Magenic Technologies Community Blog

Find text in stored Proc.

MarkSt — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:11:00 GMT

Love projects with undocumented work.

Here is a simple routine to find the stored procedures with a given text.

declare @text varchar(100)
set @text = 'REVSERV'
select object_name(object_id), definition from sys.sql_modules
where definition like '%'+@text+'%'

The definition will contain the entire stored procedure that you need.

How To: REST Services in WCF 3.5 Part 2 - The POST

this.Reflect() — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:29:25 GMT

This post is part of a series. Part 1 Part 2 (this post) Implementing a POST HTTP Verb Call In this post we're going to cover what it takes to implement a PUT into our REST Service that we defined in Part 1 of this series. First of all, what is the POST Read More......(read more)

SharePoint Workflow Services

MS Innovations Blog — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:51:26 GMT

I was working recently on a SharePoint Workflow project and was exploring some of the Office SDK samples. The latest Office SDK ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6D94E307-67D9-41AC-B2D6-0074D6286FA9&displaylang=en ) includes Read More......(read more)

Sotue Lexical Analysis Engine Design Underway

Jeff Ferguson — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 04:16:24 GMT

The DFA creation code in Sotue is well underway. I have more to do on the DFA front (namely, supporting exclusive character classes), but I have been happy with the results I have seen to this point. With this work well underway, I can finally turn to Read More......(read more)

Best Practices for SPList access and Web Part development

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:50:56 GMT

Body: So I've been looking through the new (as of 5 Nov 2008) SharePoint Guidance on Microsoft.com at www.microsoft.com/spg . It's not immediately obvious, but if you click on the last (right-most, at least in left-to-right languages) breadcrumb, you Read More......(read more)

SVCUtil & VS2008

this.Reflect() — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:56:53 GMT

After some research into a Service Reference problem I was having with Silverlight I came to find out (but not officially) that VS2008 DOES NOT use SvcUtil under the hood to get its service reference. It uses its own internal implementation of a proxy Read More......(read more)

Dime Cast on RESTful WCF

this.Reflect() — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:31:43 GMT

I recently created a small 10 minute recording on how to create a WCF REST ful service. This screen cast has been published on Dime Casts .NET here. This is part 1 of the series in which I go into how to create a WebGet based WCF RESTful service. This Read More......(read more)

Viewing Sotue NFAs and DFAs

Jeff Ferguson — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:20:12 GMT

As I mentioned back in this post , the initial phase of work needed to allow Sotue to recognize data in input streams is to build a state machine that input characters can move through as they are read. If the state machine ends up in what is called an Read More......(read more)

Back to work

Pauli — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:19:00 GMT

I just returned to work from an unplanned 3 month medical leave. Had I known that I was going to be away from work for 3 months before my medical mishap occurred I may have done some additional things on that last Friday that I had worked. Of course you never know when the unexpected is going to happen but it would sure make life easier. Here are the things that I would have done on that Friday:

Check in the code and database changes that I had worked on that day.
I am usually good about checking my code back in but I had just started working on an item that required some database changes before I had completed the all the required code changes. So I made the needed changes in the database and was ready to start the coding changes but the weekend had arrived and I would be able to wrap up the changes the following Monday morning which by then I was starting on my medical leave.

About three weeks after I was discharged from my 1 month hospital stay I received a phone call from someone at work. This was someone that I had not known and did not recognize the number on caller ID so I let the call go the answering machine. As I was listening to the message being left the phrase that jumped out at me was “ I need to stop by your home to pick up your laptop”. What? That’s one thing you never want to hear from your employer, especially when you are on leave. So I immediately ran to the phone and picked it up to find out what this was all about. As it turned out the architect on the project I was on was getting ready to prepare for the deployment of the next release and noticed that there was still code checked-out by me. Because they didn’t want to bother me while I was on leave, they figured they would just have someone stop by to get my laptop to get the code changes. When I found out that was all they really needed I went back through the VS project and checked in the changes within a couple of hours. I assured the project manager it was OK to bother me. Much better than asking for my laptop.

Documented what was left to complete on the associated work item.
This would have been a great help when I was checking in the code changes since I did not want to check in changes that were only partially completed or would negatively impact the application. I had to review all my code changes and reconstruct in my mind what I was doing on that last day. I was able to determine that the code and database changes could be safely checked-in but had discovered that there were still some important code and database changes that still needed to be done. This exercise was actually quite helpful in my recovery process as it forced me back into using the skills I would need once I returned back to work.

Make a note of the numerous passwords being used on the various systems in the project I was working on.
Sometimes I’m hard pressed to remember some passwords on a long weekend or a week off but after being off for 3 months my mind went blank when attempting to login in to the VPN and SQL Server database. Thankfully one of the project team members was working offsite (from the client) in the office that day and helped where my memory had failed. It’s funny how things you do numerous times everyday becomes so automatic to you. I guess you need to use it or lose it. Once I “relearned” the passwords I needed, it was like I had never forgotten them in the first place. (On a side note I also forgot my password for signing into my blog site. The list goes on.)

Shutdown my laptop rather than putting it into standby
It seems that without power the laptop cannot remain in the standby mode forever so upon first turning on the laptop Outlook had to recover from an improper shutdown. Now this did not cause much of a problem but you never like to see that you potentially have a corrupted Outlook file.

Clearing all the unneeded emails in outlook
The hospital I was at had a wireless internet connection so I was able to use my laptop to check my work and personal emails. One day I started to receive the dreaded “Your Inbox is full” message warning me that I could stop receiving or sending any more emails unless I archived or deleted past emails so as not to exceed the stated storage limit. So for the next few days I tried to delete all the messages I didn’t need and even emptied the deleted folder but I was still getting the “Your Inbox is full” message every day. So I moved all my emails, which I had been placing in several different folders, over to my personal folders. Now because of the total size of the emails I was moving this took a few hours but at least I got the total size of my Outlook storage down.

Things could have been a whole lot worse but thinking of the things I would have done before going on a leave makes me want to think about how I could change me weekly routine to make things easier even If I do am not gone on leave.

Deploying SSRS Reports from Powershell

DanielS — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:17:00 GMT

My current client has a BI group that writes SSRS reports. In the "legacy" ALM tool they built, they used VSS, nAnt,Cruise Control and a product called "Visual Intercept" to "build" (actually just extract RDL files) and a nAnt script with a custom task to Deploy the SSRS report (RDL File) to Reporting Services.

We migrated to TFS and use a lot of Powrshell for the deploy scripts. I searched for some solutions from Powershell to deploy RDL's that I felt was a good fit. This solution: http://blogs.devhorizon.com/reza/?p=751 is for a Sharepoint Reporting Service Integration. These are stand-alone SSRS reports - so I'm not even sure if I have the .DLL it relies on "ReportService2006.dl" so it was no go.

The other solution that looks quite promising, from Paul Stovell at Readify http://www.paulstovell.com/blog/reporting-services-automation is an excellent approach, but relies on a utility "rs.exe". But that wasn't installed on the server they run the deploys from (actually the TFS Build server for the time being) and I didn't want any dependencies I didn't have complete control over.

Being a C# guy - I figured the easiest thing was just to write copy the code from the original nAnt custom Task that called the SSRS Web Service to Deploy the report. I wrote a very simple Wrapper to the webservice as a Static Method to a Static Class. I then just copy the generated DLL's to the Build/Deploy server - and call that wrapper from the Deploy script. Simple enough.

I cleaned the original code a bit - adding an integer return that shows 0 for success, 4 for warnings and either 12 or 16 for a fatal error. The C# Code is here. I just added a .NET 2.0 style WebService Reference (as Derick Whitaker explains here: http://devlicio.us/blogs/derik_whittaker/archive/2008/07/21/referencing-2-0-web-services-asmx-in-visual-studio-2008.aspx in case you don't know how) to http://localhost/reportserver/reportservice.asmx?wsdl (don't use ReportService2005.asmx - that's a different web service!)

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Xml;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using SSRSDeployer.ReportServer;
using System.Web.Services.Protocols;

namespace SSRSDeployer
{
    public static class SSRSDeployer
    {
        public static int Deploy(string webServiceURL, string rdlPath, string parentFolder, string reportName, out string warnings)
        {
            //create an instance of the WebService Proxy and set URL and credentials
            ReportingService rs = new ReportingService();
            rs.Url = webServiceURL;
            rs.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;

            Byte[] definition = null;
            Warning[] warns = null;
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            int ret = 0;

            try
            {

                //read the file as a filestream into a byte array
                FileStream stream = File.OpenRead(rdlPath);
                definition = new Byte[stream.Length];
                stream.Read(definition, 0, (int)stream.Length);

                //    Call the web service to create the report
                rs.Timeout = 1000000;
                warns = rs.CreateReport(reportName, parentFolder, true, definition, null);

                if (warns != null)
                {
                    foreach (Warning warning in warns)
                    {
                        //ignore the warning about shared data source
                        if (!(warning.Message.StartsWith("The data set ‘") && warning.Message.Contains("’ refers to the shared data source ‘") && warning.Message.EndsWith("which is not published on the report server.")))
                        {
                            // otherwise return it to output
                            sb.Append(string.Format("Warning returned from WebService: {0}", warning.Message));
                            ret = 4;
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (IOException)
            {
                //report any IO error reading the RDL file
                sb.Append(string.Format("Error: IOExcption reading file: {0}", rdlPath));
                ret = 12;
            }

            catch (SoapException e)
            {
                //report any Errors from the WebService call
                sb.Append(e.Message);
                ret = 16;
            }

            warnings = sb.ToString();
            return ret;
        }
    }
}

To Call it from Powershell, simply load the assembly and call the Method: This Powershell script will deploy all RDL's found in the specified folder with a report name matching the file name. Make sure you put all the generated DLL's from the compile to the folder referenced by the $lib= statement

[string] $webServiceURL = "http://SSRSServer/ReportServer/ReportService.asmx"
[string] $rdlPath = "C:\File13"
[string] $parentFolder = "/SSRS.Folder";

$file = Get-Item $rdlPath
$lib="C:\File13\SSRSDeployer\SSRSDeployer.dll"
$x=[Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom($lib)

$files = Get-ChildItem $rdlPath *.rdl
ForEach ($file in $files) {
[string] $reportName = ([string] $file.Name.ToUpper()).Replace(".RDL","")
[string] $warnings = ""
"Deploying Report: $reportName"
[Int32] $result = [SSRSDeployer.SSRSDeployer]::Deploy($webServiceURL, $file.FullName, $parentFolder, $reportName, [ref] $warnings)
if ($result -eq 0) {"Deployed without Errors"}
elseif ($result -eq 4) {"Warnings from Deploy: $warnings"}
elseif ($result -eq 12) {"IO Error reading RDL File"}
elseif ($result -eq 16) {"Error Deploying Report: $warnings"}
}

Technical Timeout 1

this.Reflect() — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 03:02:27 GMT

I'm going to try a new thing out on my blog. It's called the "Technical Timeout" ... its a small time to take a break from Technology and get a laugh or two. With that said, here is Technical Timeout, Part 1. Introducing.... Terry Tate - Office Linebacker Read More......(read more)

PerformancePoint Custom Dashboard Filter Experience

Dan English's BI Blog — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:32:06 GMT

Over the last couple of weeks I was asked to setup a filter off an ODBC source (going against and Oracle database server and have to use the ODBC source – using that instead of a SQL Server Linked source and SQL Server Table Tabular List source). I was Read More......(read more)

dates of stored procedures

MarkSt — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:46:00 GMT

Here is a simple SQL to get the date of a stored procedure creation and modified date

SELECT name, create_date, modify_date
FROM sys.objects
WHERE type = 'P' AND name = ' STORED PROC NAME'

Feeling Like Homer and exclaiming "D'Oh!"

DanielS — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:49:00 GMT

I'm a big Simpsons fan - and one of the appeals is watching Homer do something really stupid that he should have known better and exclaim "D'oh" when the inevitable happens. So there's nothing more painful when you end up "pulling a Homer"...

I had one today. I was trying to solve a problem, and made it worse by doing something that I should have known better. At my client I'm doing some pretty complex TFS build automation. Since some of what I'm doing is pushing the limits of what I personally think should be done using MSBuild, I wrote a C# custom MSBuild task that calls PowerShell. My complex scripting therefor is done in what I believe is by far the best scripting language on the Windows platform, instead of a tool that is excellent for determining dependencies between source code...

While trying to debug a problem of getting my PowerShell script in an MSBuild script, all of sudden things that were previously working started breaking. After annoying "cubical neighbors with exclamations of frustration" - I realized what I had just done to make things worse.

I was deploying changes to the build server using a "C$" type file share (I have admin access to the "box") and notepad. I had the "Format-Word wrap" option in notepad checked - and it was inserting line breaks "randomly" in the scripts - wreaking havoc in both PowerShell and MSBuild...

D'oh!

Store Locator - Moved to Codeplex

this.Reflect() — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 18:29:01 GMT

The Store Locator I built for ASP.NET has been getting a lot of traffic over the last year and requests have been coming in for new features like crazy. To manage this project a little more effectively, I've decided to move the project to CodePlex . You Read More......(read more)

Contributing to the Technical Community

Dan English's BI Blog — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 13:34:21 GMT

There is nothing I enjoy more than helping out the technical community and my colleagues. There are different ways that I do this. I talk to people about technology to share my excitement and knowledge about what I know, have read, or done. Besides talking Read More......(read more)

Downloads and Catch-Up

Dan English's BI Blog — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:33:05 GMT

Ok I took a bit of time off from the blogging. Just got into some really interesting work with a new client and have been holding off on sending out some links to some great content that I have come across over the past month. I am also in the process Read More......(read more)

WPF and Cursor

Sergey Barskiy — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:31:03 GMT

I was trying to figure out today the WPF's equivalent to old WinForms functionality that allows a developer to change cursor shape. For example, if you have a control that may take a second or two to load, you want to change cursor shape to hourglass Read More......(read more)

OT: Another reason to love Red Gate

WhitneyW — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:15:22 GMT

After Thursday’s sessions ended I was invited to a dinner thrown by Red Gate software. I’m in their “Friends of Red Gate” program, which basically means I show their tremendous software to customers or at user groups. It’s been an easy relationship for me as I am quite a fan of their products.

So the event is packed at a local restaurant, we all sit down and on either side of me I’ve got Peter deBetta and Adam Machanic. Also at the table is Roman Rehak and Heidi Sweeney. Not bad company at all, right? So the conversation runs in every possible direction and a lot of red wine and good food follows. I begged off the party at 3 as I’m a sissy (or at least that’s what I was told).

Red Gate put on a really great evening and their people are even better than the products they build (if you can imagine).

UPDATE: I added a couple iPhone photos from the evening.

Note the serious, foreboding face of one Peter DeBetta…

And the rest of the gang…Rowan, Heidi, and Adam.

SQL PASS: Thursday

WhitneyW — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:37:28 GMT

Another fun filled day at PASS started with a session from Kalen Delaney. The room was packed and she was discussing query plans. I had heard a good bit of the content before but it was still interesting to finally see her present live. Very much like Itzik, her asides can be as informative as the content in her slides or demos.

The second session was a lot of fun as Paul Nielson and Louis Davidson had everyone join in their personal debate over what exactly is “proper design”. It was a 300 level session so nothing really earth-shattering came from it but it was really interesting to see the wide range of opinions across the room. There were even defenders of the dreaded “Muck” table, or the single table housing all look-up data (the horror!). I tend to fall on Louis’ side of most issues, but Paul made some strong arguments as well. At the end of the session Paul demoed a project called NORDIC which is an object-oriented database design. I’ll need to give this more attention before commenting but it certainly left me with questions swirling in my head.

The third session I attended was the most fun for me personally. Erik Kang, Program Manager from the product team, discussed intellisense and the debugger in 2008. We talked for a while after the session and I have a much better understanding of where he was coming from back in our early conversations about down-level support for intellisense. I think there are other pieces of the product that will be much better for the attention devoted to them than the time for implementing down-level support. I missed two opportunities to meet his team this week which really bummed me out. Just too many pieces of my schedule have been in play to make it happen.

The last session was a question and answer time with three general managers of the SQL team. They basically let attendees line up and fire questions at them for over an hour and a half. Now that’s brave. Some really interesting questions (some polite others not so much) were asked ranging from dedication to new product features (we hardly knew you Notification Services) to future support for jdbc driver. The coolest part to me was when a question was trending towards too technical a direction the GMs were able to point into the crowd and say “oh, here’s XXX he/she is the program manager for the area you’re discussing, they would be more than happy to talk more about it…”. Another benefit of having the event so near Redmond.

All in all, a tremendous day of SQL geekiness. I have to give some props again to Magenic for okaying this adventure out to the northwest. It’s been a great time.

Another thing to collect when capturing a Site Request

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:34:38 GMT

Body: Assuming you require your users to fill out a form to request a new site or site collection, one more thing that you may want to ask them for is one or more distinctive keywords that describe the site content. You could then take these and turn Read More......(read more)

Debugging Silverlight Tip

this.Reflect() — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:09:16 GMT

If you're doing any kind of Silverlight work you're bound to get "Error on page" in Internet Explorer. Here's what I'm talking about. You fire up your app in the browser window and BLAM. Screen is empty and you get the "Error in page" error. Double click Read More......(read more)

Major BizTalk Incomatibility - IIS 7 and WCF Publishing Wizard

MS Innovations Blog — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:38:30 GMT

On my current project the client has been dabbling with BizTalk 2006 R2 in a very unsupported configuration with Windows Server 2008, and SQL 2008. In previous posts I talked about Windows Server 2008 and some challenges installing BizTalk on this OS. Read More......(read more)

SQL PASS: Wednesday

WhitneyW — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:59:50 GMT

A quick post about today’s sessions so far…Ted Kummert’s keynote was interesting in how sparse his details were. Aaron has a good overview of his talking points – I won’t bother retyping. I guess I was expecting at least one big “woo hoo” announcement out of him. Oh well.

The most interesting thing I saw was a demo from Dan Jones of a new feature called DAC. The basic premise is that you have a “fabric” of instances defined and you can then create a deployment package (Dan used the analogy of an .msi for the database) for use against any of those instances. The tool in SSMS will allow you to apply policy to the deployment and check for successful passage of said policies before implementing on the target instance. Very cool.

Another great piece of the keynote was a demo of some of the DATAllegro features that will be rolled into the next version of the product. A demo took place showing data being spread across multiple instances then coming together as it was accessed via an SSRS report.

I went to Mark Sousa’s session on lessons learned by the SQLCAT team around SQL 2008 installations. The session focused on places where the product team expecting certain behaviors and were surprised by results on the ground (both positive and negative).

I’m about to head to a session with Paul Randall and Kimberly Tripp called “Corruption Survival Techniques”. I suspect my head will be close to explosion after listening to those two for an hour and a half. :)

More fun to come…

Pair Programming - Marketing FAIL

aarone — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:47:00 GMT

When people talk about lack of adoption of "XP" (aka Extreme Programming) practices, one of the chief problems people have with it is the idea of "Pair Programming". There are more times than I can count where I have been in conversations, where something along the lines of "those crazy agile guys want to have 2 developers do the work of 1 - no way we are doing agile" becomes part of the conversation. What an amazing failure of marketing. It is proof that before anyone in the software development business wants to come up with a great idea, they should run it by some people in marketing to see if the thing will fly.

Lets talk about some of the benefits of Pair Programming. When you are working with someone else, you are not:

* Surfing the web reading SlashDot/DIGG/etc.together

* Reading personal email

* Writing personal email

* Shopping on amazon.com

* Playing solitare

* Letting your ego continue to pound away at a problem that, for whatever reason, you can't solve. Your person you are pairing with should not have the patience for you to take them on "wild goose chases"

* Getting interrupted by others - people are much more reluctant to interrupt two people who are activley solving a problem than one person quietly contemplating

Rather...

* You are pacing eachother - people tend to run faster in races when they can directly work with eachother and co-motivate

* You are collaborating - two bright people should have a broader knowledge base than one single person

* You are active - walking into a team where people are activley collaborating looks like more "active" work than one where people are silently poring over their screens

* You are sharing knowledge - pairs can cross-pollenate good ideas that working alone we have to work harder to see. We seldom watch others program - and pick up from eachother little productivity habits (keystroke shortcuts, etc.)

The focus you get from pairing, so long as you are not paired with a psychopath, are immense. Pairing should generate the work of 3 people based on the productivity gains. It makes surface sense - when pairing, you are much more likely to get the 8 full professional hours per person than you are otherwise.

So why does this not sell? Seems like the benefits are pretty darn obvious. Well, personally, I believe the branding and naming of XP is one of the biggest marketing failures in history. CIOs are a conservative bunch. So are business owners. Like it or not, most of the time, they have to approve budgets, projects, and investments. Unless I have read a TON of literature and are ready to take on faith that it will work, if I am a CIO and my job depends on it, I ain't doing "Extreme" lunch, much less "Extreme Programming". I like having a BMW in the garage and not living on Ramen, ThankYouVeryMuch.

My modest proposal is to stop calling it Pair Programming or Extreme Programming. At this point, that is like calling your new energy company Enron. I propose calling it Collaborative Development. If we have two people on a project, they collaborate to get things done faster. And we leave it at that. Then, when we get things done faster and can point to good results, then we can talk about how good our new "methods" are.