Monday, May 24, 2004 - Posts
Left to Right: Michael Earls, yours truly, Joe Olsen and Adam Kinney
Okay, for the record, I'm not much of one for vendor fairs. I've already got more T-shirts, mouse pads and stuff animals that I, my kids, my grandkids and half of the state of Nebraska will need for the next 20 generations. But I did scope it the area twice today. Some observations:
- Way at the back of the floor, there's a number of big name companies with little kiosks. Some of these are about storage system, the other is about Federated Identity. Go up to the Microsoft booth in this area and get their CD. I think this technology has legs, folks and its something we really need.
- I was also able to the the TabletPC SDK, version 1.7. from the TabletPC Team booth. I need to stop back and figure out more about using ink controls with the Whidbey CTP bits, though. The TabletPC team is also taking applications to be product evaluators.
- The Compact Framework team is handing out a Starter Kit CD that looked very nice.
- I got the WSE Resource CD by stopping by the VS.NET Web Service both. Excellent!
- Chatted with the DB2 guy for a bit about Stinger and .NET support. Be on the look-out for actual bits and VS.NET project templates for it this fall.
- The only other vendor that really stood out to me was a company called Xprime. They are offering this tool that really looks like an amplifier for SQL Server.
Presenter is the most excellent Kimberly Trip. This is one session I went to specifically because of the presenter rather than the content (although it is interesting too!) You should be able get the scripts and so on from her site: http://www.sqlskills.com/
- Session was rather better attended that I thought it might be
- Each GROUP BY query creates a temp table object
- Two type of aggregates: stream (data in-of-order) and hash (data out-of-order.) Best performance is usually achieved with stream.
- Consider this query: select member_no,sum(charge_amt) from dbo charge group by member_no. This requires a table scan (assume no index on
- "Well this is exciting, you get to be here the first time the first time I totally hosed a demo." Stuff happens.
- Dropping a clustered index forces a rebuild on non-clustered indices, but the way.
- Covering Index is an index that has of the columns in a query as part of the index.
- Underlying point: if you have a good index, you probably won't have to sort.
- Indexed views can be used on standard edition if you use the right index hints.
- This technique is great for mostly read-only data, not so good with heavy inserts
- Computed columns can be indexing
- Bad news items
- Fully supported in Enterprise edition only
- In standard edition, must name query and add the ViewNane and add hint
- Consistent session settings are required and these must be on: ANSI_NULL, ANSI_WARNING and so on.
Kimberly got going about 900 miles an hour after that and it was hard too keep good notes. The bottom line is that while Indexed Views may be available in the standard edition, there's a lot of work to do to use them.
Brian started with a discussion of how report development really works when you try to write them with pure ASP.NET. Premise of his presentation: what types of applications make sense with Reporting Services.
- Did a demo of a tool that generates RDL programmatically by getting the schema for a query. Walked through the RDL file and how the program wrote it.
- Talked URL Addressabiluty. Missed the opportunity to talk about not using GETs for security reasons.
- But did talk about the use of dsu and dsp and did say this should be done with SSL.
- rc: parameters are used to control rendering on a device specific level.
- Talked about the WebServices and the 11 main services exposed.
- SessionID, ServerInfo and BatchID are held in SOAP headers
- Remember the first step is set an authentication context, using either a standard login or WIA.
- Did a demo of an application that consumed a service to get a list of reports, then fetched the given report and do a export. Kind of cool.
- Talked about Server Extensions, but didn't show any demo
- Talked about Data Extensions and rolling your own Managed Provider. They require IDbConnection, IDbCommand, IDataParameter and something else I missed.
- Talked about Rendering Extensions. The said that these were the most difficult to write and maintain. "proceed with caution."
- Talked about Server Extensions:
- Whidbey/Yukon controls for both WinForms and WebForms. He did a demo of them. Not the smoothest of presentations, but understandable given the build in use.
- WinForm control actually does the rendering on the client. On the WebForm version, rendering is done on the server.
The inconsistent wireless made me cranky, so I gave up on this session and decided to go find a nice hard connection.
Pretty good session, not as advanced as I would have liked, but nothing to complain in total. I hope he makes the source for the demos available, especially the RDL writer.
Taken out today:Feeling Guilty, Catching Up.
# of referenced posts by category: Blogging: 15; Development: 5; Other: 8; SQL: 5; WILY: 12
Covering TSQL enhancements in Yukon and address complex problems. His basic theme is "Get comfortable with the basics and move up from there." Also going tackle Relational Divison.
- New functions: ROW_NUMBER, RANK, DENSE_RANK and NTILE, limited to select and order sections
- ROW_NUMBER is based on order and group. This is non-deterministic. RANK is deterministic with respect to the total data. DENSE_RANK works like RANK, without gaps. A demo will help and I'll try to write on out.
- NTILE(x) partitions the data into x strata and returns the strata a row falls into. You'll have the same number of results in each partition, except for the likely the tail-end groups which may get fewer.
- PARTITION BY is like creating a ROW_NUMBER for groups with a result set.
- Gave example of doing row count in SQL2000 on 100k row table. Ugly. rank for 30 minutes. Yukon? Two seconds.
- UGH! just lost some of my notes about doing string concats.
- Discussion of applying a little Linear Algebra: consider try multiple matrix. Interesting solution: presented was to the POW and LOG functions. Talked about the zero problem and using NULLIF to cope with it.
- Demonstrated a shred of comma-delimited data. He demonstrated using a join on list of numbers. You just have to see it.
- Talked about using a function to do the same thing and CROSS APPLY and OUTER APPLY
- Discussion of relational division. Two ways to tackle this: Think positive and think negative. Talked about the value of using negative.
I need to post some examples. Great session!
- Got to the exhibit hall nice and early and got excellent seats about 10 rows back from the main stage. Julie Lerman, Greg Hubner and some other INETA folks are clustered together.
- MS is pretty well know for running trivia questions at the start of a show. The most interesting I saw: what's the term used to describe a Linux OS crash: Kernel Panic. Now I wonder why they put that up?
- Two connsective video case studies during the warm up prompting VS.NET. Oh, yeah, TechEd is strictly an ITPro event, hun?
- Ballmer started, bummer -- no "developers, developers..." Dude, somebody turn his speaker down. Nice joke about MS controlling the weather world wide.
- Steve really drilled in "do more with less." Steve predicted a smoothing out of the IT Spending curve. New mission statement for the industry: Enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.
- Steve: "All I see is blue sky...about the benefits we can bring to world." Like Healthcare and education..
- Spending nearly $6.8 in R&D. Second behind Pfeizer. Inteesting.
- Direction is towards "integrated innovation." Thank you, Microsoft.
- "Security is job #1" - Steve Ballmer. Underlying message of "keep up to date.
- Major efforts to combat SPAM. Three tier model: Protection Filters, Prevention Agents and Prove Identity and Purpose. They are "excited" about raising the economic barrier to SPAM being a cost-efficient business to be in.
- Maybe 20%-25% of the folks here (quick visual check) said application development is their primary role.
- Steve talked about MBS become more WebServices-centric. He also stressed MSFTs investment in Open Standard. Most important: Their WS>I investment. They are firmly comitted to it.
- Yeah! WSE 2,0 announced! Technical Beta for WSE for Office kicked out.
Rebecca Dias got up talked about MSO-IBF
- Interesting demo of using a Web Service to place a stock purchase order in Outlook. Nice demo of a Wizard to generate all of the WSI>Security bits. This looks really, really really cool and extremely slick. This is just too cool. Must get these bits and start playing.
Back to Steve
- More than 50% of US Developers prefer .NET to anything else. Folks that use .NET think its 67% more reliable, 76% more performant and more twice as secure. Couldn't agree more.
- Talked about the Oracle, SAP and now TIBCO are VSIP players.
- Talked about Whidbey and Yukon.
- Launched Whidbey Team System.
Prashant talked about VS-TeamSystems (Whitehorse)
- Workflow features
- Drag and drop plug in of web services. Talked about designing for operations.
- Integrated and enforced testing tools. Good smattering of applause for that.
- Visual marking of untested code.
- Feature like LINT, but security focused.
- Looks like AppCenterTest has been integrated smoothly into the VS.NET platform
Back to Steven who talked about Dynamic Systems and Connected Productivity
- SMS + MOM == System Center (not new news)
- Good adoption of Office 2003 and SharePoint by show of hands.
- Lots of pumping of MBS as the "easiest to use ERP for the lower 99.5%:" of the market.
- Talked about three case studies: Meno's logistics; McGraw Hill's Construction Knowledgebase and Robertson RI use as a medical diagnostic tool.
- Competitive points: Integrated Innovation; Trustworthiness; Partnerships and Choices. More total value from Microsoft than their competitors.
Good kickoff, MOS-IBF was clearly the showstopper.
- The best presentation since my last post has been a discussion with the
development evangelism team. The Microsoft team made is that we (are you as
INETA UGs) really need to engage with their local MS reps to mutually drive
the program. Couldn't agree more, our representation has been great. Big
(and positive changes) are in the works to make more resources available to
us.
- After the INETA program end, I hurried back over to the convention
center for the authors' meet and pretty cool event -- got to catch up my
Hero Alex Homer a bit. You'll be glad to hear that he, Mark and Dave have
been working hard to produce updated version of the ASP2 and ADO2 intro
books which should be out by July. We also talked about there new ASP.NET
Insiders book and the state of the industry as a whole. Alex fascinates me
to no end: excellent write, great speaker and somebody that appreciates good
beer! The look on face when tasting a Miller Lite for the first time was
priceless.
- Had dinner back at the Hotel's RICE restaurant. Order the duck and a
glass of Pinot. Earlier in the evening I has lucky enough to meet Tim
Anderson, the well known IT journalist from the UK and we had a good
discussion about that differences in things and where the EU was heading
technology wise. Scott Coleson -- another of the Twin Cities Region's
Community Rock Stars -- and one of the PM from the Compact Framework team
ate together. The conversation was really great and learned way more about
ActiveSync that I though I ever could. Yes, they know its a bit of problem
(especially the debugging with an Active Network) and, oh yes, you can be
sure they are working it.