Geekswithblogs.net

Tampa CodeCamp is this weekend

Nikita Polyakov — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:31:05 GMT

Tampa CodeCamp is this weekend. Great speakers and great sessions, see you there!

12/6/2008

8:30 AM - 5:30 PM

Welcome Time:
12/6/2008 7:30 AM Eastern Time

K-FORCE BLDG

1001 E Palm Ave

Tampa, FL , FL 33605

Be sure to sign up for this event ASAP at - http://www.tampacodecamp.com/

Twin Cities SharePoint Camp - January 24, 2009

TwinCitiesITandDevEvents — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:07:55 GMT

The 2009 date has been set for January 24, 2009 from 8:00 - 4:30 at New Horizons of MN.

Details are being finalized and as soon as the registration page is open, we will post the information here

SharePoint Camps are about the SharePoint community at large. They are meant to be a place for developers, administrators and any SharePoint user to come and learn from their peers. Topics are always based on community interest and never determined by anyone other than the community.

Registration link: http://www.nhmn.com/Courses/CrsDetail.aspx?C=NHTCSPCamp2

Call a method from MasterPage in Content Page

Diadiora Alexandru — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:58:57 GMT

To access a method from master page in the content page ensure first:

The method in master page is declared as public

than call this code from your content page code behind:

MasterPageClassName MyMasterPage = (MasterPageClassName)Page.Master;

MasterPageClassName.SetMenuToRegistered();

where:

SetMenuToRegistered() - is a method positioned in the master page class.

CTA Luncheon - December 9

TwinCitiesITandDevEvents — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:23:54 GMT

Annual Holiday Networking Event
Where: Eagan Community Center
When: Tuesday, December 9, 2008,
Special Time: 3:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Speaker: Sue Lindgren, YESS!
Registration Link: http://www.ctamn.org/cde.cfm?event=219036

Are you as effective as you could be? Do you know what is holding you back or getting in your way so you can be effective? What is Emotional Intelligence?
Event Notes:
• Afternoon Event
(3 p.m. to 6 p.m.)
• Plenty of Networking Delight
• Appetizers
• Cash Bar (registration includes one drink ticket)
• Speaker

We are excited to bring back Sue Lindgren by popular demand! She will show you specifically where you can improve working the “people side” of your business and how you can dramatically affect performance and profitability… perhaps even job security. The information in this program is extremely powerful. As a leader, manager, co-worker or in any role you will find valuable tools you can use to increase your effectiveness in the workplace.

Have you ever been frustrated with the people you work with? Have you ever dreaded a meeting because it was boring, non-essential or a complete waste of time? Do you know the primary cause of project failure and how it affects your bottom-line? Do you know the value of emotionally intelligent leadership and the price you pay if your leaders aren’t highly competent this way?

New feature for December: Buy a table!
Buy a full table of 8 for the CTA December Afternoon Holiday Networking Event at the reduced rate of $200. Bring a table of your colleagues, your customers, your friends! What a great way to have an inexpensive holiday outing, have some fun, learn great information from Sue Lindgren and network with others. Purchasing a Table is only available by using this form.

Your days are full. Your people are busy. Your business demands the best of you. The question is, are you effective? Are your people? Is your business? With all the demands in your job, business and life today, it’s critical that you focus on what’s most imperative to your success and fulfillment. Unfortunately, by ourselves, we can rarely see what's holding us back or getting in the way.
Sue and her company have invested thousands in a conclusive research project targeting specific areas where most managers and leaders miss the mark. They’ve taken this research and designed a comprehensive program that she will give us a taste.
Here's just a portion of what you'll learn:
• The 14 skills a leader and manager must cultivate in order to succeed
• The greatest contributor to your rising healthcare costs
• Where 90% of a manager’s time is wasted
• The most undervalued component in business today
• The top 3 reasons careers are derailed
• How to define coaching’s role in business and what kind of coaching fits your needs

SharePoint User Group Meeting - December 10

TwinCitiesITandDevEvents — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:20:49 GMT

You're invited. Register at www.sharepointmn.com

Please join us on Wednesday, December 10, for another opportunity to collaborate with experts on methods used to maximize the potential of the Microsoft Office SharePoint platform. Previous MNSPUG presenters will team to facilitate an open forum around the platform. Be sure to bring your questions and experience to participate in this dynamic discussion. Several subject areas within the SharePoint platform will be covered, including:
• Planning
• Development
• Delivery
• Tips and Tricks
• Governance
• and more!
SharePoint Open Forum

New Features in VB.NET 10 (.NET 4.0)

DarrenFieldhouse — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:31:05 GMT

Following the PDC, there has been a whole host of announcements about the new features we’ll be seeing in .NET 4.0. I’d like to take a moment to look at some of the features that will be coming to VB.NET 10.

Auto implemented properties
When this feature came to C# it created real language envy among VB developers. In those instances where all you need a property to do is hold a value (i.e. where a public field would do the job nicely if it wasn’t evil), C# 3.0 allows the developer to write the property using a shorthand notation and the compiler will implement the private field for you:

public int CustomerID

{

   get   { return customerIdField; }

   set   { customerIdField = value; }

}

Can be written as:

public int CustomerID { get; set; }

Of course, if you need to access the private field you need to write the property using the first style, but if you don’t the shorthand is really useful. VB.NET is getting this feature using the following syntax:

Public Property CustomerID As Integer

Collection Initialisers
Another feature C# has that is missing from VB.NET is the ability to declare and initialise a collection in one go. Well, the playing field is getting levelled a little more in .NET 4.0 as this feature is added to VB:

Dim words As New List(Of String) From {"Hello", "World"}

Implicit Line Continuations
In C# a statement is finished with a semicolon, so you can add new lines wherever you want to improve readability. Not so in VB.NET, if you want a new line you need to let the compiler know it’s not the end of the statement by adding an underscore (the line continuation character). With VB 10 the compiler will be smart enough to infer the line continuation character in most cases:

Dim s As String = “Hello” &

  “World”

Of course, it is likely to be confused if the line is a valid statement:

Dim s As String = "Hello"

  & "World"

In those cases you’ll still need the underscore.

I’ve just touched the surface of some of the new features we should be seeing in VB.NET 10, but it is already looking very exciting! I’m sure I’ll be blogging about many more features as the details are released…

Charting in ASP.NET, ASP.NET Chart Controls for .NET 3.5 SP1

Harish Ranganathan — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:36:58 GMT

Here is a HelloWorld sample on the new ASP.NET Charting control.

To begin with, install the free Microsoft Chart Controls and the "Tools for VS 2008 for Chart Controls" from here and here

Note that if you don’t install the Tools for VS 2008 for Chart controls, the Chart Server Control doesnt show up in the Toolbox

Once you are done with the installation, restart Visual Studio if you are already running the same (of course, save your work)

1. Start Visual Studio 2008 and create a File – New – ASP.NET Website or a Web Application

2. From the ToolBox, under Data tab, pick up the “Chart” control (the icon would be a series of colored bar graphs) and drag and drop it into the page.

3. Click on the smart tag for configuring the Chart control and Choose DataSource

4. Select “Database” and provide the connection string to your database server (in my case I chose Northwind)

5. Choose to save the connection string etc., and select the Database table (in my case I chose “Category Sales for 1997”)

6. Click “Finish” to complete the process.

7. Now if you run the page you will NOT get the Chart Control.

8. You need to select the Properties of the Chart Control from design view.

9. Make sure under “Data” DataSource is set to “SqlDataSource1” unless you gave a different name and DataMember is set to “DefaultView”

10. Under “Series” in Properties, click on the tab to open up the “Series Collection Editor”.

11. Scroll down the Series1 Properties to DataSource section.

12. Specify “CategoryName” as the XValueMember and “CategorySales” for YValueMembers and click Ok.

13. Build the page and hit F5 to run the page.

14. You will be able to see the Chart in your webpage.

15. Right Click on the chart and you would be able to see that it is an image generated dynamically that can be saved as a “.png” file.

You can download a comprehensive list of samples from here and verify the different implementations and source code for the same. For more details, visit the forums here

Cheers !!!

Do we really need properties in C#?

Changhong Fu — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:42:44 GMT

Last week, I had a discussion with some friends about the new features in C# programming language. It is kind of interesting that for most of the new features, I always found myself start with some sort of reluctance and then gradually accept it and finally find myself couldn’t write code without it. When I started learning C# a few years ago, I didn’t even like properties (I was a big fun of java). I didn’t understand that if they are just getters and setters, why we were bothered to have properties and let the complier hiding the truth? But now, I can’t imagine how I can write program without them. In my discussion, I told my friends that now I so much prefer the syntax of counter.Count++ over counter.setCount(counter.getCount() + 1).

Today, I suddenly realised that have given a very bad example. It actually shows the opposite of my point.

Yes, we all agree that counter.setCount(counter.getCount() + 1) is very ugly syntax, as a programmer who only write beautiful code, we all unhappy with it. So, it will make us to think, how can we make it better, should the getter and setter exist at the first place, isn’t it a clear sign of breaking the Law of Demeter? Then we may come up with better solution like this:

public class MyFancyCounter

{

private int count;

public void Increase()

{

count++;

}

As for counter.Count++, we are so happy with the syntax, we are probably never going to think if we should expose Count as a property, even though it does exactly the same as counter.setCount(counter.getCount() + 1).

So, with properties, life is easy. And it is so easy, that we are going to expose every single field as a property. In C#3, it is made even easier by have this syntax:

public int Count { get; set; }

By the way, can anyone tell me is there any real difference between public int Count { get; set; } and public int Count;? To me, they are the same. But as we all know public fields are very bad and we all love the ease of the public fields, this feature is kind of making compromise so that we can have public fields without feeling guilty. I remember a couple of years ago when this feature was demonstrated in a meeting, people were so excited and cheering loudly. I didn’t understand why people love it so much, are we going to tell our boss that we can finish the next project on time because we don’t have to type in all the properties?

Encouraging unnecessary exposure of private fields is not the only problem. A property gives impression of that it a simply field access, but in fact it is a method and it can do arbitrarily anything. Sometimes a property can cause great confusion when it is not supposed to be a property. Here is a real world story I can share. When I started working on a system a year ago, I found some services were suffering badly from memory leak. After running the service for a couple of hours, its memory usage shot up from 20M to 600M. With some help from Windbg/SOS, I found that all the WCF Channel objects were never got freed up. When I looked the code I find this pattern is used throughout the whole system:

ISecurityService service = serviceManager.SecurityService;

User[] users = service.GetUsers();

When I jumped into serviceManager.SecurityService, the code was something like this:

public ISecurityService SecurityService

{

get { return _securityFactory.CreateChannel(); }

}

The SecurityService property actually created a new instance of Channel every time it gets called! And as the factory object maintains the reference to all the channel objects it created, if you don’t explicitly dispose a channel object, it will never be garbage collected. So the correct way of using SecurityService is this:

using (ISecurityService service = serviceManager.SecurityService)

{

User[] users = service.GetUsers();

}

But do you feel it just looks wired? Yes, because you feel you are disposing a private field of serviceManager which might be used by someone else. I guess that is why everyone was deceived by the serviceManager.SecurityService property. So in this case, changing SecurityService property to method will make things much clearer. Like following:

public ISecurityService CreateSecurityService()

{

return _securityFactory.CreateChannel();

}

and

using (ISecurityService service = serviceManager.CreateSecurityService ())

{

User[] users = service.GetUsers();

}

Despite of the title of this post, I have no intention to challenge the existence of properties in C#. I love to use properties myself, even this one: public int Count { get; set; }

What I really want to say is sometimes to use a property is not a simple choice. When you enjoy the ease of the syntax you should ask some questions:

Do I really need to expose a field as a property?
Is it semantically very different from a field access?
Will the operation be much complicated than a field access?
Will calling the getter have a side effect?
Will the getter return different result every time it is called?

Do not pass data between static methods using static data members.

Michael Freidgeim — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:49:08 GMT

In one of static class in our application, I found local static members that were used to pass data between calls of static methods.
It’s wrong and can cause errors that are intermittent and very hard to reproduce.
The problem will happen if the same code executed for 2 users simultaneously. In this case value for one user could be used for the second user and result will be unpredictable.

The code was similar the following:

    public static class HelperClass
    {
       private static string _dataToPass = "";

static void Method1(string param)

{

_dataToPass =param;

}

static void Method2()
{

//logic based on _dataToPass value;

}

}

The pattern is popular for instance object, when one method saves state in the instance, and other method use it, but it is not acceptable for static class.

Consider to use singleton pattern, if you have shared for the domain object.

The issue is well known(e.g. see Statics & Thread Safety: Part I and Part 2 ), but I decided to write about it again.

Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio 2008

Harish Ranganathan — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:16:00 GMT

The Windows Live Team put up a neat bunch of controls that can be used in your ASP.NET Websites. In fact once you install the Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio 2008 from http://dev.live.com/tools/ you get a few server controls in the toolbox as well as website templates for Visual Studio 2008 project/website.

I wanted to demonstrate how you can quickly add a video to your website that is being streamed from the Silverlight Streaming Service, all within 5 minutes.

Pre-requisites

1. Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Web Developer Expression Edition

2. Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio 2008 (http://dev.live.com/tools/)

3. Your video uploaded to Silverlight Streaming Service

i. Visit http://silverlight.live.com

ii. Sign-in using your Live ID/Hotmail/Passport

iii. Click on "Get it Free" Icon

iv. Click on "I accept Terms and Conditions"

v. You would receive an Account ID and Account Key (GUID ID)

vi. Note them for your reference for now. You would also be able to view it every time you login.

vii. Click on "Manage Videos" in the left

viii. Click "Upload Video" to provide a video title as well as uploading the video.

Adding your uploaded video into ASP.NET Website

1. Create a File - New - ASP.NET Windows Live Website

2. From the ToolBox under "Windows Live" Tab, drag and drop "SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer" into the page

3. Click on the smart tag ">" on the Top right of the SilverlightLightStreamingMediaPlayer control in design view.

4. Click on the tab next to the URL textbox in the "SillverlightStreamingMediaPlayer Tasks" wizard.

5. It prompts you with a dialog for providing the Account ID and the Account Key.

6. You would need to provide the same that you acquired from the steps in pre-requisites above.

7. Click on "List" and it will provide a list of the videos uploaded by you to the Streaming Service already.

8. Select the video and click "Ok" to add it to the page.

9. You are all set to play your streaming video in your ASP.NET Website.

Cheers !!!

Apple closes iTunes account work-around

BizTalk Visionary — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:43:40 GMT

For many years savvy iTunes users have been setting up US iTunes accounts to not only get music, video and film at a reduced cost but also be able to get TV programs early. It has been one of the ‘legal’ ways of breaking the Sky monopoly.

That has all been stopped as Apple decides to maximize revenue. Previously a US account could be had by setting up an iTunes account and selecting the ‘No’ card payment option. Of course a US address was required and the purchase of iTunes US gift certificates thro’ ebay was needed.

The option was not a bug as previously reported by other commentators but the need to allow children the option of downloading without having to use an adults credit card. This is now been stopped. The argument is simply setup a paypal account for the child and do it that way.

At a stroke Apple has now pushed 1000’s of users previously paying for music, film and TV towards the world of Bit Torrent and the illegal non-paying exchange of such items.

This strikes me as madness in today’s world where I can purchase CD’s, Videos and the like and have them shipped to the UK.

Well done Apple!

Step one...

mattjgilbert — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 04:08:41 GMT

Hello. I’ve often wondered why I’ve never blogged before and never really came up with a convincing reason why not. I guess it’s partly laziness and partly wondering if no-one is going to read it then what is the point. I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that I should at least blog my thoughts so that even if nobody else reads them, at least I’ve taken the time to consider more about what I am thinking and writing which can only be a good thing.

I’m currently focused on Integration and have been working with BizTalk since the first version. In the last 12+ months I’ve been more involved in design, planning and management but I’m due to change jobs in the new year and should be getting back to more hands on work; which is good news for me :)

Until then, this blog might be a little sporadic but I hope to at least present some of my experiences gained so far within my latest role. To start with I’ll dig out the slide deck I presented at the UK BizTalk user group and post an accompanying entry explaining it all. Watch this space…

Lord of the widgets!

BizTalk Visionary — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:54:35 GMT

This web page from Sprint takes web widgets to the nth level. It most certainly is one page to rule them all!

Lord of the widgets!

Hot Bag Syndrome

Richard Jones — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:42:45 GMT

Ever had the issue, when you think you're laptop is powering down. Place laptop in bag only to find a while later laptop didn't power down and has done a nice job in warming up your bag?

This phenomenon has been happening more and more to me, as the graphics drivers are causing a crash when my machines attempts to hibernate.

I just thought we'd better give this syndrome a name. I've called it 'Hot Bag Syndrome'

VMware one day sale - today, Monday 1 December 2008

Liam Westley — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:16:07 GMT

VMware workstation is 25% of today at the www.vmware.com estore, use CyberMondayDeal code to get the discount.

Thanks to Oliver Sturm for the top tip.

Selecting Items in a list using DIVs instead of Radio Buttons

xlinesonegoal — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:20:14 GMT

Selecting Items in a list using DIVs instead of Radio Buttons

Problem: Radio buttons cannot be styled using CSS. Another problem is that they simply f*** up your design if used incorrectly. They are also not very useful if you would like a user to be able to click on a large item in order to select it.

Solution: A solution to this problem would be to allow the user to click on whole DIVs in order to select an item. This is done using some javascript, CSS and a hidden textbox. This is how it's done using ASP VB and Javascript. Obviously this can be done using other Server Side languages as the main work will be done by Javascript. So...

This is the javascript needed.

The highlighted part in this code is the most important thing. The 'selected' variable holds the ID Number of the selected DIV. It is important to set it by default as the item selected when the page loads.

This is the HTML/ASPVB code needed.

    <% for i = 0 to 5
        if i = 0 then
            myclass = "itemselected"
        else
            myclass = "item"
        end if

        divid = "div" & i
    %>
        <div class="<%= myclass %>" id="<%= divid %>" onclick="selectDIV(<%= i %>)">
            To select DIV #<%= i %> click here.
        </div>
    <% next %>

    <form action="default.asp" method="post">
        <input type="hidden" id="selecteddivid" name="selecteddivid" value="0" />
        <input type="submit" value="SAVE" />
    </form>

In this case, I used a loop from 0 to 5 to generate 6 divs. The ID of each DIV is 'divx' where x is a number from the loop. The onclick event calls the selectDIV function which we did above. As you can see a hidden textbox 'selecteddivid' is created here which will hold the selected div's id. This can later be read using request.form("selecteddivid") after the form posts.

Conclusion: Javascripts like this are easy to create and will help you create better-looking webpages by allowing the user to interact better with your website.

Code example will be coming soon.

Microsoft Offering Free Media Streaming for Silverlight

D'Arcy Lussier — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:45:21 GMT

So you have a Silverlight application, and you want it to serve up some videos or deep zoom images, but you don’t want to fork over major cash to your hosting provider for the extra disk space and traffic. Well has Microsoft got a deal for you…

The Microsoft Silverlight Streaming program gives you space online to not only host your media files but also the bandwidth to serve them up to your Silverlight app…and its *free*! Here’s the details:

- 10 GB of space to host your media files.
- Up to 5 TB of bandwidth per user account per month
- Videos need to be capped at 10 minutes in length and have a max bit rate of 1.4 Mbps

Now, because this is in beta its free…however they do state that when it moves out of beta there will be two models:

- Ad Supported (free, but with adds downloaded before your video I guess?)
- Paid Service (no statement on how much they’d charge per month)

If you want more information, check out the site here.

The Path Is Not a Legal Form

Chris Eargle — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:08:00 GMT

I've been struggling through a Team Foundation Server 2008 install with Sql Server 2008 over the weekend. It seems to be having an especially hard time with the SQL Server Reporting Services. After analyzing a few things, I determined that the configuration tool was having an issue due to some prior installations of software. The report urls were pointing to a SQL Express directory.

I went about setting up the virtual directories manually. This required setting up an application pool, and I assigned my service user to run the pool. After I did that, I had to grant the user write access to the RSTempFiles folder. Then I received an error when browsing the site, "the path is not a legal form."

I couldn't find a site anywhere with a solution, though there was a dead thread on the old msdn forums with the same problem with SRSS. Since the tubes held no hope for me, I had to resort to old fashioned troubleshotting.

If you receive this error, you need to add your application pool user to the SQLServerReportServerUser (followed by $servername$instancename) group. It's that simple, but the error doesn't indicate what is necessary to fix it.

Where Did My Memory Go?

Alois Kraus — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:48:23 GMT

When you program in a high level language like .NET where the Garbage collector takes care of your memory you do not have to think about memory as often as it is the case in C++. Memory leaks tend to show up much more often in C++ and other non garbage collected languages because nobody is cleaning after you. Garbage collection is a good thing but somehow your application consumes much more memory than you thought it should. What should you do now? First of all you need to understand how your memory is organized by Windows itself. Mark Russinovich has a very eloquent article about that. If you do not understand what the whole article is all about I give you a quick start.

Download Process Explorer from TechNet.

Now you see some output like this.

What do the numbers of Working Set, Working Set Private, Private Bytes, ... mean to a "normal" programmer? I do allocate memory, use it and let the garbage collector free it when I no longer use it. The usage of memory is easy but Windows does a lot behind the scenes to make it work in an efficient way. The most crucial part is that Windows does is to share memory between processes when it is read only. Your code and read only data in a dll is a good example of a read only data structure that can be used in many processes. If you use the same dll in more than one process it will be shared between all processes that use it.

Shared Memory

If you look at the columns in the screen shot of Process Explorer you will notice that different counters for Working Set and Private Bytes have been selected. The deeper reason for this is that these numbers are incredibly useful to tune your application. To get more data you can select the Properties (right click on a process) of a process.

Working set is the actually used physical memory which cannot be more than the amount of your RAM chips installed on your computer.
Private Bytes is the memory that cannot be shared between processes.
Working Set Private tells you how much private bytes attribute to your working set (allocated physical memory) .

When you add the total working set of all processes you can get a much bigger number than the installed memory on your machine. The reason behind this is that much of your process data (e.g. code) can be shared. You can calculate your working set out of

Working Set = Working Set Private + Working Set Shareable

If you want to create a well behaved .NET application you would aim for a low working set and low private bytes. Private bytes are for example all your allocated objects which live on the CLR heap either in Generation 0,1,2 or the Large Object Heap. More about that comes later.

Code Sharing - NGen And Precompiled Assemblies

In the .NET environment things are complicated a bit by the JIT compiler which does compile your IL code into each process separately. To achieve full code sharing in .NET processes you need to precompile your assembly with the NGEN tool to enable cross process code sharing. If you look with process explorer at your loaded dlls (press Ctrl-D in Process Explorer) you will find that all .NET assemblies from Microsoft are precompiled to minimize the memory footprint if more than one .NET process (which is very likely) is runnig. To validate that you are you using the precompiled images look into the Fusion Log (Fuslogvw and check the Native Image checkbox). An even easier way is to look at the path of you loaded dlls. If it does contain C:\Windows\NativeImages_v2.xxxx then you have loaded the precompiled assembly successfully. If not your NGen image did not match the loaded assembly and must be updated or you are using multiple AppDomains. In that case you need to decorate your Main method with LoaderOptimization.MultiDomain value to tell the JIT compiler to share the code between AppDomains.

        [LoaderOptimization(LoaderOptimization.MultiDomain)]
         static void Main(string[] args)

Code size in enterprise applications can easily reach several hundred MB which would become a major headache if no code sharing between processes is possible.

Data Sharing

Another way to share data between processes are Memory Mapped Files which will be supported by the .NET Framework 4.0 without any PInvokes finally.

Page File Allocated Memory

An even trickier thing is to allocate memory in the page file directly by calling VirtualAllocEx. Since the page file is shared between all processes it is not really possible to attribute this allocation to a specific process (yet). This is the reason why Page File backed memory does not show up as private byte memory at all although your application might consume GBs of it.

Working Set and Allocation Size

There is a very direct relation between Working Set size and allocation size in .NET applications. Try to run the following code snippet

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            List<byte[]> memory = new List<byte[]>();
            const int Factor = 85; // Allocate 85000 bytes with each loop run
            while (true)
            {
                var bytes = new byte[Factor * 1000];
                memory.Add(bytes); // prevent the GC from reclaiming the memory
                Thread.Sleep(Factor / 2);  // throttle the  allocation to make it visible
                Console.WriteLine("Next run");
            }
        }
    }

That code snippet will allocate memory in blocks each the size of 85000 bytes and sleep a little to watch the memory allocations more easily. If you wonder why on Earth I did use 85000 bytes as block size: That is the size when the .NET Framework (2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 3.5 SP1) will allocate your object on the Large Object Heap. All objects on this heap are never moved by the Garbage Collector. You can observe this directly when you watch the Working Set Size. It remains constant while you allocate hundreds of MBs of private bytes memory! Windows allocates the memory and finds that since you did not touch the memory it can be moved to the page file where your application will happily allocate more and more page file but not physical memory until you reach the 2 GB limit for a 32 bit process or the page file becomes full.

The effect changes drastically when you change the Factor from 85 to 84. This will change the allocation size below the threshold and you will allocate the memory on the normal CLR heap. That heaps are compacted from time to time by the GC which means that the GC will force Windows to move our memory from the page file into the physical memory. Although our application does not access the allocated bytes the GC will which binds our memory allocation directly to physical memory!

When you allocate memory in smaller chunks than 85000 bytes it will be allocated in your physical RAM due to the GCs nature to traverse the whole heap from time to time.

That is important since it severely limits our ability to run an application with many small objects on machines with not so much RAM. It is therefor vitally important for all .NET developers to track their memory consumption and have a sharp eye on many small (<85000 bytes) object allocations which directly add to the process working set. How and which memory profilers can be used to track typical .NET applications is a topic for a future post.

Bloodletting XNA

Scott Miller — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:35:47 GMT

Back in the past (circa May 2006) I entered the GWB Game Contest. Six weeks of design and programming in Visual C#.Net 2005, pre-XNA days. I created a post-apocalyptic arena card game, similar to Magic, where patrons fight their champions (or slaves) in an arena. It included anime game art created by my daughter Mindy.

Now I have been converting it to XNA. In addition, I want to significantly tweak the gameplay, and add lots more cards. Mindy is unavailable for game art, so I was stumped for card art. Then I found that the charas PRGMaker art site has a faceset creator engine. So I have been using it to design card art.

Plugging the card art into the old Bloodletting game engine looks like this:

While converting this to XNA, I also want to add armor, and a "cost" to each card. Then one cannot play a card without enough money, with money being like mana in Magic.

That is Phase 1 plan. Phase 2 plan is to add multiple characters fighting at one time.

Book Review : MCTS 70-503 Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Windows Communication Foundation (Self-Paced Training Kit). MS-Press : 9780735625655

Kurt Claeys — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:51:01 GMT

As one of the books part of the 75 centimeters of MS Press books I won as Speaker Idol at TechEd EMEA Barcelona I selected the training kit for the WCF Exam (70-503). Here's my review on this book.

You can buy the book at http://www.microsoft-press.co.uk/scripts/product.asp?ref=877207

Included in the book is :

- a DVD with Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition (90 day evaluation). Nice to have for people without VS2008 at their work environment and want to learn WCF and prepare for the exam.

- CD containing :

Training Kit Application with lesson reviews and exam question examples. Great value !!!
All exercises from the book, organized per chapter/lesson with the solutions to start form (before) and the completed solutions (after).
The book as e-book in PDF format.
Some sample chapters from other MS Press books (Training Kit for Workflow Foundation, WF Step by Step, WCF Step by Step and Application = Code + Markup)
Some links to great webcasts.

- A discount voucher for the Exam

The Microsoft Press Training Kit Exam Prep is an exam simulator/lesson review application with 56 questions for lesson review and another 200 questions in practice test mode. In lesson review mode you can configure your test objectives which makes it very useful to study and review the lessons on your own pace.

Content of the Book :

The book has 610 pages and includes 12 chapters :

Contracts
Exposing the Services
Deploying Services
Consuming Services
Configuring WCF
Instrumentation
Infrastructure Security
User-Level Security
When Simple Isn’t Sufficient
Sessions and Instancing
Transaction Services
Concurrency

+ A chapter containing answers on the lesson review and scenario parts for each chapter.

The book starts, like most training material on WCF with the types of contracts. It quickly goes into details about FaultContracts. A good idea, as FaultContracts are very important in real world WCF applications. The Exposing, Deploying and Consuming chapters talk about Endpoints, WAS, IIS and managed application hosting, bindings and custom bindings, creating proxies and using svcutil.exe. Most Exercises are good as training material but are not in-depth enough compared to real life applications. Nice to see content on instrumentation (which is needed for the exam). The security part is well explained. The 'When Simple isn't Sufficient' chapter (weird name) talks about POX and handling exceptions on the client (important in real life !!!). The remaining chapters contain the typical content on sessions, transaction and concurrency.

I found this book being complete enough and having average to good examples and labs. It explains hard topics like authorization and implementation good. It's also one of the few WCF training materials I've seen which includes a lab on monitoring WCF Services. Although not an in-depth lab, it's worth doing it to become familiar with monitoring.

Personal review :

What I like most about this book :

- The content ;-) ... WCF is a great technology.

- It's a complete package. It has everything needed for studying WCF, preparing for and doing the exam (the ebook, the solutions for the exercises, a practice test, the Visual Studio evaluation version and the discount for buying a voucher for the exam).

- It has multiple small lessons which makes it possible to consume this book at you own pace. Even if you have only one hour to spare, you can start reading a lesson.
- It has a great educational structure. I mean ... every lesson starts with a brief overview of the lesson content, the well explained content, a lab, a summary and a review with questions. After the lesson you can watch the screencasts and do the review again with the training application.

What the book lacks is some content on using WCF services from AJAX enabled sites and JSON serialization and some more real life in-depth labs.

Conclusion :

This book is not making you immediately the greatest WCF/SOA guru, but it has very good content, even useful for experienced WCF consultants. It prepares the reader for the exam quite well. I can recommend this book to everyone.

Future of Mobile VAS in India

Manish Agrawal — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:49:38 GMT

Nice presentation on Mobile VAS in India.

Mobile Vas In India

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: bda bajaj)