Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Friday, April 16, 2010

Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore

Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore
Sorry for my delayed post on day 3 because I had to travel from Blore to Chennai So I couldnt write for the past two days.
On day 3 as usual we had lot of simultaneous tracks on various sessions.
This day I choose the Your Data, Our Platform Track.
It had sessions on the following 5 topics :

  1. Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam
  2. SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M
  3. SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan
  4. Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M
  5. Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave
  • Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam
This was one of the superb sessions i have attended. He explained all the concepts in detail with a demo.
The important thing in this is there is something called Data-Tier application project which is newly introduced in this VS2010 with which we can manage all our data along with our application inside our VS itself. We can create DB,Tables,Procs,Views etc. here itself and once we deploy it creates a compressed file called .dacpac which stores all the changes in Table Schema,Created procs, etc. on to that single file which reduces our (developer's) effort in preparing the deployment scripts and giving it to the DBA. It also has some policy configurations which can be managed easily by checking some rules like in outlook. For Ex : IF the SQL Server Version > 10 then deploy else dont. This rule specifies that even if we try to deploy on SQL Server DB with version less than 10 It will not do it. And if we deploy some .dacpac to SQL server production db with the option upgrade DB with this dacpac once everything completes successfully it will say success else it rollsback to the prior version. Even if it gets deployed successfully and later @ a point of time you wish to revert it back to the prior version, you can go ahead and delete the existing dacpac version so that it reverts to the older version of the db changes. And for the good questions that were asked in the session T-Shirts were given.
  • SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M
This one too was the best session. The speaker Vinod explained everything very much clearly. This was really useful session and you dont believe, as per my knowledge, in the total 3 days in the TechEd except the Keynote, for this session seats were full (House FULL)  People were even standing out to attend this session. Such a great one it was. The speaker did a deep dive in to the Query Plan section and showed which actually causes the problem. Its all about the thing that we need to understand about the execution of SQL server Queries. We think in a way and SQL Server never executes in that way. We need to understand that first. He also told about there might be two plans generated for a single query at a point of time because of parallel processors in the system. The Key is here in every query. There is something called Estimated Row Count and Actual Row Count in the query plan. If the estimated row count by SQL server tallies with the actual row count your performance will be awesome. He said some tweaks to achieve the same.
After this as usual we had lunch
  • SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan
This was more of a DBA's session. Am really sorry I was totally blank and I was not interested to attend this session and walked out to attend Migrating to the cloud by Harish Ranganathan (My favorite Speaker)
but unfortunately that was some other persons session. There the speaker was telling about how to configure the connection strings in such a way that we can connect to the SQL Azure platform from our VS and also showed us how to deploy the same in to Windows Azure. In between there were lot of technical problems like laptop hang, user locked and he was switching between systems, also i came in the half so i wasnt able to listen that fully.
In between, Since I got an MCTS certification they gave me T-Shirt with the lines 'Iam Certified. Are you?' and they asked me to wear that. If we wear that we might get spotted and they would give us some goodies  So on the 3rd day I was wearing that T-Shirt. I got spotted by the person Tarun who was coordinating things about the certification, and he was accompanied with a cameraman and they interviewed me about the certification and I was shown live in the Teched and was seen by 60000 live viewers of the TechEd. I was really happy on that.
  • Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M
This was one of the best sessions too in the TechEd. This guy is really amazing. In front of us he crashed a DB and showed how to recover the same in 6 different ways for different no of failures.
Showed about
Different types of error msgs like : 823,824,825
msdb..suspect_pages
DBCC CheckDB (different parameters to it)
I am really waiting for his session to get uploaded live in the Teched Website.
Here is his contact info If you wish to connect to him :
Twitter : @vinodk_sql
  • Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave
Pinal Dave is a King in SQL and he is a SQL MVP and he is the owner of SQLAuthority.com
He took the session on Spatial Databases from the start. Showed about the different types of Spatial :
Geometric and Geographic
Geometric : x and y axis its a planar surface
Geographic : Spherical surface with 360 as the maximum which is used to represent the geographic points on the earth and easy to draw maps of different kinds.
He had a lot of obstacles during his session like rain coming inside the hall, mic wires got bursted due to rain, Videos off on the display screens. In spite of that he asked the audience to come in the front rows and managed to take a good session without ppts and finally we got the displays on and he was showing demos on the same what he explained orally. That was really a fun filled informative session. He gave some books for the persons who asked good questions and answered well for his questions and I got one too  (It was a book on Data Mining - Wrox Publishers)
And finally after all these things there was Keynote session for close of the TechEd. and we all assembled in a big hall where Mr.Ashok Soota, a man of age around 70  co-founder of Mindtree was called to give some lecture on his successes.
He was explaining about his past and what all companies he switched and for what reasons and what are all his successes and what are all his failures and the learnings of him from his past failures. and his success and failures on his partnerships with the other concern. And there were some questions for him like
  • What is your suggestion on young entrepreneur?
  • How did you learn from past failures?
  • What is reiterating your success?
  • What is your suggestion on partnerships?
  • How to choose partnerships? etc.
And they said @ 7.30 Pm there would be a party night, but unfortunately i was not able to attend that because I had to catch my train and before that i had to pack things, so I started @ 7 itself.
Thats it about the TechED!!! Stay tuned for further Technology updates.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 2 @ Bangalore

Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 2 @ Bangalore
Today is the day 2 @ Microsoft TechEd 2010.
We had lot of technical sessions as usual there were many tracks going on side by side and
I was attending the Web simplified track, Which comprised of the following sessions :

  1. Developing a scalable Media Application using ASP.NET MVC - This was a kind of little advanced stuff. Anyways I couldn't understand much because this was not my piece of cake and I havent worked on this before
  2. ASP.Net MVC Unplugged - This was really great because this session covered from the basics of MVC showing what is Model,View and Controller and how it worked and the speaker went into the details of the same.
  3. Building RESTful Applications with the Open Data Protocol - There were some concepts explained about this from the basics on how to build RESTful Services and it went on till some advanced configurations of the same.
  4. Developing Scalable Web Applications with AppFabric Caching - This session showed about the integration of AppFabric with the .Net Web Applications. Instead of using Inproc Sessions, we can use this AppFabric as a substitute for Caching and outofProc Session Storage without writing code and doing a little bit of configurations which brings in High Scalability, performance to our applications. (But unfortunately there were no demos for this session )
  5. Deep Dive : WCF RIA Services - This session was also an interactive one, in this the speaker presented from the basics of WCF and took a Book Store Application as a sample and explained all details concepts on linking with RIA Services

Apart from these sessions, in between there happened some small events in the breaks like
  • Some discussions about Technology, Innovations
  • Music
  • Jokes
  • Mimicry, etc.
And on doing all these things, the developers were given some kool gifts / goodies like USBs, T-Shirts, etc.
And today I got a chance to do the following certification : (70-562)
Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in .NET 3.5 Web Applications
Since I already have an MCTS in .NET 2.0, I wanted to do an MCPD and for doing the same I was required to do an update to my MCTS with the .NET 3.5 framework and I did the same I cleared it and now am an MCTS in .NET 3.5 Web Apps
And on doing this I got a T-Shirt and they gave something called Learning $ of worth 30$.
And in various stalls for attending each quiz or some game or some referrals we got some Learning $ which we can redeem later based on our Total Learning $. I got 105 $
which i was able to redeem and got a Microsoft Learning BagPack, 1 free Microsoft certification offer, a laptop light and an e-learning content activated.
And after all these sessions and small events, we had
something called Demo Extravaganza like I mentioned yesterday. This was a great funfilled event with lot of goodies for the attendees.
There were some lucky draw which enabled 2 attendees to get Netbooks (Sponsored by Intel) and 1 attendee to get X-box (Sponsored by Citrix).
After Choosing the raffle in the lucky draw they kept it on a device called Microsoft Surface which is a kind of big touch screen device and on putting the raffle on that it detected the code of the attendee and said intelligently how many sessions that person has attended and if he has attended more than 5 he got a Netbook and this was coded by a guy called Imran.
Apart from they showed demos on :
  1. Research by 2 Tamilnadu students from Krishna Arts and Science college, taken 1200 photographs of their college from different angles and put that up in Bing maps using silverlight and linked with Photosynth, which showed a 3d view of their college based on the photos they uploaded
  2. Reasearch by Microsoft on Panaramic HD views of the images. One young guy from Microsoft Research showed a demo of this on Srivilliputhur Andal Temple, in Tamil Nadu and its history with a panoramic view of the temple and the near by places with narration of the historical information on the same and with the videos embedded in it with high definition images which we can zoom to a very detailed level.
  3. Some Demo on a business app with Silverlight, Business Intelligence (BI) and maps integrated. It showed the sales of a particular product across locations.
  4. Some kool demos by 2 geeks who used Robots to show their development talents.
    • 2 Robots fought with each other
    • 2 Robots danced in sync for the A.R. Rehman song Humma Humma...
  5. A dream home project by Raman. He is currently using the same in his home too. Robots are controlling his home currently. They showed a video on this. Here are the list of activities that Robot does for him
    • When he reads a book, robot automatically scans that and shows that image of that person in the screen (TV or comp) in front of him. It shows a wikipedia about that person. It says that person is not in linked in. do you want to add him
    • If he sees an IPL Match news in the book and smiles it understands he is interested in that and opens a website related to that and shows the current game and the scorecard.
    • It cooks for him
    • It cleans the room for him whenever he leaves the house
    • when he is doing something if some intruder comes inside his house his computer automatically switches his screen showing the video of the person coming inside.
    • When he wakes up it automatically opens up the system, loads his mails and the news by the side, etc.
  6. Some Demos on Microsoft Pivot. This was there in livelabs but it is now available in getpivot.com its a pivoting of the pictorial data based on some categories and filters on the searches that we do.
And finally on filling up some feedback forms we got T-Shirts and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit CDs.
Whats more on TechEd??? Stay tuned!!! Will update you soon on the other happenings!!

Great event : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch @ Microsoft TechEd Blore

Great event : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch @ Microsoft TechEd Blore

I was really excited on attending the day 1 of Microsoft TechEd 2010 in Bangalore.
This is the first Teched that am attending.
TechEd 2010
The event was really fun filled with lot of knowledge sharing sessions and lots of goodies and gifts by the partners
Initially the Event Started by Murthy's Session. He explained about the Developers relating to the 5 elements of nature
(Pancha Boothaas)
1. Fire - Passion
2. Wave (Water) - Catch the right wave which we need to apply.
3. Earth - Connections and lots of opportunities around the world
4. Air -  Its whatever we breathe. Developers.. Without them nothing is possible. they are like the air
5. Sky - Cloud based applications

Next the Keynote and the announcement of Visual Studio by SomaSegar. List of things that he delivered his speech on :
1. Announcement of Visual Studio 2010
2. Announcement of .NET 4.0
3. Announcement of Silverlight later this week
4. What is the current Trend? Microsoft has done a research with many developers across the globe
and have got the following feedback from the users.
  • Get Lost (interrupted) - When we do some work and somebody is calling or interrepting by someother way we lose track of what we were doing and we need to do from the start
  • Falling Behind- Technology gets updated  phenomenally over a period of time and developers always have a scenario like they are not in the state of the art technology and they always have a doubt whether they are staying updated.
  • Lack of Collobaration - When a Manager asks a person what the team members have done and some might be done and some might not be and finally all are into a state like we dont know where we are.
So they have addressed these 3 points in the VS 2010 by the following features :
  • Get Lost - Some cool features which could overcome this. We have some Graphical interface. which could show what we have done and where we are. Some Zoom features in the code level.
  • Falling Behind - Everything is based on .NET language base. 2010 has been built in such a way that if developers know the native language that's enough for building good applications.
  • Lack of Collobaration - Some Dashboard Features which would show where exactly the project is. And a graphical user interface is shown on clicking which it directly drills down even to the code level.
5. An overview on all new features in VS 2010.
6. Some good demos of new features in VS 2010 by Polita and one more girl.
Some of the new features included :
1. Team Explorer
2. Zoom in Code
3. Ribbon Development
4. Development in Single Platform for Windows Phone, XBox, Zune, Azure, Web Based and Windows based applications
5. Sequence Diagram Generation directly from code
6. Dashboards to show project status
7. Javascript and JQuery intellisense
8. Native support for JQuery
9. Packaging feature while deploying.
10. Generation of different versions of web.config like Web.Config.Production, Web.Config.Staging, etc.
11. IntelliTrace - Eliminating the "Not Reproducible" statement.
12. Automated User Interface Testing.
At last in the closing of the day we had a great event called Demo Extravaganza, where lot of cool projects that were launched by Microsoft and also the projects that are under research were also shown.
I got a lot of info about Bing today.
BING really rocks!!! It has the following :
1. Visual Search
2. Product based search. For each product different menu filters were provided to make an advanced search
3. BING Maps was awesome!! It zoomed in to the street level and we can assume that we are the persons who are walking or running on the road and we can see the real objects like buildings moving by our side.
4. PhotoSynth was used in BING to show up all the images taken around the globe in a 3D format.
5. Formula - If we give some formula it automatically gives the value for the variable or derivation of expression
Also some info about some kool touch apps which does an authentication and computation of Teched Attendee's
Points that they have scored and the sessions attended.
One guy won an XBOX in lucky draw as a gift.
There were lot of Partner Stalls like Accenture,Intel,Citrix,MicroFocus,Telerik,infragistics,Sapient etc.
Some Offers were provided for us like 50% off on Certifications, 1 free Elearning Course, etc.
Stay tuned!! Wil update you on other events too..

Friday, March 26, 2010

Finished a successful session on basics of SQL Server 2008 yesterday.

Finished a successful session on basics of SQL Server 2008 yesterday.

  • Started from the basics of how to install SQL Server 2008,
  • How to Open the same,
  • What is the Use of it.
  • Explained the Interface of SQL Server Management Studio
  • Started with SQL Queries Syntax. ( I took the reference from w3schools.com for the same)

I was able to cover up to the following topics yesterday :



Still there are more topics to cover. Enough time was not there yesterday. So would take up a Part-2 soon on this.
Got a fan for my session yesterday. Her name is Lisha and she is from US.
Hyderabadtechies owner chandu asked her also to join with me to take the second part of my SQL session.
So got a team member to offload my work ;)

Tonight @ 9PM stay tuned to hyderabadtechies to listen to my C# Session :

Here is the meeting URL :


For more details on how to install live meeting and how to join the sessions, Read my previous blog posts.

How to enable connections tab, autoconfig, proxy, and set proxy server thru registry settings

The following snapshots would show you what are all the keys that you need for setting up
the registry settings in such a way that your connections tab in IE gets enabled and also for editing your proxy server.
See the rounded places below.
Those are the places where exactly you need to have all these keys.
The values need to be set to 0 for enabling and  1 for disabling.
If you still have more doubts you can mail me.. i would write another blog in detail :)




Adding a value to a 'datetime' column caused overflow.

Adding a value to a 'datetime' column caused overflow.

Came across this error today. So thought of posting the same.
Whenever you try to do a dateadd like this 

dateadd(mm,12,datefield)

you might face this error if the value in your records in the datefield is not a valid date or
if u add some months or date to this value and the output of that will exceed the date range

In my case i was just thinking what would be the error here.
But unfortunately there was some data in the table which was there with the value
(Ex:date of joining column)

1-1-9999

So my sql statement has tried to add 12 months to this and it had caused this error.