Last week I did my session recordings for the SSWUG vConference and it was great, this time I am doing 4 sessions and I kept all of them at level 100 as I remembered when I started looking at these topics few months back I was struggling myself. There is so much information on the Internet but its hard to find introductory topics, topics which will tell you in short what the technology is all about, in what case you need it. I hope I have done a good job at that :)
BTW if anyone wants to register for the event they can use "SPVSUVC09" coupon code and that should save them $25, not bad. Plus the total cost is also very less compare to other conferences so great opportunity for all of us to save some bucks and attend the great sessions seating at home or office in comfort.
Wow what an event considering that it was first SQL Saturday event in South Florida, now the next event we have to setup is where Scott Klein will jump in a pool full of alligators, (he had promised in one of the SQL PASS meetings that he would do that if we have more than 300 registered attendees, and it was way more than that).
I did a session on ADO .Net sync services (my favorite), one thing that surprises me is that it’s been out for well over 2 years and still has not found a big user base. It’s a great product; imagine the capability of making your application work in offline mode is great. But I guess it’s mainly because most of us are still busy in churning out applications that are over kill for a poor browser, we have a complicated ERP applications running on a browser; which was meant for publishing static information. Hopefully in future people will start going back to the Rich client applications when WPF, click once and WCF takes off in real sense. I developed my first smart client application in 2002 using win-forms and web services and haven’t looked back.
Below are the links for the ppt and my code project article.
Presentation
Sync in 2 Tier
Sync in Multitier
And for those of you who attended the session and had question regarding insert with duplicate primary key, I promise to come up with example on that one.
REadyBoost is one of the very usefull feature that was introduced in Windows Vista. Recently I asked few of my colleagues and friends about this feature and only couple of them knew about it, so thought of adding a blog post on this one.
You can increase the performance of your machine by using a high speed USB flash drive to supplement your RAM. Upgrading RAM on a machine can be expensive plus the machines have their limitations on how much can you add more. Even though it won’t be same as upgrading RAM on the machine, it can be as fast as 10 times reading from physical disk. You can go to MSDN to find out how you will configure your Vista or Window 7 to take advantage of ReadyBoost.
Today the news about Google coming out with its own operating system "Chrome" is all over the Internet and I was wondering can they make an in-road into the OS field which is basically been dominated by Microsoft for decades. And the answer to that is possibly yes, if not as a full fledge OS for desktops and servers but for portable devices.
There are 2 things that I hate most about windows OS first it takes forever to boot the OS, since I had SP1 installed on my Vista it takes more than 5 minutes just to boot the machine (I have dual core CPU with 4 GB of Ram with high speed HDD), it seems that the OS has gone into some kind of comma, and it's frustrating. Windows 7 seems to be lot better but I still have to see one with all the applications and junk loaded on it. Here Google is giving indications that it wants to keep its OS simple and lighter for the faster boot up. Vista may have many features that are great and that's the reason it may be taking forever to load, but 90% of the users are not even aware of those Features, so why load them by default, let the user turn it on as they need it.
Second feature that I use to hate about windows is that currently it lacks security against spy ware and viruses which they have finally decided to take care by offering Microsoft Security Essentials. I feel that security should always have been part of OS, Windows did have Windows defender but it did not have protection against viruses and spy-wares. One could get the anti-virus with Live One care plan but not many people were aware of the plan and it was like buying a car first and then buying it's warranty plan (here we are not even talking about the extended warranty :) ). Microsoft has promised to release the Security Essentials during the second half of 2009 and one can download the Beta from Microsoft site . Reviews on CNet are mixed, will have to wait and see how the final product turns out.
>> Update: I just checked the Microsoft site and they are not accepting any more participants for the Beta testing of Security Essentials so if you have not downloaded already you may have to wait for some time.
It may take years for Google to come up with a serious OS for the desktops and laptops but for the portable devises and netbooks it may come up with a good solution.
Yesterday I was trying to create my first database on SQL 2008 and thought let me check out if there are any new data types that I can take advantage of and yes in fact there are. The best I liked is Date and Time data type, how many times we needed a field just to store either the date part or just the time part and we ended up using DateTime data type which stores both date and time when you don't need both. Besides saving space in storage it saves the hurdle of reformatting or massaging the code while displaying, comparing or manipulating. I use Oracle more often then SQL sever (not by my choice) and each time we have to compare the date part we have to remember to do the TRUNC to remove the time part, same applies while displaying the fields on screen. Some time we just want to store the time part like Shift start and end time, we still end up storing both date and time and then remove date before displaying. It's just annoying. Also on storage side the date field just takes up 3 bytes instead of 8, one may say that in current time when we are dealing with Tera bytes of data how much does 5 bytes matter; I would say there is no alternative to responsive design.
When I designed my tables first time I added the fields with SQL 2005 in mind, good that I checked the new types and even though I had to redesign some of my tables I think it's worth the efforts :)
Check out TechNet for nice article explaining the types in detail.
That's the fun being in IT field you can never say you know the it, every time you cross check you will learn something new. Happy learning.
Yesterday Telmo Sampaio of Blue Dasher Technologies presented Virtual Earth development with silverlight at the West Palm Beach .net user group and it was more than amazing. During his presentation he demonstrated how one can take the mapping applications to next level with the help of silverlight, now the maps on your application need not be just plain maps with zoom in and zoom out, you can plot any custom silverlight objects on the map and play with them. Enough said take a look at this cool application they have developed at Blue Dasher
http://www.bluedashertech.com/
You can learn more about SDK download and updates from Bing Maps team blog.
Recently I received a discount code for the virtual conference by SSWUG group, the organizers call it VIP code :) I am going to present 3 sessions under the .net conference sessions and really liked the whole concept; for less than 5% cost of what one would pay at VS live or Teched one can get same quality of session at the comfort of home or office and you can pause the session or replay them when you think it’s getting way over your head to understand the accent of guys like me.
Check out the sessions at SSWUG vConference
And if you plan to register you can save $10 on registration by using SPVVSHSP09
code. They have over 140 session in 4 different tracks.
It was another great code camp event at Miami with so many great speakers and .net enthusiasts. The only difficult thing is to choose between tracks that you want to go.
In today's session of Sync services I saw more interest than in past which is always good and fun. For a presenter there is nothing is more satisfying than having a presentation more like a group discussion.
Below are the link for presentation and code example
ADO .Net Sync Services Presentation
2 Tier Example
N Tier Example using WCF Service
:)
Dec 6th' 08 I presented ADO .Net Sync services at the Tampa code camp. This was my 6th presentation on same topic in as many months and except Orlando Tech Ed I did not see enough developers interested in Sync services. At first it was kind of disappointing to see just 15 developers in the session but then I realized that there were few other sessions running parallel and the one that had biggest crowd was MVC architecture in ASP .net. I guess that's true for winform or smart client development. Out of 10 developers I meet 8-9 are on web development and if I am lucky I might meet one or 2 who might be interested in smart client development and this is surprisingly shocking as the winforms of today have so much to offer than 5 years back. I feel many developers and architects have not yet exploited the potential that winform applications offer.
In Feb 2002 when .net 1.0 was in beta we were going to start a new application at Palm Beach county for the Fire Rescue dept so we decided to jump on .net and that's when my supervisor came across an article "Death of browser", which mentioned about how the browser which was originally designed for browsing static contents have been over abused for application development; and how web services along with stub deployment will change the game back to using win forms. This is where my first love towards winform apps started, though after doing web developments for almost 4 years it took me 3-4 months to accept the winform development, but then it was never looking back. Since then I have been spending most of my time on winform (Smart client) application development.
Smart clients have so much to offer, the biggest hurdle that people had with winform applications is that they were difficult to maintain and upgrade, implementing N tier architecture and security was bit difficult etc, but with click once or stub deployment deploying application is as good as opening a web page and the application maintains it self by auto-upgrading. And the web services or WCF makes designing a robust N tier architecture easier than web application. Today's desktop have been powered with GHz CPUs and Gigs of memory, so why not take advantage of that resource and offer user a really slick application with true GUI and not just a mimic using DHTML. Unless your application is people facing on Internet with unlimited users, I think for most Intranet or even Internet application with known user base; Smart client can be the best solution.
I feel sometime it's about the developers who are use to upgrading them self from asp to .net 1.0 to 3.5 and so on, they have a big resistance to move towards the winforms and one of the argument that I hear most is that with new web controls from third parties like Telerik and dev-express your application can look like winform app, so what's the need to design winform app? And my answer to that is its lot easier to design and maintain winform application, plus the performance can be unmatched. Also with technologies like sync services you can design applications that are available to user even when the network or main database is down.
Finally after 2 weeks I did get chance to publish the second part of my article on Sync Services.
The article is a follow up article to Introduction to ADO .Net Sync and takes a look at how easily we can convert a two Tier Sync application to N tier using WCF services. The ability to sync up your data without connecting to the main database is a great value and opens the door to many complex architecture implementations. There are many examples on sync services online but most of them are in C#, hence here I am just trying to have very basic examples for the VB community.
If you need slides for your own presentation you can get it from my previous blog. In the coming weeks I'll try to post more examples on sync services, and my next target is to convert the 101 sample library from MSDN to VB .net if someone has not already done that.