Shawn Weisfeld [MVP]

Ramp Up

sweisfeld — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:08:00 GMT

Microsoft has started a new program called Ramp UP (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/rampup/default.aspx). “Ramp Up is a free, online, community-based learning program, with a number of different tracks that will help you build your portfolio of professional development skills. Ramp Up has a solid foundation of premium technical content from subject-matter gurus, and provides easy-to-access content in a variety of forms that guide you in learning the important skills.”
At this time they have 6 tracks. . .

SharePoint for Developers (Part 1)
Visual Studio 2008
Aspiring Developer (VS 2005)
Java Developer (VS 2005)
VB 6.0 Developer (VS 2005)
VS 200/2003 Developer (VS 2005)

Check it out!

Pipe "|" delimited files with Excel & SQL Server

sweisfeld — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:06:00 GMT

I am constantly querying random data out of SQL Server and sending it to EXCEL files to email to a co-worker. Exporting to a comma separated or tab separated file is no good since those characters appear in my data frequently so I have switched to using a Pipe, “|”, character. This is easy enough to do in SQL Server Management Studio. Go to Tools and options. In the options dialog go to query results, sql server, and select results to text.

Here you can set the output format to custom delimiter and then set the custom delimiter to the pipe. Press OK to close the dialog and it will remind you to open an new query window where the setting will be changed. The next trick is to change your output destination to text by selecting the results to file icon in the tool bar . Now when you run a query in SSMS it will pop up and ask you where to save the file. If you save it to something with a .xls extension excel will open it. However it will open with all the data in the first column. Now you could to a “Text to Columns” and have excel parse the file but what is the fun in that. By changing a windows setting excel will automatically parse the file for us. Open the Control Panel and select “Regional and language options”. On the Regional Options tab select the customize button, then change your list separator from a comma to the pipe. Press Apply, then Ok on the Customize Regional Options window, and again on the Regional and language options window. Now when you open those pipe delimited files with a .xls extension excel will automagically pars them for you.

UPDATE: changing these settings will also change things like your formula's in excel to use pipes in place of commas.

SQL PASS 2008 Feedback

sweisfeld — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:34:00 GMT

I wanted to share the feedback that I got from my presentation this year at the PASS Summit. (http://drowningintechnicaldebt.com/blogs/shawnweisfeld/archive/2008/11/23/sql-pass-2008-talk.aspx) Again thank you to all that attended, and a special thank you to those that provided feedback it is an invaluable tool to help presenters improve over time. (BTW these are all the comments, I did not filter them at all)

Overall 4.44 out of 5

What is your overall evaluation of the session? 4.5
Difficult topic to present. He did a good job.
Good content. Bonus content at the end took it to the next level without getting exotic. Wirht the time to sit through.
Interesting, but a little slow at the start.
Outstanding!
Speaker stands in the dark. Have some light on him.
This was the best session I attended. The presenter's pace was excellent and his lecture was well-thought out. He's obviosly comfortable speaking in front of a group.

How would you rate the usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment? 4.08
Good selections.
The content was in an area we don't actively use, but don't want to avoid. This gave me a solid foot in the door as a DBA / Developer and exposed me to different facets to consider.
Samples should be more real world on what should be done in a CLR versus T-SQL.

How would you rate the Speaker's presentation skills? 4.5
Speaker is very smart about what to say.
Great speaking skills, kept the content flowing within the time alloted and managed to put in very valuable bonus content at the end. Great posative attitude.
He directed the audience well, even when we wanted to jump ahead of him.

How would you rate the Speaker's knowledge of the subject? 4.67
Obviously well versed on the topic, and for the most part able to take questions and resolve and answer that made sense.
My favorite part was that he showed errors we were likely to see and how to recover. No other presenter I've seen did this.

How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session? 4.5
Reletively hard to misunderstand this. Could have added the word "USING". NOt that there was a lack of space for it.

How would you rate the amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session? 4.5
A bit tight, but the content fit into the space allowed and the speaker stayed on topic to assure it worked.
And he did a great job of staying within his allocated time.
Great time management and ease of dealing with questions from the floor.

How would you rate the quality of the presentaion materials? 4.33
Good code examples demonstrated. Excellent use of realtime erros and troubleshooting.
stop showing the same thing on PPT and in code. it is not useful! You would save a lot of time.
He had all of his scripts pasted into his powerpoint for easy reading. Again, no other presenter did this.
Just leave most in power point. with just one or two real samples
Good examples; building on the go.

ASP.NET charting controls

sweisfeld — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:04:00 GMT

Microsoft released a set of controls called the ASP.NET charting controls. I don’t know if they licensed this from Dundas, however in one of my projects I was able to replace Dundas with this in about 30 min. Most of the class names are the same. Oh and they are FREE!!!!! The only caveat is that you have to be using .NET 3.5.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx

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!