# Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Microsoft starts new ad campaign

Microsoft has started a new ad campaign. Why mention it here? I like the ad, that's why.

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# Thursday, January 01, 2009

MVP Award 2009

The year is off to a great start! I got an email this morning informing me I've been awarded the MVP Award 2009. Terrific! 

MVPLogo

 

Quote: The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say "Thank you for your technical leadership."

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# Thursday, December 18, 2008

SQL Server file sizes

Today I needed a query to see what the size and growth settings were for our databases. The query below will output name, size and growth information.

SELECT  SUBSTRING([name], 0, 40) as [Name],
                (([size]*8)/1024) as SizeMB,
                CASE [growth]
                        WHEN 0 THEN 'Fixed Size'
                        ELSE
                                CASE [is_percent_growth]
                                        WHEN 0 THEN 'Absolute growth: ' + CAST([growth] as varchar)
                                        WHEN 1 THEN 'Percentage growth: ' + CAST([growth] as varchar)
                                END
                END as [GrowthInfo]
FROM    sys.database_files

Output looks like this:

Name                                     SizeMB      GrowthInfo
---------------------------------------- ----------- -------------------------------------------------
AdventureWorks                           10          Fixed Size
AdventureWorks_log                       5           Fixed Size

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SQL Server 2005 SP3

Microsoft has release SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3, download the service pack here.

Release notes can be found here and there is also a list of the bugs that are fixed in SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3. Looks like around 45 bugs fixes!

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# Thursday, December 11, 2008

EC2 in Europe

Living in the United States it is sometimes easy to forget that some companies are much more America focused than others. Microsoft will offer some of it's betas to the North American region only, but products are usually available worldwide. Windows Azure, as a beta, is offered worldwide.

Amazon EC2 (RTM) has been offered in North America only, but has made the jump across the pond to Europe. In my mailbox today:

"We are excited to announce that we have extended Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to Europe. Developers and businesses can now run their Amazon EC2 instances in the EU to help achieve lower latency, operate closer to other resources like Amazon S3 in the EU, and meet EU data storage requirements when applicable. The new European Region for Amazon EC2 contains two Availability Zones enabling you to easily and cost effectively run fault-tolerant applications with the same scalability, reliability and cost efficiency achieved with Amazon EC2 in the U.S."

 

Amazon EC2 is the Amazon offering for hosting virtual machines in the Amazon Cloud. Windows Azure is a slightly different, but competing solution from Microsoft.

 

Note: Interested in Amazon services? Some time ago I wrote Introduction to AWS for C# developers.

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# Tuesday, December 09, 2008

The next thing for the web: Google Native Client = Googlelight?

Brad Chen from Google just announced a new form of browser technology: Native Client. It will allow you to write C or C++ code which runs, through Native Client, in the browser.

"At its core, our release consists of a runtime, a browser plugin, and a set of GCC-based compilation tools."

With my Microsoft minded way of thinking, I read:

  1. a runtime which needs to be installed, like the .NET CLR,
  2. a browser plugin, like Silverlight,
  3. tools to develop like Visual Studio / Expression Blend.

Sounds to me like Google is a little worried about Silverlight and Flash and wants to play too :-)

Update [9/12/2008]: PC World refers to Native Client as Google ActiveX. It'll be interesting to see how soon the focus will go from computing power to animation power.

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# Monday, December 08, 2008

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-561): Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 ADO.NET Application Development

I just send the last revision of my chapters for TK 70-561 to the editor. Yeah! Hopefully the book will go to print soon. You can pre-order already on Amazon!

Cover-TK70-561

For me the last chapter to work on was LINQ to SQL, but the book includes chapters on learning ADO.NET, Typed DataSets, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework. You'll need to know it all. :-)

Stephen Forte has an interesting post on the relevance of LINQ to SQL.

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# Sunday, November 30, 2008

LINQ to SQL SubmitChanges()

The DataContext.SubmitChanges() method will update the database in the following order:

- Perform all inserts
- Perform all updates
- Perform all deletes

Running SQL Profiler while running the following code will first perform all inserts on product, then the updates and the deletes. Also note that SubmitChanges will perform a batch update (which is good). The SubmitChanges is a single statement, but it does not implement a transaction, so if you want a rollback to occur if an exception occurs (for instance a foreign key violation) then you'll need to use a TransactionScope.

public void UpdateOrders()
{
    using ( var db = new VideoGameStoreDBDataContext() )
    {
        var query =  from p in db.Products
                    select p;
 
        foreach(var product in query)
        {
            product.ListPrice = product.ListPrice * 1.1;
            if ( product.ListPrice > 400 )
            {
                db.Products.DeleteOnSubmit( product );
            }
        }
 
        ProductType game = (from pt in db.ProductTypes 
                         where pt.ProductTypeName == "Game"
                         select pt).Single();
 
        Product newProduct = new Product()
        {
            ProductName = "Travian",
            ListPrice = 20,
            ProductType = game,
            ProductDescription = "Online Game",
            ProductTypeID = 1,
            ListPriceCurrency = "$"
        };
 
        db.Products.InsertOnSubmit( newProduct );
        db.SubmitChanges();
    }
}
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# Thursday, November 27, 2008

Change selected cell in DataGridView on right click

I wanted to add a context menu to a DataGridView, allowing the user to perform an action on a specific row. However, right clicking in a DataViewGrid does not change the selected row. This can be achieved by adding the following code to the CellMouseDown event (the name of my grid is dgvWorkflows):

private void dgvWorkflows_CellMouseDown(object sender, DataGridViewCellMouseEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.ColumnIndex >= 0 && e.RowIndex >= 0)
    {
        dgvWorkflows.CurrentCell = dgvWorkflows.Rows[e.RowIndex].Cells[e.ColumnIndex];
    }
}

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# Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Workflow Foundation, fault handlers and self recovering state machines

We had an interesting workflow issue the other day. For some inexplicable reason our state machine workflow was terminated. After digging around in the database trying to reconstruct what might have happened we finally figured it out:

We have a transaction scope activity which sends an update to the database. The update failed and the exception cause the fault handler on the activity to kick in. The fault handler changed the state of the state machine to custom state called 'TechnicalError'. We explicitly modeled this state because it allows our administrators to recover a workflow from a technical error and essentially restart the workflow. In the InitializeState of the 'TechnicalError' state we wanted to update some data in the database. This also failed, since the cause of the original error was that we had lost connectivity to our database.

Next?

Since we had no fault handler on this database action the workflow crashed. Since connectivity to our workflow persistence database was also lost we now have a situation where the workflow in memory is inconsistent with the data in our line of business application database and is also inconsistent with the last persisted state in the workflow persistence database.

Next?

The workflow runtime never crashed several minutes later the workflow persistence database came back online and the in memory state of the workflow (which was terminated) was sync-ed with the workflow persistence database. However, our line of business database was never updated. The timestamp on the updates in the workflow persistence database where minutes apart from the last updates in the line of business database, which made it hard to reconstruct what had happened.

Solution?

We now have a fault handler on the initialize state of the 'TechnicalError' state. If the workflow persistence database OR the line of business application database is unavailable then a delay is introduced. And the workflow retries to transition to the TechnicalError state. This way the workflow will never ever terminate. The only scenario left is where the machine running the workflow is turned off. If this happens then the workflow will recover from it's last save point and life should be good.

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MSDN Roadshow is coming to Augusta

 Roadshow-September-2008_thumb

The Maine Developer Network is proud to announce that the Northeast MSDN Roadshow by Chris Bowen and Jim O'Neil will once again make it as far north as Augusta!

Don't hesitate: sign up today!

 mdn_logo

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# Saturday, November 01, 2008

LINQ to SQL is dead

It would appear that LINQ to SQL is running on a dead end track.

At PDC the announcement was made that no more investments in LINQ to SQL are made and the Entity Framework will absorb any features that LINQ to SQL has and that are worth preserving.

The following message from Tim Mallalieu says it all:

Is LINQ to SQL Dead?

We will continue make some investments in LINQ to SQL based on customer feedback. This post was about making our intentions for future innovation clear and to call out the fact that as of .NET 4.0, LINQ to Entities will be the recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios. As mentioned, we have been working on this decision for the last few months. When we made the decision, we felt that it was important to immediately to let the community know. We knew that being open about this would result in a lot of feedback from the community, but it was important to be transparent about what we are doing as early as possible.  We want to get this information out to developers so that you know where we’re headed and can factor that in when you’re deciding how to build future applications on .NET.  We also want to get your feedback on the key experiences in LINQ to SQL that we need to add in to LINQ to Entities in order to enable the same simple scenarios that brought you to use LINQ to SQL in the first place.

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# Friday, October 31, 2008

Live Mesh goes to world wide beta

Live Mesh has gone from Tech Preview to official beta status. This also means it has gone world wide!

"Worldwide availability. We’ve removed the limits on what countries are able to sign up to use Live Mesh. We previously had limitations in place so that we could complete our testing with various language and locale settings, and now that work is indeed complete (with the caveat of course that for now the mobile client, as mentioned above, is not actually available worldwide)."

Yesterday I watched Don Gillet's PDC session on building a Mesh Application. It looks very easy.

My main concern with all this data in the cloud is securing my data. I'm thinking I may need to implement some sort of EncryptedDataEntry class which derives from DataEntry. I'll think about it some more...

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# Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Windows Live ID Becomes OpenID Provider

In the past I looked at the OpenID standard in relation to Cardspace and AOL. Now Microsoft has committed to making Windows Live ID (previously known as Microsoft Passport) support the OpenID initiative.

"Beginning today, Windows Live ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider."

The Live Services page does not mention Cardspace in relation to OpenID, but it stands to reason that as an OpenID provider Microsoft will somehow offer Cardspace support as well, just like www.myopenid.com.

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# Monday, October 27, 2008

Microsoft Cloud Platform

Windows Azure is the name Microsoft has given to the cloud based platform. If you're not at PDC (like me) then go here for more information: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/services.mspx.

"The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises."

The Cloud Computing and Services Platform Diagram

Looks like my personal point of interest, Live Mesh, is part of this platform:

"Live Services includes Mesh technologies for synchronizing user’s data and extending web applications across multiple devices."

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# Sunday, October 26, 2008

LINQ to SQL cross database queries

After discovering that the LINQ to SQL Designer will only support tables from a single data source I set out to manually implement a cross database query using two data contexts.

The result is the following query which joins orders in the OrderDB to products in the VideoGameStoreDB.

public List<Order> FindOrders( string typename )

{

    try

    {

        var productdb = new VideoGameStoreDBDataContext();

        var orderdb = new OrderDBDataContext();

 

        var query  = from o in orderdb.Orders

                     join p in productdb.Products on o.ProductID equals p.ProductID

                     where p.ProductType.ProductTypeName.Contains( typename )

                     select o;

 

 

        return query.ToList();

    }

    catch ( Exception exception )

    {

        Trace.WriteLine( exception );

        throw;

    }

}

 

LINQ to SQL is unable to resolve this query, even though both databases sit on the same server. The compiler will however not warn you not to do this, instead a runtime exception with message 'The query contains references to items defined on a different data context.' occurs.

In a scenario like this the only solution appears to be to write a stored procedure which can perform the cross database query and use that stored procedure from a data context.

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LINQ to SQL Designer supports just one connection

The LINQ to SQL Designer supports just one connection, which makes sense since a LINQ DataContext is scoped to one connection. The designer does offer to change the connection string for you, but I guess making cross database queries is not possible using the designer.

The following message is what you get when dragging a table from a second data source onto the design surface.

image

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LINQ to SQL does not support UDT's

I just discovered that the LINQ to SQL Designer does not support User Defined Types.

The following message appears when I try and add a table from my database to my design surface. The Customer table in question has a UDT named 'Point' to specify the GPS location of the business.

image

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Daylight Savings

Daylight savings for Europe started today. The United States does not switch to daylight savings until the first Sunday in November (this year: Nov. 2nd 2008). Between now and then the time difference between the States and Europe is one hour less.

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