Well, I finally decided to take the plunge and host my own blog server. This means that I am moving this blog to a new home. I'll leave the stuff that is here, but all new posts will be at the new location: http://portal.sqltrainer.com

 

Hope to see you all at the new site.

 

 

I've been spending some time lately (in between traveling and playing architect dude for our AD module) researching issues around scaling database systems. I've come across a couple of really impressive articles from the SQL team on MSDN on this subject. It's nice to see some of the quality coming out of the SQL team lately, good job guys!

 

Here is an article on scalability with SQL 2005: http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/learnmore/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/ScalOutSQL.asp

 

And here is an article that gets to the heart of the matter: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/dataoutsideinside.asp

 

 

Well, in all of the excitement around TechEd, I forgot one of the more personally interesting things... The product that I am principally responsible for, ECM, once again has won the Best of TechEd award.. No other product has won the award 2 years in a row, so that is just way cool!

 

From the announcement:

 

WINNER! Best of Tech Ed, Systems Management & Operations

“For systems administrators who want not only complete control but also remediation capabilities, Configuresoft’s Enterprise Configuration Manager is a solution that answers the questions you don’t know to ask. This enterprise configuration management product enables cross-platform management and can monitor, manage and audit hardware and software configurations for the servers and clients in the organization.”

-- Amy Eisenberg, Windows IT Pro 

Well, I guess it had to happen sooner or later, my secret is out...

 

I have been nominated as a forum moderator on the TechNet beta forums.. Right now the Office 2007 forums are live, but the Vista ones will be soon... Come check out the foums at:

 

 

And if you're really brave:

 

So I am back at my desk after a nice week at the MEDC conference in Vegas.. Lots of good stuff at the conference, although I spent the entire time in the Hands on Labs (HOL) area.

 

On a side note, I have to say that Eric E. did a fantastic job of running the HOLs. I have not been to a more organized and prepared HOL at a Microsoft Conference(Not to say that there wasn't some glitches, but all in all, they were minor and the actual labs were for the most part excellent!)

 

It's interesting to see the emergence of the mobile platform as a targeted app dev platform. Seems like more and more people are getting on that bandwagon and creating addons for their products that fit the smartphone/pocketPC platform.. I guess it doesn't hurt that Windows Mobile 5.0 is a pretty nice OS, and the devices themselves are getting very good. (I am about to pull the trigger on a Verizon XV6700 myself)

 

Anyway, enough rambling and back to work it is....

You'd think that we've actually done something right....

 

:)

 

 

 

Today must be my day for updating the blog..

 

For those interested, I will be at the Microsoft MEDC conference in Las Vegas May 8-11..

 

 

Well, those of you that know me are aware of the fact that I am pretty proud of the product that my company, Configuresoft, Inc., develops. We just released version 4.8, which includes a lot of new Unix platform support, as well as some very cool new functionality for the Windows platforms. We were entered into a contest at the recent Microsoft Management Summit in San Diego, and walked away with the grand prize. This is the second "Big Show" award that we've received (TechEd 2005 was the first) and we're all very jazzed by this...

 

From the citation:

 

 

 

 

I'll be working as a Technical Learning Guide (TLG) at TechEd Boston. Look for me in the "Blue" section of the Hands On Labs

I've recently had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Test Driven Development (TDD) issues that surround database development. In searching through the information that is available "out there", I've come to the conclusion that there is no real consensus as to what exactly TDD for SQL developers really means... I've put together a presentation on this that I hope to deliver for the Rocky Mountain SQL Server Users Group and I've also submitted an abstract to the Professional Association for SQL Server for the November Summit, we'll see how it goes...

 

In short, TDD is an Agile method that states developers will develop unit tests first, and write just enough code to satisfy the test. Doing this requires that the developer have a full understanding of exactly how their code will be used. At first glance this seems to be a backwards way of thinking.. How many times have you written a proc where you've stubbed in the input parameters and then started piecemeal development of the proc until it is complete? Using TDD, you'd first write your test cases, and then write the proc to satisfy those cases... It's an iterative process that ultimately ends up with a fully-tested (assuming the developer understood the use-case requirements of what they were developing) piece of code that is ready to plug into the system... (I'm reminded of the time that I did NOT use TDD to develop a particularly important piece of code that was critical for our internal security model..... There was a piece of functionality that I didn't fully understand, so I blocked it out in the proc and wrote a comment along the lines of "Finish Code here"... Well, I never did make it back to that particular block of code, and the short story is that the product ended up releasing with this critical bit of code simply missing -- That was 3 years ago and it still makes for a good joke around here)

 

Look for more posts from me on this subject in the future..

 

 

This is a very good article/blog post on MSF and Agile methodologies. (And very pertinent, considering I've spent the day working with MS Team Foundation Server!)

 

 

 

This phrase is getting a bit overused I think, but I came across a very good performance modeling whitepaper today, and thought I would share it. Take a look at: How to Eat an Elephant

 

 

I've recently had the opportunity to work on a small project for a company that I do some volunteer work for (see http://www.hopeandhome.org) to help simplify their workflow when it comes to inprocessing. I found that in working on this small project, I learned a lot about some of the new features available in .NET 2.0, and was able to come up with what I think is a fairly "cool" use of .NET and SQL Server to solve an age-old problem..

 

The problem:

Hand-written documents must be scanned and saved to a processors computer, and then that processor manually enters information from the form into their application, which includes uploading a copy of the scanned form in .PDF format... This takes time, and requires that a specific person always enter each form (the person who's been trained to do it) into the application.

 

The solution high-level:

 

It turns out that the scanner being used is smart enough to be able to email scanned documents to a specific email address in the form of .PDF docs, and the email can be configured to fill out specific items from the scanned document using OCR technology...

 

I created a .NET application that reads the email coming from the scanner, and populates a SQL Server table with the various info from the document, as well as populating the .PDF file in the table itself. (The Database is wholly separate from the main processing database).. I then created a Windows Service that executes the application and periodically checks for new email....

 

Couple the above with some triggers that move the data from the temporary database into the main database, and we've got a solution that saves time and allows anyone to process incoming documents...

 

Assuming that there is interest, I'll post some of the guts of the solution in later entries...

 

I thought that this was a pretty good show:

 

In previous entries, I've discussed using SQL Server 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 to build and access a web service. One of the nice things about building web services in SQL Server is that you can truly abstract the data access from the application accessing the data... (Hmmmmmm, sounds very SOAish, doesn't it?)

 

At any rate, lets discuss building an Asyncronous web service client, using the design pattern discussed in my previous blog entry.

 

The first thing we need to do is to setup the event handler for the completion event. Using the web service discussed several entries ago, this might look something like this(notice the reference to OrdersRangeCompleted EventArgs):

 

void ws_OrdersRangeCompleted(object sender, RMSOctPresentation.WebService.OrdersRangeCompletedEventArgs e)

{

// Actually populate the DataSet with the results of the call

// This is no different than what was done earlier, and frankly should be wrapped into

// a single method that takes a control reference as input

DataSet ds1 = (DataSet)e.Result[0];

DataTable dt = ds1.Tables[0];

lstOrdersRange.DataSource = dt;

lstOrdersRange.DisplayMember =

"PurchaseOrderID";

lstOrdersRange.Refresh();

}

 

Then we need to create the class that will hold the results of the Async call. We do this by deriving from the AsyncCompletedEventArgs class. This might look something like this:

 

public partial class OrdersRangeCompletedEventArgs : System.ComponentModel.AsyncCompletedEventArgs {

private object[] results;

internal OrdersRangeCompletedEventArgs(object[] results, System.Exception exception, bool cancelled, object userState) :

base(exception, cancelled, userState) {

this.results = results;

}

/// <remarks/>

public object[] Result {

get {

this.RaiseExceptionIfNecessary();

return ((object[])(this.results[0]));

}

}

}

 

There are a couple of interesting points here. First off, note that one of the members of the class is an object array. Basically this will be the placeholder for the results of the call to the web service method. Secondly, note how we use the base class members in the constructor. Once this is done, we can actually make the call to the method itself.