SqlXml Blogs

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)

A “Default Command” for Silverlight

bryantlikes — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:23:00 GMT

The current Silverlight application that I’m building has a Login view. One of the things that bugged me when I started using the application is that you would have to click the Login button after typing your password. I wanted to duplicate the default button behavior of HTML forms where when you hit the enter key it would trigger the default button on the form. I did some googling on the subject and came across this post by Patrick Cauldwell which is one way to solve the problem. However, in my case I had a username Textbox, a password Passwordbox, and a company Combobox and didn’t want to specify the button for each control.

So I create a simple solution of creating a content control that attaches to all the KeyUp events of all the child FrameworkElements in the content. To do this I used the FindChildren<T> extension method from the Avanade Silverlight Accelerator which is a toolkit we use internally at Avanade to speed up Silverlight development. The ContentControl exposes a DefaultCommand property which you then bind to the ICommand property on your ViewModel.

Below is a trimmed down example of the Login view. I’m using a variant of the RelayCommand/DelegateCommand as the LoginCommand here (see Laurent’s post on the RelayCommand for a good overview of Commands in Silverlight).

<ctrls:FormControl DefaultCommand="{Binding LoginCommand}">   
  <TextBox Text="{Binding Username, Mode=TwoWay}" />
  <PasswordBox Password="{Binding Password, Mode=TwoWay}" />
  <Button IsEnabled="{Binding LoginEnabled}" 
          cmds:ButtonClickCommand.Command="{Binding LoginCommand}" 
          Content="Login" />
</ctrls:FormControl>

There are many other things you could add to this but this is all the functionality that I needed and I decided to keep it simple. Download the class file (plus the extension method) below. Let me know if you find it useful!

FormControl.cs

MapPoint Add-in for SQL Server 2008

vinodkumar — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:35:00 GMT

It has been close to a month of the release and I have been wanting to drop a line on this. The MapPoint 2009 Add-in for SQL Server 2008 capitalized on the spatial data that come out-of-box with SQL Server and integrates with the maps. More about it is over the homepage I have shared. You can get various views of its integration and get amazing views like a heat-map or button locate or analyze environment data etc. An intro video of this integration of MapPoint and SQL Server is available . For folks...(read more)

Estimated Vs Actual rows

vinodkumar — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:27:39 GMT

I have seen this as a constant struggle to understand even when people come to the performance labs in our environments. Today I got a chance to read this post from Gail Shaw on Estimated rows, actual rows and execution count which are all a common areas of confusion. Gives a very good indicator to what to lookout for …...(read more)

Visual Web Developer Express Videos

vinodkumar — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 13:53:00 GMT

Using Express edition is something I recommend a lot in my sessions. But a number of times people ask do we really have easy to learn videos … Well, with all the web-technologies hype here are a number of too good video’s that you can use from the ASP.NET site. Intro to Visual Web Developer IntelliSense Intro to Web Forms Page Layout Page Lifecycle Events Intro to ASP.NET Controls Submit and Postback Application Level Objects Session Level Objects Debugging CSS MasterPages An Introduction...(read more)

Sizing Tools with SQL Server?

vinodkumar — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:02:26 GMT

I have seen a number of people ask me if there are tools and easy way to do sizing esp when working with SQL Server. I was browsing through the HP site and bumped into these cool resources which I felt is worth sharing. You might find a similar set of resources with other Hardware vendors too … But here is the starter links: Business Intelligence Sizer for Microsoft SQL Server Best practices for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for Very Large Database (VLDB) BI solutions OLTP Sizer for Microsoft SQL Server...(read more)

Service Broker – Bookmarker

vinodkumar — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:48:00 GMT

Since SQL Server 2005 this feature of Service Broker has been in the outside world but in my opinion is an underutilized feature. In SQL Server 2008 the capabilities atleast from a UI has been addressed partially via the Management Studio which was one of the biggest drawback for using this feature. Quick Intro - Service Broker provides queuing, scalable and reliable messaging for inside SQL Server. Service Broker is used both for applications that use a single SQL Server instance and applications...(read more)

ZoomIT V4.0 from SysInternals

vinodkumar — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:08:22 GMT

I do a lot of these presentations and many times I use some zomming tools to show the code and explain the concepts. And a number of times people have come back to me asking what that tool was … No rocket science :) … I have been using ZoomIT from Sysinternals for ages and I still love using them because of the simplicity and the ease at which I can turn them on. Few weeks back I got to see the updated version of the same online from Mark. The photo maybe shows some of the capabilities for me to...(read more)

Testing from Windows Live Writer

vinodkumar — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 04:20:26 GMT

How cool is to use the Windows Live writer. Testing to see if it will also display pictures without any problems :) Are we good here … I just rebuild my machine with Win7 + SQL Server 2008 + Office 2010 all x64 version. And it really rocks !!!...(read more)

P&P Developing SharePoint Applications V2 Released

vinodkumar — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:20:23 GMT

Developing SharePoint Applications guidance integrates new guidance with the original release, SharePoint Guidance – November 2008 , into a single download. The guidance contains the following components: SharePoint Guidance Library A set of reusable components that helps developers manage configuration, build repositories for SharePoint lists, log traces and events, and use service location. Guide The documentation includes a variety of topics, such as how to use design and application patterns...(read more)

Springboard Virtual Roundtable - Sept 24 - Windows 7 AppCompat Part 2: Virtualization

vinodkumar — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:36:00 GMT

This session comes directly from the heart of the most respected person on the planet for me "Mark Russinovich". No one can talk as authentic and as deep technical than this man. Dont miss the action as you are sure to get lot of fireworks and great amount of detail on Windows 7. Details for the event are – Date: Thursday, September 24 Time: 9:00am Pacific Time https://ms.istreamplanet.com/springboard Abstract: Hear from a panel of experts how virtualization tools can help you with...(read more)

Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP - Beta release

vinodkumar — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:40:00 GMT

Today IIS team has released the beta of the Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP . The Windows Cache Extension for PHP is a PHP accelerator , which is used to increase the speed of PHP applications running on the Windows operating systems. Any PHP application can take advantage of the functionality provided by the Windows Cache Extension for PHP without any code modifications. All that is required is that the extension is enabled and loaded by the PHP engine. Download the same from - Windows Cache...(read more)