SqlXml Blogs

FastCGI 1.5 for IIS6 & 5.1 is RTW

vinodkumar — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:15:00 GMT

Wanted to update that the FastCGI module v1.5 has been released for IIS 6 and IIS 5.1. A lot more details can be got from Ruslan’s blog on this release: http://blogs.iis.net/ruslany/archive/2010/01/18/fastcgi-extension-1-5-for-iis-5-1-and-iis-6-0-rtw.aspx Fast CGI Forum with announcement and where to send folks with technical questions: http://forums.iis.net/t/1164235.aspx Some fast features. See blog post for the details - Monitor changes to a file (php.ini as an example). Will recycle FastCGI...(read more)

SSMA for MySQL to SQL Server

vinodkumar — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:24:00 GMT

Just wanted to make sure you were aware that the new free MySQL to SQL Server migration assistant (“SSMA for MySQL”) is now available. More info: http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2010/01/11/free-download-microsoft-sql-server-migration-assistant.aspx - Download SSMA SQL Server 2005 for MySQL v1.0 CTP1 - Download SSMA SQL Server 2008 to MySQL v1.0 CTP1 It is interesting to tryout once atleast :) …...(read more)

VS 2010 Beta resources

vinodkumar — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:12:00 GMT

There have been tons and tons of resources on the MS.com website that one can download from. I am just trying to consolidate them for your quick reference. MS released a new Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4 Training Kit. This is a downloadable version of the training content used in Training Workshops and includes 17 presentations, 21 Demos and 26 Hands-on Labs. The January preview adds content for Office , SharePoint and Application Lifecycle Management . The content in this training kit...(read more)

Instructions on using Windows Azure Blob Storage and retrieving content onto SL

vinodkumar — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:25:00 GMT

Here are a number of interesting videos that help you understand step-by-step in storing data onto the Azure Blob storage and use the content via Silverlight. · Provisioning Windows Azure · Setting up Windows Azure for video storage · Creating and publishing a video in a Silverlight player to a Windows Azure storage account (using Expression Encoder 3) · Embedding a published video in a blog (using Windows Live Writer) · How to retrieve content that is stored on Silverlight Live Streaming With this...(read more)

End of Service Pack Support for SQL Server 2005 SP2 and SQL Server 2008 RTM

vinodkumar — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:16:00 GMT

I would like to remind all users that Service Pack Support for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 (SP2) will end on January 12, 2010 and support for SQL Server 2008 RTM will end on April 13, 2010 . Microsoft is ending support for these products as part of their Service Pack support policy, found in http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle . Both SQL Server 2005 SP2 and SQL Server 2008 RTM will no longer receive assisted support or security updates from Microsoft after their respective end of support dates...(read more)

Creating PHP CRUD Apps with SQL Server on your Server or in the Azure Cloud

vinodkumar — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:22:00 GMT

As part of getting Interoperability Bridges there is a new post out, Creating PHP CRUD Apps with SQL Server on your Server or in the Azure Cloud that helps PHP web users to build SQL Server, SQL Azure or Windows Azure Storage bound applications via a helper CRUD application that developers can modify. The post includes simple code snippets and images that show the end product working on a PHP web site running on Windows. References: Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability/archive/2010/01/06...(read more)

Windows Azure Platform Training Kit – Dec’09

vinodkumar — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:46:00 GMT

It is holiday season and I am sure that doesn't deter you from trying the hot technologies round the corner. Get ready to grab the new Azure Platform Training kit released for the holiday season with tons and tons of content. Outlining the content inside the kit for quick reference. Hands On Labs Introduction to Windows Azure Exploring Windows Azure Storage Deploying and Monitoring Applications in Windows Azure Windows Azure: Worker Role Communication Federated Authentication in a Windows Azure...(read more)

Evangelism beyond boundaries with an Evangelists !!!

vinodkumar — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:27:00 GMT

I love the title of “ Technology Evangelist ” and it is because of this inspiring title that I am where I am today. Though “Technology evangelism” is a relatively recent phenomenon, today's Evangelists have transformed the term “evangelism” into a household word. My long time friend Jani posted about the same topic a month back and I have been thinking of writing this post - it surely did take sometime. I couldn't agree more to all the points that Jani brings out in his post. But here are...(read more)

ExtremeExperts: ResourceDB Tip

vinodkumar — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:29:00 GMT

I recently wrote a tip around ResourceDB changes with SQL Server 2008. You can read the same on my website here . Feel free to drop in your comments. I have been on vacation for the past two weeks and hence have been silent here. Nevertheless, I got hold of a number of useful links that might be of interest to you. The Parallel Computing Developer Center on MSDN has a new look, and it’s now live for the public: http://msdn.com/concurrency In the coming years, Data Visualization will become...(read more)

MDS Nov-CTP release

vinodkumar — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:14:57 GMT

Master Data Services (MDS) with Master Data Hub and Stewardship Portal This is one of those much awaited features. If you are wondering its need, let me explain you the scenario. As organizations grow in size and complexity, their data becomes more distributed and difficult to manage. Meanwhile, mergers, acquisitions and asymmetrical solution development compound the problem, resulting in IT organizations containing numerous independent and non-interoperable systems. Each of these systems uses...(read more)

Download StreamInsight November CTP refresh

vinodkumar — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:29:00 GMT

The November CTP release of Microsoft StreamInsight went live as part of the SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP. In this post we are introducing the November CTP refresh , which already contains further improvements. You can find the download page here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=161910 StreamInsight CTP2, was well received and generated a lot of excitement. The improvements over previous beta include - New extensibility API through user-defined aggregates and operators Declarative specification...(read more)

InterOp on Windows Azure

vinodkumar — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:37:00 GMT

This recent PDC over the couple of days has tons of announcements to go a look forward from a Microsoft technologies point of view. One of the important announcement which I had the privilege to watch is the InterOp story esp around the Cloud Platform. At the PDC Keynote, we did see how WordPress was ported to make it work on Windows Azure. So I thought I will bring some of these interesting InterOp stories and resources you might love to go ahead and read. Windows Azure SDK for Java™ The Windows...(read more)

Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 5.0 - CTP

vinodkumar — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:38:00 GMT

The Solution Accelerators Team is offering customers and partners added inventory and assessment capabilities with the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 Community Technical Preview (CTP). The MAP Toolkit 5.0 CTP provides customers and partners with new features such as inventory of heterogeneous server environments; the ability to determine usage of deployed System Center Configuration Manager (a member of the Core Client Access License Suite); and readiness assessment for migration...(read more)

Free useful Tech-Books

vinodkumar — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:25:00 GMT

Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/C/0/5C0BD0AB-040D-4C56-A60B-661001012DDA/Windows_Server_2008_R2_e-book.pdf Learn about the new features of Windows Server 2008 R2 in the areas of virtualization, management, the Web application platform, scalability and reliability, and interoperability with Windows 7. Download Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2, written by industry experts Charlie Russel and Craig Zacker along with the Windows Server team at Microsoft. Microsoft...(read more)

IronRuby and IronPython CTPs for .NET 4.0 Beta 2

vinodkumar — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 09:21:00 GMT

Now to continue from what I posted in my last post around the VS2010 and .NET Beta 2 update, here is another. This is the third preview of IronRuby and IronPython running under the Dynamic Language Runtime that is built directly into .NET 4.0. As before, this release allows you to use IronRuby objects and types as .NET 4.0 dynamic objects from within C# and Visual Basic code. These binaries are roughly equivalent to the functionality found in IronRuby 0.9 and IronPython 2.6. Take a look at Harry...(read more)

VS 2010, .NET 4.0 Beta2 & Channel 9

vinodkumar — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:45:00 GMT

Couple of days back we did announce the availability of Visual Studio 2010 to the MSDN subscribers and there are enough online buzz around the product. I will be installing the same just like you folks sometime on Monday as I have a session to deliver tomorrow and refrained from rebuilding this week :). You can surely download the same now online at the VS 2010 Download page . It is also very refreshing to see the new Logo and all the reports have been how sleek the tool is now … I just gotta...(read more)

PowerPivot for Excel 2010

vinodkumar — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:26:00 GMT

I just installed the internal Beta of Office 2010 and couldn’t wait to see this new add-in working. PowerPivot for Excel is a data analysis tool that delivers unmatched computational power directly within the application users already know and love—Microsoft Excel. Leveraging familiar Excel features, users can transform enormous quantities of data from virtually any source with incredible speed into meaningful information to get the answers they need in seconds. Using SQL Server PowerPivot...(read more)

IIS Media Services 3.0 is RTW

vinodkumar — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:48:00 GMT

IIS Media Services is a set of extensions for Internet Information Services 7 (IIS) that provide an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform. This includes the new IIS Live Smooth Streaming and the separate IIS Advanced Logging package. Also with it is the release of Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, which allows developers to easily create Smooth Streaming experiences using Silverlight. Supported features include PlayReady, DVR controls, instant replay, slow motion, multiple camera angles...(read more)

Migrated from Community Server to DasBlog

bryantlikes — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:31:55 GMT

Just a quick note that I’ve moved my blog from here to http://bryantlikes.com. All the posts here should automatically redirect you to the new blog and the feeds should all migrate automatically. See you at my new site!

Extending Life of your Computer - Tips

vinodkumar — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:28:00 GMT

Recently, I have had the opportunity to replace my home laptop and one of my demo Laptops because of different reasons. I have been a bit relaxed on maintaining these laptops and hence the headaches followed and some resolution had to be made. Now that they are behind my back and I take utmost care of the work-laptop from time-to-time, I thought I share some of these with you in this online space. These are my suggestions and felt worth sharing with you. I am going to learn a lot from your personal...(read more)

SQLCAT Articles – SQL 2008

vinodkumar — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:29:00 GMT

The SQL Server Customer Advisory Team handles tons and tons of large deployments and they try to go ahead and document all their findings for the benefit of the larger community. Their whitepapers are generally loaded with loads of information that I have had instances where I used to read the article 2-3 times to get the facts and reasons behind their suggestions. Just listing some of these for your reference, do bookmark and read them when time permits - The Analysis Services 2008 Performance Guide...(read more)

A’bad UG CTD and Gandhi Ashram …

vinodkumar — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:33:00 GMT

I have been planning to write the trip report from my recent trip - Community TechDays in Ahmedabad over weekend. Well, flying on a holiday Oct 2nd ( Gandhi Jayanthi ) and executing the event on a Saturday Oct 3rd was something I had to first skilfully negotiate with my family for permission. Having gone past all that, it was the session preparation. I was allotted 120 mins for two sessions i.e. Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2010. I have been doing tons of work to get a lot of trivia and interesting...(read more)

Two System Center Beta’s

vinodkumar — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:15:00 GMT

System Center Essentials 2010 PM blog - http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenteressentials/archive/2009/09/29/sce-2010-public-beta-is-here.aspx www.microsoft.com/SCE SCE 2010 is designed specifically for mid-sized organizations and delivers a unified physical and virtual IT management experience. It enables you to better secure, update, monitor, and troubleshoot from a single console, so you can efficiently and proactively manage your IT environment: A unified solution with a single console for managing...(read more)

Behaviors vs Subclassing in Silverlight

bryantlikes — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:42:54 GMT

As a Silverlight developer, when you want to add functionality to an existing control, you have two main options as I see it (if you want to get reuse from your code). You can either subclass the control or, as of Silverlight 3, you can write a behavior for it. For example, one of the requests for the current Silverlight application that I’ve been working on was to have the TextBox select all the text when you tabbed to it or clicked in it. We can easily add this functionality using both of the above methods:

Here is how this could be done using subclassing:

public class SelectAllTextBox : TextBox 
{
    public SelectAllTextBox()
    {
        this.GotFocus += new RoutedEventHandler(TextBox_GotFocus);
    }

    private void TextBox_GotFocus(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        this.SelectAll();
    }
}

And here is how you would write this as a behavior:

public class SelectAllBehavior : Behavior<TextBox>
{
    protected override void OnAttached()
    {
        base.OnAttached();
        AssociatedObject.GotFocus += new RoutedEventHandler(AssociatedObject_GotFocus);
    }

    void AssociatedObject_GotFocus(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        ((TextBox)sender).SelectAll();
    }
}

The behavior has one more line of code and the added requirement of adding a reference to System.Windows.Interactivity.dll from the Blend 3 SDK. The bigger difference is how the code looks in our view when we add the control to it.

The subclassed control looks like (where ctrls is the controls namespace of our subclassed control):

<ctrls:SelectAllTextBox Text="{Binding MyText}" />

And the behavior looks like (where i is the System.Windows.Interactivity namespace and b is our behavior’s namespace):

<TextBox Text="{Binding MyText}">
    <i:Interaction.Behaviors>
        <b:SelectAllBehavior />
    </i:Interaction.Behaviors>
</TextBox>

Obviously the behavior is more verbose in this case than the subclassed approach.

Since both of these approaches work, which is the better approach? I think the subclassing is the easier approach, but I think the behavior would be the recommended approach. The reason is that I can build my SelectAll behavior today and then down the road build a different behavior and then selectively apply them to my TextBoxes as appropriate. However, if use the subclass approach I would automatically get the new behavior on all my controls which might not be what I wanted. It also means that if someone builds a better TextBox that I want to use that I would have to try to subclass that control, but with the behavior I could just apply it to the new control.

Update: A couple of quick updates. First, Alan Le pointed out that it depends on reuse. Obviously if you had to add the behavior to 20 TextBoxes it would take more time to use the behavior. However, Blend makes this a lot easier. Secondly, Brian mentioned in the comments that you could also use an attached property to do this so I thought I would quickly show what that might look like.

The code for the attached property would be:

public static class TextBoxProperties
{
    public static readonly DependencyProperty SelectAllProperty =
        DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached("SelectAll", typeof(bool), 
        typeof(TextBoxProperties), new PropertyMetadata(false, OnSelectAllChanged));

    public static void SetSelectAll(DependencyObject o, bool value)
    {
        o.SetValue(SelectAllProperty, value);
    }

    public static bool GetSelectAll(DependencyObject o)
    {
        return (bool)o.GetValue(SelectAllProperty);
    }

    private static void OnSelectAllChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)
    {
        if ((bool)e.NewValue == true)
        {
            ((TextBox)d).GotFocus += new RoutedEventHandler(TextBoxProperties_GotFocus);
        }
    }

    private static void TextBoxProperties_GotFocus(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        ((TextBox)sender).SelectAll();
    }
}

And the Xaml would look like:

<TextBox Text="{Binding MyText}" ctrls:TextBoxProperties.SelectAll="true" />

I still think the Behavior is the best method to use since (at least in this case) we are just trying to add a behavior to the TextBox, not add significant functionality. The attached property also doesn’t feel right to me, but it does work just fine. Ultimately it comes down to preference and what method you like to use. :)

Web Application Toolkits – V1.0

vinodkumar — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

I think we maybe a bit late to talk about these, nevertheless it is worth mentioning. Recently a week back MS launched the WebsiteSpark initiative and this surely has brought all the buzz in the web world and it surely is catching some spark in a number of forums … I personally feel there is tons of reasons to be excited about. If you want the specifics, feel free to check ScottGu’s blog which has the specifics. Along with release has also come a number of Web Application Toolkits. The...(read more)