Noah Subrin's Dev Blog

SQL Saturday #14

2009-04-26T12:35:00Z

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to be able to deliver a presentation at the SQL Saturday #13 Community Event at the Microsoft Campus in Alpharetta. SQL Saturday is a community event for Microsoft SQL Server professionals. Several well known speakers presented including Joe Celko, Kevin Kline, and Andy Warren. A great amount of effort and preparation went into delivering this event, which had approximately 200 people in attendance. Hats off to all of the leadership team at Atlanta MDF for making this happen, as well as all of the sponsors, and Microsoft for providing the facility. There was a tremendous amount of give aways, and I think everyone went away satisfied.

My presentation, "Building Effective T-SQL Solutions" was based on five articles I have published on the SQL Server World Wide User Group web site . I discussed the following topics in my presentation which is available for download here:

How to Set Compatibility Mode Using T-SQL
How to Determine Membership in Windows Groups Using T-SQL
Creating a Data Driven Web site using MySQL and VS 2008
Importing a .csv file into SQLExpress using Bulk Insert
Creating a Non-Sequential Order Number System

All in all, it was a great success.

Orlando Code Camp

2009-03-26T09:59:00Z

This Saturday is the fourth annual Orlando Code Camp. I will be delivering my presentation on 'Developing A Biometric Application''.
Biometrics are automated methods of authenticating or verifying an individual based on physical or behavioral characteristics. In this session, we will build a Biometric software application using a fingerprint reader, Visual Studio 2008, Windows Forms, and a third party SDK.

At the time of this post there are over 540 people registered for the event. It is an all day event of free training, so I encourage everyone to attend. There are over 40 speakers, 60 sessions, and 11 tracks.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Presentation at the Atlanta Code Camp

2009-02-28T21:29:00Z

It's that time of year again - time for the fifth annual Atlanta Code Camp.
For those of you who have not been to a code camp, it is similar to developer conference, with many speakers and various tracks, except that it is free to attend. Lunch is provided, and most attendees also leave with a good bit of swag. In these challenging economic times, you can't beat that.

This year's Atlanta Code Camp is being held at Georgia Gwinnett College off of Collins Hill road in the Lawrenceville-Suwanee area.

I will be delivering a presentation on how to build a biometric application based on Visual Studio 2008, Windows Forms, SQL Server 2005, and a third party SDK.

I hope to see you there. Spread the word, these events typically "sell out" quickly because registration is capped due to space limitations at the facility.

How to set Compatibility Mode for a Database Using T-SQL

2008-11-05T11:20:00Z

I participated in a database server migration from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 and noticed some query performance issues that came up during testing. When a database is upgraded from SQL 2000 to SQL Server 2005 using backup\restore or sp_attach, the database retains its current compatibility level. Read my article on the SQL Server World Wide User Group web site as I explain how to set compatibility mode for a single database using T-SQL and how this may affect query performance.

Building Effective Web Applications with ASP .Net 3.5 - Week 2

2008-11-05T11:02:00Z

Last week I delivered part two of a six part series of webcasts for a course I created for my employer, titled "Building Effective Web Applications with ASP .Net 3.5". Each session lasts two hours. Week 2 we focused on LINQ (Language Integrated Query). LINQ is a general purpose query facility to query relational data, XML data, objects/collections that allows us to query any of these data shapes in a consistent manner. LINQ query syntax resembles SQL except that the 'from' clause is in the beginning of the query, which allows the compiler to infer the type of the object.

Here are some of the benefits of using LINQ:

You may not need to build an entire DAL (data access layer)
It is much easier to query XML – don’t have to use Xpath
We can work with data in a consistent way – whether it is SQL Server data, XML data, ADO .Net dataset, an object collection, or data in memory
Offers compile time checking, autocompletion, and Intellisense

There are new features in C# that support LINQ including:

Automatic properties
Initializers
Type Inference
Anonymous types

Automatic properties provide us with a shorthand method for defining a new property. The C# compiler generates to get and set. Initializers reduce the amount of work it takes to create a new instance of a class.
Local variable type inference allow the C# or VB .Net compiler to determine the type of a variable at compile time
Anonymous types allow us to create an object type on the fly.

One of the coolest features in LINQ using VB.Net is XML literals. If you have ever had the experience of creating an XML document using the DOM (Document Object Model) you know that it may be cumbersome to build. It also is difficult to query using XPath. XML literals allow us to copy an paste code into LINQ and the compiler builds the syntax to make this happen. Read on here to read a description of XML literals and how it's done in VB9. In C#, we have to build an add-in to provide this same functionality. The following link describes how to build the Paste XML as XElement addin.

My slide deck can be downloaded here. Let me know what you think!

Building Effective Web Applications with ASP .Net 3.5 - Week 1

2008-10-26T15:06:00Z

This week I began a 6 part series of webcasts for a course I created for my employer, titled "Building Effective Web Applications with ASP .Net 3.5". Each session lasts two hours. Week 1 we focused on laying out the course and how to get started with ASP .Net 3.5.

Here are the course objectives:

Become familiar with new features in ASP .Net 3.5
Build database driven apps using LINQ
Leverage ASP .Net AJAX on both the client and server side
Learn about state management and caching
Secure your ASP .Net websites
Create an end to end web app

Week 1's agenda presented the following topics:

Tools We Will Use
ASP .Net 3.5 Overview
Project Setup/Configuration
WebForms Overview
Server Controls
User Controls
Master Pages
Debugging and Tracing
New Features in ASP .Net 3.5

My slide deck can be downloaded here:

Let me know what you think!

ASP .Net Service Pack 1

2008-10-11T11:17:00Z

If you are not aware, Visual Studio Service Pack 1 and the .Net Framework Service Pack 1 were released a few months ago. In addition to bug fixes, a lot of new functionality is contained in this release. A partial list of new features includes the following:

VS 2008 SP1:

    * Improved WPF designers
    * SQL Server 2008 support
    * ADO.NET Entity Designer
    * Visual Basic and Visual C++ components and tools (including an MFC-based Office 2007 style ‘Ribbon’)
    * Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server (TFS) addresses customer feedback on version control usability and performance, email integration with work item tracking and full support for hosting on SQL Server 2008
    * Richer JavaScript support, enhanced AJAX and data tools, and Web site deployment improvements

The .NET Framework 3.5 SP1:

* Performance increases between 20-45% for WPF-based applications – without having to change any code
    * WCF improvements that give developers more control over the way they access data and services
    * Streamlined installation experience for client applications
    * Improvements in the area of data platform, such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and support for SQL Server 2008’s new features

Additional details and a link to download SP1 can be found in this MSDN article.

How to determine membership in Windows Groups using T-SQL

2008-08-05T00:14:00Z

I lead a recent server\database migration from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005. Several of my team were supposed to be added to a Windows group that was to have been granted access to the new SQL Server. We tested their access and they were not able to authenticate to the new SQL Server . Read my feature article on the SQL Server World Wide User Group website as I explain how I determined whether they were in fact members of a particular group.

32 Bit ActiveX on a 64 bit Windows Server

2008-07-29T01:19:00Z

I currently am working on a server migration. We are moving my customer's web site and database platform into an Enterprise computing center. The Production environment will eventually be running on an HP Superdome. As part of the migration, we moved both the web and database servers from a 32 bit platform to Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, running on Itanium 64 hardware. We also are migrating our RDBMS from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005. We have done a lot of work so far, including rewriting many ETL scripts, but we still have much work to do. One interesting problem, I just resolved involved hosting Office Web Components (OWC) 2003.

Our customer uses Office Web Components 2003 for basic charting functions. In our current environment (Windows 2003 Server 32 bit mode) the customer's web content runs without issues. We ported the web pages over and when instantiating the OWC Charts objects, we received the infamous "Cannot Create ActiveX Object error". I did a lot of research, tried registering the control using regvsr32.exe, assigning the dll full permissions to the 'everyone' windows group to no avail.

Finally I realized that OWC is a 32 bit ActiveX object. Our IIS 6.0 environment was configured for 64 bits. I researched the feasiblity of using a different 64 bit ActiveX control, but that would include a lot of time spent on evaluation, testing, recommendation, and procuring funding - not to mention rewriting all of the code that uses our OWC Chart objects. The approach I ended up taking was to configure IIS to run in 32 bit mode. I also had to install the 32 bit version of ASP .Net in the framework directory. This process is discussed in the following Microsoft Knowlege Base Article:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894435

I performed both steps described in the section "ASP.NET 2.0, 32-bit version". This includes running a script to enable IIS 32 bit mode, and installing the version of ASP.NET 2.0 (32-bit) and to install the script maps at the IIS root.

SRA University SilverLight Course Week 5 - A Look at Animation

2008-06-13T12:24:00Z

I presented Week 5 material this week from my 6 part SRA-University course on SilverLight development. We began by reviewing the downloader control and an MSDN on-demand web cast that showed how to refactor redundant XAML code using a web service, the downloader control, and the CreateFromXAML function. The CreateFromXAML method takes a string of XAML and returns a SilverLight object. In the webcast, the design scenario is a page that displays sales for 6 technical books over the course of a year. The sales are displayed as bar graphs on a web page, and the months and height of the rectangles are animated as sales are shown for each month using SilverLight animation. Instead of hard coding all of the data, such as the number of books, a two dimensional array is loaded, which for the sake of the demo, simulates a web service call. The code and video for this particular sample can be downloaded from the SilverLight .Net site.

We then proceeded to discuss Chapter 9 of the course text, SilverLight 1.0 Unleashed by Adam Nathan. The chapter begins by performing animation by hand, using only JavaScript and the SetInterval/SetTimer and ClearInterval functions. We then discussed animation using the SilverLight object model. We are able to perform DoubleAnimation, PointAnimation, and ColorAnimation. With DoubleAnimation, we are able to animate Width, Height, Opacity, ScaleX, ScaleY, Angle and other properties that use the double data type.

Animation using the SilverLight object model requires the following:
1) EventTrigger - which represents a trigger that applies a set of actions (animation storyboards) in response to an event.
2) StoryBoard - controls animations with a timeline, and provides object and property targeting information for its child animations
3) Begin StoryBoard object - a trigger action that begins a StoryBoard and distributes its animations to their targeted objects and properties.

Standard animation only varies a specific property from one value to another. More complex animations are performed using keyframe animation. There are alternative interpolation methods using keyframes such as the following:

1) Linear interpolation - With linear interpolation, the animation progresses at a constant rate of the segment duration.

2) Discrete interpolation - With discrete interpolation, the animation function jumps from one value to the next without interpolation.

3) Splined interpolation - Splined interpolation can be used to achieve more realistic timing effects. Because animations are so often used to imitate effects that occur in the real world, developers might need fine control of the acceleration and deceleration of objects, and close manipulation of timing segments. Spline key frames enable you to animate with splined interpolation.

Next week we are going to wrap up this semester with a discussion of SilverLight audio and video capabilities. Week 5 course content can be downloaded here. See you next week!

Bill Gates keynote at MS Tech ED Developer 2008

2008-06-06T17:35:00Z

Bill Gates delivered the keynote speech at the MS Tech ED Developer Conference Tuesday morning before a full house at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. He is due to step down as chairman of Microsoft on July 1 to concentrate full time on his charitable foundation. He began by offering a humorous look at what might occur on his last day. This skit included cameo appearances by celebrities such as Bono, George Clooney, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain. Gates mentioned that the transition period has been mapped out for two years and that this was his last public appearance as Chairman of Microsoft.

Gates looked at what he considered to be important”Technology Megatrends’ over the next 10 years. He mentioned that the most significant will be how people interact with computers including voice recognition and touch screens. He spoke about how in the future desks will have computers in them.

He also took a logical look at multi-tiered applications and broke them down into presentation, business, data access, and service layers. He shared the stage with some of his vice presidents who presented demos on each of these tiers with current functionality. This included Internet Explorer 8.0, WPF and SilverLight in the presentation layer; SQL Server 2008 and improved tooling in Visual Studio Team System in the data layer, and looks at architectural validation tools in the business layer. He also was pleased with the direction of Windows Communication Framework and mentioned that he thought that services in the cloud were going to be a huge future trend. Some services will be free, some paid for by advertisements, and some would be paid or subscription based services.

He reminisced about his early days of computing on an Altair running Basic and that getting 16K of memory was a milestone, because it allowed early programmers to have access to lower case. Prior to that, all text was in upper case. He contrasted this with the richness of Visual Studio’s IDE and noted how far software development tools have come.

He closed his appearance by taking questions from the audience. He certainly is a man of great vision and his place as a thought leader will be missed.

TSQL Enhancements in SQL Server 2008

2008-06-03T20:10:00Z

I am writing this blog from Orlando where I am attending Microsoft Tech-ED Developer 2008 conference. Yesterday I attended an informative pre-conference session on SQL Server 2008 New Features for Developers. The product is currently in CTP 6 (Community Technology Preview), but Release Candidate 0 is expected any day. The presentation was delivered by Bob Beauchemin of SQLSkills. Bob is a SQL Server MVP and the author of “A Developer’s Guide to SQL Server 2008”.

SQL Server 2008 has several features of interest to developers. One major enhancement from a developer’s UI perspective is the addition of Intellisense in SQL Server Management Studio. This provides a familiar look and feel to developers who are used to doing development in Visual Studio. Other major items to be included in the upcoming release are the following:

· New T-SQL Functionality

· Alternative Data Structure and Storage

· Client Enhancements

· XML Enhancements

· SQLCLR Enhancements

· Service Broker Enhancements

Each one of these topics is worthy of a lengthy blog. This blog will focus on these T-SQL enhancements.

· DateTime support – we can now separate date and time, which saves space. There is support for a greater range of years with the new DateTime2 data type with greater accuracy. Variable precision saves space as well.

· Table Valued Parameters - This allows us to insert data structures such as a single order with several line items in a single server round trip. Also know as table valued row constructors.

· TSQL syntax – we can declare and initialize local variables in a single roundtrip. We can also use increment operators such as +=.

· Grouping sets - allow multiple group bys with performance enhancements

· Merge – Can be used to perform multiple DML operations on a single set

· Insert over DML – an enhancement to the OUTPUT clause that allows us to put the results of an OUTPUT statement in a nested INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, or MERGE statement into a target table.

· FORCESEEK hint – overrides the initial plan for a query selected by the Query Optimizer.

Stay tuned for more updates from Tech-ED!

SRA University SilverLight Course Week 4 - A Look at the Downloader control

2008-05-30T11:32:00Z

I presented Week 4 material this week from my 6 part SRA-University course on SilverLight development. We began by reviewing the SilverLight SDK material on building interactive controls from scratch. We took a look at the three sample controls in Expression Blend 2. using split view. Using Blend makes it easier to see both the XAML and the control that is being designed.

We also went over a list of Performance Tips and Tricks for SilverLight. Here is a link to a document that is part of the MSDN library that shows us how to create SilverLight apps that run fast and smoothly. Examples of these performance tips are things like not animating the size of text, using visibility instead of opacity to show and hide objects, and setting the EnableFrameRateCounter boolean variable to true during development. One of the other tips and tricks dealt with the downloader control, which coincidentally was the focus of our discussion from our course text.

The downloader control is used to download files asynchronously using an HTTP Get. By using the downloader control, we can download content when we need it - not necessarily when the SilverLight control is instantiated. Here's another performance tip and best practice - when using the downloader control, after we are finished downloading content on demand, we should always detach our event handlers and set the downloader instance to null.

My week 4 slide deck can be found here.

Week 5 class will be held on June 12. Next week, I will be at the MS Tech-ED Developer conference, as well as presenting at the Microsoft Community Summit 2008. I will be speaking at the .Net University series on .Net 3.5 service development. Here's a link to our session. I hope to see you down there.

SRA University SilverLight Course Week 3

2008-05-25T12:29:00Z

I presented week 3 material of my SRA-University SilverLight course this week. We discsussed the Quickstart material that deals with media, animation, mouse events, and scripting. I demonstrated some additional applications from the SilverLight.net community gallery, and discussed how to implement drag and drop. We also discussed that Linux support for SilverLight has recently been announced. This is part of the mono project and is known as project Moonlight. The goals of mono-based support for SilverLight are the following:

To run Silverlight applications on Linux.

To provide a Linux SDK to build Silverlight applications.

To reuse the Silverlight engine we have built for desktop applications.

My week 3 class slides can be downloaded here . Next week we will look at sample controls and downloading content on demand. See you then!

Monster Weekend Between the Weeks of Tech-ED

2008-05-23T20:28:00Z

The Florida Developer Community is presenting a tremendous amount of great free content in the weekend in between the two weeks of Tech-ED in Orlando this year. Kudos go out to MS Developer Evangelists Joe Healy and Doug Turnure for rounding up a killer lineup. On Saturday, June 7 there will be a .Net Code Camp, Day of Agile, Day of SilverLight III, Exam Crams, IT Professional Camp, OpenSpace, SQL Saturday, and Train the Trainer. On Sunday, there will be three separate .Net Universities put on by Doug Turnure - Biztalk, Sharepoint, and .Net 3.5 Services development. I am proud to be presenting on Worfklow Services as part of the .Net 3.5 Services .Net U, along with Glen Gordon and Bayer White. For further information check out this website - www.floridatweener.com

Additional information describing the .Net 3.5 services track of .Net University at the Microsoft Community Summit can be found here . I look forward to seeing you there!

SRA University SilverLight Course Week 2

2008-05-15T20:49:00Z

In today's webcast, I presented SilverLight 1.0 material about how to build a SilverLight app from scratch using just a text editor. We built up the application to include an html file, some javascript include files, and a .xaml file. We reviewed last week's material, addressed some student questions, and reviewed several of the static content controls that can be created. We also took a look at some of the Community Gallery 1.0 controls hosted on www.silverlight.net including the MineSweeper application and a sliding puzzle application. I had a lot better luck using the Webex product after attending a seminar on how to leverage many of its features, such as Chat and File Transfer. My slides can be downloaded here . Next week we will look at Javascript events (such as mouse clicks, animation, and how to host SL content in an ASP .Net control)

SRA University SilverLight Course Week 1

2008-05-10T14:51:00Z

I developed an internal knowledge sharing course for the company I work for, SRA International on building SilverLight applications with SilverLight 1.0. The course is part of SRA University, which is a means of providing SRA employees with free training, provided by course developers, who volunteer their efforts. My Week 1 slides are available here. They are free for the public to download as well. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

WCF Services and Windows Vista

2008-05-04T20:27:00Z

I was working on some WCF services and encountered an unusual problem. Some services that I had run on my Windows Server 2003 machine were failing under Windows Vista with an "access denied" error. I tested the service using the built in WCF test client tool that comes with Visual Studio 2008. When I hovered over the error it gave reference to an MSDN article . The article states that running WCF services requires a service host, and manual configuration of the HTTP server through the HTTP API may be required. For Windows Vista, it suggests running the Network services shell command (netsh) from a command prompt. To see all of the options run netsh /?. The article also supplies the syntax for Vista - netsh http add urlacl url=http://+:80/MyUri user=DOMAIN\user

I opened up a command prompt to enter the net shell command and received a user error stating that I was not authorized to issue the command. This, at first, seemed strange because I am an administrator on the machine. I dug further and found out that Vista has an "administrative command prompt" that you get to by typing "command" followed by ctl-shift-enter key strokes.

After finding my way to the Administrative command prompt, I was able to enter my netsh command. The result of executing the command delegate this ownership from the built in administrative account to the user account under which the service is running. You can look at the existing delegations by using "netsh http show urlacl".

There is an excellent MSDN blog by Amit Lale that supplies addition details.

New User Group in Gwinnett

2008-04-23T21:42:00Z

There is a new .Net user group organizing in Gwinnett County Georgia. Their website is www.ggmug.com . The first meeting is Thursday, May 8 at Gwinnett Tech. Doug Turnure, Microsoft Developer Evangelist, and myself will be presenting. Doug is presenting on the topic of WCF, REST, JSON, and Syndication. I will be presenting on the topic of Workflow Services. See you there!

Workflow Services (AKA 'Silver Services')

2008-03-31T20:13:00Z

On Saturday, March 29, 2008 I was honored to be part of the 4th annual Atlanta Code Camp. Over 200 area developers attended. The event was a smashing success due to a lot of hard work by the organizers and volunteers.

Workflow Services are new in .Net Framework 3.5. They allow Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) workflows and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services to talk together. This is accomplished primarily, by the addition of two new activities, the SendActivity and the ReceiveActivity. These new activities can be dragged onto the work surface to create a workflow using Visual Studio 2008. I demonstrated how to consume a WCF service from a workflow, how to expose a WCF service endpoint in a workflow, and duplex communication. Duplex communication allows the server and the client to communicate to each other. My slide deck and code can be downloaded from this link .

The tooling for WCF is also greatly improved in Visual Studio 2008. You can test a WCF service using the WCF test client and set optional parameters for security. You can also see the request and response in the raw xml format.

I look forward to delivering this presentation at an upcoming Atlanta area user group meeting!