Friday, May 29, 2009

Here are my recent articles on EnterpriseDB

I find it interesting to write articles on EnterpriseDB. Here are a couple of the recent ones.


Transferring a table in a MS Access 2003 database to PostGres using SQL Server Integration Services
This is on a site to which you should subscribe. But you can sign up as a guest to read this article. SSIS 2008 is used to make the transfer

Creating a linked Postgres Server on SQL Server 2008
SQL Server 2008 provides a convenient GUI to make this possible. You will be using the ODBC provider from EnterpriseDB

Creating a VB.NET application with EnterpriseDB
Visual Studio 2008 is a great IDE for developing a desktop application such as this one.


Migrating from MS SQL Server 2008 to EnterpriseDB
Migration Studio from EnterpriseDB makes this a piece of cake.

Installation and basic features of EnterpriseDB
Install this product and take it to a test drive. You will like it

More to come in the coming months.


Wednesday, May 27, 2009

You know WWW, WWF but do you know what is WWT?

WWT stands for World Wide Telescope. WWT is Microsoft's virtual telescope born out of an arrangement with NASA that helps providing the most interesting part of NASA's high resolution images and data. We will probably see more details of our only satellite and see how hospitable or otherwise is mars from MRO (Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter) pictures. Hey! WWT will use Web 2.0 visualization environment and that means Silverlight would get another dose of steroid.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Don't miss this opportunity


Do not miss this Weeklong XAML free training on the internet. Makesure you attend thisevent if you are interested in XAML, Silverlight, and WPF.

Sign up and discover for yourself.
There are 15 sessions with 5 introductory courses.
This is meant for both designers and developers
Links to goodies as well.
User Experience is the all embracing driving force for this.

This is good stuff.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Optical Character Recognition and You

OCR is a powerful technology that extracts text in picture files that can be used for further processing. Microsoft Office Document Imaging is a program that does this extraction in a few very easy steps. Take a look at the following Video on the Associated Contents.com web site where I have hosted a video tutorial.

What you need?


  • A picture file containing text in TIFF format
  • Microsoft Office Document Imaging (Available in Windows XP Pro)
This is the image file used in the Video demo. 
Now to the video 

20 Million rows in MS Excel -- You must be kidding


Well, I am not, I was amazed after looking at the Preview of Microsoft's Gemini. The 6 minute Self service Analysis demo Video is worth watching.

It looks like everything is happening on Excel but behind it is lurking, the next version of Ananlysis Services, it appears.

If you are the slice and dice guy you have a ready made slicer.

How to create a linked Postgres Server on SQL Server 2008?

This article published on the DotNETSlackers site describes in detail setting up a linked EnterpriseDB server on SQL Server 2008. Methods to query the linked server as well as executing statements remotely on the linked server are also described.

Learn to work with LINQ using the Linq Data Source Control

Linq to SQL is an object relational model that you can leverage in Visual Studio 2008. Your connection to SQL Server 2008 database is through a new control in Visual Studio 2008, the LinqDataSource control. This control needs a data context. The data context is provided by the Linq to SQL classes, a class generator that maps SQL server objects to the model. The class files generated support CRUD operations.

In this article a LinqDataSource control is the starting object for displaying data from an instance of a resident SQL Server 2008.

Read on and get a head start....


Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Learn to code double animation in Silverlight 3.0

Read this comprehensive tutorial on Double Animation on the most popular Aspalliance.com web site

This tutorial describes the basics of setting up an animation project in Silverlight 3.0 using the Silverlight Application Project template in Visual Studio 2008. The tutorial describes DoubleAnimation applied to two of the XAML objects in the application. Also discussed are the details of enabling Out of Browser execution of Silverlight Applications.


DoubleAnimation Basics with Silverlight Application


Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Data Access Pages get a wrong message in Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview (March Preview)

Data Access Pages (with the HTM extension) you create in Microsoft Access function like dynamic web pages. They can be opened in Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 5.5 and above. They can be deployed to intranet / internet. However you need another component (run OWC10.exe to install it) in order to display these pages.

The Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview does not seem to recognize the existence of OWC and therefore it is unable to display Data Access Pages.

This page opened in IE 8.0















The same page could not be displayed in SuperPreview.


Monday, May 18, 2009

Element Binding in Silverlight 3.0 with a DatePicker Control

Binding control elements one with the other is a very powerful tool that can reduce writing code. Now with Silverlight 3 which is in beta this is easy. There are many examples wherein the values of a given element would depend on the setting of another control and binding elements would reduce the amount of code to be written otherwise. Although the code for the example chosen would have been very small, it could be substantial in other cases. This tutorial shows how to set the date on a date picker control that would display the date in a text box. Although the example by itself quite trivial, it brings out the essentials of element binding. In order to test this you need to have Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Silverlight 3.0 installed on your machine.

Step 1: Create a Silverlight application

You create a Silverlight Application project from File | New |Project in Visual Studio 2008. Make sure you have displayed .NET Framework 3.5 in your New Project window as shown. Provide a name for your project. Herein it is called XmalianSL32.
When you click on OK Visual Studio creates an XmalianSL32 solution with an XmlaianSL32 VB project and an XmalianSL32.web project as shown with all necessary folders and files.

















The web project has both an ASPX page as well as an HTML page. When you browse this (Right click XmalianSL32.aspx (or XmalianSL32.html) and choose
View in Browser) you would bring up the web (or html) page in a sand-boxed web site [you do not need a separate web server for this]. However the project may also be placed in a folder in the local web server's root directory. In the case of the HTML page you would see an embedded Silverlight object with the MimeType="applicaiton/x-silverlight-2". In the case of the ASPX page you will see a ASP:Silverlight control (review the source code for both). Well, this is two birds with one stone!!. The Object or the control both gets their XAML from the MainPage.XAML in the project.




Step 2: Place a Stack Panel in the grid 

When you double click the MainPage.xaml you would open the XMAL code with its preview XMAL as shown. The default layout scheme is grid. The white area you see in the preview is the grid.
Place a StackPanel inside the grid. Contrary what you would do in Visual Studio with other projects you may be tempted to drag and drop a StackPanel from the Toolbox and drop it in XMAL. You cannot drag and drop it into what appears like a design area. Because this is only a preview window for the XMAL code. You may however drag and drop the Stack Panel inside the XMAL code. When you do this you will see that the preview changes as shown. When you make changes to the code you may also hit on the Build menu item to load the XMAL code. I just colorized the stack panel to orient myself as shown. You may also add other attributes which are supported by intellisense as shown. As of now you cannot edit the properties in the property window as you might be doing for other project types.

Step3: Drag and drop DatePicker and a Textbox to the Stack Panel

Drag and drop a DatePicker control and a Textbox control from Toolbox |Silverlight XAML Controls shown.
These get added to the stack panel as shown. Provide a name to the DataPicker as shown[x:Name="dpx"]. In doing this you have intellisense support.

<StackPanel Width="200" Height="60" 
                    VerticalAlignment="Center" 
                    HorizontalAlignment="Center" 
                    Background="LawnGreen" >
            <controls:DatePicker x:Name="dp" Visibility="Visible"></controls:DatePicker>
            <TextBox Text=""></TextBox>
</StackPanel>

You can see that the DatePicker and the Textbox are unrelated. So if you browse the page you would see the following displayed.












When you pick a date in the date picker it is not displayed in the textbox as they are unrelated.



Step 4: Bind the controls using the Element Name


In the next step you will bind the DatePicker to the Textbox using the Element Name which you provided for the DatePicker.
Now build the solution and browse to the page (either of the ASPX or HTML). When the page gets displayed click on the DatePicker to open up and click on a date. The date you picked gets displayed in the textbox.
Note that you could have accomplished the same using code by assigning the DatePicker's date property to the textbox's text property.
It may be noted that the project files were placed in a folder on the root directory of the Local IIS web server as shown. This folder can be accessed with anonymous authentication with read only privileges. You may browse the HTML page from here (IIS).

Reversing the role of TextBox and DatePicker

In the previous case the DatePicker drove what was displayed in the TextBox. It can be the other way as well. However in order to do this you need to bind the appropriate property for the DatePicker. How would one know what property of one element can be bound to what property of the other element? You may know this by looking at the properties that are accessible from a drop-down list that intellisense provides. This is shown in the next figure.

Now you can try binding the DisplayDate of the Calendar part of the DatePicker to the value that is in the text box. If you already have a hard-coded date in the textbox the calendar would display that date when you browse either of the ASPX or HTML pages.


After editing the XAML markup of the two controls, the XMAL code is as shown here. An extra Label control is also added with its Content property bound to the textbox. If the Textbox is hard-coded with its Text property it would be immediately visible for the Label but not for the DatePicker.

Browsing either of the pages (HTML or ASPX) and then typing in a date in the Textbox would set the date of the Calendar part of the DatePicker to the date entered as shown here. 

Binding with properties within the same element

It is also possible to bind one property of an element to another property in the same element. Changes were made to the XMAL mark up to test the binding.

<UserControl xmlns:controls="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=System.Windows.Controls"  xmlns:dataControls="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.Data.DataForm"  x:Class="XmalianSL33.MainPage"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    Width="400" Height="300">
    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
        <StackPanel Width="200" Height="80"
                    VerticalAlignment="Center"
                    HorizontalAlignment="Center"
                    Background="LawnGreen" >
            <controls:Label Background="PowderBlue"
                 Content="{Binding Text,ElementName=tb}">        
            </controls:Label>
            <TextBox x:Name="tb" Text="2/2/2020"></TextBox>
            <controls:DatePicker  x:Name="dp"
                 DisplayDate="{Binding Text,ElementName=tb}"
                 Text="{Binding DisplayDate, ElementName=dp}"
                 Visibility="Visible"></controls:DatePicker>
          
        </StackPanel>
    </Grid>
</UserControl>

The above code would work when (the first time) you browse as seen in the following browser display.


However when you change the textbox entry to something different in the browser, the display in the Calendar synchronizes with the textbox change but the text of the DatePicker does not. One of the reasons for this could be that between an existing content and the one referenced by the ElementName, the existing content has precedence.

Summary

The article described the essentials of codeless Element Binding in Silverlight 3.0 using a very simple example. A variation of Element Binding was tested for binding of properties within the same element with limited success. Visual Studio 2008 allows you to choose any of the browsers on your machine. IE 8 used in the preparation of this article was too slow to respond and was changed over to Safari browser. The other option for viewing the pages is the internal browser in Visual Studio.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Download using Google Chrome

Google chrome makes it very easy to download. The problem however is it changes the extension. If you click on a link to a .pdf document, it saves it as .pdf.htm which is not serious since you know what it is and you can rename it to .pdf. 

This is not cool.

Comcast is revving up

I just received an email from comcast, that with the launch of Docsis 3.0, users can experience higher speed connections.

For example what used to be 6 Mbps download / 1 Mbps upload is now pushed to 12 Mbps download / 2 Mbps upload. The speed is doubled in both directions. Come on Microsoft, I dare you to send me bigger downloads!!

Comcast is also offering two new speed tiers:

Ultra             22 Mbps download/5 Mbps upload and
Extreme     50 Mbps download/10Mbps upload

Read the customer related information from Docsis 3.0:
Details of the Cable Modem to Customer Premise Equipment Interface Specification CM-SP-CMCLv3.0-101-08020

Friday, May 08, 2009

EnterpriseDB application with Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio 2008 is a powerful IDE that can access many different data sources. Combined with SQL Server 2008 it can deliver end-to-end support for many kinds of applications. Add a little bit Silverlight and a dash of jQuery, the clients will be experiencing unheard of delights.

This article shows how you may leverage VS2008 to access data on the EnterpriseDB.

Creating a VB.NET application with EnterpriseDB

The following two articles are recommended before you read the above if you are new to EnterpriseDB.
installation and some basic features of EnterpriseDB 
Migrating from MS SQL Server 2008 to EnterpriseDB

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Chapter 1 hands-on exercises in "Learning SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services"

The step-by-step hands-on in this chapter is really to perusade and guide the user to install appropriate software after evaluating the resources he/she has on the user computer. This is going to be a one-man/woman show. One user with one computer doing all the stuff.

The hands-on exercises are:

* Installing a named instance of SQL Server 2008

* Reviewing the installation

* Installing a test database

* Configuring the Reporting Services

There is a lot of information and a lot of screen shots to make it an effortless experience.

Have fun.

This book may be purchased from here :

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Get Dojo 1.3.1


Get the latest (best as some say) version of DOJO from the following site:

http://www.dojotoolkit.org/2009/03/31/dojo-1-3-now-available

If you are wrapped up in web here are two other sources that you can src

Google CDN add,
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/dojo/1.3.0/dojo/dojo.xd.js"></script>

AOL distribution at:
<script src="http://o.aolcdn.com/dojo/1.3.0/dojo/dojo.xd.js"></script>

Have I tried them?
Yes with some funny results. It is probably got to do with them CSS.

I reference my previous article to illustrate what I found.

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2009/02/dojo-123-widget-with-embedded-jquery.html

What I did was take out the reference to the dojo.xd.js from my file and use the Google and AOL CDN's. Here are the screen shots (graphics are full and unclipped) of what I saw got displayed. However the functionality of neither the accrodion nor the jquery's effect has not changed. The first one is from an Opera browser, the other two are form IE 8.0

































Windows 7 RC is out - Go grab it

Windows 7 RC can be downloaded now. You can down load the following ISO file:

7100.0.090421-1700_x86fre_client_en-us_retail_ultimate-grc1culfrer_en_dvd.iso (2.35 GB)
from the Microsoft site ( It took me 1.5 hrs with my Comcast Broadband connection). I had perhaps the best download experience with the down loader.

https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/productkeys/win7-rc-32/enus/

You will have to first register.

This version is good for almost a whole year.

Words of caution

Do not install it on your main computer that you use regularly for your personal use. A dedicated test pc is good if you can afford it. I am planning to put it on a desktop virtual.

What are the minimum requirements?

This is probably the mfaq (most frequently asked question). Here are the bare essentials:

* 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor

* 1 GB RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB RAM (64-bit)

* 16 GB available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)
   DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

You may probably get away with a less stringent requirement with some reduced performance.

Monday, May 04, 2009

Element Binding in Silverlight 3.0

Binding control elements one with the other is a very powerful tool that can reduce writing code. Now with Silverlight 3 which is in beta this is easy. There are many examples wherein the values of a given element would depend on the setting of another control and binding elements would reduce the amount of code to be written otherwise. Although the code for the example chosen would have been very small, it could be substantial in other cases. 

This tutorial shows how to set the date on a date picker control that would display the date in a text box. Although the example by itself quite trivial, it brings out the essentials of element binding. In order to test this you need to have Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Silverlight 3.0 installed on your machine.

Review this article on Webdotdev's web site:

Articles on earlier versions of Oracle SQL Developer

If you are interested in reading about earlier versions of Oracle SQL Developer you may want to review these articles

http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Oracle/How-to-Use-the-Oracle-SQL-Developer-Tool/3/

MS Access Queries with Oracle SQL Developer 1.2 Tool


Migrating MS Access 2003 Data using the Oracle SQL Developer 1.2
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