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Limitations in Flex 3 and Silverlight 2

ASP.NET Blogs — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Lately I find myself playing with both technologies in the same day. Normally I have open by default Flex Builder 3 and Visual Studio 2008. Great if you thinking to slow down your computer.

Both technologies have become pretty popular to enriched the web applications to something more than HTML. I guess AJAX wasn’t the solution that web developers have been waiting for. I believe there is a raising concern to deliver rich user interfaces to the user without having to install a desktop application and being able to be cross platform. This is where Flex/Flash and Silverlight come into play.

Being a plug in for the browser, means will run the application downloaded from the server without having to install it. So it’s an application running on the browsers context and limited by the platform.

So those 2 technologies can run as a desktop application, however both Flex and Silverlight got limitation added by Adobe and Microsoft to resemble the browsers security. So let’s talk about the most important to me.

Flex and Silverlight cannot have access to the users hard disk, they do have a isolated storage to save a few things. That storage is limited by the technologies. This is to avoid hackers using that technology to scan hard disks.
Flex and Silverlight cannot make requests to domains besides their own without that domain allowing them to do so. This is the one I do not understand why Adobe and Microsoft implemented such a thing. Web developers now create proxies to bypass this problem and makes the request slower. I really hope one day, this limitation gets removed.

Even with that, makes a huge difference using these technologies to provide the user a rich environment.

I would like to mention this great post from Curtis Morley about Flex little things that you need to know about deploying Flex applications here. If you are using Flex, this is a must read.

Cheers

MS BI Conference: Monday Keynote

Mike Diehls WebLog — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Here are my notes on the Monday morning keynote:

About 3000 attendees at the conference, over 60 countries represented.
There is BI in Halo3: whenever you look at competitor stats or weapon effectiveness, this is implemented using BI tech

Madison - MS has acquired DATAllegro, a company that was accomplishing low TCO MPP (massively parallel processing) scale out of BI. Using standard enterprise servers, you can process queries on very large data warehouse databases very quickly. They demonstrated a hardware setup of a MPP cluster: one control node, 24 compute nodes, and at least as many storage nodes (ie. shared disks). They loaded 1 trillion (yes trillion) rows in the fact table, and a bunch of dimension tables, such that the data warehouse contained over 150 TeraBytes of data. Then they sliced the fact table up onto the 24 SQL instances on the compute nodes (each compute node then had 1/24 of the trillion rows) and replicated the dimension tables to all compute nodes. Using SQL 2008 (and its new star join optimization) they then issued a query on the fact table and the related dimension tables to the cluster, where the control node passed the query along to the compute nodes, they each processed it, and returned the results back to the client.

On one screen they had Reporting Services (the client app) and on another, a graphic display of the CPU and disk stats for the control node and all 24 compute nodes, each node having 8 CPUs. When the Report was being displayed, the query got processed, and you could see the CPU usage go up on many of the nodes, then disk usage on each of the nodes, then the activity would subside and the reporting view would then display the results. It was all done in under 10 seconds. It was truly impressive. Now, that was with essentially read only data, so you could probably "roll your own" MPP system, given the time and hardware. It's not a huge technical problem to scale out read-only data. If they could show the same demonstration except with a SSIS package *loading* a trillion rows into the cluster, that would have been astounding - it's a much different and more difficult problem. Still, I was impressed.

Gemini - this is "BI Self Service" - the first evidence of this is an Excel addin that the always-entertaining Donald Farmer demonstrated. He used the addin to connect to a data warehouse and in a spreadsheet showed 20 million rows. We didn't *see* all 20 million rows, but he did sort it in under a second, and then filtered it (to UK sales only, about 1.5 million rows) in under a second. That performance and capacity was on what he said was a <$1000 computer with 8 GB RAM, similar to what he purchased for home a few weeks ago.

Aside from the jaw-dropping performance, he used the addin to dynamically link the data from analysis services with another spreadsheet of user-supplied data (I think it was "industry standard salary" or something). The add-in was able to build a star-schema in the background automatically and then make it available in the views they wanted in Excel  ( a graph or something? I can't remember). So it was showing the fact that sometimes the data warehouse doesn't have all the data needed for users to make decisions, so they got the data themselves, rather than wait for IT to get it in the DW. Ok, cool. So then he published that view into Sharepoint using Excel services, and the user-supplied data went along with it. So centrally publishing that view means it can be utilized by others in the enterprise, rather than sharing via email or a file share or something.

From the IT perspective, he showed a management view (dashboard) in SharePoint showing usage stats of "Sandboxes" (the thing they are currently calling these publications) and they could see how popular this particular sandbox was, and then take steps to formalize it into the enterprise. The tantalizing link on that web page was "Convert to Performance Point" - the idea was that you could take the sandbox view and convert it into a PPS web part. That looked cool too.

So Gemini looks very interesting.

Timeframes: the next major release of SQL will be 24-36 months from release of SQL 2008, but in the meantime, there are a number of releases coming: Madison and Gemini will be coming in the first half of 2010, and CTP's will be available sometime early next year. There are some incremental releases of Analysis Services, Integration Services and Reporting Services coming - the next gen of Reporting Services in particular will become available in a Feature Pack "real soon now".

SQL SERVER - 2008 - High Resolution Wallpaper and Screen Saver

DotNetSlackers Latest ASP.NET News in Category SQL — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Recently I came across two very interesting ‘objects’ of SQL Server 2008.SQL Server 2008 High Resolution Wallpaper (click on image to see larger version)SQL Server 2008 Screen Saver Click Here to DownloadReference : Pinal Dave (http://www.SQLAuthority.com)...

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SQLAuthority News - Author Visit - SQL Hour at Patni Computer Systems

DotNetSlackers Latest ASP.NET News in Category SQL — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group has started organizing a special event, “SQL Hour”, where we visit IT companies and interact with the SQL Server professionals. We had the first meeting this Saturday, 4th October 2008 at Patni Computer Systems, Gandhinangar.This meeting was lead by SQL Server User Group President Jacob Sebastian, who is known for [...]...

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ASP.NET website Continuous Integration+Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy

ASP.NET Blogs — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

You can setup continuous integration and automated deployment for your web application using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy. I will show you how you can automatically build the entire solution, email build report to developers and QA, deploy latest code in IIS all using CruiseControl.NET every N minutes.

First get the following:

CruiseControl.NET
Subversion (install the command line tools and add the Subversion bin path to PATH environment variable)
Robocopy (Windows Vista/2008 has it built-in, here's the link for Windows 2003)
Install .NET Framework. You need it for MSBuild.

You will learn how I have configured Continuous Integration and Deployment for my open source AJAX Portal project www.Dropthings.com. The code is hosted at CodePlex. When some developer makes a commit, CruiseControl downloads the latest code, builds the entire solution, emails build report and then deploys the latest web site to IIS 6.0.

After installing CruiseControl.NET, go to Programs -> Cruise Control -> CruiseControl.NET Config.

Now keep copying and pasting the following XML blocks and make sure you understand each block and make necessary changes:

   1: &lt;cruisecontrol&gt;   2:     &lt;project name="Dropthings" queue="DropthingsQueue" queuePriority="1"&gt;   3:         &lt;!--    4:         Path to the trunk folder where the full solution starts from. This is where   5:         subversion checkout and incremental update is performed    6:         --&gt;   7:         &lt;workingDirectory&gt;d:\cc\dropthings\code\trunk\&lt;/workingDirectory&gt;   8:         &lt;!-- Some path where CCNet writes its logs and stuffs. It can be outside the log folder --&gt;   9:         &lt;artifactDirectory&gt;d:\cc\dropthings\artifact\&lt;/artifactDirectory&gt;  10:         &lt;category&gt;Dropthings&lt;/category&gt;  11:         &lt;!-- CCNet installs a web dashboard. Enter the URL of that dashboard here --&gt;  12:         &lt;webURL&gt;http://localhost/ccnet/&lt;/webURL&gt;  13:         &lt;modificationDelaySeconds&gt;60&lt;/modificationDelaySeconds&gt;  14:         &lt;labeller type="defaultlabeller"&gt;  15:             &lt;prefix&gt;0.1.&lt;/prefix&gt;  16:             &lt;incrementOnFailure&gt;true&lt;/incrementOnFailure&gt;  17:             &lt;labelFormat&gt;000&lt;/labelFormat&gt;  18:         &lt;/labeller&gt;  19:         &lt;state type="state" directory="State" /&gt;

First change the working directory. It needs to be the path of the folder where you will have the solution downloaded. I generally create folder structure like this:

D:\CC - Root for all CC.NET enabled projects
- \ProjectName - Root project folder
  - \Code - Code folder where code is downloaded from subversion
  - \Artifact - CC.NET generates a lot of stuff. All goes here.

Next comes the Subversion integration block:

   1: &lt;sourcecontrol type="svn"&gt;   2:     &lt;!-- Subversion trunk repository to keep checking for latest code --&gt;   3:     &lt;trunkUrl&gt;http://localhost:8081/tfs02.codeplex.com/dropthings/trunk&lt;/trunkUrl&gt;   4:     &lt;workingDirectory&gt;&lt;/workingDirectory&gt;   5:     &lt;username&gt;***** SUBVERSION USER NAME *****&lt;/username&gt;   6:     &lt;password&gt;***** SUBVERSION PATH *****&lt;/password&gt;   7: &lt;/sourcecontrol&gt;

Here specify the subversion location where you want to download code to the working folder. You should download the entire solution because you will be building the entire solution using MSBuild soon.

I left <workingDirectory> empty. This means whatever is specified earlier in the <workingDirectory> is used. Otherwise you can put some relative folder path here or any absolute folder.

Now we start building the tasks that CC.NET executes - Build, Email, and Deploy.

   1: &lt;tasks&gt;   2:     &lt;artifactcleanup   cleanUpMethod="KeepLastXBuilds"   cleanUpValue="5" /&gt;   3:     &lt;modificationWriter&gt;   4:         &lt;filename&gt;mods.xml&lt;/filename&gt;   5:         &lt;path&gt;&lt;/path&gt;   6:     &lt;/modificationWriter&gt;   7:&nbsp;    8:     &lt;!-- MSBuild task to build a .msbuild file that basically builds a .sln file --&gt;   9:     &lt;msbuild&gt;  10:         &lt;executable&gt;C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v3.5\MSBuild.exe&lt;/executable&gt;  11:         &lt;workingDirectory&gt;&lt;/workingDirectory&gt;  12:         &lt;projectFile&gt;Dropthings.msbuild&lt;/projectFile&gt;  13:         &lt;targets&gt;Build&lt;/targets&gt;  14:         &lt;timeout&gt;300&lt;/timeout&gt;  15:         &lt;logger&gt;C:\Program Files (x86)\CruiseControl.NET\server\ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.MsBuild.dll&lt;/logger&gt;  16:     &lt;/msbuild&gt;

This block first says, keep artifacts for last 5 build and remove olders. Artifacts are like build reports, logs etc. You can increase the value for longer history.

Then the most important <msbuild> task. The executable path is to the MSBuild.exe. I am using .NET 3.5 Framework 64bit edition. You might have .NET 2.0 and 32bit version. So, set the right path here for the MSbuild.exe.

<projectFile> maps to a MSBuild file. It's a skeleton MSBuild file which basically says build this Visual Studio solution file. Here's how the msbuild file looks like:

&lt;Project DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"&gt;  &lt;Target Name="Build"&gt;     &lt;!-- Rebuild entire solution --&gt;    &lt;MSBuild Projects="Dropthings.sln" Targets="Rebuild" /&gt;  &lt;/Target&gt;&lt;/Project&gt;

The Dropthings.msbuild and Dropthings.sln file exists in the same trunk folder. This file says - build Dropthings.sln and do a rebuild.

Now you got the build done. Next is to deploy it. You will be using robocopy to copy files from the code folder to a destination folder which is mapped in IIS to a website. Robocopy will do a synchronization of the directories. It will add new files, overwrite old files and removes files from destination folder which no longer exists in the source folder.

Before you can deploy, you need to stop the website or restart IIS. Otherwise some files may be in use and you will not be able to delete or overwrite the files. Here's how to stop IIS using the iisreset command line tool:

&lt;!-- Stop IIS before copying over the latest web project files so that there's no write lock and IIS does notstart restarting the site half way through--&gt;&lt;exec&gt;    &lt;executable&gt;iisreset&lt;/executable&gt;    &lt;buildArgs&gt;/stop&lt;/buildArgs&gt;&lt;/exec&gt;

If you do not want to stop the entire IIS, instead just stop a website and recycle an application pool, you can use the iisweb.vbs script for stopping a website and iisapp.vbs script for recycling application pool. Here's an example:

&lt;exec&gt;    &lt;executable&gt;iisweb&lt;/executable&gt;    &lt;buildArgs&gt;/stop "Dropthings"&lt;/buildArgs&gt;&lt;/exec&gt;&nbsp;&lt;exec&gt;    &lt;executable&gt;iisapp&lt;/executable&gt;    &lt;buildArgs&gt; /a "Dropthings" /r&lt;/buildArgs&gt;&lt;/exec&gt;

You need to first register cscript as the default script runtime. In order to do this, go to command line and enter iisweb. It will tell you that it cannot use wscript to run this script and it needs to make cscript default. Let it make cscript as default.

Now the time to do the deployment of latest web site files. The following task launches robocopy to do the deployment:

&lt;!--Sync the web project folder with the deployment folder. The deployment folder is where IISis mapped to serve the site. The deployment folder is at the buildArgs node. The robocopy utility does an exact sync, adding new files, updating old files, deleting files that no longerexist.--&gt;&lt;exec&gt;    &lt;!--&lt;executable&gt;C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\robocopy.exe&lt;/executable&gt;--&gt;    &lt;executable&gt;robocopy.exe&lt;/executable&gt;    &lt;baseDirectory&gt;Dropthings\&lt;/baseDirectory&gt;    &lt;buildArgs&gt;.\ d:\cc\Dropthings\Deploy *.* /E /XA:H /PURGE /XO /XD ".svn" /NDL /NC /NS /NP&lt;/buildArgs&gt;    &lt;buildTimeoutSeconds&gt;60&lt;/buildTimeoutSeconds&gt;    &lt;successExitCodes&gt;1,0&lt;/successExitCodes&gt;&lt;/exec&gt;

First you need to correct the robocopy.exe path. For Windows Vista/Windows 2008, keep it as it is. For Windows 2003, you need to specify the full path. You also need to remove the (x86) from the path if you have 32bit OS.

Next is the <baseDirectory>. This is relative to the working directory. It's the path of the website folder. Dropthings website folder is located under the Dropthings folder under trunk. So, I have specified Dropthings\ as the subfolder where the website files are located. You need to specify your project's website folder's relative path here form the <workingDirectory>.

Next change the path in the <buildArgs> node. First one is the source ".\" which you keep as it is. It means copy files from the baseDirectory. Next is the absolute path to the deployment folder where the web site is mapped in IIS. You can use both relative or absolute path here. While using relative path, just keep in mind the robocopy is running from the <workingDirectory>\<baseDirectory> folder.

After the path keep the *.* and the remaining flags intact. The flags mean:

Copy all subdirectories /E
Copy hidded files /XA:H
Do not copy old files /XO
Exclude .svn directory while copying files /XD ".svn"
Do not show list of files and directories being copie /NDL, /NC, /NP

After the deployment, you need to turn IIS back on or start the website that you stopped:

&lt;!-- Turn IIS back on --&gt;&lt;exec&gt;    &lt;executable&gt;iisreset&lt;/executable&gt;    &lt;buildArgs&gt;/start&lt;/buildArgs&gt;&lt;/exec&gt;&nbsp;&lt;!--&lt;exec&gt;    &lt;executable&gt;iisweb&lt;/executable&gt;    &lt;buildArgs&gt;/start "Dropthings"&lt;/buildArgs&gt;&lt;/exec&gt;            --&gt;

Now we got the build and deployment done. Next is to email a nice report to developers and QA. If build succeeds, email both developers and QA so that they can check out the latest build. But if build fails, email only developers.

&lt;publishers&gt;    &lt;rss/&gt;    &lt;xmllogger /&gt;    &lt;statistics /&gt;&nbsp;    &lt;!-- Email build report to development and QA team --&gt;    &lt;email from="admin@yourcompany.com" mailhost="localhost" mailport="25" includeDetails="TRUE"           mailhostUsername=" " mailhostPassword=" " useSSL="FALSE"&gt;&nbsp;        &lt;users&gt;            &lt;user name="Developer1" group="devs" address="dev1@yourcompany.com"/&gt;            &lt;user name="Developer2" group="devs" address="dev2@yourcompany.com"/&gt;            &lt;user name="Developer3" group="devs" address="dev3@yourcompany.com"/&gt;                        &lt;user name="QA1" group="qa" address="qa1@yourcompany.com"/&gt;            &lt;user name="QA2" group="qa" address="qa2@yourcompany.com"/&gt;            &lt;user name="QA3" group="qa" address="qa3@yourcompany.com"/&gt;                                        &lt;/users&gt;&nbsp;        &lt;groups&gt;            &lt;group name="devs" notification="Always"/&gt;            &lt;group name="qa" notification="Success"/&gt;        &lt;/groups&gt;&nbsp;        &lt;converters&gt;            &lt;!--&lt;regexConverter find="$" replace="@dropthings.com" /&gt;--&gt;        &lt;/converters&gt;&nbsp;        &lt;modifierNotificationTypes&gt;            &lt;NotificationType&gt;Always&lt;/NotificationType&gt;        &lt;/modifierNotificationTypes&gt;&nbsp;    &lt;/email&gt;    &lt;modificationHistory  onlyLogWhenChangesFound="true" /&gt;&lt;/publishers&gt;

First you need to change the <email> tab where you specify the from address, mail server name, and optionally a user account for the email address that you need to use to send out emails.

Then edit the <users> node and put your developers and QA.

That's it! You got the configuration file done. Next step is to launch the CruiseControl.NET from Programs -> CruiseControl.NET -> CruiseControl.NET. It will launch a process that will execute the tasks according to the configuration. On Windows Vista, you will have to run it with Administrative privilege.

There's also a Windows Service that gets installed. It's named CruiseControl.NET. You can start the service as well on a server and go to sleep. It will do continuous integration and automated deployment for you.

There's also a web based Dashboard that you can use to force a build or stop a build or see detail build reports.

You can create multiple projects. You can have one project to build trunk code only, but do no deployment. Then you can create another project to build, deploy some branch that's ready for production. You can create another project to build and deploy on QA server and so on.

Here's the full configuration file that you can use as your baseline.

Client templates in MSDN Magazine

Atlas and more — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

My first full-length article in MSDN Magazine is out with the October issue and it’s about Microsoft AJAX client templates. Check it out…

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc972638.aspx

Conditional gets in REST

ASP.NET Blogs — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

According to the Http specification, any Http GET request should be idempotent and safe. In this context, these principles have the following meaning:

Idempotence: One or more calls with identical requests should return the same resource representation (As long as the resource has not changed on the server between calls).

Safety:  The only action produced by a GET request is to retrieve a resource representation, no side-effects should be evident on the service side after executing the request. An example that violates this principle could be a GET request that also updates some info in the resource.

As long as these principles are applied correctly by a service implementation, the client will have more available mechanisms to cache the resource representation on its side. This has a very positive meaning from a scalability view point, which represents a better use of the network bandwidth and an optimization in the utilization of server resources.

Those caching mechanisms are based on what is commonly called Http conditional gets. An Http conditional get involves the use of two special headers generated by the service, ETag and Last-Modified.

An Etag represents an opaque value that only the server knows how to recreate, it could represent anything, but it is usually a hash representing the resource version (it can be generated hashing the whole representation content or just some parts of it, like the timestamp). On the other hand, the Last-Modified headers represents a datetime that the service can use to determine whether the resource has changed since the last time it was served. The following example illustrates the request/response messages interchanged by the client/service for a service that returns information about customers

First request, the client does not have anything on the cache.

GET http://foo/customers/1

Host foo
Accept */*
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Connection close
Referer http://foo/
Pragma no-cache
Cache-Control no-cache

Response:

Connection close
Date Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:46:57 GMT
Server Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version 2.0.50727
Content-Encoding gzip
Content-Length 1212
Expires Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:46:57 GMT
Last-Modified Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:40:27 GMT
Etag a9331828c517ac5d97f93b3cfdbcc9bc
Content-Type text/xml

The next time the client sends a new request for the same customer, some extra information will be included in the request headers,

GET http://foo/customers/1

Host foo
Accept */*
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Connection close
Referer foo
If-Modified-Since Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:40:27 GMT
If-None-Match a9331828c517ac5d97f93b3cfdbcc9bc

With these two new headers, the service can now determine whether it has to serve the resource representation again or the client can use the cached version. If the resource has not changed according to the values in those headers (If-Modified-Since for Last-Modified and If-None-Match for Etag), the service can return an Http status code "304 Not Modified", which instructs the client to use the cached version.

This approach is widely used nowadays by syndication, RSS or Atom, that usually use the Last-Modified/If-Modified-Since to determine which items they have to send to the client.

Since I am a WCF fan, I will also include here some code snippets to get the value in those headers and return a "304" http status code,

Code to get those values:

if (WebOperationContext.IncomingRequest.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.IfNoneMatch] != null)
{
&nbsp; // Do something with etag...
}
else if (WebOperationContext.IncomingRequest.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.IfModifiedSince] != null)
{
&nbsp; var date = DateTime.Parse(context.IncomingRequest.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.IfModifiedSince]);
} 
&nbsp;
Code to set those values:
&nbsp;
WebOperationContext.OutgoingResponse.LastModified = // sets the last modified;
WebOperationContext.OutgoingResponse.ETag = // sets the Etag

Code to return an Http 304 status code:

WebOperationContext.OutgoingResponse.StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.NotModified;
WebOperationContext.OutgoingResponse.SuppressEntityBody = true;

Microsoft Outlines Next-Generation Databases

DotNetSlackers Latest ASP.NET News in Category SQL — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Microsoft is planning to enhance the BI capabilities in the next version of its flagship SQL Server database, the company revealed today, as it kicked off its second annual Business Intelligence Conference in Seattle....

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MS BI Conference 2008 - First Impressions

Mike Diehls WebLog — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

It has been over a year since I last blogged, but I want to restart with some posts about the BI Conference I am attending this week.

Chris and I flew to Vancouver yesterday and drove down to Seattle in a Camry Hybrid. Sitting in the lineup at the US border for an hour drained the batteries on the Camry so it had to restart the engine to recharge a couple of times, for about 10 minutes each time. Seemed odd to discharge so much battery just sitting in a lineup and moving 10 feet every five minutes. Anyway...the trip display shows that our fuel efficiency was under 8 liters/100km on the trip down. That also seems a little poor compared to my Golf TDI that gets 4.5 liters/100 km regularly.

We registered last night and wandered the Company Store for a bit - saw uber-geek stuff there and we thought of getting something for Cam, our uber-geek on the team at Imaginet. The conference package was predictable: a nice back-pack, a water bottle, a pen, a 2 GB USB stick, a SQL Server magazine, not as many sales brochures as last year, and a conference guidebook.

Last year's guide book was a small coil bound notebook with a section of blank pages at the end for taking notes. This year's edition has the same content - a description of all the sessions and keynotes and speakers, as well as sponsor ads, but it is missing the note-taking section. I really liked that section last year, so today I found myself scribbling notes on loose paper, and running out. I specifically left my (paper) notebook at home because I liked the smaller conference book instead, but now I am going back to the Company Store to buy a small notebook for the rest of the sessions.

The conference is trying to be more environmentally friendly - in the backpack was a water bottle and they encouraged you to refill that at the water stations rather than having bottled water. That's cool. For me, I would have preferred a coffee mug, since I had three cups of coffee over the day (in paper cups, and no plastic lids). In a strange twist, the breakfast and lunch dishes were on paper plates and not the real dishes like last year - one step forward, two steps back I guess. I can't figure it out.

In the main hall before the keynote address, there was an live band playing 80's hits. They were pretty good, but it seemed odd to have a bouncy energetic group on stage at 8:30 on a Monday morning, everyone was filing in and sitting down, morning coffee still just starting to kick in. The bass player was one or two steps beyond bouncy-happy. It reminded me of someone on a Japanese game show.

Named Capture for SQL Server connection strings

DotNetSlackers Latest ASP.NET News in Category SQL — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Capture the information from a SQL Server connection string

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