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• Microsoft Codename Houston

  - by kaleidoscope

  On one of the final talks about SQL Azure in Day 3 of PDC09, David Robinson, Senior PM on the Azure team, announced a project codenamed ‘Houston’ which is basically a Silverlight equivalent of SQL Server Management Studio. The concept comes from the SQL Azure being within the cloud, and if the only way to interact with it is by installing SSMS locally then it does not feel like a consistent story. From the limited preview, it only contains the basics but it clearly lets you create tables, stored procedures and views, edit them, even add data to tables in a grid view reminiscent of Microsoft Access. The UI was based around the standard ribbon bar, object window on the left and working pane on the right. As of now this tool is still pre-alpha and it seems like a basic tool that will facilitate rapid database development on cloud. When asked about general availability, no dates were given but calendar 2010 was indicated as the target. More information can be found at:      http://sqlfascination.com/2009/11/20/pdc-09-day-3-sql-azure-and-codename-houston-announcement/   Tinu, O

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• Get to Know a Candidate (18 of 25): Jack Fellure&ndash;Prohibition Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting.  Information sourced for Wikipedia.  NOTE:  I apologize for getting this entry out of order. Fellure (born October 3, 1931) is an American perennial political candidate and retired engineer.  Fellure has formally campaigned for President of the United States in every presidential election since 1988 as a member of the Republican Party. He asserts on his campaign website that his platform based on the 1611 Authorized King James Bible has never changed. As a candidate, he calls for the elimination of the liquor industry, abortion and pornography, and advocates the teaching of the Bible in public schools and criminalization of homosexuality. He has blamed the ills of society on those he has characterized as "atheists, Marxists, liberals, queers, liars, draft dodgers, flag burners, dope addicts, sex perverts and anti-Christians." After another run in 2008, Fellure initially ran for the Republican Party's 2012 presidential nomination. He then decided to seek the nomination of the Prohibition Party at the party's national convention in Cullman, Alabama The Prohibition Party (PRO) is a political party in the United States best known for its historic opposition to the sale or consumption of alcoholic beverages. It is the oldest existing third party in the US. The party was an integral part of the temperance movement. While never one of the leading parties in the United States, it was once an important force in the politics of the United States during the late 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. It has declined dramatically since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. The party earned only 643 votes in the 2008 presidential election. The Prohibition Party advocates a variety of socially conservative causes, including "stronger and more vigorous enforcement of laws against the sale of alcoholic beverages and tobacco products, against gambling, illegal drugs, pornography, and commercialized vice." Fellure has Ballot Access in: LA Learn more about Jack Fellure and Prohibition Party on Wikipedia.

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• An introductory presentation about testing with MSTest, Visual Studio, and Team Foundation Server 2010

  - by Thomas Weller

  While it was very quiet here on my blog during the last months, this was not at all true for the rest of my professional life. The simple story is that I was too busy to find the time for authoring blog posts (and you might see from my previous ones that they’re usually not of the ‘Hey, I’m currently reading X’ or ‘I’m currently thinking about Y’ kind…). Anyway. Among the things I did during the last months were setting up a TFS environment (2010) and introducing a development team to the MSTest framework (aka. Visual Studio Unit Testing), some additional tools (e.g. Moq, Moles, White),  how this is supported in Visual Studio, and how it integrates into the broader context of the then new TFS environment. After wiping out all the stuff which was directly related to my former customer and reviewing/extending the Speaker notes, I thought I share this presentation (via Slideshare) with the rest of the world. Hopefully it can be useful to someone else out there… Introduction to testing with MSTest, Visual Studio, and Team Foundation Server 2010 View more presentations from Thomas Weller. Be sure to also check out the slide notes (either by viewing the presentation directly on Slideshare or - even better - by downloading it). They contain quite some additional information, hints, and (in my opinion) best practices.

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• Craftsmanship Tour: Day 2 Obtiva

  - by Liam McLennan

  I like Chicago. It is a great city for travellers. From the moment I got off the plane at O’Hare everything was easy. I took the train to ‘the Loop’ and walked around the corner to my hotel, Hotel Blake on Dearborn St. Sadly, the elevated train lines in downtown Chicago remind me of ‘Shall We Dance’. Hotel Blake is excellent (except for the breakfast) and the concierge directed me to a pizza place called Lou Malnati's for Chicago style deep-dish pizza. Lou Malnati’s would be a great place to go with a group of friends. I felt strange dining there by myself, but the food and service were excellent. As usual in the United States the portion was so large that I could not finish it, but oh how I tried. Dave Hoover, who invited me to Obtiva for the day, had asked me to arrive at 9:45am. I was up early and had some time to kill so I stopped at the Willis Tower, since it was on my way to the office. Willis Tower is 1,451 feet (442 m) tall and has an observation deck at the top. Around the observation deck are a set of acrylic boxes, protruding from the side of the building. Brave soles can walk out on the perspex and look between their feet all the way down to the street. It is unnerving. Obtiva is a progressive, craftsmanship-focused software development company in downtown Chicago. Dave even wrote a book, Apprenticeship Patterns, that provides a catalogue of patterns to assist aspiring software craftsmen to achieve their goals. I spent the morning working in Obtiva’s software studio, an open xp-style office that houses Obtiva’s in-house development team. For lunch Dave Hoover, Corey Haines, Cory Foy and I went to a local Greek restaurant (not Dancing Zorbas). Dave, Corey and Cory are three smart and motivated guys and I found their ideas enlightening. It was especially great to chat with Corey Haines since he was the inspiration for my craftsmanship tour in the first place. After lunch I recorded a brief interview with Dave. Unfortunately, the battery in my camera went flat so I missed recording some interesting stuff. Interview with Dave Hoover In the evening Obtiva hosted an rspec hackfest with David Chelimsky and others. This was an excellent opportunity to be around some of the very best ruby programmers. At 10pm I went back to my hotel to get some rest before my train north the next morning.

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• C#: LINQ vs foreach - Round 1.

  - by James Michael Hare

  So I was reading Peter Kellner's blog entry on Resharper 5.0 and its LINQ refactoring and thought that was very cool.  But that raised a point I had always been curious about in my head -- which is a better choice: manual foreach loops or LINQ?    The answer is not really clear-cut.  There are two sides to any code cost arguments: performance and maintainability.  The first of these is obvious and quantifiable.  Given any two pieces of code that perform the same function, you can run them side-by-side and see which piece of code performs better.   Unfortunately, this is not always a good measure.  Well written assembly language outperforms well written C++ code, but you lose a lot in maintainability which creates a big techncial debt load that is hard to offset as the application ages.  In contrast, higher level constructs make the code more brief and easier to understand, hence reducing technical cost.   Now, obviously in this case we're not talking two separate languages, we're comparing doing something manually in the language versus using a higher-order set of IEnumerable extensions that are in the System.Linq library.   Well, before we discuss any further, let's look at some sample code and the numbers.  First, let's take a look at the for loop and the LINQ expression.  This is just a simple find comparison:       // find implemented via LINQ     public static bool FindViaLinq(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.Any(item => item == target);     }         // find implemented via standard iteration     public static bool FindViaIteration(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         foreach (var i in list)         {             if (i == target)             {                 return true;             }         }           return false;     }   Okay, looking at this from a maintainability point of view, the Linq expression is definitely more concise (8 lines down to 1) and is very readable in intention.  You don't have to actually analyze the behavior of the loop to determine what it's doing.   So let's take a look at performance metrics from 100,000 iterations of these methods on a List<int> of varying sizes filled with random data.  For this test, we fill a target array with 100,000 random integers and then run the exact same pseudo-random targets through both searches.                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     Any         10       26          0.00046             30.00%     Iteration   10       20          0.00023             -     Any         100      116         0.00201             18.37%     Iteration   100      98          0.00118             -     Any         1000     1058        0.01853             16.78%     Iteration   1000     906         0.01155             -     Any         10,000   10,383      0.18189             17.41%     Iteration   10,000   8843        0.11362             -     Any         100,000  104,004     1.8297              18.27%     Iteration   100,000  87,941      1.13163             -   The LINQ expression is running about 17% slower for average size collections and worse for smaller collections.  Presumably, this is due to the overhead of the state machine used to track the iterators for the yield returns in the LINQ expressions, which seems about right in a tight loop such as this.   So what about other LINQ expressions?  After all, Any() is one of the more trivial ones.  I decided to try the TakeWhile() algorithm using a Count() to get the position stopped like the sample Pete was using in his blog that Resharper refactored for him into LINQ:       // Linq form     public static int GetTargetPosition1(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.TakeWhile(item => item != target).Count();     }       // traditionally iterative form     public static int GetTargetPosition2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;           foreach (var i in list)         {             if(i == target)             {                 break;             }               ++count;         }           return count;     }   Once again, the LINQ expression is much shorter, easier to read, and should be easier to maintain over time, reducing the cost of technical debt.  So I ran these through the same test data:                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile   10       41          0.00041             128%     Iteration   10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile   100      171         0.00171             88%     Iteration   100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile   1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Iteration   1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile   10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Iteration   10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile   100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Iteration   100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Wow!  I expected some overhead due to the state machines iterators produce, but 90% slower?  That seems a little heavy to me.  So then I thought, well, what if TakeWhile() is not the right tool for the job?  The problem is TakeWhile returns each item for processing using yield return, whereas our for-loop really doesn't care about the item beyond using it as a stop condition to evaluate. So what if that back and forth with the iterator state machine is the problem?  Well, we can quickly create an (albeit ugly) lambda that uses the Any() along with a count in a closure (if a LINQ guru knows a better way PLEASE let me know!), after all , this is more consistent with what we're trying to do, we're trying to find the first occurence of an item and halt once we find it, we just happen to be counting on the way.  This mostly matches Any().       // a new method that uses linq but evaluates the count in a closure.     public static int TakeWhileViaLinq2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;         list.Any(item =>             {                 if(item == target)                 {                     return true;                 }                   ++count;                 return false;             });         return count;     }     Now how does this one compare?                         List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method         Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile      10       41          0.00041             128%     Any w/Closure  10       23          0.00023             28%     Iteration      10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile      100      171         0.00171             88%     Any w/Closure  100      116         0.00116             27%     Iteration      100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile      1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Any w/Closure  1000     1101        0.01101             33%     Iteration      1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile      10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Any w/Closure  10,000   10802       0.10802             32%     Iteration      10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile      100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Any w/Closure  100,000  108378      1.08378             33%     Iteration      100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Much better!  It seems that the overhead of TakeAny() returning each item and updating the state in the state machine is drastically reduced by using Any() since Any() iterates forward until it finds the value we're looking for -- for the task we're attempting to do.   So the lesson there is, make sure when you use a LINQ expression you're choosing the best expression for the job, because if you're doing more work than you really need, you'll have a slower algorithm.  But this is true of any choice of algorithm or collection in general.     Even with the Any() with the count in the closure it is still about 30% slower, but let's consider that angle carefully.  For a list of 100,000 items, it was the difference between 1.01 ms and 0.82 ms roughly in a List<T>.  That's really not that bad at all in the grand scheme of things.  Even running at 90% slower with TakeWhile(), for the vast majority of my projects, an extra millisecond to save potential errors in the long term and improve maintainability is a small price to pay.  And if your typical list is 1000 items or less we're talking only microseconds worth of difference.   It's like they say: 90% of your performance bottlenecks are in 2% of your code, so over-optimizing almost never pays off.  So personally, I'll take the LINQ expression wherever I can because they will be easier to read and maintain (thus reducing technical debt) and I can rely on Microsoft's development to have coded and unit tested those algorithm fully for me instead of relying on a developer to code the loop logic correctly.   If something's 90% slower, yes, it's worth keeping in mind, but it's really not until you start get magnitudes-of-order slower (10x, 100x, 1000x) that alarm bells should really go off.  And if I ever do need that last millisecond of performance?  Well then I'll optimize JUST THAT problem spot.  To me it's worth it for the readability, speed-to-market, and maintainability.

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• TechEd India 2010 - my first session on developing an IPL Portal using Visual Studio 2010

  - by Harish Ranganathan

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• SharePoint Saturday Charlotte 2010 Recap, Slides and Photos

  - by Brian Jackett

  This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Charlotte (SPSCLT) in Charlotte, North Carolina.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This made my fourth SharePoint Saturday attended and third I’ve spoken at.  The event was very well organized, attended, and a pleasure to be a part of along with many other great speakers.     At SharePoint Saturday Charlotte I had the opportunity to give two presentations.  First was “The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint 2007” and second was a new one “Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell.”  I want to thank everyone who attended either of my sessions and for all of the feedback given.  Below you will find links to my slides, demo scripts, and pictures taken throughout the event.  If anyone has any questions from the slides or scripts feel free to drop me a line.   Pictures SharePoint Saturday Charlotte Apr '10 Pictures on Facebook (recommend these with comments and tagging)   View Full Album   Slides, Scripts, and Rating Links SharePoint Saturday Charlotte Apr '10 Slides and Demo Scripts SpeakerRate: The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint 2007 SpeakerRate: Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell   Conclusion     Big thanks out to Brian Gough (@bkgough), Dan Lewis (@sharepointcomic) and all of the other organizers of this event.  Also a big thanks out to the other speakers and sponsors (too many to list) who made the event possible.  Lastly thanks to my Sogeti coworker Kelly Jones (@kellydjones) for picking me up from the airport and a ride back to Columbus.  I hope everyone that attended got something out of the event and will continue to grow the SharePoint community.  I’m on a break from conferences for a few weeks and then have 3 more back to back weekends in May, blog posts announcing those coming later.  Enjoy the slides, scripts, and pictures.         -Frog Out

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• Silverlight Cream for April 11, 2010 -- #836

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Rénald Nollet, Roboblob, Laurent Bugnion, Timmy Kokke, Michael Sync(-2-), Victor Gaudioso, and Bill Reiss. Brought to you from a tiny table in my no-tell-motelTM in 'Vegas AKA "cheaper than anywhere else" and the WiFi is free and smokin'... From SilverlightCream.com: Sync your Silverlight out-of-browser application data without service but with Dropbox Rénald Nollet is in good company (Walt Ritscher) because he's demo'ing synching OOB apps with dropbox. Unit Testable WCF Web Services in MVVM and Silverlight 4 Roboblob is discussing calling WCF Web Services from a Silverlight MVVM app... something he's been avoiding up to now. Good long code and text-filled article, with the project to download. Using commands with ApplicationBarMenuItem and ApplicationBarButton in Windows Phone 7 I almost missed this post by Laurent Bugnion, on how to get around the problem of not being able to attach commands to the ApplicationBarMenuItem and ApplicationBarButton in WP7. He gets around it with (gasp) code behind :) Introducing jLight – Talking to the DOM using Silverlight and jQuery. Oh boy... if you haven't been using jQuery yet, this should get it going for you... Timmy Kokke has produced jLight which brings jQuery into Silverlight for ease of DOM interaction... and it's on CodePlex! Test-Driven Development in Windows Phone7 – Part 1: Unit Testing with Silverlight for Phone7 Michael Sync's starting a series on TDD with Silverlight on WP7. Great tutorial and all the code is available. Tip: “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” Error in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 Michael Sync also has a tip up for the resolution of an error we've all seen in all sorts of development, but now in WP7, and the workaround is deceptively simple. New Silverlight Video Tutorial: How to Create Gradients Victor Gaudioso has a new video tutorial up for creating gradients in Expression Blend... don't fumble around in Blend... learn from the master! Space Rocks game step 8: Hyperspace Bill Reiss is up to episode 8 in his Silverlight game series now... this latest is on Hyperspace ... don'cha wish you could just do that? My trip to 'Vegas would have been a lot faster :) Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Linux Mint is Brilliant

  - by Simon Moon

  Most of my blog posts sound way too whiny. I'm not that guy. (Am I?) I've been using SUSE-flavored Linux for personal projects since 2002 (SUSE Linux 8.1). This past weekend, I made the heart-wrenching decision to abandon openSUSE (version 12.1) in favor of Linux Mint (version Maya). OpenSUSE had just become too burdensome. Packages that installed easily on RedHat or Debian always had issues running on top of OpenSUSE. And I never could get the Heroku Toolbelt installed in any kind of usable state.And so, ...I'm beginning again with this enticing young thing -- Mint with the Cinnamon window environment. Delicious. And while I'll always have fond memories of my years with openSUSE, I've got to admit that Mint makes running Linux feel good again. http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2031

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• MCP 70-536 Acquired

  - by dave

  Yeah...   Today I passed the 70-536 exam, so my way to 70-562 (ASP.NET 3.5) is open. Points: 815 Points needed for pass:700 Strarting to read new book :)

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• Migrating Databases from SQL Server 2008 to SqlAzure

  - by kaleidoscope

  Connect SQL Azure through SSMS. (It will get connected, only if you have port 1433 open.) Create required databases on SQL Azure. Create and execute schema scripts for databases.(Make sure you have written scripts which are 100% compatible with SQL Azure. Tool called SQL Azure migration tool by CodePlex helps with doing this.) Create and execute insert scripts for databases. (One can use SSMS for generating insert scripts.) For further details refer to the Windows Azure Platform Kit Nov 2009.   Anish

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• Lazy coding is fun

  - by Anthony Trudeau

  Every once in awhile I get the opportunity to write an application that is important enough to do, but not important enough to do the right way -- meaning standards, best practices, good architecture, et al.  I call it lazy coding.  The industry calls it RAD (rapid application development). I started on the conversion tool at the end of last week.  It will convert our legacy data to a completely new system which I'm working on piece by piece.  It will be used in the future, but only the new parts because it'll only be necessary to convert the individual pieces of the data once.  It was the perfect opportunity to just whip something together, but it was still functional unlike a prototype or proof of concept.  Although I would never write an application like this for a customer (internal or external) this methodology (if you can call it that) works great for something like this. I wouldn't be surprised if I get flamed for equating RAD to lazy coding or lacking standards, best practice, or good architecture.  Unfortunately, it fits in the current usage.  Although, it's possible to create a good, maintainable application using the RAD methodology, it's just too ripe for abuse and requires too much discipline for someone let alone a team to do right. Sometimes it's just fun to throw caution to the wind and start slamming code.

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• Using SharePoint PeoplePicker control in custom ASP.NET pages

  - by Jignesh Gangajaliya

  I was developing custom ASP.NET page for a SharePoint project, and the page uses SharePoint PeoplePicker control. I needed to manipulate the control on the client side based on the user inputs. PeoplePicker Picker is a complex control and the difficult bit is that it contains many controls on the page (use the page source viewer to see the HTML tags generated). So getting into the right bit is tricky and also the default JavaScript functions like, control.disabled; control.focus(); will not work with PeoplePicker control. After some trial and error I came up with the solution to manipulate the control using JavaScript.  Here I am posting the JavaScript code snippet to enable/disable the PeoplePicker Control: function ToggleDisabledPeoplePicker(element, isDisabled) {     try     {         element.disabled = isDisabled;     }            catch(exception)     {}            if ((element.childNodes) && (element.childNodes.length > 0))     {         for (var index = 0; index < element.childNodes.length; index++)         {             ToggleDisabledPeoplePicker(element.childNodes[index], isDisabled);         }     } } // to disable the control ToggleDisabledPeoplePicker(document.getElementById("<%=txtMRA.ClientID%>"), true); The script shown below can be used to set focus back to the PeoplePicker control from custom JavaScript validation function: var found = false;         function SetFocusToPeoplePicker(element) {     try     {         if (element.id.lastIndexOf("upLevelDiv") !=-1)         {             element.focus();             found = true;             return;         }     }             catch(exception)     {}             if ((element.childNodes) && (element.childNodes.length > 0))     {         for (var index = 0; index < element.childNodes.length; index++)         {             if (found)             {                 found = false;                 break;             }                      SetFocusToPeoplePicker(element.childNodes[index]);         }     } } - Jignesh

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• Guest Post: Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the &lsquo;Hello World of WPF&rsquo;

  - by Eric Nelson

  [You might want to also read other GuestPosts on my blog – or contribute one?] On the 26th and 27th of March (2010) myself and Edd Morgan of Microsoft will be popping along to the Scottish Ruby Conference. I dabble with Ruby and I am a huge fan whilst Edd is a “proper Ruby developer”. Hence I asked Edd if he was interested in creating a guest post or two for my blog on IronRuby. This is the second of those posts. If you should stumble across this post and happen to be attending the Scottish Ruby Conference, then please do keep a look out for myself and Edd. We would both love to chat about all things Ruby and IronRuby. And… we should have (if Amazon is kind) a few books on IronRuby with us at the conference which will need to find a good home. This is me and Edd and … the book: Order on Amazon: http://bit.ly/ironrubyunleashed Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the ‘Hello World of WPF’ In my previous post I introduced, to a minor extent, IronRuby. I expanded a little on the basics of by getting a Rails app up-and-running on this .NET implementation of the Ruby language — but there wasn't much to it! So now I would like to go from simply running a pre-existing project under IronRuby to developing a whole new application demonstrating the seamless interoperability between IronRuby and .NET. In particular, we'll be using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) — the component of the .NET Framework stack used to create rich media and graphical interfaces. Foundations of WPF To reiterate, WPF is the engine in the .NET Framework responsible for rendering rich user interfaces and other media. It's not the only collection of libraries in the framework with the power to do this — Windows Forms does the trick, too — but it is the most powerful and flexible. Put simply, WPF really excels when you need to employ eye candy. It's all about creating impact. Whether you're presenting a document, video, a data entry form, some kind of data visualisation (which I am most hopeful for, especially in terms of IronRuby - more on that later) or chaining all of the above with some flashy animations, you're likely to find that WPF gives you the most power when developing any of these for a Windows target. Let's demonstrate this with an example. I give you what I like to consider the 'hello, world' of WPF applications: the analogue clock. Today, over my lunch break, I created a WPF-based analogue clock using IronRuby... Any normal person would have just looked at their watch. - Twitter The Sample Application: Click here to see this sample in full on GitHub. Using Windows Presentation Foundation from IronRuby to create a Clock class Invoking the Clock class   Gives you The above is by no means perfect (it was a lunch break), but I think it does the job of illustrating IronRuby's interoperability with WPF using a familiar data visualisation. I'm sure you'll want to dissect the code yourself, but allow me to step through the important bits. (By the way, feel free to run this through ir first to see what actually happens). Now we're using IronRuby - unlike my previous post where we took pure Ruby code and ran it through ir, the IronRuby interpreter, to demonstrate compatibility. The main thing of note is the very distinct parallels between .NET namespaces and Ruby modules, .NET classes and Ruby classes. I guess there's not much to say about it other than at this point, you may as well be working with a purely Ruby graphics-drawing library. You're instantiating .NET objects, but you're doing it with the standard Ruby .new method you know from Ruby as Object#new — although, the root object of all your IronRuby objects isn't actually Object, it's System.Object. You're calling methods on these objects (and classes, for example in the call to System.Windows.Controls.Canvas.SetZIndex()) using the underscored, lowercase convention established for the Ruby language. The integration is so seamless. The fact that you're using a dynamic language on top of .NET's CLR is completely abstracted from you, allowing you to just build your software. A Brief Note on Events Events are a big part of developing client applications in .NET as well as under every other environment I can think of. In case you aren't aware, event-driven programming is essentially the practice of telling your code to call a particular method, or other chunk of code (a delegate) when something happens at an unpredictable time. You can never predict when a user is going to click a button, move their mouse or perform any other kind of input, so the advent of the GUI is what necessitated event-driven programming. This is where one of my favourite aspects of the Ruby language, blocks, can really help us. In traditional C#, for instance, you may subscribe to an event (assign a block of code to execute when an event occurs) in one of two ways: by passing a reference to a named method, or by providing an anonymous code block. You'd be right for seeing the parallel here with Ruby's concept of blocks, Procs and lambdas. As demonstrated at the very end of this rather basic script, we are using .NET's System.Timers.Timer to (attempt to) update the clock every second (I know it's probably not the best way of doing this, but for example's sake). Note: Diverting a little from what I said above, the ticking of a clock is very predictable, yet we still use the event our Timer throws to do this updating as one of many ways to perform that task outside of the main thread. You'll see that all that's needed to assign a block of code to be triggered on an event is to provide that block to the method of the name of the event as it is known to the CLR. This drawback to this is that it only allows the delegation of one code block to each event. You may use the add method to subscribe multiple handlers to that event - pushing that to the end of a queue. Like so: def tick puts "tick tock" end timer.elapsed.add method(:tick) timer.elapsed.add proc { puts "tick tock" } tick_handler = lambda { puts "tick tock" } timer.elapsed.add(tick_handler)   The ability to just provide a block of code as an event handler helps IronRuby towards that very important term I keep throwing around; low ceremony. Anonymous methods are, of course, available in other more conventional .NET languages such as C# and VB but, as usual, feel ever so much more elegant and natural in IronRuby. Note: Whether it's a named method or an anonymous chunk o' code, the block you delegate to the handling of an event can take arguments - commonly, a sender object and some args. Another Brief Note on Verbosity Personally, I don't mind verbose chaining of references in my code as long as it doesn't interfere with performance - as evidenced in the example above. While I love clean code, there's a certain feeling of safety that comes with the terse explicitness of long-winded addressing and the describing of objects as opposed to ambiguity (not unlike this sentence). However, when working with IronRuby, even I grow tired of typing System::Whatever::Something. Some people enjoy simply assuming namespaces and forgetting about them, regardless of the language they're using. Don't worry, IronRuby has you covered. It is completely possible to, with a call to include, bring the contents of a .NET-converted module into context of your IronRuby code - just as you would if you wanted to bring in an 'organic' Ruby module. To refactor the style of the above example, I could place the following at the top of my Clock class: class Clock include System::Windows::Shape include System::Windows::Media include System::Windows::Threading # and so on...   And by doing so, reduce calls to System::Windows::Shapes::Ellipse.new to simply Ellipse.new or references to System::Windows::Threading::DispatcherPriority.Render to a friendlier DispatcherPriority.Render. Conclusion I hope by now you can understand better how IronRuby interoperates with .NET and how you can harness the power of the .NET framework with the dynamic nature and elegant idioms of the Ruby language. The manner and parlance of Ruby that makes it a joy to work with sets of data is, of course, present in IronRuby — couple that with WPF's capability to produce great graphics quickly and easily, and I hope you can visualise the possibilities of data visualisation using these two things. Using IronRuby and WPF together to create visual representations of data and infographics is very exciting to me. Although today, with this project, we're only presenting one simple piece of information - the time - the potential is much grander. My day-to-day job is centred around software development and UI design, specifically in the realm of healthcare, and if you were to pay a visit to our office you would behold, directly above my desk, a large plasma TV with a constantly rotating, animated slideshow of charts and infographics to help members of our team do their jobs. It's an app powered by WPF which never fails to spark some conversation with visitors whose gaze has been hooked. If only it was written in IronRuby, the pleasantly low ceremony and reduced pre-processing time for my brain would have helped greatly. Edd Morgan blog Related Links: Getting PhP and Ruby working on Windows Azure and SQL Azure

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• .NET CoffeeScript Handler

  - by Liam McLennan

  After more time than I care to admit I have finally released a rudimentary Http Handler for serving compiled CoffeeScript from Asp.Net applications. It was a long and painful road but I am glad to finally have a usable strategy for client-side scripting in CoffeeScript. Why CoffeeScript? As Douglas Crockford discussed in detail, Javascript is a mixture of good and bad features. The genius of CoffeeScript is to treat javascript in the browser as a virtual machine. By compiling to javascript CoffeeScript gets a clean slate to re-implement syntax, taking the best of javascript and ruby and combining them into a beautiful scripting language. The only limitation is that CoffeeScript cannot do anything that javascript cannot do. Here is an example from the CoffeeScript website. First, the coffeescript syntax: reverse: (string) -> string.split('').reverse().join '' alert reverse '.eeffoC yrT' and the javascript that it compiles to: var reverse; reverse = function(string) { return string.split('').reverse().join(''); }; alert(reverse('.eeffoC yrT')); Areas For Improvement ;) The current implementation is deeply flawed, however, at this point I’m just glad it works. When the server receives a request for a coffeescript file the following things happen: The CoffeeScriptHandler is invoked If the script has previously been compiled then the compiled version is returned. Else it writes a script file containing the CoffeeScript compiler and the requested coffee script The process shells out to CScript.exe to to execute the script. The resulting javascript is sent back to the browser. This outlandish process is necessary because I could not find a way to directly execute the coffeescript compiler from .NET. If anyone can help out with that I would appreciate it.

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• xcopy file, suppress &ldquo;Does xxx specify a file name&hellip;&rdquo; message

  - by MarkPearl

  Today we had an interesting problem with file copying. We wanted to use xcopy to copy a file from one location to another and rename the copied file but do this impersonating another user. Getting the impersonation to work was fairly simple, however we then had the challenge of getting xcopy to work. The problem was that xcopy kept prompting us with a prompt similar to the following… Does file.xxx specify a file name or directory name on the target (F = file, D = directory)? At which point we needed to press ‘Y’. This seems to be a fairly common challenge with xcopy, as illustrated by the following stack overflow link… One of the solutions was to do the following… echo f | xcopy /f /y srcfile destfile This is fine if you are running from the command prompt, but if you are triggering this from c# how could we daisy chain a bunch of commands…. The solution was fairly simple, we eventually ended up with the following method… public void Copy(string initialFile, string targetFile) { string xcopyExe = @"C:\windows\system32\xcopy.exe"; string cmdExe = @"C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe"; ProcessStartInfo p = new ProcessStartInfo(); p.FileName = cmdExe; p.Arguments = string.Format(@"/c echo f | {2} {0} {1} /Y", initialFile, targetFile, xcopyExe); Process.Start(p); } Where we wrapped the commands we wanted to chain as arguments and instead of calling xcopy directly, we called cmd.exe passing xcopy as an argument.

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• Charms and the App Bar

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Ok. I admit. I made a mistake in the last post about our planespotter app. I have dedicated a full part of the hub to Social. I also had a section called Friends but that made sense since I said that “Friends” is a special group of people that connect to each other through our app and only our app. Social however is sharing our spots with Twitter, Facebook and so on. Now, we could write that functionality in our app in a different section but there is one small problem with that: users don’t expect that. Ok, I admit. The mistake was quite deliberate to give me an excuse to write this part. But still: the mistake is one I see a lot. People are trying to do stuff in their application that they shouldn’t be doing. This always strike me as slightly odd: why do some work when others have already done it for you and you can just use it? After all: good developers are lazy (lazy people will always try to find the easiest way to do something and in development land this usually means the cleanest and best to support way…) So. What is that part that Microsoft has done for us and we don’t have to do ourselves? The answer lies on the right hand of your Win8 screen: This is a screenshot of my tablet (as you can see I am writing this right now….) When I swipe my finger from out of the screen on the right inside the screen (or move the mouse to the upper right corner) this menu will appear. Next to settings and the start menu button we’ll find the Search and the Share charms. These are two ways that your app can share the information it contains with the rest of the world, or at least: the rest of your system. So don’t write a Search feature in your app. Don’t write a Share feature in your app. It’s here already. Users, once they are used to Windows 8, will use that feature and expect it to work. If it doesn’t, they won’t like your app and you can kiss you dreams of everlasting fame goodbye. So use these two. What are they? Well, simply they are parts of a contract. In your app you say somewhere in code that you are supporting Search and Share. So when the user selects Share the system will interrogate the current app in the foreground if it supports this feature. Your app will say “But why, yes, I do!” Then the system will ask the app “Ok then, wisecrack, then share!” and you will have to provide the system with some information about the format. Other applications have subscribed to be at the receiving end of the Share contract. They have told the system that they support Sharing (receiving) and which formats they understand. If one or more of them support the formats you specify, the user will see them. The user clicks / taps on the app of their choice and data is moved from your app to the new one. So if you say you support Facebook and Twitter users can post data from your app to these networks by selecting Share. The same applies to Search. Don’t make a “search” button in your app but use the contract to tell the system that you support search and use that instead. Users will be grateful (remember that bar with men/women/creatures that are waiting for you?) The more and more people get to know Windows 8, the more they will use this. And if you are one of the people who wrote an app that helped them learn the system, well, that’s even better. So. We don’t have a Share or a Search button. We do have other buttons. Most important: we probably need a “New Spot” button. And a “Filter” might be useful. Or someway to open the camera so you can add a picture to the spot. Where will be put those? The answer is the “Appbar” . This is a application / context aware menu that slides up from the bottom of the screen when you move your finger / mouse from below the screen into it. From above downwards works just as well. Here you see an example of the appbar from the People app. (click on it for a larger version). This appears whenever you slide your finger up from below of down from above. This is where you put your commands. Remember, this is context aware so this menu will change when you are in different parts of your app or when you have selected different items. There are a few conventions when you create this appbar. First, the items on the right are “General” items, meaning they have little to do with what is on the screen right now. I think this would be a great place to add our “New Spot” icon. On the far left are items associated with the current selected item or screen. So if you have a spot selected, the button for Add Photo should be visible here and on the left hand side. Not everything is as clear as this, but this is what you should strive for. Group items together. And please note: this is the only place in Metro design where we are allowed to use lines as separators. So when you want to separate a group of icons from another group, add a line. Also note the simplicity of the buttons. No colors, no lights or shadows, no 3D. After a couple of years of fancy almost realistic looking icons people have finally decided that hey, this is a virtual world: it’s ok to look virtual as well. So make things as readable and clear as possible and don’t try to duplicate nature. It’s all about the information, remember? (If you don’t remember I’d like to point you to a older blog post of mine about the what and why of Metro). So.. think about the buttons a bit and think about Share and Search. What will you put there? Remember: this is the way the users interact with your apps and while you shouldn’t judge a book by its covers when it comes to people, this isn’t entirely so when it comes to apps. People DO judge an app by its looks and the way it feels. Take advantage of that. History has learned that a crappy app with a GREAT user interface gets better reviews than a GREAT app with a lousy UI… I know: developers will find this extremely unfair but that’s the world we live in (No, I am not saying you should deliver rubbish apps). Next time: we’ll start by building the darn thing!

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• Paper Gold Rush

  - by Chris G. Williams

  The last few days at the shop have been reminiscent of a marathon of Pawn Stars. Quite a few people have come in wanting to trade for store credit. Most of them have left disappointed. We did pick up a few things here and there (which hopefully I can sell.) The problem, in a nutshell, is that people get it in their head that a (YuGiOh) card is worth X amount because they looked it up 2-3 years a...go, or someone told them it was valuable... then they play it in their deck for a year without sleeves, and cram it in a binder covered in duct tape. By the time they bring the cards in to me, new sets have come out which often de-value the tournament usefulness of the card from $20 to *maybe* 50 cents, in mint condition. Which means I can offer them about 10-15 cents... only they are almost never in mint condition, which means I usually offer them nothing at all. Most of the time, you can watch their smile fade as I start going through their cards. It's kinda sad, really, since I know they think they've spent the last two years walking around with the keys to their own personal gold mine. I don't really enjoy seeing that look on a child's face. I like kids and I remember those moments when perception and reality crashed headlong into each other. It was seldom pretty. So, when I'm talking to a child, I try to take it easy on them and give them some suggestions on how to better preserve their cards. Sometimes though, it's an adult. Depending on the situation, my response to them varies pretty broadly. Most of the time though, I still feel pretty bad when it doesn't go their way.

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• Visual Studio, .NET Framework, and language versions

  - by Scott Dorman

  Every so often a question comes up about how Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and a .NET programming language relate to each other. Mostly, these questions have to do with versions. The reality is that these are actually three different “products” that are versioned independently of each other but are related. Looking at how Visual Studio, the .NET Framework version, and the CLR versions relate to each other results in the following: Visual Studio CLR .NET Framework Visual Studio .NET (Ranier) 1.0.3705 1.0 Visual Studio 2003 (Everett) 1.1.4322 1.1 Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) 2.0.50727 2.0 Visual Studio 2005 with .NET 3.0 Extensions 2.0.50727 2.0, 3.0 Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) 2.0.50727 2.0 SP1, 3.0 SP1, 3.5 Visual Studio 2008 SP1 2.0.50727 2.0 SP2, 3.0 SP2, 3.5 SP1 Visual Studio 2010 (Hawaii) 4.0.30319 4.0 The actual Visual Studio version numbers are: Product Name Version Ship Date Visual Studio .NET 7.0.???? 02/2002 Visual Studio .NET 2002 SP1 7.0.????   Visual Studio 2003 7.1.???? 04/2003 Visual Studio 2003 SP1 7.1.6030 09/13/2006 Visual Studio 2005 8.0.5072   Visual Studio 2005 SP1   12/14/2006 Visual Studio 2008 9.0.21022.8 11/19/2007 Visual Studio 2008 SP1 9.0.30729.1   Visual Studio 2010 10.0.30319.1 04/12/2010 (For those entries that are missing information, it simply means that I didn’t already know it and/or couldn’t easily find it online.) So far, everything seems fairly reasonable and isn’t terribly difficult to keep coordinated. However, when you start trying to find language versions and how those relate to .NET Framework, CLR, or Visual Studio releases it becomes more difficult. The breakdown for the programming languages that are part of Visual Studio are: Framework CLR Language     C# VB F# 1.0 1.0.3705 1.0 7.0 - 1.1 1.1.4322 1.1 7.1 - 2.0 2.0.50727 2.0 8.0 - 3.0 2.0.50727 2.0 8.0 - 3.5 2.0.50727 2.0 9.0 - 4.0 4.0.30319 4.0 10.0 2.0   Technorati Tags: Visual Studio,.NET

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• Cannot resolve the collation conflict between "Latin1_General_CI_AS" and "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_

  - by Patrick Olurotimi Ige

  I was writing a store proc for a report and i needed some data from another server so i added a linked server to connect to this new db server. when i do a select like below its all fine select a,b,c from Server.DatabaseName.dbo.table But when i use the table in a join i get the error "Cannot resolve the collation conflict between "Latin1_General_CI_AS" and "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS" in the equal to operation." I did check the collation set on the 2 databases and it was actually the same and had mo idea why i'm getting the error. I later found out that you could specifically tell it to use a COLLATE Just rewrite your join like this on a.name COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS = eaobjname Hope that helps and saves your precious time Patrick

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• Welcome to www.badapi.net, a REST API with badly-behaved endpoints

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2014/08/14/welcome-to-www.badapi.net-a-rest-api-with-badly-behaved-endpoints.aspxI've had a need in a few projects for a REST API that doesn't behave well - takes a long time to respond, or never responds, returns unexpected status codes etc.That can be very useful for testing that clients cope gracefully with unexpected responses.Till now I've always coded a stub API in the project and run it locally, but I've put a few 'misbehaved' endpoints together and published them at www.badapi.net, and the source is on GitHub here: sixeyed/badapi.net.You can browse to the home page and see the available endpoints. I'll be adding more as I think of them, and I may give the styling of the help pages a bit more thought...As of today's release, the misbehaving endpoints available to you are:GET longrunning?between={between}&and={and} - Waits for a (short) random period before returningGET verylongrunning?between={between}&and={and} -Waits for a (long) random period before returningGET internalservererror    - Returns 500: Internal Server ErrorGET badrequest - Returns 400: BadRequestGET notfound - Returns 404: Not FoundGET unauthorized - Returns 401: UnauthorizedGET forbidden - Returns 403: ForbiddenGET conflict -Returns 409: ConflictGET status/{code}?reason={reason} - Returns the provided status code Go bad.

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• A Good .NET Quiz ...

  - by lavanyadeepak

  A Good .NET Quiz ... Whilst casually surfing today afternoon I came across a good .NET quiz in one of the indian software company website. It is rather a general technology quiz than just a .NET quiz because it also contains options for the following technologies.   .NET PHP Javascript MySql Testing QTP English Aptitude General Knowledge Science HTML CSS All It also has the following levels for the Quiz:   Easy Medium Hard All   The URL of the quiz is as below: http://www.qualitypointtech.net/quiz/listing_sub_level.php

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• C#: Does an IDisposable in a Halted Iterator Dispose?

  - by James Michael Hare

  If that sounds confusing, let me give you an example. Let's say you expose a method to read a database of products, and instead of returning a List<Product> you return an IEnumerable<Product> in iterator form (yield return). This accomplishes several good things: The IDataReader is not passed out of the Data Access Layer which prevents abstraction leak and resource leak potentials. You don't need to construct a full List<Product> in memory (which could be very big) if you just want to forward iterate once. If you only want to consume up to a certain point in the list, you won't incur the database cost of looking up the other items. This could give us an example like: 1: // a sample data access object class to do standard CRUD operations. 2: public class ProductDao 3: { 4: private DbProviderFactory _factory = SqlClientFactory.Instance 5:  6: // a method that would retrieve all available products 7: public IEnumerable<Product> GetAvailableProducts() 8: { 9: // must create the connection 10: using (var con = _factory.CreateConnection()) 11: { 12: con.ConnectionString = _productsConnectionString; 13: con.Open(); 14:  15: // create the command 16: using (var cmd = _factory.CreateCommand()) 17: { 18: cmd.Connection = con; 19: cmd.CommandText = _getAllProductsStoredProc; 20: cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; 21:  22: // get a reader and pass back all results 23: using (var reader = cmd.ExecuteReader()) 24: { 25: while(reader.Read()) 26: { 27: yield return new Product 28: { 29: Name = reader["product_name"].ToString(), 30: ... 31: }; 32: } 33: } 34: } 35: } 36: } 37: } The database details themselves are irrelevant. I will say, though, that I'm a big fan of using the System.Data.Common classes instead of your provider specific counterparts directly (SqlCommand, OracleCommand, etc). This lets you mock your data sources easily in unit testing and also allows you to swap out your provider in one line of code. In fact, one of the shared components I'm most proud of implementing was our group's DatabaseUtility library that simplifies all the database access above into one line of code in a thread-safe and provider-neutral way. I went with my own flavor instead of the EL due to the fact I didn't want to force internal company consumers to use the EL if they didn't want to, and it made it easy to allow them to mock their database for unit testing by providing a MockCommand, MockConnection, etc that followed the System.Data.Common model. One of these days I'll blog on that if anyone's interested. Regardless, you often have situations like the above where you are consuming and iterating through a resource that must be closed once you are finished iterating. For the reasons stated above, I didn't want to return IDataReader (that would force them to remember to Dispose it), and I didn't want to return List<Product> (that would force them to hold all products in memory) -- but the first time I wrote this, I was worried. What if you never consume the last item and exit the loop? Are the reader, command, and connection all disposed correctly? Of course, I was 99.999999% sure the creators of C# had already thought of this and taken care of it, but inspection in Reflector was difficult due to the nature of the state machines yield return generates, so I decided to try a quick example program to verify whether or not Dispose() will be called when an iterator is broken from outside the iterator itself -- i.e. before the iterator reports there are no more items. So I wrote a quick Sequencer class with a Dispose() method and an iterator for it. Yes, it is COMPLETELY contrived: 1: // A disposable sequence of int -- yes this is completely contrived... 2: internal class Sequencer : IDisposable 3: { 4: private int _i = 0; 5: private readonly object _mutex = new object(); 6:  7: // Constructs an int sequence. 8: public Sequencer(int start) 9: { 10: _i = start; 11: } 12:  13: // Gets the next integer 14: public int GetNext() 15: { 16: lock (_mutex) 17: { 18: return _i++; 19: } 20: } 21:  22: // Dispose the sequence of integers. 23: public void Dispose() 24: { 25: // force output immediately (flush the buffer) 26: Console.WriteLine("Disposed with last sequence number of {0}!", _i); 27: Console.Out.Flush(); 28: } 29: } And then I created a generator (infinite-loop iterator) that did the using block for auto-Disposal: 1: // simply defines an extension method off of an int to start a sequence 2: public static class SequencerExtensions 3: { 4: // generates an infinite sequence starting at the specified number 5: public static IEnumerable<int> GetSequence(this int starter) 6: { 7: // note the using here, will call Dispose() when block terminated. 8: using (var seq = new Sequencer(starter)) 9: { 10: // infinite loop on this generator, means must be bounded by caller! 11: while(true) 12: { 13: yield return seq.GetNext(); 14: } 15: } 16: } 17: } This is really the same conundrum as the database problem originally posed. Here we are using iteration (yield return) over a large collection (infinite sequence of integers). If we cut the sequence short by breaking iteration, will that using block exit and hence, Dispose be called? Well, let's see: 1: // The test program class 2: public class IteratorTest 3: { 4: // The main test method. 5: public static void Main() 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine("Going to consume 10 of infinite items"); 8: Console.Out.Flush(); 9:  10: foreach(var i in 0.GetSequence()) 11: { 12: // could use TakeWhile, but wanted to output right at break... 13: if(i >= 10) 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine("Breaking now!"); 16: Console.Out.Flush(); 17: break; 18: } 19:  20: Console.WriteLine(i); 21: Console.Out.Flush(); 22: } 23:  24: Console.WriteLine("Done with loop."); 25: Console.Out.Flush(); 26: } 27: } So, what do we see? Do we see the "Disposed" message from our dispose, or did the Dispose get skipped because from an "eyeball" perspective we should be locked in that infinite generator loop? Here's the results: 1: Going to consume 10 of infinite items 2: 0 3: 1 4: 2 5: 3 6: 4 7: 5 8: 6 9: 7 10: 8 11: 9 12: Breaking now! 13: Disposed with last sequence number of 11! 14: Done with loop. Yes indeed, when we break the loop, the state machine that C# generates for yield iterate exits the iteration through the using blocks and auto-disposes the IDisposable correctly. I must admit, though, the first time I wrote one, I began to wonder and that led to this test. If you've never seen iterators before (I wrote a previous entry here) the infinite loop may throw you, but you have to keep in mind it is not a linear piece of code, that every time you hit a "yield return" it cedes control back to the state machine generated for the iterator. And this state machine, I'm happy to say, is smart enough to clean up the using blocks correctly. I suspected those wily guys and gals at Microsoft engineered it well, and I wasn't disappointed. But, I've been bitten by assumptions before, so it's good to test and see. Yes, maybe you knew it would or figured it would, but isn't it nice to know? And as those campy 80s G.I. Joe cartoon public service reminders always taught us, "Knowing is half the battle...". Technorati Tags: C#,.NET

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• Windows Azure Evolution - Web Sites (aka Antares) Part 1

  - by Shaun

  This is the 3rd post of my Windows Azure Evolution series, focus on the new features and enhancement which was alone with the Windows Azure Platform Upgrade June 2012, announced at the MEET Windows Azure event on 7th June. In the first post I introduced the new preview developer portal and how to works for the existing features such as cloud services, storages and SQL databases. In the second one I talked about the Windows Azure .NET SDK 1.7 on the latest Visual Studio 2012 RC on Windows 8. From this one I will begin to introduce some new features. Now let’s have a look on the first one of them, Windows Azure Web Sites.   Overview Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS), as known as Antares, was a new feature still in preview stage in this upgrade. It allows people to quickly and easily deploy websites to a highly scalable cloud environment, uses the languages and open source apps of the choice then deploy such as FTP, Git and TFS. It also can be integrated with Windows Azure services like SQL Database, Caching, CDN and Storage easily. After read its introduction we may have a question: since we can deploy a website from both cloud service web role and web site, what’s the different between them? So, let’s have a quick compare.   CLOUD SERVICE WEB SITE OS Windows Server Windows Server Virtualization Windows Azure Virtual Machine Windows Azure Virtual Machine Host IIS IIS Platform ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, WCF ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, PHP Language C#, VB.NET C#, VB.NET, PHP Database SQL Database SQL Database, MySQL Architecture Multi layered, background worker, message queuing, etc.. Simple website with backend database. VS Project Windows Azure Cloud Service ASP.NET Web Form, ASP.NET MVC, etc.. Out-of-box Gallery (none) Drupal, DotNetNuke, WordPress, etc.. Deployment Package upload, Visual Studio publish FTP, Git, TFS, WebMatrix Compute Mode Dedicate VM Shared Across VMs, Dedicate VM Scale Scale up, scale out Scale up, scale out As you can see, there are many difference between the cloud service and web site, but the main point is that, the cloud service focus on those complex architecture web application. For example, if you want to build a website with frontend layer, middle business layer and data access layer, with some background worker process connected through the message queue, then you should better use cloud service, since it provides full control of your code and application. But if you just want to build a personal blog or a  business portal, then you can use the web site. Since the web site have many galleries, you can create them even without any coding and configuration. David Pallmann have an awesome figure explains the benefits between the could service, web site and virtual machine.   Create a Personal Blog in Web Site from Gallery As I mentioned above, one of the big feature in WAWS is to build a website from an existing gallery, which means we don’t need to coding and configure. What we need to do is open the windows azure developer portal and click the NEW button, select WEB SITE and FROM GALLERY. In the popping up windows there are many websites we can choose to use. For example, for personal blog there are Orchard CMS, WordPress; for CMS there are DotNetNuke, Drupal 7, mojoPortal. Let’s select WordPress and click the next button. The next step is to configure the web site. We will need to specify the DNS name and select the subscription and region. Since the WordPress uses MySQL as its backend database, we also need to create a MySQL database as well. Windows Azure Web Sites utilize ClearDB to host the MySQL databases. You cannot create a MySQL database directly from SQL Databases section. Finally, since we selected to create a new MySQL database we need to specify the database name and region in the last step. Also we need to accept the ClearDB’s terms as well. Then windows azure platform will download the WordPress codes and deploy the MySQL database and website. Then it will be ready to use. Select the website and click the BROWSE button, the WordPress administration page will be shown. After configured the WordPress here is my personal web blog on the cloud. It took me no more than 10 minutes to establish without any coding.   Monitor, Configure, Scale and Linked Resources Let’s click into the website I had just created in the portal and have a look on what we can do. In the website details page where are five sections. - Dashboard The overall information about this website, such as the basic usage status, public URL, compute mode, FTP address, subscription and links that we can specify the deployment credentials, TFS and Git publish setting, etc.. - Monitor Some status information such as the CPU usage, memory usage etc., errors, etc.. We can add more metrics by clicking the ADD METRICS button and the bottom as well. - Configure Here we can set the configurations of our website such as the .NET and PHP runtime version, diagnostics settings, application settings and the IIS default documents. - Scale This is something interesting. In WAWS there are two compute mode or called web site mode. One is “shared”, which means our website will be shared with other web sites in a group of windows azure virtual machines. Each web site have its own process (w3wp.exe) with some sandbox technology to isolate from others. When we need to scaling-out our web site in shared mode, we actually increased the working process count. Hence in shared mode we cannot specify the virtual machine size since they are shared across all web sites. This is a little bit different than the scaling mode of the cloud service (hosted service web role and worker role). The other mode called “dedicate”, which means our web site will use the whole windows azure virtual machine. This is the same hosting behavior as cloud service web role. In web role it will be deployed on the virtual machines we specified and all of them are only used by us. In web sites dedicate mode, it’s the same. In this mode when we scaling-out our web site we will use more virtual machines, and each of them will only host our own website. And we can specify the virtual machine size in this mode. In the developer portal we can select which mode we are using from the scale section. In shared mode we can only specify the instance count, but in dedicate mode we can specify the instance size as well as the instance count. - Linked Resource The MySQL database created alone with the creation of our WordPress web site is a linked resource. We can add more linked resources in this section.   Pricing For the web site itself, since this feature is in preview period if you are using shared mode, then you will get free up to 10 web sites. But if you are using dedicate mode, the price would be the virtual machines you are using. For example, if you are using dedicate and configured two middle size virtual machines then you will pay $230.40 per month. If there is SQL Database linked to your web site then they will be charged separately based on the Pay-As-You-Go price. For example a 1GB web edition database costs $9.99 per month. And the bandwidth will be charged as well. For example 10GB outbound data transfer costs $1.20 per month. For more information about the pricing please have a look at the windows azure pricing page.   Summary Windows Azure Web Sites gives us easier and quicker way to create, develop and deploy website to window azure platform. Comparing with the cloud service web role, the WAWS have many out-of-box gallery we can use directly. So if you just want to build a blog, CMS or business portal you don’t need to learn ASP.NET, you don’t need to learn how to configure DotNetNuke, you don’t need to learn how to prepare PHP and MySQL. By using WAWS gallery you can establish a website within 10 minutes without any lines of code. But in some cases we do need to code by ourselves. We may need to tweak the layout of our pages, or we may have a traditional ASP.NET or PHP web application which needed to migrated to the cloud. Besides the gallery WAWS also provides many features to download, upload code. It also provides the feature to integrate with some version control services such as TFS and Git. And it also provides the deploy approaches through FTP and Web Deploy. In the next post I will demonstrate how to use WebMatrix to download and modify the website, and how to use TFS and Git to deploy automatically one our code changes committed.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Get Current QuarterEnd for a given FYE Date

  - by Rohit Gupta

  Here is the code to get the Current Quarter End for a Given FYE Date: 1: public static DateTime ThisQuarterEnd(this DateTime date, DateTime fyeDate) 2: { 3: IEnumerable<DateTime> candidates = 4: QuartersInYear(date.Year, fyeDate.Month).Union(QuartersInYear(date.Year + 1, fyeDate.Month)); 5: return candidates.Where(d => d.Subtract(date).Days >= 0).First(); 6: } 7:  8: public static IEnumerable<DateTime> QuartersInYear(int year, int q4Month) 9: { 10: int q1Month = 3, q2Month = 6, q3Month = 9; 11: int q1year = year, q2year = year, q3year = year; 12: int q1Day = 31, q2Day = 31, q3Day = 31, q4Day = 31; 13:  14: 15: q3Month = q4Month - 3; 16: if (q3Month <= 0) 17: { 18: q3Month = q3Month + 12; 19: q3year = year - 1; 20: } 21: q2Month = q4Month - 6; 22: if (q2Month <= 0) 23: { 24: q2Month = q2Month + 12; 25: q2year = year - 1; 26: } 27: q1Month = q4Month - 9; 28: if (q1Month <= 0) 29: { 30: q1Month = q1Month + 12; 31: q1year = year - 1; 32: } 33:  34: q1Day = new DateTime(q1year, q1Month, 1).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1).Day; 35: q2Day = new DateTime(q2year, q2Month, 1).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1).Day; 36: q3Day = new DateTime(q3year, q3Month, 1).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1).Day; 37: q4Day = new DateTime(year, q4Month, 1).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1).Day; 38:  39: return new List<DateTime>() { 40: new DateTime(q1year, q1Month, q1Day), 41: new DateTime(q2year, q2Month, q2Day), 42: new DateTime(q3year, q3Month, q3Day), 43: new DateTime(year, q4Month, q4Day), 44: }; 45:  46: } The code to get the NextQuarterEnd is simple, just Change the Where clause to read d.Subtract(date).Days > 0 instead of d.Subtract(date).Days >= 0 1: public static DateTime NextQuarterEnd(this DateTime date, DateTime fyeDate) 2: { 3: IEnumerable<DateTime> candidates = 4: QuartersInYear(date.Year, fyeDate.Month).Union(QuartersInYear(date.Year + 1, fyeDate.Month)); 5: return candidates.Where(d => d.Subtract(date).Days > 0).First(); 6: } Also if you need to get the Quarter Label for a given Date, given a particular FYE date then following is the code to use: 1: public static string GetQuarterLabel(this DateTime date, DateTime fyeDate) 2: { 3: int q1Month = fyeDate.Month - 9, q2Month = fyeDate.Month - 6, q3Month = fyeDate.Month - 3; 4:  5: int year = date.Year, q1Year = date.Year, q2Year = date.Year, q3Year = date.Year; 6: 7: if (q1Month <= 0) 8: { 9: q1Month += 12; 10: q1Year = year + 1; 11: } 12: if (q2Month <= 0) 13: { 14: q2Month += 12; 15: q2Year = year + 1; 16: } 17: if (q3Month <= 0) 18: { 19: q3Month += 12; 20: q3Year = year + 1; 21: } 22:  23: string qtr = ""; 24: if (date.Month == q1Month) 25: { 26: qtr = "Qtr1"; 27: year = q1Year; 28: } 29: else if (date.Month == q2Month) 30: { 31: qtr = "Qtr2"; 32: year = q2Year; 33: } 34: else if (date.Month == q3Month) 35: { 36: qtr = "Qtr3"; 37: year = q3Year; 38: } 39: else if (date.Month == fyeDate.Month) 40: { 41: qtr = "Qtr4"; 42: year = date.Year; 43: } 44:  45: return string.Format("{0} - {1}", qtr, year.ToString()); 46: }

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