Last week, we were very lucky to have Sebastien Lambla do a session at our Bracknell user group. The topic of the talk was 'When Agile development goes wrong'.

Since the group was quite small, we did away with the PowerPoints after the break and ended up chatting late into the evening about all things Agile.

For anyone interested, the slides can be downloaded from Seb's blog here:
http://serialseb.blogspot.com/2009/06/when-agile-goes-bad-slides-and-pointers.html

If anyone wants to see his session, Seb will be repeating it on the 14 July 2009 in Nuneaton.

Yesterday evening, I organised a LiveMeeting with Laurent Bugnion - the first online meeting that we've had for several months.

The title of Laurent's meeting was the .Net continuum and the topics covered included ASP.NET, AJAX, Silverlight and WPF.

Many thanks to Laurent for giving up his time to be involved and if any one is interested, here is a recording of a similar session that he gave at Mix.

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T13F

Earlier on this week, Johannes Kebeck gave a presentation at my VBUG Bracknell group on Virtual Earth and Windows Live Maps. The venue for the event was the Bracknell Council Chambers, a plush location in the centre of town. 

The content throughout the evening was excellent. Johannes began by talking about the MapPoint background of Live Maps and key acquisitions throughout the years which makes Virtual Earth what it is today. These include partnerships with TerraServer, GeoTango, and Multimap.

Unlike Google Street View, the 3D imagery in Live Maps is extrapolated using the images taken from the sky. To capture these images, 5 cameras onboard an airplane are used and the the amount of storage required to hold a typical city is around 100TB. These images are processed using Windows HPC Server (High Performance Computing).

During the demonstration, Johannes demonstrated how maps can include time and weather information. During an overcast evening, a map will display a cloudy dark image.

Examples of commercial applications included the Harley Davidson website. Using the site, riders can upload their favourite motorcycle routes which are then displayed and shared with others on a map. Superimposed upon the maps are the locations of Shell petrol stations and Great Western hotels. Using sponsorship from these companies, Harley Davidson can profit from the site.

Johannes next described the 5 different APIs that are available. If using the JavaScript API, there is a project on CodePlex that adds intellisense to Visual Studio which can be found here.

One of the more fascinating parts of the talk was a demonstration on GeoCoding. Using the GeoNames 'RSS to GeoRSS Converter' web service found here, an input RSS feed is accepted. The output provided by this service adds longitude and latitude data.

During his demonstration, Johannes created a Popfly mashup in under 2 minutes. The BBC news RSS feed was used as the input. The impressive thing about the demo is that given a piece of text such as "The US president approves measures that will allow Cuban-Americans to travel more freely to Cuba", the service uses natural language processing to determine that the text relates to Cuba despite references to the US in the sentence.

Another interesting sites mentioned during the evening included a preview of upcoming technology which currently shows a race car demonstration.
http://preview.local.live.com

Johannes also spoke about how maps are rendered using a pattern of squares that you can smoothly zoom into. This technology is closely related to DeepZoom and HD View. If you wish to create your own panoramic images that you can view using HD View, ICE (Image Composite Editor) can be used to do this.

More details about these applications can be found on the Microsoft Research site here:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/HDView/
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/

During another demo, an existing PDF map was superimposed on top of a LiveMap. To do this, the MapCruncher application was used.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/mapcruncher/Gallery/

At the end of the evening, Alan Le Marquand from Microsoft kindly donated a TechNet subscription as a prize.  The evening was certainly interesting so many thanks to to Johannes and Alan for making the event a success.

Earlier on this week, Santosh Benjamin and David Parker gave presentations on Biztalk and Visio at my VBUG meeting in Bracknell.

Santosh began with an introduction to Biztallk. This was an excellent overview that included details on Biztalk usage scenarios, topologies, adapters and state persistence. More details can be found on his blog here:

http://santoshbenjamin.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/speaking-at-vbug-bracknell

Santosh also mentioned Windows Server 'Dublin' (http://www.microsoft.com/NET/Dublin.aspx) and has kindly offered to speak further on this subject later on in the year.

Next, David Parker gave an introduction to Visio. This included a demonstration of the Org Chart wizard and sample code showing these charts can be created in VBA code. The key highlight for me was learning how to bind data to diagrams. David also demonstrated visViewer, a free utility which he has developed enabling Visio files to be viewed without Visio. A summary of what was covered can be found on David's blog here:

http://bvisual.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3350D61BC93733A9!1311.entry  

Radio Bracknell (http://www.radiobracknell.com/) are now helping to promote our activities in Bracknell and our next meeting will take place on the 7th April where Johannes Kebeck will be doing a talk on Microsoft Virtual Earth.

During yesterday evening, we held our first meeting at our new venue in Bracknell. There was much interest in this event and places filled up very quick. It was also good to see many new faces at this event.

Our guest speaker Colin Leversuch-Roberts gave an excellent talk on SQL Server Indexes and performance. There was much more that he could have covered and it's a shame that we didn't have more time. Afterwards, I gave a brief session on a few random SQL Server tips which some people found useful.

For more details on SQL Server Indexes and performance, you can visit Colin's blog here.
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/grumpyolddba/

Colin has expressed an interest to speak in Bracknell again and I look forward to taking him up on his offer!

On Saturday, I attended the DDD7 developer conference in Reading where Andy Westgarth and myself helped out with room monitoring.

The first session that I went to was Phil Pursgrove's (VBUG coordinator for Cambridge) session on ASP.Net scalability. One of the interesting topics covered was caching in ASP.NET using the SqlCacheDependency class. Another item mentioned was JSMin, a tool that reduces the size of JavaScript files by removing comments and whitespace.

The second session that I went to was Toby Henderson's talk on developing .Net applications using Linux and Mono. Since directory separators are different in Linux, an excellent tip given was to use the .Net Path.Combine and Path.DirectorySeparatorChar methods/fields to build file paths. Also mentioned was IKVM.Net which allows you to call Java classes from .Net code.

In order to identify issues when porting .Net code to Mono, the MoMA tool can be used.

A tool recommended by a member of the audience was Wubi. This allows you to duel boot into Linux without having to create a partition.

The final session that I went to was Helen Emerson's talk on the web which featured an excellent overview of the new features in HTML5 and CSS3.0. An interesting feature is the addition of forms in HTML 5. The HTML inputs element can have types specified such as datetime. This will then display a datetime picker automatically in a supported browser. A canvas element is also introduced that allows you to draw shapes and here are some examples.

http://www.abrahamjoffe.com.au/ben/canvascape/

http://blobsallad.se/

Also very interesting was a demonstration of locating yourself on a Google map using geo-location features. The ajaxian blog site is also recommended by Helen.

Overall, the DDD committee did a great job of organising this event and I look forward to the next one in 2009. There will be a DDD South West in Exeter during quarter 2 of 2009 and the next SQLBits will be held in Manchester on 28th March 2009.

On Friday, I attended a 'Community Leaders Day' at Microsoft and here are some random notes from the day.

Here are some upcoming events in 2009:

Microsoft UK Challenge - 10-14 June 2009
http://www.ukchallenge.co.uk/

Microsoft Mix 2009 - 18-19 March 2009
http://2009.visitmix.com/

DDD Scotland - 2nd May 2009
http://developerdayscotland.com/

During the morning, Nathan Winters did a session on user group collaboration highlighting the need for developer groups to provide developer assistance for IT pro groups.

http://www.ukusergroups.co.uk/

Afterwards, Colin Mackay did a session on managing events with EventBrite and here some links that came about during discussions:

http://www.eventbrite.com/

http://www.timesnapper.com/

http://www.surveymonkey.com/

http://www.feedbackserver.com

Also mentioned was the popularity of office sharing through 'co-working' in Brighton and possibilities of finding venues in the evenings through such schemes. In terms of funding, the possibility of Government Regeneration Schemes was mentioned. Registering a 'Limited Company by Guarantee' and the advantages of 'charity' status was also discussed.  

Afterwards, Andrew Fryer delivered a session on PDC highlights that included cloud computing, Office 14 and illustrations of successful projects including the RNLI project for monitoring man-over-board scenarios and Bluehoo.

Finally, Graham Watson spoke about Microsoft Usergroup Services and the organisational structure including Ineta and Culminus.

During the VBUG meeting in Bracknell yesterday evening, Colin MacKay gave a great talk on LINQ to XML. Colin is actively involved in organising Scottish DDD and the next one takes place on the 2nd May 2009.

The first part of the session contained a demo of constructing XML using the System.Xml.Linq.XElement object and the various methods associated with this class. This object allows you to add an event handler to the 'changed' event that fires whenever the value of an xml element is modified. An interesting part of this is that setting the value on an XElement object removes and adds the new value rather than just setting the new value. As a result, any child elements will be removed. Also of interest is the ability to be able to add and retrieve annotations to the XML. These annotations can be any object. During the second part, Colin gave a comprehensive demonstration of querying the data using LINQ including calculations and aggregations.

During the evening, David Parker also mentioned the System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer class containing methods to convert text to speech. There was also some discussion about speech recognition and the latest version of Dragon Naturally Speaking. At the end of the evening, we raffled away a copy of Nevron Chart for .NET.

Thanks once again to Colin for presenting and putting on a great show!

Here's a quick reminder about the next meeting in Bracknell on Thursday 20th November at 19:00. During the evening, Colin Mackay will be doing a session on XML to LINQ and here is an outline of his talk:

Colin Angus Mackay will be giving an introduction to the new XML classes in .NET 3.5, how they work and what can be done with them. He'll then show how the new XML classes can be used in LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) in order to get data out in the way that you want. Colin Angus Mackay is a Microsoft MVP (C#), Code Project MVP, and Member of the British Computer Society, Member of the Institution of Analysts and Programmers. He first got started with software development when he was 9 years old with a ZX Spectrum.

During the evening, we will also be giving away a license for Nevron Chart for .Net worth $299.

http://www.nevron.com/

If you wish to attend, please register through the following link.

http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/November-2008/VBUG-Bracknell-LINQ-to-XML--Everything-but-the-Kitchen-SINQ.aspx

This afternoon, myself and Prasanya Sahadevan from the British Computer Society gave a talk for HND and BSc students at Thames Valley University.

During the presentation, we spoke about how we started in IT industry, the projects that we've worked on and general careers advice.

It was interesting to see the students prospective on IT and how they view the industry during the current economic climate. Interesting questions that we had included career paths for those that are not 'programming inclined', how to find work without commercial experience and advice on IT internships.

Over the past couple of days, I've been attending many of the SQL Server sessions which have mostly been very interesting.

I've attended a couple of Bob Beauchemin's sessions which were excellent. The first one was a 1hr 15min session covering everying about the SQL Server FileStream data type. This included details on converting existing columns to FileStream and a good tip on creating a persisted computed column on a FileStream column. The example given involved saving gif images in the database. Since certain parts of the gif header contain information about the colours used in the image, a persisted computed column can be ceated to allow you to quickly search for all images matching a certain background colour.

The second talk that Bob gave was an in depth session about the SQL Server performance that included details about execution plans, viewing items in the query cache and parameter sniffing.

Another good session that I attended was Ward Pond's SQL Tricks session. This included a useful tip on using 'openrowset' to execute a stored procedure, thus enabling you to join the output columns to anther view or column.

Other sessions that I attended included talks on SQL Server Report Builder 2008 which featured the use of the tablix control and gauges. I also attended a session on SQL Server Security which gave a good explaination of how to implement encryption in SQL 2008.

Unfortunately, the meeting scheduled in Bracknell for this evening has been cancelled due to a lack of numbers. A contributing factor is that it's half term this week.  

However, registration for our next meeting with Colin Mackay is now open. The details and link to the registration page is below:

Title:
LINQ to XML - Everything but the Kitchen SINQ

Overview:
Colin Angus Mackay will be giving an introduction to the new XML classes in .NET 3.5, how they work and what can be done with them. He'll then show how the new XML classes can be used in LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) in order to get data out in the way that you want.

Colin Angus Mackay is a Microsoft MVP (C#), Code Project MVP, and Member of the British Computer Society, Member of the Institution of Analysts and Programmers. He first got started with software development when he was 9 years old with a ZX Spectrum.

http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/November-2008/VBUG-Bracknell-LINQ-to-XML--Everything-but-the-Kitchen-SINQ.aspx

After a bit of break with the VBUG LiveMeetings, I'm pleased to have been involved in organising an online yesterday evening with Andrew Hallmark.

Andrew's presentation was a shortened version of the CSLA talk that he gave at my Bracknell meeting. 

This is the first meeting that we've carried out using Office LiveMeeting 2007 and it's worked out very well. Myself and Andrew conducted a test meeting the evening before which went very smoothly. Compared to the previous version of LiveMeeting, a big advantage in this new version is the ability to broadcast audio from a presenter's PC rather than having to use the phone.

Thanks once again to Andrew for giving up his time and hopefully, we'll be organising more online meetings over the next few months. Thanks also to John Nunn (our Birmingham co-ordinator) for supporting this event and kindly agreeing to assist with future events.

Michelle Flynn has announced the details of the next Silverlight usergroup meeting. It takes place on the 5th November 6:30pm and will be held at either the Conchango or Microsoft London offices depending on numbers.  Tricky (TrickyBusiness) and Michael McClary (Microsoft) will be presenting.

You can register through the following email address: silverlight.usergroup at conchango.com

More details can be found on Mark Mann's Blog here:

http://blogs.conchango.com/markmann/archive/2008/10/08/silverlight-uk-user-group-4-agenda-announced.aspx 

Registration is now open for the 11th VBUG annual conference which takes place at Microsoft headquarters in Reading on Tuesday 4th and Wednesday 5th November. The price for VBUG members is £299 and £399 for non-members. 

There are 2 tracks running over 2 days and a full PDF agenda is available here. Some of the topics covered will include:

• Tips and tricks for successful software teams
• Data-Driven ASP.NET AJAX
• Silverlight for mobile
• Create managed code for Office 2007 in Visual Studio 2008
• ASP.NET 4.0
• Team Foundation Server

Our keynote speaker is Roy Osherove, founder of the Agile Israel community. I'm also excited that Ken Getz will be covering 2 sessions. Prior to .Net when I worked with Microsoft Access , I learnt a great deal by reading Ken's books. Dave Sussman and Phil Winstanley will also be doing a session on ASP.Net 4.0 which I'm looking forward to.

On the Tuesday evening, a private buffet will be held upstairs at the Ivory lounge in Reading. This is a fashionable bar that is conveniently located in the centre of Reading by the river.

You can register online using the link below or contact the VBUG office on +44(0)20 7183 3819. Andy Westgarth and myself will be there and we both look forward to seeing you!

http://www.vbug.com/Events/October-2008/THE-VBUG-NET-ANNUAL-CONFERENCE-2008.aspx 

During yesterday evening, we held a very enjoyable user group meeting in Bracknell.

During the first half, NxtGen's John Price gave a talk on Microsoft Sync Services. This began with some theory slides covering the important issues which was very well presented. The topics included why you would want to use sync in your application and the architectural components such as the sync adapters and sync groups.

During his demo, John built a Windows app that synchronised with a SQL2005 database and made it appear very simple. One thing that I learnt about SQL Server Compact is the lack of 64bit support and the need to change the 'platform target' to x86 in the compile options.  An interesting suggestion raised by the audience was using Sync Services as a mechanism for preserving battery life on a mobile device. An application would be coded to switch off radio during low battery conditions and to use Sync Services in order to work offline. To conclude the demo, the sync logic was moved into a WCF service which was impressive.

During the second half, Vincent O'Hare gave a great talk on Software as a Service. The interesting part of his talk was the explanation of the business model, how the 'rental model' currently accounts for 10% of the software market share and the 'Land and Expand' tactics that businesses follow. In a typical scenario, businesses will offer 3 tiers of service (Bronze, Silver, Gold). These begin with a free trial and there are targets for recruiting/retaining customers and moving them up tiers. On a technical level, Vince also spoke about the challenges of customising applications/database extensibility and touched upon the importance of internationalisation.

The feedback for the event was great. Thanks once to John for making the long journey down to Bracknell and thanks to Vince for volunteering to speak.

This months VSJ Magazine (September/October) includes an article that I've written on the history of VBUG and relates to some work that I've been doing in building up a partnership with the IAP.

The magazine usually contains articles on .Net development and if you don't yet receive this magazine, you can claim a free 12 month printed subscription by visiting the VSJ website below.

http://www.vsj.co.uk/ 

 
Click the image above for a larger version

One of the new features in SQL Server 2008 is the ability to compress the data in your database. I've recently been investigating this feature and here are some of my notes on the topic. There are 2 different types of compression - Row and Page compression. In very simplistic terms, Here is an explanation of how these 2 types of compression work.

1. Row Compression

Supposing that you have a CHAR(100) field, all values saved into this field will use up 100 characters. By using Row Compression, fixed length types will be saved using a variable length format. Saving "Hello" into the field above will therefore take up 5 characters, not 100. This method of compression can be applied to all fixed length data types including int, char and float.

2. Page Compression

Page compression minimises repetition and redundancy in the data. Chad Boyd gives an excellent explanation of this:

Assume you have a column of data on a single page of rows that contain values like 'Chad', 'Chadwick', 'Chadly', 'Chad', 'Chadster', 'Chadwick', and 'Chadly' (values repeated purposely) - as you can tell, there's quite a bit of redundant data 'prefixing' each of the rows in this column on this page, yes? So, what you might end up with in a scenario like this would be a column prefix value of 'Chad' stored in the CI (Compression Information) structure, and each column ending up with pointers to that prefix value - resulting in values like this on-disk: '<empty>', '1wick', '1ly', '<empty>', '1ster', '1wick', and '1ly'

The example above is called 'Prefix Compression' because it is performed on the prefixing values of each column. Following Prefix Compression, 'Dictionary Compression' is applied. This replaces repeated values that occur anywhere on a page and unlike row compression, it is not restricted to a single column. 

Applying Compression to a table

To enable compression for a table, right click the table in Management Studio and bring up the 'Storage' menu item. From here, you will find an option to 'Manage Compression...'.  Selecting this item will bring up the 'Data Compression Wizard'.

 
Fig1. Starting the Data Compression Wizard
 

 
Fig2. Setting Page/Row Compression using the wizard

The second page in the wizard enables you to choose between either Page or Row compression. A 'Calculate' button on the bottom right shows you the estimated space saving based upon the selected compression type.   

If you want to compress an index, you can do so by right clicking the index and starting the Data Compression Wizard from there.

 
Fig3. To compress an index, start the wizard from the Index folder

TSQL DDL

The TSQL DDL for creating and altering tables is as follows:

CREATE TABLE <table_name> (<column_names>) 
WITH (DATA_COMPRESSION = ROW | PAGE)
ALTER TABLE <table_name> 
REBUILD PARTITION = 1 WITH (DATA_COMPRESSION = ROW | PAGE) 

The TSQL for calculating the potential space savings for Row and Page compression is as follows:

EXEC sp_estimate_data_compression_savings 'dbo', 'tblTimsTestTable', NULL, NULL, 'ROW';
GO

EXEC sp_estimate_data_compression_savings 'dbo', 'tblTimsTestTable', NULL, NULL, 'PAGE';
GO 

Compression Strategies

Here's an excellent article on Compression Strategies by Sunil Agarwal (http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2008/01/27/compression-strategies.aspx)

To briefly summarise his points:

• Don't use compression if the relative space saving is small compared to the overall size of the database
• In a typical OLTP system with lots of DML activity, Row compression is more effective
• On a table with multiple indexes, compress those that are used least frequently.  

SQL Server compression is a large topic and if you wish to learn more, here are a couple of links from MSDN that are very useful. 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc280449.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2007/11/12/types-of-data-compression-in-sql-server-2008.aspx

wbadmin start systemstatebackup -backuptarget:Drive_Letter:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wbengine\SystemStateBackup\  
 
Name: AllowSSBToAnyVolume
Data type: DWORD
Value data: 1