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  • prescription nolvadex pharmacy

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  • current line number in Lua

    - by prideout
    Does Lua support something like C's _LINE_ macro, which returns the number of the current code line? I know Lua has a special built-in variable called _G, but I don't see line number in there...

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  • Oracle Insurance Unveils Next Generation of Enterprise Document Automation: Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition

    - by helen.pitts(at)oracle.com
    Oracle today announced the introduction of Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition, the next generation of the company's market-leading Enterprise Document Automation (EDA) solution for dynamically creating, managing and delivering adaptive enterprise communications across multiple channels. "Insurers and other organizations need enterprise document automation that puts the power to manage the complete document lifecycle in the hands of the business user," said Srini Venkatasanthanam, vice president, Product Strategy, Oracle Insurancein the press release. "Built with features such as rules-based configurability and interactive processing, Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition makes possible an adaptive approach to enterprise document automation - documents when, where and in the form they're needed." Key enhancements in Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition include: Documaker Interactive, the newly renamed and redesigned Web-based iDocumaker module. Documaker Interactive enables users to quickly and interactively create and assemble compliant communications such as policy and claims correspondence directly from their desktops. Users benefits from built-in accelerators and rules-based configurability, pre-configured content as well as embedded workflow leveraging Oracle BPEL Process Manager. Documaker Documaker Factory, which helps enterprises reduce cost and improve operational efficiency through better management of their enterprise publishing operations. Dashboards, analytics, reporting and an administrative console provide insurers with greater insight and centralized control over document production allowing them to better adapt their resources based on business demands. Other enhancements include: enhanced business user empowerment; additional multi-language localization capabilities; and benefits from the use of powerful Oracle technologies such as the Oracle Application Development Framework for all interfaces and Oracle Universal Content Management (Oracle UCM) for enterprise content management. Drive Competitive Advantage and Growth: Deb Smallwood, founder of SMA Strategy Meets Action, a leading industry insurance analyst consulting firm and co-author of 3CM in Insurance: Customer Communications and Content Management published last month, noted in the press release that "maximum value can be gained from investments when Enterprise Document Automation (EDA) is viewed holistically and all forms of communication and all types of information are integrated across the entire enterprise. "Insurers that choose an approach that takes all communications, both structured and unstructured data, coming into the company from a wide range of channels, and then create seamless flows of information will have a real competitive advantage," Smallwood said. "This capability will soon become essential for selling, servicing, and ultimately driving growth through new business and retention." Learn More: Click here to watch a short flash demo that demonstrates the real business value offered by Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition. You can also see how an insurance company can use Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition to dynamically create, manage and publish adaptive enterprise content throughout the insurance business lifecycle for delivery across multiple channels by visiting Alamere Insurance, a fictional model insurance company created by Oracle to showcase how Oracle applications can be leveraged within the insurance enterprise. Meet Our Newest Oracle Insurance Blogger: I'm pleased to introduce our newest Oracle Insurance blogger, Susanne Hale. Susanne, who manages product marketing for Oracle Insurance EDA solutions, will be sharing insights about this topic along with examples of how our customers are transforming their enterprise communications using Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition in future Oracle Insurance blog entries. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance.

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  • SQL Authority News – Download Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Feature Pack and Microsoft SQL Server Developer’s Edition

    - by Pinal Dave
    Yesterday I attended the SQL Server Community Launch in Bangalore and presented on Performing an effective Presentation. It was a fun presentation and people very well received it. No matter on what subject, I present, I always end up talking about SQL. Here are two of the questions I had received during the event. Q1) I want to install SQL Server on my development server, where can we get it for free or at an economical price (I do not have MSDN)? A1) If you are not going to use your server in a production environment, you can just get SQL Server Developer’s Edition and you can read more about it over here. Here is another favorite question which I keep on receiving it during the event. Q2) I already have SQL Server installed on my machine, what are different feature pack should I install and where can I get them from. A2) Just download and install Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Service Pack. Here is the link for downloading it. The Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Feature Pack is a collection of stand-alone packages which provide additional value for Microsoft SQL Server. It includes tool and components for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 and add-on providers for Microsoft SQL Server 2014. Here is the list of component this product contains: Microsoft SQL Server Backup to Windows Azure Tool Microsoft SQL Server Cloud Adapter Microsoft Kerberos Configuration Manager for Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Semantic Language Statistics Microsoft SQL Server Data-Tier Application Framework Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Transact-SQL Language Service Microsoft Windows PowerShell Extensions for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Shared Management Objects Microsoft Command Line Utilities 11 for Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft ODBC Driver 11 for Microsoft SQL Server – Windows Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft Drivers 3.0 for PHP for Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Transact-SQL ScriptDom Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Transact-SQL Compiler Service Microsoft System CLR Types for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Remote Blob Store SQL RBS codeplex samples page SQL Server Remote Blob Store blogs Microsoft SQL Server Service Broker External Activator for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft OData Source for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft Balanced Data Distributor for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft Change Data Capture Designer and Service for Oracle by Attunity for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Master Data Service Add-in for Microsoft Excel Microsoft SQL Server StreamInsight Microsoft Connector for SAP BW for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Upgrade Advisor Microsoft OLEDB Provider for DB2 v5.0 for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 PowerPivot for Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 ADOMD.NET Microsoft Analysis Services OLE DB Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Analysis Management Objects Microsoft SQL Server Report Builder for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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  • Using the West Wind Web Toolkit to set up AJAX and REST Services

    - by Rick Strahl
    I frequently get questions about which option to use for creating AJAX and REST backends for ASP.NET applications. There are many solutions out there to do this actually, but when I have a choice - not surprisingly - I fall back to my own tools in the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. I've talked a bunch about the 'in-the-box' solutions in the past so for a change in this post I'll talk about the tools that I use in my own and customer applications to handle AJAX and REST based access to service resources using the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. Let me preface this by saying that I like things to be easy. Yes flexible is very important as well but not at the expense of over-complexity. The goal I've had with my tools is make it drop dead easy, with good performance while providing the core features that I'm after, which are: Easy AJAX/JSON Callbacks Ability to return any kind of non JSON content (string, stream, byte[], images) Ability to work with both XML and JSON interchangeably for input/output Access endpoints via POST data, RPC JSON calls, GET QueryString values or Routing interface Easy to use generic JavaScript client to make RPC calls (same syntax, just what you need) Ability to create clean URLS with Routing Ability to use standard ASP.NET HTTP Stack for HTTP semantics It's all about options! In this post I'll demonstrate most of these features (except XML) in a few simple and short samples which you can download. So let's take a look and see how you can build an AJAX callback solution with the West Wind Web Toolkit. Installing the Toolkit Assemblies The easiest and leanest way of using the Toolkit in your Web project is to grab it via NuGet: West Wind Web and AJAX Utilities (Westwind.Web) and drop it into the project by right clicking in your Project and choosing Manage NuGet Packages from anywhere in the Project.   When done you end up with your project looking like this: What just happened? Nuget added two assemblies - Westwind.Web and Westwind.Utilities and the client ww.jquery.js library. It also added a couple of references into web.config: The default namespaces so they can be accessed in pages/views and a ScriptCompressionModule that the toolkit optionally uses to compress script resources served from within the assembly (namely ww.jquery.js and optionally jquery.js). Creating a new Service The West Wind Web Toolkit supports several ways of creating and accessing AJAX services, but for this post I'll stick to the lower level approach that works from any plain HTML page or of course MVC, WebForms, WebPages. There's also a WebForms specific control that makes this even easier but I'll leave that for another post. So, to create a new standalone AJAX/REST service we can create a new HttpHandler in the new project either as a pure class based handler or as a generic .ASHX handler. Both work equally well, but generic handlers don't require any web.config configuration so I'll use that here. In the root of the project add a Generic Handler. I'm going to call this one StockService.ashx. Once the handler has been created, edit the code and remove all of the handler body code. Then change the base class to CallbackHandler and add methods that have a [CallbackMethod] attribute. Here's the modified base handler implementation now looks like with an added HelloWorld method: using System; using Westwind.Web; namespace WestWindWebAjax { /// <summary> /// Handler implements CallbackHandler to provide REST/AJAX services /// </summary> public class SampleService : CallbackHandler { [CallbackMethod] public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } } } Notice that the class inherits from CallbackHandler and that the HelloWorld service method is marked up with [CallbackMethod]. We're done here. Services Urlbased Syntax Once you compile, the 'service' is live can respond to requests. All CallbackHandlers support input in GET and POST formats, and can return results as JSON or XML. To check our fancy HelloWorld method we can now access the service like this: http://localhost/WestWindWebAjax/StockService.ashx?Method=HelloWorld&name=Rick which produces a default JSON response - in this case a string (wrapped in quotes as it's JSON): (note by default JSON will be downloaded by most browsers not displayed - various options are available to view JSON right in the browser) If I want to return the same data as XML I can tack on a &format=xml at the end of the querystring which produces: <string>Hello Rick. Time is: 11/1/2011 12:11:13 PM</string> Cleaner URLs with Routing Syntax If you want cleaner URLs for each operation you can also configure custom routes on a per URL basis similar to the way that WCF REST does. To do this you need to add a new RouteHandler to your application's startup code in global.asax.cs one for each CallbackHandler based service you create: protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { CallbackHandlerRouteHandler.RegisterRoutes<StockService>(RouteTable.Routes); } With this code in place you can now add RouteUrl properties to any of your service methods. For the HelloWorld method that doesn't make a ton of sense but here is what a routed clean URL might look like in definition: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="stocks/HelloWorld/{name}")] public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } The same URL I previously used now becomes a bit shorter and more readable with: http://localhost/WestWindWebAjax/HelloWorld/Rick It's an easy way to create cleaner URLs and still get the same functionality. Calling the Service with $.getJSON() Since the result produced is JSON you can now easily consume this data using jQuery's getJSON method. First we need a couple of scripts - jquery.js and ww.jquery.js in the page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <link href="Css/Westwind.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script src="scripts/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="scripts/ww.jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> Next let's add a small HelloWorld example form (what else) that has a single textbox to type a name, a button and a div tag to receive the result: <fieldset> <legend>Hello World</legend> Please enter a name: <input type="text" name="txtHello" id="txtHello" value="" /> <input type="button" id="btnSayHello" value="Say Hello (POST)" /> <input type="button" id="btnSayHelloGet" value="Say Hello (GET)" /> <div id="divHelloMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display:none;width: 450px;" > </div> </fieldset> Then to call the HelloWorld method a little jQuery is used to hook the document startup and the button click followed by the $.getJSON call to retrieve the data from the server. <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnSayHelloGet").click(function () { $.getJSON("SampleService.ashx", { Method: "HelloWorld", name: $("#txtHello").val() }, function (result) { $("#divHelloMessage") .text(result) .fadeIn(1000); }); });</script> .getJSON() expects a full URL to the endpoint of our service, which is the ASHX file. We can either provide a full URL (SampleService.ashx?Method=HelloWorld&name=Rick) or we can just provide the base URL and an object that encodes the query string parameters for us using an object map that has a property that matches each parameter for the server method. We can also use the clean URL routing syntax, but using the object parameter encoding actually is safer as the parameters will get properly encoded by jQuery. The result returned is whatever the result on the server method is - in this case a string. The string is applied to the divHelloMessage element and we're done. Obviously this is a trivial example, but it demonstrates the basics of getting a JSON response back to the browser. AJAX Post Syntax - using ajaxCallMethod() The previous example allows you basic control over the data that you send to the server via querystring parameters. This works OK for simple values like short strings, numbers and boolean values, but doesn't really work if you need to pass something more complex like an object or an array back up to the server. To handle traditional RPC type messaging where the idea is to map server side functions and results to a client side invokation, POST operations can be used. The easiest way to use this functionality is to use ww.jquery.js and the ajaxCallMethod() function. ww.jquery wraps jQuery's AJAX functions and knows implicitly how to call a CallbackServer method with parameters and parse the result. Let's look at another simple example that posts a simple value but returns something more interesting. Let's start with the service method: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="stocks/{symbol}")] public StockQuote GetStockQuote(string symbol) { Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.UtcNow.Add(new TimeSpan(0, 2, 0))); StockServer server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid Symbol passed."); return quote; } This sample utilizes a small StockServer helper class (included in the sample) that downloads a stock quote from Yahoo's financial site via plain HTTP GET requests and formats it into a StockQuote object. Lets create a small HTML block that lets us query for the quote and display it: <fieldset> <legend>Single Stock Quote</legend> Please enter a stock symbol: <input type="text" name="txtSymbol" id="txtSymbol" value="msft" /> <input type="button" id="btnStockQuote" value="Get Quote" /> <div id="divStockDisplay" class="errordisplay" style="display:none; width: 450px;"> <div class="label-left">Company:</div> <div id="stockCompany"></div> <div class="label-left">Last Price:</div> <div id="stockLastPrice"></div> <div class="label-left">Quote Time:</div> <div id="stockQuoteTime"></div> </div> </fieldset> The final result looks something like this:   Let's hook up the button handler to fire the request and fill in the data as shown: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [$("#txtSymbol").val()], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").show().fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, HH:mm EST")); }, onPageError); }); So we point at SampleService.ashx and the GetStockQuote method, passing a single parameter of the input symbol value. Then there are two handlers for success and failure callbacks.  The success handler is the interesting part - it receives the stock quote as a result and assigns its values to various 'holes' in the stock display elements. The data that comes back over the wire is JSON and it looks like this: { "Symbol":"MSFT", "Company":"Microsoft Corpora", "OpenPrice":26.11, "LastPrice":26.01, "NetChange":0.02, "LastQuoteTime":"2011-11-03T02:00:00Z", "LastQuoteTimeString":"Nov. 11, 2011 4:20pm" } which is an object representation of the data. JavaScript can evaluate this JSON string back into an object easily and that's the reslut that gets passed to the success function. The quote data is then applied to existing page content by manually selecting items and applying them. There are other ways to do this more elegantly like using templates, but here we're only interested in seeing how the data is returned. The data in the object is typed - LastPrice is a number and QuoteTime is a date. Note about the date value: JavaScript doesn't have a date literal although the JSON embedded ISO string format used above  ("2011-11-03T02:00:00Z") is becoming fairly standard for JSON serializers. However, JSON parsers don't deserialize dates by default and return them by string. This is why the StockQuote actually returns a string value of LastQuoteTimeString for the same date. ajaxMethodCallback always converts dates properly into 'real' dates and the example above uses the real date value along with a .formatDate() data extension (also in ww.jquery.js) to display the raw date properly. Errors and Exceptions So what happens if your code fails? For example if I pass an invalid stock symbol to the GetStockQuote() method you notice that the code does this: if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid Symbol passed."); CallbackHandler automatically pushes the exception message back to the client so it's easy to pick up the error message. Regardless of what kind of error occurs: Server side, client side, protocol errors - any error will fire the failure handler with an error object parameter. The error is returned to the client via a JSON response in the error callback. In the previous examples I called onPageError which is a generic routine in ww.jquery that displays a status message on the bottom of the screen. But of course you can also take over the error handling yourself: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [$("#txtSymbol").val()], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, hh:mmt")); }, function (error, xhr) { $("#divErrorDisplay").text(error.message).fadeIn(1000); }); }); The error object has a isCallbackError, message and  stackTrace properties, the latter of which is only populated when running in Debug mode, and this object is returned for all errors: Client side, transport and server side errors. Regardless of which type of error you get the same object passed (as well as the XHR instance optionally) which makes for a consistent error retrieval mechanism. Specifying HttpVerbs You can also specify HTTP Verbs that are allowed using the AllowedHttpVerbs option on the CallbackMethod attribute: [CallbackMethod(AllowedHttpVerbs=HttpVerbs.GET | HttpVerbs.POST)] public string HelloWorld(string name) { … } If you're building REST style API's this might be useful to force certain request semantics onto the client calling. For the above if call with a non-allowed HttpVerb the request returns a 405 error response along with a JSON (or XML) error object result. The default behavior is to allow all verbs access (HttpVerbs.All). Passing in object Parameters Up to now the parameters I passed were very simple. But what if you need to send something more complex like an object or an array? Let's look at another example now that passes an object from the client to the server. Keeping with the Stock theme here lets add a method called BuyOrder that lets us buy some shares for a stock. Consider the following service method that receives an StockBuyOrder object as a parameter: [CallbackMethod] public string BuyStock(StockBuyOrder buyOrder) { var server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(buyOrder.Symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid or missing stock symbol."); return string.Format("You're buying {0} shares of {1} ({2}) stock at {3} for a total of {4} on {5}.", buyOrder.Quantity, quote.Company, quote.Symbol, quote.LastPrice.ToString("c"), (quote.LastPrice * buyOrder.Quantity).ToString("c"), buyOrder.BuyOn.ToString("MMM d")); } public class StockBuyOrder { public string Symbol { get; set; } public int Quantity { get; set; } public DateTime BuyOn { get; set; } public StockBuyOrder() { BuyOn = DateTime.Now; } } This is a contrived do-nothing example that simply echoes back what was passed in, but it demonstrates how you can pass complex data to a callback method. On the client side we now have a very simple form that captures the three values on a form: <fieldset> <legend>Post a Stock Buy Order</legend> Enter a symbol: <input type="text" name="txtBuySymbol" id="txtBuySymbol" value="GLD" />&nbsp;&nbsp; Qty: <input type="text" name="txtBuyQty" id="txtBuyQty" value="10" style="width: 50px" />&nbsp;&nbsp; Buy on: <input type="text" name="txtBuyOn" id="txtBuyOn" value="<%= DateTime.Now.ToString("d") %>" style="width: 70px;" /> <input type="button" id="btnBuyStock" value="Buy Stock" /> <div id="divStockBuyMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display:none"></div> </fieldset> The completed form and demo then looks something like this:   The client side code that picks up the input values and assigns them to object properties and sends the AJAX request looks like this: $("#btnBuyStock").click(function () { // create an object map that matches StockBuyOrder signature var buyOrder = { Symbol: $("#txtBuySymbol").val(), Quantity: $("#txtBuyQty").val() * 1, // number Entered: new Date() } ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "BuyStock", [buyOrder], function (result) { $("#divStockBuyMessage").text(result).fadeIn(1000); }, onPageError); }); The code creates an object and attaches the properties that match the server side object passed to the BuyStock method. Each property that you want to update needs to be included and the type must match (ie. string, number, date in this case). Any missing properties will not be set but also not cause any errors. Pass POST data instead of Objects In the last example I collected a bunch of values from form variables and stuffed them into object variables in JavaScript code. While that works, often times this isn't really helping - I end up converting my types on the client and then doing another conversion on the server. If lots of input controls are on a page and you just want to pick up the values on the server via plain POST variables - that can be done too - and it makes sense especially if you're creating and filling the client side object only to push data to the server. Let's add another method to the server that once again lets us buy a stock. But this time let's not accept a parameter but rather send POST data to the server. Here's the server method receiving POST data: [CallbackMethod] public string BuyStockPost() { StockBuyOrder buyOrder = new StockBuyOrder(); buyOrder.Symbol = Request.Form["txtBuySymbol"]; ; int qty; int.TryParse(Request.Form["txtBuyQuantity"], out qty); buyOrder.Quantity = qty; DateTime time; DateTime.TryParse(Request.Form["txtBuyBuyOn"], out time); buyOrder.BuyOn = time; // Or easier way yet //FormVariableBinder.Unbind(buyOrder,null,"txtBuy"); var server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(buyOrder.Symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid or missing stock symbol."); return string.Format("You're buying {0} shares of {1} ({2}) stock at {3} for a total of {4} on {5}.", buyOrder.Quantity, quote.Company, quote.Symbol, quote.LastPrice.ToString("c"), (quote.LastPrice * buyOrder.Quantity).ToString("c"), buyOrder.BuyOn.ToString("MMM d")); } Clearly we've made this server method take more code than it did with the object parameter. We've basically moved the parameter assignment logic from the client to the server. As a result the client code to call this method is now a bit shorter since there's no client side shuffling of values from the controls to an object. $("#btnBuyStockPost").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "BuyStockPost", [], // Note: No parameters - function (result) { $("#divStockBuyMessage").text(result).fadeIn(1000); }, onPageError, // Force all page Form Variables to be posted { postbackMode: "Post" }); }); The client simply calls the BuyStockQuote method and pushes all the form variables from the page up to the server which parses them instead. The feature that makes this work is one of the options you can pass to the ajaxCallMethod() function: { postbackMode: "Post" }); which directs the function to include form variable POST data when making the service call. Other options include PostNoViewState (for WebForms to strip out WebForms crap vars), PostParametersOnly (default), None. If you pass parameters those are always posted to the server except when None is set. The above code can be simplified a bit by using the FormVariableBinder helper, which can unbind form variables directly into an object: FormVariableBinder.Unbind(buyOrder,null,"txtBuy"); which replaces the manual Request.Form[] reading code. It receives the object to unbind into, a string of properties to skip, and an optional prefix which is stripped off form variables to match property names. The component is similar to the MVC model binder but it's independent of MVC. Returning non-JSON Data CallbackHandler also supports returning non-JSON/XML data via special return types. You can return raw non-JSON encoded strings like this: [CallbackMethod(ReturnAsRawString=true,ContentType="text/plain")] public string HelloWorldNoJSON(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } Calling this method results in just a plain string - no JSON encoding with quotes around the result. This can be useful if your server handling code needs to return a string or HTML result that doesn't fit well for a page or other UI component. Any string output can be returned. You can also return binary data. Stream, byte[] and Bitmap/Image results are automatically streamed back to the client. Notice that you should set the ContentType of the request either on the CallbackMethod attribute or using Response.ContentType. This ensures the Web Server knows how to display your binary response. Using a stream response makes it possible to return any of data. Streamed data can be pretty handy to return bitmap data from a method. The following is a method that returns a stock history graph for a particular stock over a provided number of years: [CallbackMethod(ContentType="image/png",RouteUrl="stocks/history/graph/{symbol}/{years}")] public Stream GetStockHistoryGraph(string symbol, int years = 2,int width = 500, int height=350) { if (width == 0) width = 500; if (height == 0) height = 350; StockServer server = new StockServer(); return server.GetStockHistoryGraph(symbol,"Stock History for " + symbol,width,height,years); } I can now hook this up into the JavaScript code when I get a stock quote. At the end of the process I can assign the URL to the service that returns the image into the src property and so force the image to display. Here's the changed code: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { var symbol = $("#txtSymbol").val(); ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [symbol], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, hh:mmt")); // display a stock chart $("#imgStockHistory").attr("src", "stocks/history/graph/" + symbol + "/2"); },onPageError); }); The resulting output then looks like this: The charting code uses the new ASP.NET 4.0 Chart components via code to display a bar chart of the 2 year stock data as part of the StockServer class which you can find in the sample download. The ability to return arbitrary data from a service is useful as you can see - in this case the chart is clearly associated with the service and it's nice that the graph generation can happen off a handler rather than through a page. Images are common resources, but output can also be PDF reports, zip files for downloads etc. which is becoming increasingly more common to be returned from REST endpoints and other applications. Why reinvent? Obviously the examples I've shown here are pretty basic in terms of functionality. But I hope they demonstrate the core features of AJAX callbacks that you need to work through in most applications which is simple: return data, send back data and potentially retrieve data in various formats. While there are other solutions when it comes down to making AJAX callbacks and servicing REST like requests, I like the flexibility my home grown solution provides. Simply put it's still the easiest solution that I've found that addresses my common use cases: AJAX JSON RPC style callbacks Url based access XML and JSON Output from single method endpoint XML and JSON POST support, querystring input, routing parameter mapping UrlEncoded POST data support on callbacks Ability to return stream/raw string data Essentially ability to return ANYTHING from Service and pass anything All these features are available in various solutions but not together in one place. I've been using this code base for over 4 years now in a number of projects both for myself and commercial work and it's served me extremely well. Besides the AJAX functionality CallbackHandler provides, it's also an easy way to create any kind of output endpoint I need to create. Need to create a few simple routines that spit back some data, but don't want to create a Page or View or full blown handler for it? Create a CallbackHandler and add a method or multiple methods and you have your generic endpoints.  It's a quick and easy way to add small code pieces that are pretty efficient as they're running through a pretty small handler implementation. I can have this up and running in a couple of minutes literally without any setup and returning just about any kind of data. Resources Download the Sample NuGet: Westwind Web and AJAX Utilities (Westwind.Web) ajaxCallMethod() Documentation Using the AjaxMethodCallback WebForms Control West Wind Web Toolkit Home Page West Wind Web Toolkit Source Code © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  jQuery  AJAX   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • SQL Server – Learning SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics – Video

    - by pinaldave
    Today I remember one of my older cartoon years ago created for Indexing and Performance. Every single time when Performance is discussed, Indexes are mentioned along with it. In recent times, data and application complexity is continuously growing.  The demand for faster query response, performance, and scalability by organizations is increasing and developers and DBAs need to now write efficient code to achieve this. DBA and Developers A DBA’s role is critical, because a production environment has to run 24×7, hence maintenance, trouble shooting, and quick resolutions are the need of the hour.  The first baby step into any performance tuning exercise in SQL Server involves creating, analysing, and maintaining indexes. Though we have learnt indexing concepts from our college days, indexing implementation inside SQL Server can vary.  Understanding this behaviour and designing our applications appropriately will make sure the application is performed to its highest potential. Video Learning Vinod Kumar and myself we often thought about this and realized that practical understanding of the indexes is very important. One can not master every single aspects of the index. However there are some minimum expertise one should gain if performance is one of the concern. We decided to build a course which just addresses the practical aspects of the performance. In this course, we explored some of these indexing fundamentals and we elaborated on how SQL Server goes about using indexes.  At the end of this course of you will know the basic structure of indexes, practical insights into implementation, and maintenance tips and tricks revolving around indexes.  Finally, we will introduce SQL Server 2012 column store indexes.  We have refrained from discussing internal storage structure of the indexes but have taken a more practical, demo-oriented approach to explain these core concepts. Course Outline Here are salient topics of the course. We have explained every single concept along with a practical demonstration. Additionally shared our personal scripts along with the same. Introduction Fundamentals of Indexing Index Fundamentals Index Fundamentals – Visual Representation Practical Indexing Implementation Techniques Primary Key Over Indexing Duplicate Index Clustered Index Unique Index Included Columns Filtered Index Disabled Index Index Maintenance and Defragmentation Introduction to Columnstore Index Indexing Practical Performance Tips and Tricks Index and Page Types Index and Non Deterministic Columns Index and SET Values Importance of Clustered Index Effect of Compression and Fillfactor Index and Functions Dynamic Management Views (DMV) – Fillfactor Table Scan, Index Scan and Index Seek Index and Order of Columns Final Checklist: Index and Performance Well, we believe we have done our part, now waiting for your comments and feedback. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology, Video

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  • Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales.  Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released.  Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge  (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys.   As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching  structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note   Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia   In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch.   Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation.   Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code.   Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from.   Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years.   Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software.     Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow.   Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching?   Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs.   Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established.   Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding.  Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible.   Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

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  • ASP.NET Dynamic Data Deployment Error

    - by rajbk
    You have an ASP.NET 3.5 dynamic data website that works great on your local box. When you deploy it to your production machine and turn on debug, you get the YSD Server Error in '/MyPath/MyApp' Application. Parser Error Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately. Parser Error Message: Unknown server tag 'asp:DynamicDataManager'. Source Error: Line 5:  Line 6:  <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolder1" Runat="Server"> Line 7:      <asp:DynamicDataManager ID="DynamicDataManager1" runat="server" AutoLoadForeignKeys="true" /> Line 8:  Line 9:      <h2><%= table.DisplayName%></h2> Probable Causes The server does not have .NET 3.5 SP1, which includes ASP.NET Dynamic Data, installed. Download it here. The third tagPrefix shown below is missing from web.config <pages> <controls> <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/> <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI.WebControls" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/> <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.DynamicData" assembly="System.Web.DynamicData, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/> </controls></pages>     Hope that helps!

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  • SQL SERVER – WRITELOG – Wait Type – Day 17 of 28

    - by pinaldave
    WRITELOG is one of the most interesting wait types. So far we have seen a lot of different wait types, but this log type is associated with log file which makes it interesting to deal with. From Book On-Line: WRITELOG Occurs while waiting for a log flush to complete. Common operations that cause log flushes are checkpoints and transaction commits. WRITELOG Explanation: This wait type is usually seen in the heavy transactional database. When data is modified, it is written both on the log cache and buffer cache. This wait type occurs when data in the log cache is flushing to the disk. During this time, the session has to wait due to WRITELOG. I have recently seen this wait type’s persistence at my client’s place, where one of the long-running transactions was stopped by the user causing it to roll back. In the future, I will see if I could re-create this situation once again on my machine to validate the relation. Reducing WRITELOG wait: There are several suggestions to reduce this wait stats: Move Transaction Log to Separate Disk from mdf and other files. Avoid cursor-like coding methodology and frequent committing of statements. Find the most active file based on IO stall time based on the script written over here. You can also use fn_virtualfilestats to find IO-related issues using the script mentioned over here. Check the IO-related counters (PhysicalDisk:Avg.Disk Queue Length, PhysicalDisk:Disk Read Bytes/sec and PhysicalDisk :Disk Write Bytes/sec) for additional details. Read about them over here. There are two excellent resources by Paul Randal, I suggest you understand the subject from those videos. The links to videos are here and here. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All the discussion of Wait Stats in this blog is generic and varies from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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  • SQL SERVER – FT_IFTS_SCHEDULER_IDLE_WAIT – Full Text – Wait Type – Day 13 of 28

    - by pinaldave
    In the last few days during this series, I got many question about this Wait type. It would be great if you read my original related wait stats query in the first post because I have filtered it out in WHERE clause. However, I still get questions about this being one of the most wait types they encounter. The truth is, this is a background task processing and it really does not matter and it should be filtered out. There are many new Wait types related to Full Text Search that are introduced in SQL Server 2008. If you run the following query, you will be able to find them in the list. Currently there is not enough information for all of them available on BOL or any other place. But don’t worry; I will write an in-depth article when I learn more about them. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_os_wait_stats WHERE wait_type LIKE 'FT_%' The result set will contain following rows. FT_RESTART_CRAWL FT_METADATA_MUTEX FT_IFTSHC_MUTEX FT_IFTSISM_MUTEX FT_IFTS_RWLOCK FT_COMPROWSET_RWLOCK FT_MASTER_MERGE FT_IFTS_SCHEDULER_IDLE_WAIT We have understood so far that there is not much information available. But the problem is when you have this Wait type, what should you do?  The answer is to filter them out for the moment (i.e, do not pay attention on them) and focus on other pressing issues in wait stats or performance tuning. Here are two of my informal suggestions, which are totally independent from wait stats: Turn off the Full Text Search service in your system if you are  not necessarily using it on your server. Learn proper Full Text Search methodology. You can get Michael Coles’ book: Pro Full-Text Search in SQL Server 2008. Now I invite you to speak out your suggestions or any input regarding Full Text-related best practices and wait stats issue. Please leave a comment. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All the discussions of Wait Stats in this blog are generic and vary from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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  • Using DNFS for test purposes

    - by rene.kundersma
    Because of other priorities such as bringing the first v2 Database Machine in Netherlands into production I did spend less time on my blog that planned. I do however like to tell some things about DNFS, the build-in NFS client we have in Oracle RDBMS since 11.1. What DNFS is and how to set it up can all be found here . As you see this documentation is actually the "Clusterware Installation Guide". I think that is weird, I would expect this to be part of the Admin Guide, especially the "Tablespace" chapter. I do however want to show what I did not find in the documentation that quickly (and solved after talking to my famous colleague "the prutser"): First, a quick setup: 1. The standard ODM library needs to be replaced with the NFS ODM library: [oracle@ocm01 ~]$ cp $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libodm11.so $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libodm11.so_stub [oracle@ocm01 ~]$ ln -s $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libnfsodm11.so $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libodm11.so After changing to this library you will notice the following in your alert.log: Oracle instance running with ODM: Oracle Direct NFS ODM Library Version 2.0 2. The intention is to mount the datafiles over normal NAS (like NetApp). But, in case you want to test yourself and use an exported NFS filesystem, it should look like the following: [oracle@ocm01 ~]$ cat /etc/exports /u01/scratch/nfs *(rw,sync,insecure) Please note the "insecure" option in the export, since you will not be able to use DNFS without it if you export a filesystem from a host. Without the "insecure" option the NFS server considers the port used by the database "insecure" and the database is unable to acquire the mount: Direct NFS: NFS3ERR 1 Not owner. path ocm01.nl.oracle.com mntport 930 nfsport 2049 3. Before configuring the new Oracle stanza for NFS we still need to configure a regular kernel NFS mount: [root@ocm01 ~]# cat /etc/fstab | grep nfs ocm01.nl.oracle.com:/u01/scratch/nfs /incoming nfs rw,bg,hard,nointr,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,tcp,actimeo=0,vers=3,timeo=600 4. Then a so called Oracle-'nfstab' needs to be created that specifies what the available exports to use: [oracle@ocm01 ~]$ cat /etc/oranfstab server:ocm01.nl.oracle.com path:192.168.1.40 export:/u01/scratch/nfs mount:/incoming 5. Creating a tablespace with a datafile on the NFS location: SQL create tablespace rk datafile '/incoming/rk.dbf' size 10M; Tablespace created. Be sure to know that it may happen that you do not specify the insecure option (like I did). In that case you will still see output from the query v$dnfs_servers: SQL select * from v$dnfs_servers; ID SVRNAME DIRNAME MNTPORT NFSPORT WTMAX RTMAX -- -------------------- ----------------- --------- ---------- ------ ------ 1 ocm01.nl.oracle.com /u01/scratch/nfs 684 2049 32768 32768 But, querying v$dnfsfiles and v$dnfs_channels will now return any result, and indeed, you will see the following message in the alert-log when you create a file : Direct NFS: NFS3ERR 1 Not owner. path ocm01.nl.oracle.com mntport 930 nfsport 2049 After correcting the export: SQL select * from v$dnfs_files; FILENAME FILESIZE PNUM SVR_ID --------------- -------- ------ ------ /incoming/rk.dbf 10493952 20 1 Rene Kundersma Oracle Technology Services, The Netherlands

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  • Using HTML 5 SessionState to save rendered Page Content

    - by Rick Strahl
    HTML 5 SessionState and LocalStorage are very useful and super easy to use to manage client side state. For building rich client side or SPA style applications it's a vital feature to be able to cache user data as well as HTML content in order to swap pages in and out of the browser's DOM. What might not be so obvious is that you can also use the sessionState and localStorage objects even in classic server rendered HTML applications to provide caching features between pages. These APIs have been around for a long time and are supported by most relatively modern browsers and even all the way back to IE8, so you can use them safely in your Web applications. SessionState and LocalStorage are easy The APIs that make up sessionState and localStorage are very simple. Both object feature the same API interface which  is a simple, string based key value store that has getItem, setItem, removeitem, clear and  key methods. The objects are also pseudo array objects and so can be iterated like an array with  a length property and you have array indexers to set and get values with. Basic usage  for storing and retrieval looks like this (using sessionStorage, but the syntax is the same for localStorage - just switch the objects):// set var lastAccess = new Date().getTime(); if (sessionStorage) sessionStorage.setItem("myapp_time", lastAccess.toString()); // retrieve in another page or on a refresh var time = null; if (sessionStorage) time = sessionStorage.getItem("myapp_time"); if (time) time = new Date(time * 1); else time = new Date(); sessionState stores data that is browser session specific and that has a liftetime of the active browser session or window. Shut down the browser or tab and the storage goes away. localStorage uses the same API interface, but the lifetime of the data is permanently stored in the browsers storage area until deleted via code or by clearing out browser cookies (not the cache). Both sessionStorage and localStorage space is limited. The spec is ambiguous about this - supposedly sessionStorage should allow for unlimited size, but it appears that most WebKit browsers support only 2.5mb for either object. This means you have to be careful what you store especially since other applications might be running on the same domain and also use the storage mechanisms. That said 2.5mb worth of character data is quite a bit and would go a long way. The easiest way to get a feel for how sessionState and localStorage work is to look at a simple example. You can go check out the following example online in Plunker: http://plnkr.co/edit/0ICotzkoPjHaWa70GlRZ?p=preview which looks like this: Plunker is an online HTML/JavaScript editor that lets you write and run Javascript code and similar to JsFiddle, but a bit cleaner to work in IMHO (thanks to John Papa for turning me on to it). The sample has two text boxes with counts that update session/local storage every time you click the related button. The counts are 'cached' in Session and Local storage. The point of these examples is that both counters survive full page reloads, and the LocalStorage counter survives a complete browser shutdown and restart. Go ahead and try it out by clicking the Reload button after updating both counters and then shutting down the browser completely and going back to the same URL (with the same browser). What you should see is that reloads leave both counters intact at the counted values, while a browser restart will leave only the local storage counter intact. The code to deal with the SessionStorage (and LocalStorage not shown here) in the example is isolated into a couple of wrapper methods to simplify the code: function getSessionCount() { var count = 0; if (sessionStorage) { var count = sessionStorage.getItem("ss_count"); count = !count ? 0 : count * 1; } $("#txtSession").val(count); return count; } function setSessionCount(count) { if (sessionStorage) sessionStorage.setItem("ss_count", count.toString()); } These two functions essentially load and store a session counter value. The two key methods used here are: sessionStorage.getItem(key); sessionStorage.setItem(key,stringVal); Note that the value given to setItem and return by getItem has to be a string. If you pass another type you get an error. Don't let that limit you though - you can easily enough store JSON data in a variable so it's quite possible to pass complex objects and store them into a single sessionStorage value:var user = { name: "Rick", id="ricks", level=8 } sessionStorage.setItem("app_user",JSON.stringify(user)); to retrieve it:var user = sessionStorage.getItem("app_user"); if (user) user = JSON.parse(user); Simple! If you're using the Chrome Developer Tools (F12) you can also check out the session and local storage state on the Resource tab:   You can also use this tool to refresh or remove entries from storage. What we just looked at is a purely client side implementation where a couple of counters are stored. For rich client centric AJAX applications sessionStorage and localStorage provide a very nice and simple API to store application state while the application is running. But you can also use these storage mechanisms to manage server centric HTML applications when you combine server rendering with some JavaScript to perform client side data caching. You can both store some state information and data on the client (ie. store a JSON object and carry it forth between server rendered HTML requests) or you can use it for good old HTTP based caching where some rendered HTML is saved and then restored later. Let's look at the latter with a real life example. Why do I need Client-side Page Caching for Server Rendered HTML? I don't know about you, but in a lot of my existing server driven applications I have lists that display a fair amount of data. Typically these lists contain links to then drill down into more specific data either for viewing or editing. You can then click on a link and go off to a detail page that provides more concise content. So far so good. But now you're done with the detail page and need to get back to the list, so you click on a 'bread crumbs trail' or an application level 'back to list' button and… …you end up back at the top of the list - the scroll position, the current selection in some cases even filters conditions - all gone with the wind. You've left behind the state of the list and are starting from scratch in your browsing of the list from the top. Not cool! Sound familiar? This a pretty common scenario with server rendered HTML content where it's so common to display lists to drill into, only to lose state in the process of returning back to the original list. Look at just about any traditional forums application, or even StackOverFlow to see what I mean here. Scroll down a bit to look at a post or entry, drill in then use the bread crumbs or tab to go back… In some cases returning to the top of a list is not a big deal. On StackOverFlow that sort of works because content is turning around so quickly you probably want to actually look at the top posts. Not always though - if you're browsing through a list of search topics you're interested in and drill in there's no way back to that position. Essentially anytime you're actively browsing the items in the list, that's when state becomes important and if it's not handled the user experience can be really disrupting. Content Caching If you're building client centric SPA style applications this is a fairly easy to solve problem - you tend to render the list once and then update the page content to overlay the detail content, only hiding the list temporarily until it's used again later. It's relatively easy to accomplish this simply by hiding content on the page and later making it visible again. But if you use server rendered content, hanging on to all the detail like filters, selections and scroll position is not quite as easy. Or is it??? This is where sessionStorage comes in handy. What if we just save the rendered content of a previous page, and then restore it when we return to this page based on a special flag that tells us to use the cached version? Let's see how we can do this. A real World Use Case Recently my local ISP asked me to help out with updating an ancient classifieds application. They had a very busy, local classifieds app that was originally an ASP classic application. The old app was - wait for it: frames based - and even though I lobbied against it, the decision was made to keep the frames based layout to allow rapid browsing of the hundreds of posts that are made on a daily basis. The primary reason they wanted this was precisely for the ability to quickly browse content item by item. While I personally hate working with Frames, I have to admit that the UI actually works well with the frames layout as long as you're running on a large desktop screen. You can check out the frames based desktop site here: http://classifieds.gorge.net/ However when I rebuilt the app I also added a secondary view that doesn't use frames. The main reason for this of course was for mobile displays which work horribly with frames. So there's a somewhat mobile friendly interface to the interface, which ditches the frames and uses some responsive design tweaking for mobile capable operation: http://classifeds.gorge.net/mobile  (or browse the base url with your browser width under 800px)   Here's what the mobile, non-frames view looks like:   As you can see this means that the list of classifieds posts now is a list and there's a separate page for drilling down into the item. And of course… originally we ran into that usability issue I mentioned earlier where the browse, view detail, go back to the list cycle resulted in lost list state. Originally in mobile mode you scrolled through the list, found an item to look at and drilled in to display the item detail. Then you clicked back to the list and BAM - you've lost your place. Because there are so many items added on a daily basis the full list is never fully loaded, but rather there's a "Load Additional Listings"  entry at the button. Not only did we originally lose our place when coming back to the list, but any 'additionally loaded' items are no longer there because the list was now rendering  as if it was the first page hit. The additional listings, and any filters, the selection of an item all were lost. Major Suckage! Using Client SessionStorage to cache Server Rendered Content To work around this problem I decided to cache the rendered page content from the list in SessionStorage. Anytime the list renders or is updated with Load Additional Listings, the page HTML is cached and stored in Session Storage. Any back links from the detail page or the login or write entry forms then point back to the list page with a back=true query string parameter. If the server side sees this parameter it doesn't render the part of the page that is cached. Instead the client side code retrieves the data from the sessionState cache and simply inserts it into the page. It sounds pretty simple, and the overall the process is really easy, but there are a few gotchas that I'll discuss in a minute. But first let's look at the implementation. Let's start with the server side here because that'll give a quick idea of the doc structure. As I mentioned the server renders data from an ASP.NET MVC view. On the list page when returning to the list page from the display page (or a host of other pages) looks like this: https://classifieds.gorge.net/list?back=True The query string value is a flag, that indicates whether the server should render the HTML. Here's what the top level MVC Razor view for the list page looks like:@model MessageListViewModel @{ ViewBag.Title = "Classified Listing"; bool isBack = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.QueryString["back"]); } <form method="post" action="@Url.Action("list")"> <div id="SizingContainer"> @if (!isBack) { @Html.Partial("List_CommandBar_Partial", Model) <div id="PostItemContainer" class="scrollbox" xstyle="-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;"> @Html.Partial("List_Items_Partial", Model) @if (Model.RequireLoadEntry) { <div class="postitem loadpostitems" style="padding: 15px;"> <div id="LoadProgress" class="smallprogressright"></div> <div class="control-progress"> Load additional listings... </div> </div> } </div> } </div> </form> As you can see the query string triggers a conditional block that if set is simply not rendered. The content inside of #SizingContainer basically holds  the entire page's HTML sans the headers and scripts, but including the filter options and menu at the top. In this case this makes good sense - in other situations the fact that the menu or filter options might be dynamically updated might make you only cache the list rather than essentially the entire page. In this particular instance all of the content works and produces the proper result as both the list along with any filter conditions in the form inputs are restored. Ok, let's move on to the client. On the client there are two page level functions that deal with saving and restoring state. Like the counter example I showed earlier, I like to wrap the logic to save and restore values from sessionState into a separate function because they are almost always used in several places.page.saveData = function(id) { if (!sessionStorage) return; var data = { id: id, scroll: $("#PostItemContainer").scrollTop(), html: $("#SizingContainer").html() }; sessionStorage.setItem("list_html",JSON.stringify(data)); }; page.restoreData = function() { if (!sessionStorage) return; var data = sessionStorage.getItem("list_html"); if (!data) return null; return JSON.parse(data); }; The data that is saved is an object which contains an ID which is the selected element when the user clicks and a scroll position. These two values are used to reset the scroll position when the data is used from the cache. Finally the html from the #SizingContainer element is stored, which makes for the bulk of the document's HTML. In this application the HTML captured could be a substantial bit of data. If you recall, I mentioned that the server side code renders a small chunk of data initially and then gets more data if the user reads through the first 50 or so items. The rest of the items retrieved can be rather sizable. Other than the JSON deserialization that's Ok. Since I'm using SessionStorage the storage space has no immediate limits. Next is the core logic to handle saving and restoring the page state. At first though this would seem pretty simple, and in some cases it might be, but as the following code demonstrates there are a few gotchas to watch out for. Here's the relevant code I use to save and restore:$( function() { … var isBack = getUrlEncodedKey("back", location.href); if (isBack) { // remove the back key from URL setUrlEncodedKey("back", "", location.href); var data = page.restoreData(); // restore from sessionState if (!data) { // no data - force redisplay of the server side default list window.location = "list"; return; } $("#SizingContainer").html(data.html); var el = $(".postitem[data-id=" + data.id + "]"); $(".postitem").removeClass("highlight"); el.addClass("highlight"); $("#PostItemContainer").scrollTop(data.scroll); setTimeout(function() { el.removeClass("highlight"); }, 2500); } else if (window.noFrames) page.saveData(null); // save when page loads $("#SizingContainer").on("click", ".postitem", function() { var id = $(this).attr("data-id"); if (!id) return true; if (window.noFrames) page.saveData(id); var contentFrame = window.parent.frames["Content"]; if (contentFrame) contentFrame.location.href = "show/" + id; else window.location.href = "show/" + id; return false; }); … The code starts out by checking for the back query string flag which triggers restoring from the client cache. If cached the cached data structure is read from sessionStorage. It's important here to check if data was returned. If the user had back=true on the querystring but there is no cached data, he likely bookmarked this page or otherwise shut down the browser and came back to this URL. In that case the server didn't render any detail and we have no cached data, so all we can do is redirect to the original default list view using window.location. If we continued the page would render no data - so make sure to always check the cache retrieval result. Always! If there is data the it's loaded and the data.html data is restored back into the document by simply injecting the HTML back into the document's #SizingContainer element:$("#SizingContainer").html(data.html); It's that simple and it's quite quick even with a fully loaded list of additional items and on a phone. The actual HTML data is stored to the cache on every page load initially and then again when the user clicks on an element to navigate to a particular listing. The former ensures that the client cache always has something in it, and the latter updates with additional information for the selected element. For the click handling I use a data-id attribute on the list item (.postitem) in the list and retrieve the id from that. That id is then used to navigate to the actual entry as well as storing that Id value in the saved cached data. The id is used to reset the selection by searching for the data-id value in the restored elements. The overall process of this save/restore process is pretty straight forward and it doesn't require a bunch of code, yet it yields a huge improvement in the usability of the site on mobile devices (or anybody who uses the non-frames view). Some things to watch out for As easy as it conceptually seems to simply store and retrieve cached content, you have to be quite aware what type of content you are caching. The code above is all that's specific to cache/restore cycle and it works, but it took a few tweaks to the rest of the script code and server code to make it all work. There were a few gotchas that weren't immediately obvious. Here are a few things to pay attention to: Event Handling Logic Timing of manipulating DOM events Inline Script Code Bookmarking to the Cache Url when no cache exists Do you have inline script code in your HTML? That script code isn't going to run if you restore from cache and simply assign or it may not run at the time you think it would normally in the DOM rendering cycle. JavaScript Event Hookups The biggest issue I ran into with this approach almost immediately is that originally I had various static event handlers hooked up to various UI elements that are now cached. If you have an event handler like:$("#btnSearch").click( function() {…}); that works fine when the page loads with server rendered HTML, but that code breaks when you now load the HTML from cache. Why? Because the elements you're trying to hook those events to may not actually be there - yet. Luckily there's an easy workaround for this by using deferred events. With jQuery you can use the .on() event handler instead:$("#SelectionContainer").on("click","#btnSearch", function() {…}); which monitors a parent element for the events and checks for the inner selector elements to handle events on. This effectively defers to runtime event binding, so as more items are added to the document bindings still work. For any cached content use deferred events. Timing of manipulating DOM Elements Along the same lines make sure that your DOM manipulation code follows the code that loads the cached content into the page so that you don't manipulate DOM elements that don't exist just yet. Ideally you'll want to check for the condition to restore cached content towards the top of your script code, but that can be tricky if you have components or other logic that might not all run in a straight line. Inline Script Code Here's another small problem I ran into: I use a DateTime Picker widget I built a while back that relies on the jQuery date time picker. I also created a helper function that allows keyboard date navigation into it that uses JavaScript logic. Because MVC's limited 'object model' the only way to embed widget content into the page is through inline script. This code broken when I inserted the cached HTML into the page because the script code was not available when the component actually got injected into the page. As the last bullet - it's a matter of timing. There's no good work around for this - in my case I pulled out the jQuery date picker and relied on native <input type="date" /> logic instead - a better choice these days anyway, especially since this view is meant to be primarily to serve mobile devices which actually support date input through the browser (unlike desktop browsers of which only WebKit seems to support it). Bookmarking Cached Urls When you cache HTML content you have to make a decision whether you cache on the client and also not render that same content on the server. In the Classifieds app I didn't render server side content so if the user comes to the page with back=True and there is no cached content I have to a have a Plan B. Typically this happens when somebody ends up bookmarking the back URL. The easiest and safest solution for this scenario is to ALWAYS check the cache result to make sure it exists and if not have a safe URL to go back to - in this case to the plain uncached list URL which amounts to effectively redirecting. This seems really obvious in hindsight, but it's easy to overlook and not see a problem until much later, when it's not obvious at all why the page is not rendering anything. Don't use <body> to replace Content Since we're practically replacing all the HTML in the page it may seem tempting to simply replace the HTML content of the <body> tag. Don't. The body tag usually contains key things that should stay in the page and be there when it loads. Specifically script tags and elements and possibly other embedded content. It's best to create a top level DOM element specifically as a placeholder container for your cached content and wrap just around the actual content you want to replace. In the app above the #SizingContainer is that container. Other Approaches The approach I've used for this application is kind of specific to the existing server rendered application we're running and so it's just one approach you can take with caching. However for server rendered content caching this is a pattern I've used in a few apps to retrofit some client caching into list displays. In this application I took the path of least resistance to the existing server rendering logic. Here are a few other ways that come to mind: Using Partial HTML Rendering via AJAXInstead of rendering the page initially on the server, the page would load empty and the client would render the UI by retrieving the respective HTML and embedding it into the page from a Partial View. This effectively makes the initial rendering and the cached rendering logic identical and removes the server having to decide whether this request needs to be rendered or not (ie. not checking for a back=true switch). All the logic related to caching is made on the client in this case. Using JSON Data and Client RenderingThe hardcore client option is to do the whole UI SPA style and pull data from the server and then use client rendering or databinding to pull the data down and render using templates or client side databinding with knockout/angular et al. As with the Partial Rendering approach the advantage is that there's no difference in the logic between pulling the data from cache or rendering from scratch other than the initial check for the cache request. Of course if the app is a  full on SPA app, then caching may not be required even - the list could just stay in memory and be hidden and reactivated. I'm sure there are a number of other ways this can be handled as well especially using  AJAX. AJAX rendering might simplify the logic, but it also complicates search engine optimization since there's no content loaded initially. So there are always tradeoffs and it's important to look at all angles before deciding on any sort of caching solution in general. State of the Session SessionState and LocalStorage are easy to use in client code and can be integrated even with server centric applications to provide nice caching features of content and data. In this post I've shown a very specific scenario of storing HTML content for the purpose of remembering list view data and state and making the browsing experience for lists a bit more friendly, especially if there's dynamically loaded content involved. If you haven't played with sessionStorage or localStorage I encourage you to give it a try. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with this beyond the specific scenario I've covered here… Resources Overview of localStorage (also applies to sessionStorage) Web Storage Compatibility Modernizr Test Suite© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in JavaScript  HTML5  ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Now It’s Personal (Although It Should Always Be): Campus Recruitment

    - by user769227
    One of the things that I think is important and I want our Campus Recruitment Team here at Oracle to be known for is outstanding customer service. When I say customer service, I mean both students and hiring managers should feel they have had a great experience in our campus hiring process. I think one of the keys to providing outstanding customer service is being able to provide as best as we can a personalised experience where the students who are interviewing with us feel like individuals in our process and not just part a ‘campus drive’. In the campus world this can be challenging at times especially in countries where there is high volume hiring. It can be tricky to create a personal experience when you are hiring for a large number of open graduate roles at one time. I think Campus Recruitment is one of the areas in the recruitment industry that is just waiting for a change. We have all seen the proliferation of Social Media in Recruitment over the past 4-6 years. Every Recruiter has a LinkedIn account or uses Twitter or G+ or FB, etc… and some individuals and organisations do it really well. Even in Campus Hiring there is great Social Media initiatives where companies reach out to students and talk to them. However one thing that has not really changed (and this is a generalisation) is the campus hiring interview process. Do these words inspire enthusiasm to you: “Group Interview, Assessment Centre, On-Campus Drive, Off-Campus Drive, etc...” I don’t know about you but to me these words don’t really sound very personal or individual to students. It almost conjures up images of a factory production line or those long queues you see where the person behind the counter says ‘take a number’. Campus Recruitment has come a long way don’t get me wrong – companies can share data with and talk to students in so many different ways now it really has become a much more transparent and open process. There are some times such as at IIT’s in India where it really is a bit old school in terms of interviewing with students running from company to company interviewing on campus over the course of a few days but I want students talking to Oracle to have as great an experience as possible (the outcome of getting a job or not is separate to the customer experience). As students, what are your thoughts? Do you feel like ‘just a number’ when you are interviewing or is there ways that companies can make the process more personalised. Let us know your thoughts. If you are interviewing with Oracle and have questions, want to talk to us or want to know what it is like working here – email us and we will help where we can. If you can’t reach your local Recruiter in your region email me at [email protected] and I will put you in touch with the appropriate person.

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  • JavaOne in Brazil

    - by janice.heiss(at)oracle.com
    JavaOne in Brazil, currently taking place in Sao Paolo, is one event I'd love to attend. I once heard "father of Java" James Gosling talk about Java developers throughout the world. He observed that there were good developers everywhere. It was not the case, he said, that that the really good developers are in one place and the not-so-good developers are in another. He encountered excellent developers everywhere. Then he paused and said that the craziest developers were definitely the Brazilians. As anyone who knows James would realize, this was meant as high praise. He said the Brazilians would work through the night on projects and were very enthusiastic and spontaneous - features that Brazilian culture is known for. Brazilian developers are responsible for creating one of the most impressive uses of Java ever - the applications that run the Brazilian health services. Starting from scratch they created a system that enables an expert doctor in Rio to look at an X-Ray of a patient near the Amazon and offer advice. One of the main architects of this was Java Champion Fabinane Nardon the distinguished Brazilian Java architect and open-source evangelist. As she writes in her blog:"In 2003, I was invited to assemble a team and architect a Public Healthcare Information System for the city of São Paulo, the largest in Latin America, with 14 million inhabitants. The resulting software had 2.5 million of lines of code and it was created, from specification to production, in only 10 months. At the time, the software was considered the largest J2EE application in the world and was featured in several articles, as this one. As a result, we won the Duke's Choice Award in 2005 during JavaOne, the largest development conference in the world. At the time, Sun Microsystems make a short documentary about our work." "In 2007, a lightning struck twice and I was again invited to assemble a new team and architect an even larger information system for healthcare. And thus I became CTO and one of the founders of Zilics Healthcare Information Systems. "In 2010, I started to research and work on Cloud Computing technology and became leader of the LSI-TEC Cloud Computing group. LSI-TEC is a research laboratory in the University of Sao Paulo, one of the best in Brazil. Thus, I became one of the ghost writers behind the popular Cloud Computing Twitter @the_cloud."You can see and hear Nardon in a 4 minute documentary on Java and the Brazilian health care system produced by Sun Microsystems. And you can listen to a September 2010 podcast with Nardon and her fellow Brazilian Java Champion Bruno Souza (known in Brazil as "Java Man") here at 11:10 minutes into the podcast.Next year, I'll hope to be reporting in Brazil at JavaOne!

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  • Packing a DBF

    - by Tom Hines
    I thought my days of dealing with DBFs as a "production data" source were over, but HA (no such luck). I recently had to retrieve, modify and replace some data that needed to be delivered in a DBF file. Everything was fine until I realized / remembered the DBF driver does not ACTUALLY delete records from the data source -- it only marks them for deletion.  You are responsible for handling the "chaff" either by using a utility to remove deleted records or by simply ignoring them.  If imported into Excel, the marked-deleted records are ignored, but the file size will reflect the extra content. So, I went hunting for a method to "Pack" the records (removing deleted ones and resizing the DBF file) and eventually ran across the FOXPRO driver at ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb190233.aspx ).  Once installed, I changed the DSN in the code to the new one I created in the ODBC Administrator and ran some tests.  Using MSQuery, I simply tested the raw SQL command Pack {tablename} and it WORKED! One really neat thing is the PACK command is used like regular SQL instructions; "Pack {tablename}" is all that is needed. It is necessary, however, to close all connections to the database before issuing the PACK command.    Here is some C# code for a Pack method.         /// <summary>       /// Pack the DBF removing all deleted records       /// </summary>       /// <param name="strTableName">The table to pack</param>       /// <param name="strError">output of any errors</param>       /// <returns>bool (true if no errors)</returns>       public static bool Pack(string strTableName, ref string strError)       {          bool blnRetVal = true;          try          {             OdbcConnectionStringBuilder csbOdbc = new OdbcConnectionStringBuilder()             {                Dsn = "PSAP_FOX_DBF"             };             string strSQL = "pack " + strTableName;             using (OdbcConnection connOdbc = new OdbcConnection(csbOdbc.ToString()))             {                connOdbc.Open();                OdbcCommand cmdOdbc = new OdbcCommand(strSQL, connOdbc);                cmdOdbc.ExecuteNonQuery();                connOdbc.Close();             }          }          catch (Exception exc)          {             blnRetVal = false;             strError = exc.Message;          }          return blnRetVal;       }

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  • Packing a DBF

    - by Tom Hines
    I thought my days of dealing with DBFs as a "production data" source were over, but HA (no such luck). I recently had to retrieve, modify and replace some data that needed to be delivered in a DBF file. Everything was fine until I realized / remembered the DBF driver does not ACTUALLY delete records from the data source -- it only marks them for deletion.  You are responsible for handling the "chaff" either by using a utility to remove deleted records or by simply ignoring them.  If imported into Excel, the marked-deleted records are ignored, but the file size will reflect the extra content.  After several rounds of testing CRUD, the output DBF was huge. So, I went hunting for a method to "Pack" the records (removing deleted ones and resizing the DBF file) and eventually ran across the FOXPRO driver at ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb190233.aspx ).  Once installed, I changed the DSN in the code to the new one I created in the ODBC Administrator and ran some tests.  Using MSQuery, I simply tested the raw SQL command Pack {tablename} and it WORKED! One really neat thing is the PACK command is used like regular SQL instructions; "Pack {tablename}" is all that is needed. It is necessary, however, to close all connections to the database (and re-open) before issuing the PACK command or you will get the "File is in use" error.    Here is some C# code for a Pack method.         /// <summary>       /// Pack the DBF removing all deleted records       /// </summary>       /// <param name="strTableName">The table to pack</param>       /// <param name="strError">output of any errors</param>       /// <returns>bool (true if no errors)</returns>       public static bool Pack(string strTableName, ref string strError)       {          bool blnRetVal = true;          try          {             OdbcConnectionStringBuilder csbOdbc = new OdbcConnectionStringBuilder()             {                Dsn = "PSAP_FOX_DBF"             };             string strSQL = "pack " + strTableName;             using (OdbcConnection connOdbc = new OdbcConnection(csbOdbc.ToString()))             {                connOdbc.Open();                OdbcCommand cmdOdbc = new OdbcCommand(strSQL, connOdbc);                cmdOdbc.ExecuteNonQuery();                connOdbc.Close();             }          }          catch (Exception exc)          {             blnRetVal = false;             strError = exc.Message;          }          return blnRetVal;       }

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  • Red Gate Coder interviews: Robin Hellen

    - by Michael Williamson
    Robin Hellen is a test engineer here at Red Gate, and is also the latest coder I’ve interviewed. We chatted about debugging code, the roles of software engineers and testers, and why Vala is currently his favourite programming language. How did you get started with programming?It started when I was about six. My dad’s a professional programmer, and he gave me and my sister one of his old computers and taught us a bit about programming. It was an old Amiga 500 with a variant of BASIC. I don’t think I ever successfully completed anything! It was just faffing around. I didn’t really get anywhere with it.But then presumably you did get somewhere with it at some point.At some point. The PC emerged as the dominant platform, and I learnt a bit of Visual Basic. I didn’t really do much, just a couple of quick hacky things. A bit of demo animation. Took me a long time to get anywhere with programming, really.When did you feel like you did start to get somewhere?I think it was when I started doing things for someone else, which was my sister’s final year of university project. She called up my dad two days before she was due to submit, saying “We need something to display a graph!”. Dad says, “I’m too busy, go talk to your brother”. So I hacked up this ugly piece of code, sent it off and they won a prize for that project. Apparently, the graph, the bit that I wrote, was the reason they won a prize! That was when I first felt that I’d actually done something that was worthwhile. That was my first real bit of code, and the ugliest code I’ve ever written. It’s basically an array of pre-drawn line elements that I shifted round the screen to draw a very spikey graph.When did you decide that programming might actually be something that you wanted to do as a career?It’s not really a decision I took, I always wanted to do something with computers. And I had to take a gap year for uni, so I was looking for twelve month internships. I applied to Red Gate, and they gave me a job as a tester. And that’s where I really started having to write code well. To a better standard that I had been up to that point.How did you find coming to Red Gate and working with other coders?I thought it was really nice. I learnt so much just from other people around. I think one of the things that’s really great is that people are just willing to help you learn. Instead of “Don’t you know that, you’re so stupid”, it’s “You can just do it this way”.If you could go back to the very start of that internship, is there something that you would tell yourself?Write shorter code. I have a tendency to write massive, many-thousand line files that I break out of right at the end. And then half-way through a project I’m doing something, I think “Where did I write that bit that does that thing?”, and it’s almost impossible to find. I wrote some horrendous code when I started. Just that principle, just keep things short. Even if looks a bit crazy to be jumping around all over the place all of the time, it’s actually a lot more understandable.And how do you hold yourself to that?Generally, if a function’s going off my screen, it’s probably too long. That’s what I tell myself, and within the team here we have code reviews, so the guys I’m with at the moment are pretty good at pulling me up on, “Doesn’t that look like it’s getting a bit long?”. It’s more just the subjective standard of readability than anything.So you’re an advocate of code review?Yes, definitely. Both to spot errors that you might have made, and to improve your knowledge. The person you’re reviewing will say “Oh, you could have done it that way”. That’s how we learn, by talking to others, and also just sharing knowledge of how your project works around the team, or even outside the team. Definitely a very firm advocate of code reviews.Do you think there’s more we could do with them?I don’t know. We’re struggling with how to add them as part of the process without it becoming too cumbersome. We’ve experimented with a few different ways, and we’ve not found anything that just works.To get more into the nitty gritty: how do you like to debug code?The first thing is to do it in my head. I’ll actually think what piece of code is likely to have caused that error, and take a quick look at it, just to see if there’s anything glaringly obvious there. The next thing I’ll probably do is throw in print statements, or throw some exceptions from various points, just to check: is it going through the code path I expect it to? A last resort is to actually debug code using a debugger.Why is the debugger the last resort?Probably because of the environments I learnt programming in. VB and early BASIC didn’t have much of a debugger, the only way to find out what your program was doing was to add print statements. Also, because a lot of the stuff I tend to work with is non-interactive, if it’s something that takes a long time to run, I can throw in the print statements, set a run off, go and do something else, and look at it again later, rather than trying to remember what happened at that point when I was debugging through it. So it also gives me the record of what happens. I hate just sitting there pressing F5, F5, continually. If you’re having to find out what your code is doing at each line, you’ve probably got a very wrong mental model of what your code’s doing, and you can find that out just as easily by inspecting a couple of values through the print statements.If I were on some codebase that you were also working on, what should I do to make it as easy as possible to understand?I’d say short and well-named methods. The one thing I like to do when I’m looking at code is to find out where a value comes from, and the more layers of indirection there are, particularly DI [dependency injection] frameworks, the harder it is to find out where something’s come from. I really hate that. I want to know if the value come from the user here or is a constant here, and if I can’t find that out, that makes code very hard to understand for me.As a tester, where do you think the split should lie between software engineers and testers?I think the split is less on areas of the code you write and more what you’re designing and creating. The developers put a structure on the code, while my major role is to say which tests we should have, whether we should test that, or it’s not worth testing that because it’s a tiny function in code that nobody’s ever actually going to see. So it’s not a split in the code, it’s a split in what you’re thinking about. Saying what code we should write, but alternatively what code we should take out.In your experience, do the software engineers tend to do much testing themselves?They tend to control the lowest layer of tests. And, depending on how the balance of people is in the team, they might write some of the higher levels of test. Or that might go to the testers. I’m the only tester on my team with three other developers, so they’ll be writing quite a lot of the actual test code, with input from me as to whether we should test that functionality, whereas on other teams, where it’s been more equal numbers, the testers have written pretty much all of the high level tests, just because that’s the best use of resource.If you could shuffle resources around however you liked, do you think that the developers should be writing those high-level tests?I think they should be writing them occasionally. It helps when they have an understanding of how testing code works and possibly what assumptions we’ve made in tests, and they can say “actually, it doesn’t work like that under the hood so you’ve missed this whole area”. It’s one of those agile things that everyone on the team should be at least comfortable doing the various jobs. So if the developers can write test code then I think that’s a very good thing.So you think testers should be able to write production code?Yes, although given most testers skills at coding, I wouldn’t advise it too much! I have written a few things, and I did make a few changes that have actually gone into our production code base. They’re not necessarily running every time but they are there. I think having that mix of skill sets is really useful. In some ways we’re using our own product to test itself, so being able to make those changes where it’s not working saves me a round-trip through the developers. It can be really annoying if the developers have no time to make a change, and I can’t touch the code.If the software engineers are consistently writing tests at all levels, what role do you think the role of a tester is?I think on a team like that, those distinctions aren’t quite so useful. There’ll be two cases. There’s either the case where the developers think they’ve written good tests, but you still need someone with a test engineer mind-set to go through the tests and validate that it’s a useful set, or the correct set for that code. Or they won’t actually be pure developers, they’ll have that mix of test ability in there.I think having slightly more distinct roles is useful. When it starts to blur, then you lose that view of the tests as a whole. The tester job is not to create tests, it’s to validate the quality of the product, and you don’t do that just by writing tests. There’s more things you’ve got to keep in your mind. And I think when you blur the roles, you start to lose that end of the tester.So because you’re working on those features, you lose that holistic view of the whole system?Yeah, and anyone who’s worked on the feature shouldn’t be testing it. You always need to have it tested it by someone who didn’t write it. Otherwise you’re a bit too close and you assume “yes, people will only use it that way”, but the tester will come along and go “how do people use this? How would our most idiotic user use this?”. I might not test that because it might be completely irrelevant. But it’s coming in and trying to have a different set of assumptions.Are you a believer that it should all be automated if possible?Not entirely. So an automated test is always better than a manual test for the long-term, but there’s still nothing that beats a human sitting in front of the application and thinking “What could I do at this point?”. The automated test is very good but they follow that strict path, and they never check anything off the path. The human tester will look at things that they weren’t expecting, whereas the automated test can only ever go “Is that value correct?” in many respects, and it won’t notice that on the other side of the screen you’re showing something completely wrong. And that value might have been checked independently, but you always find a few odd interactions when you’re going through something manually, and you always need to go through something manually to start with anyway, otherwise you won’t know where the important bits to write your automation are.When you’re doing that manual testing, do you think it’s important to do that across the entire product, or just the bits that you’ve touched recently?I think it’s important to do it mostly on the bits you’ve touched, but you can’t ignore the rest of the product. Unless you’re dealing with a very, very self-contained bit, you’re almost always encounter other bits of the product along the way. Most testers I know, even if they are looking at just one path, they’ll keep open and move around a bit anyway, just because they want to find something that’s broken. If we find that your path is right, we’ll go out and hunt something else.How do you think this fits into the idea of continuously deploying, so long as the tests pass?With deploying a website it’s a bit different because you can always pull it back. If you’re deploying an application to customers, when you’ve released it, it’s out there, you can’t pull it back. Someone’s going to keep it, no matter how hard you try there will be a few installations that stay around. So I’d always have at least a human element on that path. With websites, you could probably automate straight out, or at least straight out to an internal environment or a single server in a cloud of fifty that will serve some people. But I don’t think you should release to everyone just on automated tests passing.You’ve already mentioned using BASIC and C# — are there any other languages that you’ve used?I’ve used a few. That’s something that has changed more recently, I’ve become familiar with more languages. Before I started at Red Gate I learnt a bit of C. Then last year, I taught myself Python which I actually really enjoyed using. I’ve also come across another language called Vala, which is sort of a C#-like language. It’s basically a pre-processor for C, but it has very nice syntax. I think that’s currently my favourite language.Any particular reason for trying Vala?I have a completely Linux environment at home, and I’ve been looking for a nice language, and C# just doesn’t cut it because I won’t touch Mono. So, I was looking for something like C# but that was useable in an open source environment, and Vala’s what I found. C#’s got a few features that Vala doesn’t, and Vala’s got a few features where I think “It would be awesome if C# had that”.What are some of the features that it’s missing?Extension methods. And I think that’s the only one that really bugs me. I like to use them when I’m writing C# because it makes some things really easy, especially with libraries that you can’t touch the internals of. It doesn’t have method overloading, which is sometimes annoying.Where it does win over C#?Everything is non-nullable by default, you never have to check that something’s unexpectedly null.Also, Vala has code contracts. This is starting to come in C# 4, but the way it works in Vala is that you specify requirements in short phrases as part of your function signature and they stick to the signature, so that when you inherit it, it has exactly the same code contract as the base one, or when you inherit from an interface, you have to match the signature exactly. Just using those makes you think a bit more about how you’re writing your method, it’s not an afterthought when you’ve got contracts from base classes given to you, you can’t change it. Which I think is a lot nicer than the way C# handles it. When are those actually checked?They’re checked both at compile and run-time. The compile-time checking isn’t very strong yet, it’s quite a new feature in the compiler, and because it compiles down to C, you can write C code and interface with your methods, so you can bypass that compile-time check anyway. So there’s an extra runtime check, and if you violate one of the contracts at runtime, it’s game over for your program, there’s no exception to catch, it’s just goodbye!One thing I dislike about C# is the exceptions. You write a bit of code and fifty exceptions could come from any point in your ten lines, and you can’t mentally model how those exceptions are going to come out, and you can’t even predict them based on the functions you’re calling, because if you’ve accidentally got a derived class there instead of a base class, that can throw a completely different set of exceptions. So I’ve got no way of mentally modelling those, whereas in Vala they’re checked like Java, so you know only these exceptions can come out. You know in advance the error conditions.I think Raymond Chen on Old New Thing says “the only thing you know when you throw an exception is that you’re in an invalid state somewhere in your program, so just kill it and be done with it!”You said you’ve also learnt bits of Python. How did you find that compared to Vala and C#?Very different because of the dynamic typing. I’ve been writing a website for my own use. I’m quite into photography, so I take photos off my camera, post-process them, dump them in a file, and I get a webpage with all my thumbnails. So sort of like Picassa, but written by myself because I wanted something to learn Python with. There are some things that are really nice, I just found it really difficult to cope with the fact that I’m not quite sure what this object type that I’m passed is, I might not ever be sure, so it can randomly blow up on me. But once I train myself to ignore that and just say “well, I’m fairly sure it’s going to be something that looks like this, so I’ll use it like this”, then it’s quite nice.Any particular features that you’ve appreciated?I don’t like any particular feature, it’s just very straightforward to work with. It’s very quick to write something in, particularly as you don’t have to worry that you’ve changed something that affects a different part of the program. If you have, then that part blows up, but I can get this part working right now.If you were doing a big project, would you be willing to do it in Python rather than C# or Vala?I think I might be willing to try something bigger or long term with Python. We’re currently doing an ASP.NET MVC project on C#, and I don’t like the amount of reflection. There’s a lot of magic that pulls values out, and it’s all done under the scenes. It’s almost managed to put a dynamic type system on top of C#, which in many ways destroys the language to me, whereas if you’re already in a dynamic language, having things done dynamically is much more natural. In many ways, you get the worst of both worlds. I think for web projects, I would go with Python again, whereas for anything desktop, command-line or GUI-based, I’d probably go for C# or Vala, depending on what environment I’m in.It’s the fact that you can gain from the strong typing in ways that you can’t so much on the web app. Or, in a web app, you have to use dynamic typing at some point, or you have to write a hell of a lot of boilerplate, and I’d rather use the dynamic typing than write the boilerplate.What do you think separates great programmers from everyone else?Probably design choices. Choosing to write it a piece of code one way or another. For any given program you ask me to write, I could probably do it five thousand ways. A programmer who is capable will see four or five of them, and choose one of the better ones. The excellent programmer will see the largest proportion and manage to pick the best one very quickly without having to think too much about it. I think that’s probably what separates, is the speed at which they can see what’s the best path to write the program in. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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  • SQL SERVER – Dedicated Access Control for SQL Server Express Edition – An error occurred while obtaining the dedicated administrator connection (DAC) port.

    - by pinaldave
    Recently I had faced very interesting situation. Due to some reason we were not able to login into the production server for one of client. The reason for the same was that server was very busy, we had to login into the system and bring server to normal situation. When all the attempts failed, I decided to login using Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC). However when I attempted to connect using DAC it threw following error for me. C:\Users\pinald>sqlcmd -A -d master -S .\SQLEXPRESS Sqlcmd: Error: Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 11.0 : SQL Server Network Interfaces: An error occurred while obtaining the dedicated administrator connection (DAC) port. Make sure that SQL Browser is running, or check the error log for t he port number [xFFFFFFFF]. .Sqlcmd: Error: Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 11.0 : Login timeout expired.Sqlcmd: Error: Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 11.0 : A network-related or instance-specific error has occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. Server is not found or not accessible. Check if instance name is correct and if SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. For more information see SQL Server Books Online. I was bit taken a back as I knew that my commands are correct to login and if DAC does not work, there should be some serious reason for it. When inquired further about the SQL Server version I learned that it was SQL Server Express version deployed. To conserve resources, SQL Server Express does not listen on the DAC port. There is an additional step to be done if SQL Server Express has to be used with DAC. Enable TRACEFLAG on SQL Server Express will enable the connection by DAC possible. Here is the quick methods how one can enable DAC on SQL Server Express. Go to Start >> All Program >>Microsoft SQL Server (your version) >> Configuration Tools >> SQL Server Configuration Manager. Click on SQL Server Services >> Select your SQL Server Express version >> Right Click Properties >> select Startup Parameters Once on the Startup Parameter add the Startup parameter which is TRACEFLAG -T7806. Click on OK and RESTART SQL Server Express edition. Now once again try to connect to SQL Server Express edition and it will work just fine. This is absolutely documented method on BOL and SQL Server Express needs to be restarted. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Error Messages, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Server Express

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  • Preview of MSDN Library Changes

    - by ScottGu
    The MSDN team has been working some potential changes to the online MSDN Library designed to help streamline the navigation experience and make it easier to find the .NET Framework information you need. To solicit feedback on the proposed changes while they are still in development, they’ve posted a preview version of some proposed changes to a new MSDN Library Preview site which you can check out.  They’ve also created a survey that leads you through the ideas and asks for your opinions on some of the changes.  We’d very much like to have as many people as possible people take the survey and give us feedback. Quick Preview of Some of the Changes Below are some examples of a few of the changes being proposed: Streamlined .NET Namespaces Navigation The current MSDN Class Library lists all .NET namespaces in a flat-namespace (sorted alphabetically): Two downsides of the above approach are: Some of the least-used namespaces are listed first (like Microsoft.Aspnet.Snapin and Microsoft.Build.BuildEngine) All sub-namespaces are listed, which makes the list a little overwhelming, and page-load times to be slow The new MSDN Library Preview Site now lists “System” namespaces first (since those are the most used), and the home-page lists just top-level namespace groups – which makes it easier to find things, and enables the page to load faster:   Class overview and members pages merged into a single topic about each class Previously you had to navigate to several different pages to find member information about types: Links to these are still available in the MSDN Library Preview Site TOC – but the members are also now listed on the overview page, which makes it easy to quickly find everything in one place: Commonly used things are nearer the top of the page One of the other usability improvements with the new MSDN Library Preview Site is that common elements like “Code Examples” and “Inheritance Hierarchy” (for classes) are now listed near the top of the help page – making them easy to quickly find: Give Us Feedback with a Survey Above are just a few of the changes made with the new MSDN preview site – there are many other changes also rolled into it.  The MSDN team is doing usability studies on the new layout and navigation right now, and would very much like feedback on it. If you have 15 minutes and want to help vote on which of these ideas makes it into the production MSDN site, please visit this survey before June 30, play with the changes a bit, and let the MSDN team know what you think. Important Note: the MSDN preview site is not a fully functional version of MSDN – it’s really only there to preview the new ideas themselves, so please don’t expect it to be integrated with the rest of MSDN, with search, etc.  Once the MSDN team gets feedback on some of the changes being proposed they will roll them into the live site for everyone to use. Hope this helps, Scott

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