Shawn Weisfeld [MVP]

SQL PASS 2008 Talk

sweisfeld — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:58:00 GMT

If you attended my talk at pass last week, you can get the slides & downloads here (http://www.developerroundtable.com/Libraries/Downloads/PASS_SQL_CLR.sflb.ashx). I hope you enjoyed the talk. Feel free to send me feedback!

MS Popfly

sweisfeld — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:17:00 GMT

I am tired of forgetting the link to this darn site and people keep asking me about it, hence this blog post. A while back at a presentation by Russ Fustino (http://blogs.msdn.com/rfustino/) he demoed this application. MS Popfly (http://www.popfly.com/) allows you to create online game and mashup’s using silverlight. A very cool tool, get an account and check it out.

Here is a mashup I created by doing a live picture search for me and binding it to a Carousel in all of 5 min.

http://www.popfly.com/users/ShawnOnetug/ShawnPictureMashup
(Note if it doesn't display try selecting one of the alternatives from the menu on the right hand side of the page.)

WCF & Using Statements

sweisfeld — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:29:00 GMT

I was attending the Dallas Connected Systems UG last night (http://biztalkusergroup.com/) and during the presentation I made the bold assertion that one should NOT use the "using statement" when working with WCF. Now I am a HUGE proponent of the using statement in normal circumstances. IMHO if it implements IDisposable use the using statement, except with WCF. This has to do with the way that WCF errors out and when that happens how the connection gets closed. . .

Doing my best LeVar Burton "But you don't have to take my word for it" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_Rainbow). Microsoft even says it in the documentation, "You should not use the using statement (Using in Visual Basic) because it may mask exceptions in certain failure modes. " (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms735103.aspx)

Also check out a post by Dan Rigsby that goes into more detail. http://www.danrigsby.com/blog/index.php/2008/02/26/dont-wrap-wcf-service-hosts-or-clients-in-a-using-statement/

Microsoft Web Platform Installer

sweisfeld — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:39:00 GMT

While I was not able to attend PDC, Microsoft did good by the community and has provided free recordings of many of the sessions (http://www.microsoftpdc.com). While this is cool and has some great content, the purpose of this blog post is to talk about the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebPlatformInstaller.aspx). This tool allows for single deployment model for all the bits and pieces needed to put together a clean PC image for a developer use (i.e. VS.NET, SQL SVR, and IIS). IMHO this is a great idea and Microsoft is only scratching the surface of what they could do in this space. Currently the tool works for the express editions, which is good for the hobbyist and more importantly at schools. With my experiences teaching .NET at the University anything that helps bring students into a working development environment faster and easier is goodness. However this will become much more valuable when it gets pushed into the enterprise environment. Currently one of the most frustrating jobs that I have my day job is helping team members with the setup of development machines. Anything that MSFT can do to stream line and reduce errors in the process of installing the entire suite of development tools is much appreciated.

ZooomIt

sweisfeld — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:54:00 GMT

A must have presentation aid for any technical presentation, additionally good if you have a hard time seeing area’s of the screen and it is free. Get it here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx

Developer Round Table

sweisfeld — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:22:00 GMT

I just started a new virtual user group, Developer Round Table. Check out our inaugural meeting Friday Oct 31 at 2:00 PST. All the details at http://www.developerroundtable.com, see you there.

Data Dude!

sweisfeld — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:43:00 GMT

Microsoft just changed the licensing for the Developer Team Edition for MSDN. If you have the Developer SKU you are now also licensed to use the Database Team Edition. (If you don’t know what SKU you have go to MSDN and check).

Why does this matter to me? The Database edition has many cool features but my favorite are “Schema Compare” and “Data Compare”. These allow you to do a comparison between two databases and see what the differences are (both structure and content). After you do the install you will see a new menu at the top of VS.NET that says data and the options are there.

How do I get it? Go to MSDN and download it

Please note that you will have to reapply service packs to VS after you do this install. . . .

ALM Advisor

sweisfeld — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:40:00 GMT

Microsoft has a free tool called the ALM Advisor. As you know ALM or application lifecycle management is “the process of delivering software as a continuously repeating cycle of inter-related steps: definition, design, development, testing, deployment and management” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_lifecycle_management). What the tool does is ask you a bunch of questions about how things are done currently. It then assess the maturity of your ALM process, and make recommendations on steps to make the process more mature. The good thing from what I have seen is that it breaks the process down into steps that can be more easily phased in over time and it provides a mechanism to do longer term process improvement planning.

https://www.microsoft.com/almassessment

Clear Kerberos Tickets cached on your computer

sweisfeld — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:26:00 GMT

Having trouble authenticating to that website on the intranet? Try clearing out your cache of Kerberos tickets on your computer. . .
“klist tickets” will list all the tickets you currently have
“klist purge” will clear them out
More information at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc738673.aspx
And you can download the tool at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en

Shawn @ Tech ED

sweisfeld — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:13:00 GMT

While I was at Tech ED 2008 in Orlando FL I participated in a roundtable discussion on "How to make community better" with Dan Egan (President of INETA, http://www.ineta.org), Dave Noderer (UG Leader, CO Founder of INETA, http://www.fladotnet.net), Christine Betts (GM of the Technical Audience Global Marketing for Microsoft) and Mark Wilson (Charlotte Enterprise Dev Guild, http://www.developersguild.org). They thought it was a good idea to record it, so I figured I would share http://mfile.akamai.com/14853/wmv/microsofttec.download.akamai.com/14853/TechEdOnline/Videos/08_NA_DEV_TEOPanel_36_low.asx.

Virtual CloneDrive

sweisfeld — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:54:00 GMT

If you have an MSDN license you are flush with lots of ISO files. Maybe you want to burn them all to DVD's but I keep my collection of ISO's on my Windows Home Server (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server). This saves me alot of time hunting through the pile of junk on my desk looking for a disc. However it does mean that I need software to mount the ISO. This software adds a virtual DVD drive to your computer allowing you to insert the ISO. The beauty is that it appears just like a normal DVD once mounted. . . The best piece of software I found for the job to date is Virtual CloneDrive from SlySoft (http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html). Happy ISO Busting!

XML in SQL server

sweisfeld — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:48:00 GMT

Question From NTSSUG - http://northtexas.sqlpass.org

I am working on an application that has object data mapped to tables. The mapping was done many years ago, before the likes of Hibernate came along. It basically maps a class to a table. Object properties with multiple values get their own tables. There are other interesting mappings, but that's the overall concept.

We have a guy that has been doing research on an alternate approach. He's storing the object data in an XML string. The XML string is stored in the only field of a table. The table is the only one in the system. He's reporting huge performance increases with this approach.

Have any of you heard of anything like this? What do you see are the pros and cons of such an approach?

Ok, so I come from a little different camp then most on this newsgroup. . . . I am a c# developer, not a DBA. Yes I am the enemy.

"XML String"???? I hope you mean the new XML data type and not a varchar.

However I strongly encourage storing data in a relational format in the database. Querying of XML data is more difficult and less performing then a traditional SQL query. There are XML query options available (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345122.aspx). However these require learning new syntax and might not be compatible with all 3rd party tools. (The first time I asked my DBA to create a table with an XML column, DB Artisan the tool they use instead of SQL Server Management Studio puked all over itself, then again it also converted my varchar(max) and varbinary(max) columns into varchar(1) and varbinary(1)).

That being said I do "persist" .NET objects to XML in the database in cases where my only goal is to provide long-term statefullness to my application.

As for space concerns of the XML in the DB, you have a few options (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345115.aspx) but "The XML data supplied by a user is stored internally in a binary format" so disk space concerns should be minimal.

As a developer I like XML persistence over Binary. Binary is defiantly faster to serialize and smaller "on the wire", however I think that in most cases the interoperability and human readability of XML outweighs the benefits of binary serialization. (Heck MSFT is using it for Office!)

NOTE your XML documents are limited to 2GB each.

Fun With TFS

sweisfeld — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:25:00 GMT

I have been moving to a completely virtural environment for the work I do out of my home. In that process I have set up a VirturalServer with TFS 2008 SP1 and a Dev image with VS Team Suite SP 1. Well I forgot to install the Team Explorer before I installed SP 1 on my dev box, and when I attempted to create a work item I got the following error.

"Could not load type 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.WorkItemTypeDeniedOrNotExistException' from assembly 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client" exception

I saw a posting on Dan Sniderman's blog saying he had the same problem (http://blog.magenic.com/blogs/daniels/archive/2008/08/24/Fun-with-VS2008SP1-and-VPC.aspx). He said he had to do a complete reinstall to fix the problem. I was not looking forward to that so I tried just reinstalling SP1 for VS 2008 and things appear to be all better now.

Free .NET Hosting for User Groups

sweisfeld — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 11:08:00 GMT

Recently I got a question about free hosting for .NET User Groups

I have compiled a list below. If you know of any more or your company would like to be added to the list please let me know.

VERIO has hosting for INETA UG members:
http://ineta.mykb.com/Article_7B694.aspx

Discount ASP.NET with Sitefinity CMS (from Telerik)
http://www.discountasp.com/press/2008_05_20_sitefinity-usergroup-hosting.aspx

Applied Innovations with Kentico ASP.NET CMS
http://www.devfish.net/fullblogitemview.aspx?blogid=563
http://www.misfitgeek.com/Trackback.aspx?guid=eb170258-0871-49ed-8ee0-0dd4f2d3df42

Huston TechFest 2008

sweisfeld — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:46:00 GMT

I will be giving my SQL CLR talk at the Houston TechFest on Saturday September 13 at the University of Houston. It will be a great event.