the platform, so sees Apple's war on Flash as a way of gaining market share. Why do we care? It is because HTML5/CSS3 provides facilities much far beyond HTML4, bring the reality of browser-based applications a lot closer. Probably most generally useful is the advanced typography: Safari and AIR already both support a way of reflowing text in a container across an arbitrary number of columns; Page-specific fonts can also be specified. Then there is 2D drawing, video, transitions, local storage, AJAX navigation and mutable DOM prototypes. HTML5 is likely to provide base functionality that is required but it is too early to be certain that it will render Flash, Silverlight or JavaFX obsolete. In the meantime, Adobe Air provides the best vehicle for developing HTML5/CSS3 applications without a twinge of worry about browser incompatibilities. Cheers, Laila

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – My First Conference!

  - by Chris George

  I’d like to give you a bit of background first… so please bear with me! In 1996, whilst studying for my final year of my degree, I applied for a job as a C++ Developer at a small software house in Hertfordshire  After bodging up the technical part of the interview I didn’t get the job, but was offered a position as a QA Engineer instead. The role sounded intriguing and the pay was pretty good so in the absence of anything else I took it. Here began my career in the world of software testing! Back then, testing/QA was often an afterthought, something that was bolted on to the development process and very much a second class citizen. Test automation was rare, and tools were basic or non-existent! The internet was just starting to take off, and whilst there might have been testing communities and resources, we were certainly not exposed to any of them. After 8 years I moved to another small company, and again didn’t find myself exposed to any of the changes that were happening in the industry. It wasn’t until I joined Red Gate in 2008 that my view of testing and software development as a whole started to expand. But it took a further 4 years for my view of testing to be totally blown open, and so the story really begins… In May 2012 I was fortunate to land the role of Head of Test Engineering. Soon after, I received an email with details for the “Agile Testi However, in my new role, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and at least go to one conference. Perhaps I could get some new ideas to supplement and support some of the ideas I already had.ng Days” conference in Potsdam, Germany. I looked over the suggested programme and some of the talks peeked my interest. For numerous reasons I’d shied away from attending conferences in the past, one of the main ones being that I didn’t see much benefit in attending loads of talks when I could just read about stuff like that on the internet. So, on the 18th November 2012, myself and three other Red Gaters boarded a plane at Heathrow bound for Potsdam, Germany to attend Agile Testing Days 2012. Tutorial Day – “Software Testing Reloaded” We chose to do the tutorials on the 19th, I chose the one titled “Software Testing Reloaded – So you wanna actually DO something? We’ve got just the workshop for you. Now with even less powerpoint!”. With such a concise and serious title I just had to see what it was about! I nervously entered the room to be greeted by tables, chairs etc all over the place, not set out and frankly in one hell of a mess! There were a few people in there playing a game with dice. Okaaaay… this is going to be a long day! Actually the dice game was an exercise in deduction and simplification… I found it very interesting and is certainly something I’ll be using at work as a training exercise! (I won’t explain the game here cause I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag…) The tutorial consisted of several games, exploring different aspects of testing. They were all practical yet required a fair amount of thin king. Matt Heusser and Pete Walen were running the tutorial, and presented it in a very relaxed and light-hearted manner. It was really my first experience of working in small teams with testers from very different backgrounds, and it was really enjoyable. Matt & Pete were very approachable and offered advice where required whilst still making you work for the answers! One of the tasks was to devise several strategies for testing some electronic dice. The premise was that a Vegas casino wanted to use the dice to appeal to the twenty-somethings interested in tech, but needed assurance that they were as reliable and random as traditional dice. This was a very interesting and challenging exercise that forced us to challenge various assumptions, determine/clarify requirements but most of all it was frustrating because the dice made a very very irritating beeping noise. Multiple that by at least 12 dice and I was dreaming about them all that night!! Some of the main takeaways that were brilliantly demonstrated through the games were not to make assumptions, challenge requirements, and have fun testing! The tutorial lasted the whole day, but to be honest the day went very quickly! My introduction into the conference experience started very well indeed, and I would talk to both Matt and Pete several times during the 4 days. Days 1,2 & 3 will be coming soon…  

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• AsyncBridge? Async on .NET 4.0 using VS11

  - by Alex.Davies

  I've just found something quite cool. It's a code snippet that lets you use the real VS 11 C#5 compiler to write code that uses the async and await keywords, but to target .NET 4.0. It was published by Daniel Grunwald (from SharpDevelop).That means I can stop using the Async CTP for VS2010, which is not at all supported anymore, and a pain to install if you have windows updates turned on. Obviously I couldn't ask all my users to install .NET 4.5 beta, but .NET Demon is a VS 2010 extension, so we already have .NET 4.0. At the time of writing, VS11 is in beta still, but hopefully it's stable enough for my team to use!I would have written the code myself, but I had the wrong impression that the C# 5 beta compiler only looked in mscorlib for the helper classes it needs to implement async methods. Turns out you can provide them yourself. You can get the code here: https://gist.github.com/1961087You just add it to your project, and the compiler will apparently pick it up and use it to implement async/await. I'm at my parents' place for Easter without access to a machine with VS 11 to try it out. Let me know whether you get it to work!This reminds me of LINQBridge, which let us use C# 3 LINQ, but only require .NET 2. We should stick up a webpage to explain, with a nice easy dll, put it in nuget, and call it AsyncBridge.If you were really enthusiastic, you could re-implement the skeleton of the Task Parallel Library against .NET 2 to use async/await without even requiring .NET 4. Our usage stats suggest that practically everyone that uses Red Gate tools already has .NET 4 installed though, so I don't think I'll go to the effort.

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• Using LogParser - part 1

  - by fatherjack

  A series of walk-through style articles to show someone new to LogParser what it can do and how to use it. It is appropriate to all sorts of job roles in IT, whether you are a System Administrator or a SQL DBA....(read more)

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• TortoiseSVN and Subversion Cookbook Part 3: In, Out, and Around

  Subversion doesn't have to be difficult, especially if you have Michael Sorens's guide at hand. After dealing in previous articles with checkouts and commits in Subversion, and covering the various file-manipulation operations that are required for Subversion, Michael now deals in this article with file macro-management, the operations such as putting things in, and taking things out, that deal with repositories and projects.

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• PASS Summit – looking back on my first time

  - by Fatherjack

    So I was lucky enough to get my first experience of PASS Summit this year and took some time beforehand to read some blogs and reference material to get an idea on what to do and how to get the best out of my visit. Having been to other conferences – technical and non-technical – I had a reasonable idea on the routine and what to expect in general. Here is a list of a few things that I have learned/remembered as the week has gone by. Wear comfortable shoes. This actually needs to be broadened to Take several pairs of comfortable shoes. You will be spending many many hours, for several days one after another. Having comfortable feet that can literally support you for the duration will make the week in general a whole lot better. Not only at the conference but getting to and from you could well be walking. In the evenings you will be walking around town and standing talking in various bars and clubs. Looking back, on some days I was on my feet for over 20 hours. Make friends. This is a given for the long term benefits it brings but there is also an immediate reward in being at a conference with a friend or two. Some events are bigger and more popular than others and some have the type of session that every single attendee will want to be in. This is great for those that get in but if you are in the bathroom or queuing for coffee and you miss out it sucks. Having a friend that can get in to a room and reserve you a seat is a great advantage to make sure you get the content that you want to see and still have the coffee that you need. Don’t go to every session you want to see This might sound counter intuitive and it relies on the sessions being recorded in some way to guarantee you don’t totally miss out. Both PASS Summit and SQL Bits sessions are recorded (summit is audio, SQLBits is video) and this means that if you get into a good conversation with someone over a coffee you don’t have to break it up to go to a session. Obviously there is a trade-off here and you need to decide on the tipping point for yourself but a conversation at a place like this could make a big difference to the next contract or employer you have or it might simply be great catching up with some friends you don’t see so often. Go to at least one session you don’t want to Again, this will seem to be contrary to normal logic but there is no reason why you shouldn’t learn about a part of SQL Server that isn’t part of your daily routine. Not only will you learn something new but you will also pick up on the feelings and attitudes of the people in the session. So, if you are a DBA, head off to a BI session and so on. You’ll hear BI speakers speaking to a BI audience and get to understand their point of view and reasoning for making the decisions they do. You will also appreciate the way that your decisions and instructions affect the way they have to work. This will help you a lot when you are on a project, working with multiple teams and make you all more productive. Socialise While you are at the conference venue, speak to people. Ask questions, be interested in whoever you are speaking to. You get chances to talk to new friends at breakfast, dinner and every break between sessions. The only people that might not talk to you would be speakers that are about to go and give a session, in most cases speakers like peace and quiet before going on stage. Other than that the people around you are just waiting for someone to talk to them so make the first move. There is a whole lot going on outside of the conference hours and you should make an effort to join in with some of this too. At karaoke evenings or just out for a quiet drink with a few of the people you meet at the conference. Either way, don’t be a recluse and hide in your room or be alone out in the town. Don’t talk to people Once again this sounds wrong but stay with me. I have spoken to a number of speakers since Summit 2013 finished and they have all mentioned the time it has taken them to move about the conference venue due to people stopping them for a chat or to ask a question. 45 minutes to walk from a session room to the speaker room in one case. Wow. While none of the speakers were upset about this sort of delay I think delegates should take the situation into account and possibly defer their question to an email or to a time when the person they want is clearly less in demand. Give them a chance to enjoy the conference in the same way that you are, they may actually want to go to a session or just have a rest after giving their session – talking for 75 minutes is hard work, taking an extra 45 minutes right after is unbelievable. I certainly hope that they get good feedback on their sessions and perhaps if you spoke to a speaker outside a session you can give them a mention in the ‘any other comments’ part of the feedback, just to convey your gratitude for them giving up their time and expertise for free. Say thank you I just mentioned giving the speakers a clear, visible ‘thank you’ in the feedback but there are plenty of people that help make any conference the success it is that would really appreciate hearing that their efforts are valued. People on the registration desk, volunteers giving schedule guidance and directions, people on the community zone are all volunteers giving their time to help you have the best experience possible. Send an email to PASS and convey your thoughts about the work that was done. Maybe you want to be a volunteer next time so you could enquire how you get into that position at the same time. This isn’t an exclusive list and you may agree or disagree with the points I have made, please add anything you think is good advice in the comments. I’d like to finish by saying a huge thank you to all the people involved in planning, facilitating and executing the PASS Summit 2013, it was an excellent event and I know many others think it was a totally worthwhile event to attend.

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• In search of database delivery practitioners and enthusiasts

  - by Claire Brooking

  We know from speaking with many of you at tradeshows and user groups that database delivery is not a factory production line. During planning, evaluation, quality control, and disaster mitigation, the people having their say at each step means that successful database deployment is a carefully managed course of action. With so many factors involved at every stage, we would love to find a way for our software to help out, by simplifying processes, speeding them up or joining together the people and the steps that make it all happen. We’re hoping our new research group for database delivery (SQL Server and Oracle) will help us understand the views and experiences of those of you out there in the trenches managing database changes. As part of our new group, we’ll be running a variety of research sessions, including surveys and phone interviews, over coming months. If you have opinions to share on Continuous Integration or Continuous Delivery for databases, we’d love to hear from you. Your feedback really will count as the product teams at Red Gate build plans. For some of our more in-depth sessions, we’ll also be offering participants an Amazon voucher as a thank-you for your time. If you’re not yet practising automated database deployment processes, but are contemplating or planning it, please do consider joining our research group too. If you’d like to sign up to the group and find out more, please fill in a quick form online, and we’ll be in touch to let you know about new research opportunities you might be interested in. We look forward to hearing your stories!

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• Antenna Aligner Part 3: Kaspersky

  - by Chris George

  Quick one today. Since starting this project, I've been encountering times where Nomad fails to build my app. It would then take repeated attempts at building to then see a build go through successfully. Rob, who works on Nomad at Red Gate, investigated this and it showed that certain parts of the message required to trigger the 'cloud build' were not getting through to the Nomad app, causing the HTTP connection to stall until timeout. After much scratching heads, it turns out that the Kaspersky Internet Security system I have installed on my laptop at home, was being very aggressive and was causing the problem. Perhaps it's trying to protect me from myself? Anyway, we came up with an interim solution why the Nomad guys investigate with Kaspersky by setting Visual Studio to be a trusted application with the Kaspersky settings and setting it to not scan network traffic. Hey presto! This worked and I have not had a single build problem since (other than losing internet connection, or that embarrassing moment when you blame everyone else then realise you've accidentally switched off your wireless on the laptop).

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• SQL Server Optimizer Malfunction?

  - by Tony Davis

  There was a sharp intake of breath from the audience when Adam Machanic declared the SQL Server optimizer to be essentially "stuck in 1997". It was during his fascinating "Query Tuning Mastery: Manhandling Parallelism" session at the recent PASS SQL Summit. Paraphrasing somewhat, Adam (blog | @AdamMachanic) offered a convincing argument that the optimizer often delivers flawed plans based on assumptions that are no longer valid with today’s hardware. In 1997, when Microsoft engineers re-designed the database engine for SQL Server 7.0, SQL Server got its initial implementation of a cost-based optimizer. Up to SQL Server 2000, the developer often had to deploy a steady stream of hints in SQL statements to combat the occasionally wilful plan choices made by the optimizer. However, with each successive release, the optimizer has evolved and improved in its decision-making. It is still prone to the occasional stumble when we tackle difficult problems, join large numbers of tables, perform complex aggregations, and so on, but for most of us, most of the time, the optimizer purrs along efficiently in the background. Adam, however, challenged further any assumption that the current optimizer is competent at providing the most efficient plans for our more complex analytical queries, and in particular of offering up correctly parallelized plans. He painted a picture of a present where complex analytical queries have become ever more prevalent; where disk IO is ever faster so that reads from disk come into buffer cache faster than ever; where the improving RAM-to-data ratio means that we have a better chance of finding our data in cache. Most importantly, we have more CPUs at our disposal than ever before. To get these queries to perform, we not only need to have the right indexes, but also to be able to split the data up into subsets and spread its processing evenly across all these available CPUs. Improvements such as support for ColumnStore indexes are taking things in the right direction, but, unfortunately, deficiencies in the current Optimizer mean that SQL Server is yet to be able to exploit properly all those extra CPUs. Adam’s contention was that the current optimizer uses essentially the same costing model for many of its core operations as it did back in the days of SQL Server 7, based on assumptions that are no longer valid. One example he gave was a "slow disk" bias that may have been valid back in 1997 but certainly is not on modern disk systems. Essentially, the optimizer assesses the relative cost of serial versus parallel plans based on the assumption that there is no IO cost benefit from parallelization, only CPU. It assumes that a single request will saturate the IO channel, and so a query would not run any faster if we parallelized IO because the disk system simply wouldn’t be able to handle the extra pressure. As such, the optimizer often decides that a serial plan is lower cost, often in cases where a parallel plan would improve performance dramatically. It was challenging and thought provoking stuff, as were his techniques for driving parallelism through query logic based on subsets of rows that define the "grain" of the query. I highly recommend you catch the session if you missed it. I’m interested to hear though, when and how often people feel the force of the optimizer’s shortcomings. Barring mistakes, such as stale statistics, how often do you feel the Optimizer fails to find the plan you think it should, and what are the most common causes? Is it fighting to induce it toward parallelism? Combating unexpected plans, arising from table partitioning? Something altogether more prosaic? Cheers, Tony.

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• Implementing Cluster Continuous Replication, Part 2

  Cluster continuous replication (CCR) helps to provide a more resilient email system with faster recovery. It was introduced in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and uses log shipping and failover. configuring Cluster Continuous Replication on a Windows Server 2008 requires different techniques to Windows Server 2003. Brien Posey explains all.

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• Why should i use EJB?

  - by Nitesh Panchal

  Hello, As we all know that EJB's in 3.1 or 3.0 are simple POJOs. You just need to give annotations here and there and it gets converted to EJB from simple class. So, now my question is why should i use EJBs at all? Can i not do without them? In .Net i created class library and got things done. I never felt the need for anything like EJB. Simple classes were enough. Then, why in Java people stress on EJB? What is difference between a simple POJO and EJB in terms of execution and memory? Further which function should i write in EJB and which should i write in simple class? Should i dump every function in EJB only? or there is some kind of strategy? Does EJB provide anything special?

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• Antenna Aligner part 1: In the beginning.

  - by Chris George

  Picture the scene, it's 9pm, I'm in my caravan (yes I know, I've heard all the jokes!) with my family and I'm trying to tune the tv by moving the aerial, retuning, moving the aerial again, retuning... 45 mins and much cursing later I succeed. Surely there must be an easier way than this? Aha, an app; there must be an app for that? So I search in the AppStore for such an app, but curiously drew a blank. Then the seeds of the idea started to grow. I can code, I work in a software house with lots of very clever people, surely I can make an app that points to the nearest digital tv transmitter! Not having looked into app development before, I investigated how one goes about making an iPhone app and was quickly greeted by a now familiar answer "Buy a mac!". That was not an option for many reasons, mostly wife related! My dreams were starting to fade until one of my colleagues pointed out that within Red Gate, the very company I work for, there was on-going development on a piece of software that would allow me to write an app using Visual Studio on a Windows machine, Nomad! Once I signed up for the beta program I got to work learning the Jquery mobile / Phonegap framework. Within a couple of hours I had written (in Visual Studio), built in the cloud (using Nomad) and published (via TestFlight) my first iPhone app onto my iPhone ! It didn't do much, but it was a step in the right direction. To be continued...

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