In October 2012 I joined Amido a quickly going consultancy in Brighton as a Full-Time Technical Consultant. Amido share my commitment to Open Source Software and giving back to the community. As a result I get to spend some time getting paid to write blog posts on the Amido Blog.
I shall aim to keep this post updated with all the posts I write, but just in case take a look at my Author Page.
Two and a half years ago I posted about openening an elevated command prompt on Windows Vista and Windows 7. The process has changed slightly in Windows 8 as we have lost the traditional start menu.
In Windows 8, applications don’t automatically get administrator privileges, they either need to request it or the user needs to explicitly start the application as an Administrator. The way to do this with the Command Prompt is as follows:
The Command Prompt running as an administrator will appear in much the same way as Windows 7 or Vista:
Since starting to make the move towards utilizing NHibernate in most of my projects I have been a little frustrated by the need to make properties virtual. This is by no means a criticism of NHibernate just the tooling, specifically Visual Studio 2010 and CodeRush. Whilst CodeRush has templates for everything the virtual keyword dosn’t seem to get a look in, fortunately it’s not hard to add support.
Thanks to Rory Becker’s article on Creating Virtual Methods I had everything I needed to create the template. Auto-properties are actually significantly less complex than methods as they are composed of little more than the type, property name and the { get; set; } block.
Templates are easy enough to create from the DevExpress Options Menu (DevExpress Menu -> Options) you jump to the templates page quickly with the search in the top left hand corner. I prefer to organize my custom templates into their own folder, then I can easily import and export these between machines via drop box.
1) Right click your preferred folder and select “New Template” inter “u?Type?” and press enter/OK.
2) Set the Context – I copied the context of my template from a?Type? and removed the InStruct directive, as virtual is not valid in structures, the Use: field should read something like this:
((InClass or InInterface) and OnEmptyLine) but not (InComment or InMethod or InPreprocessorDirective or InProperty or InString or VS2002 or VS2003 or VS2005)
It’s not critical you get this right, as it is probably going to work where you want it, if the above is wrong it may work where you don’t want it.
3) Enter the expansion
public virtual «?Get(Type)» «Caret»«Field(PropertyName)»«BlockAnchor» { get; set; }
This bit is essential to get right:
With that you are all set and can save and test out your new template in the code editor. Simply move to an empty line inside a class and type
us<space>
This should then expand to
public virtual string PropertyName { get; set; } |
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 has some great new ways of connecting your road warriors and teleworkers to your network. For most of us Systems Administration types Routing and Remote Access is still the most common way of achieving this connectivity without DirectAccess. Because I have written this documentation up twice now for two separate companies I thought it would be worth writing it a third time and placing it in the public domain for reference in the future.
The documentation assumes that the VPN End Point is Windows Server Routing and Remote Access, however the instructions work for a number of other vendors VPN end points.
What you will need:
1. Click the “Networking” tray icon
It is a monitor with a network cable to the left of it, although quite understandably some users see it as a “monitor and a fork”:
2. Go to Network and Sharing Center
It is the link at the bottom of the popup you see after clicking the Networking tray icon.
3. Click “Connect to a network”
4. Click “Connect to a workplace”
5. Click “Use my Internet connection (VPN)”
6. Enter your settings then click Next
The “Internet address” is the four part IP address of your work place, your friendly help desk or company intranet should be able to provide this information. The destination name is purely a useful name for you to refer to your connection as I would suggest the name of your company.
7. Enter your Login details then click Next
Chances are these Login details are going to be the same details you login to the computer with. Whilst the domain is labelled as optional it may be required for your workplace, again your IT Helpdesk or Intranet should be able to provide this to you.
8. Wait
This bit can take a while, the VPN Client will connect to your workplace VPN send your login details then setup the connection.
9. Your Done!
You may find that anything that was connected such as MSN Messenger has disconnected, it should eventually connect again however it will be done through your workplaces internet connection so beware what you are doing. You shouldn’t do what you shouldn’t do, get over it.
10. Remember to disconnect (and how to reconnect)
Remember that “Monitor and Fork” icon in the bottom right hand corner of your screen, if you click that you will be able to see that your new VPN connection is connected. Once you are done you can disconnect by clicking the connection then clicking “Disconnect”. You can reconnect in the future in a similar way, click the “Monitor and Fork” select the connection then click “Connect”.
I spent far too long trying to fix a error while developing an Orchard Module. To explain further Orchard CMS derives a lot of its flexibility by representing content in highly abstracted terms called shapes, these shapes are dispatched by the module that wishes to output content then rendered at the end. In between these shapes can be manipulated by themes or modules to change how the information is displayed. It takes a while to get your head around it, but its a great system… until you make a mistake!
Modules define where shapes are placed through a file called placement.info your module dispatches shapes through it’s Driver (a class inherited from ContentPartDriver
public class DefinitionListPartDriver : ContentPartDriver<DefinitionListPart> {
...
protected override DriverResult Display(
DefinitionListPart part,
string displayType,
dynamic shapeHelper) {
return ContentShape("Parts_DefinititionList",
() => shapeHelper.Parts_DefinitionList(
ContentPart: part,
DefinitionList: part.Entries));
}
...
}
You may have seen the mistake already, but just in case your not sure here is my placement.info file:
<Placement>
<Place Parts_DefinitionList_Edit="Content:11"/>
<Place Parts_DefinitionList="Content:11"/>
</Placement>
Yep, when I dispatched the shape it had an extra it in Definition… oh well, remember to check that first next time.
Responsive Design is a term that seems to have risen up around me over the course of the last year. Up to this point I have been largely unaware of what it meant other than had a good deal to do with designing markup and CSS for the mobile platform. Today I thought I would spend a couple of hours researching the topic, I have included some of the best articles and post I could find.
A List Apart’s Responsive Design Article
Key points I took away from this article are; the plethora of screen resolutions and orientations on the web is an advantage not a disadvantage. Mobile continues to rise in both business and the social web. Media queries are a neat implementation for modern browsers (IE9, Chrome, Safari 3+, Firefox 3.5+) with a practicable JavaScript backup for non compliant browsers.
CloudFour’s CSS Media Query for Mobile is Fool’s Gold Blog Post
This is quite a pragmatic stance on using Media Queries for the mobile platform as a direct response the aforementioned article from A List Apart. Key points for me were performance, specifically speed are very important for Mobile. The common use case for a mobile website is to find something quickly, waiting for large images and style sheets affects this performance. There are now low-power smartphones without the CPU power, resizing images in-browser does not work. There is a good response on Quirksmode.
Smashing Magazine’s Guidelines for Responsive Web Design Article
Kayla Knight goes into depth into the techniques and technologies that front end web developers have at their hands. There is a lot to take in in this article, and some great examples of responsive web design out in the wild. Further examples and discussion can be found on Adactio.
Windows Team Blog’s Targeting mobile optimized CSS at Windows Phone 7 Post
This was the article that kicked me off on my research spree this afternoon. I was seriously disappointed by Windows Phone 7′s 19/400 score on HTML5 test so I didn’t hold out much hope for support for CSS3 and Media Queries this article didn’t do much to reassure me. Microsoft advise going down the route of conditional HTML comments to import the correct style sheet for the platform you require.
Conclusion
Not being a “Front End” developer, I may never have to put any of this into practice however now I know more than when I started I can follow along when the design team talks about responsive design. If you know of any other resources or articles, please post them in the comments for me to read. If I find them useful I will update this post.
I try to do this post every year as it gives me an idea of where my readers come from and what they are looking at. My blog is consistently getting 100+ unique visitors per day, most of these are new visitors who have found a blog post via organic search results (Google, Yahoo!, etc), with a smaller number having found me through links from other sites or directly into the site.
The most popular article by far has been Change your MTU in Vista and Windows 7, this is in no small part because I have written one of the few articles that explains the method to identify your ideal MTU, not just the command to change it. The next most popular article is another one from last year titled Card Reader on Acer Aspire 5100 Series under Windows 7 and my explanation of obtaining an Elevated Command Prompt in Windows 7 comes in at number 5. With the top two entries centred around fixing problems with Windows 7 this suggests more people are interested in getting their computer working than programming, ho hum.
My review of OneNote and Evernote has been fairly popular, as has my review of Center Parcs from 2008. I shall try and review products and holidays as I go along, although I am reguarly stuck for inspiration in these terms.
Visitor Breakdown
Keywords
Unsurprisingly the most of the searches are for “windows 7 mtu” or similar. There also appear to be quite a few people searching for drivers by Googling device strings, this can work well, although in the first instance you should try PCI Database. Further down the list a couple of people have been searching for MSM/PSL which is the prescribed acronym for making a manovure as taught by the DSA, there are some good resources all over the internet including Smart Learners.
Someone has been searching for me on LinkedIn, it may not have been me you were looking for but here is my profile for reference purposes.
One user got to my site looking for an answer to the question “windows 7 what are the blue & yellow shields on desktop shortcut icons for”; unsure what it was for but these icons describe executables or shortcuts that either contain information in their manifest or have had their properties changes to require administration rights to execute. There are quite a few posts on social.microsoft.com but very little explaining exactly why they are there.
There don’t seem to be any funny keyword sequences any more (I looked through all 7,000 from 2010), maybe some will show up next year. So until 2011, good bye and have a happy new year!
Databases are a pain in the neck to look after, poorly designed models and processes that don’t remove temporary data can cause a database to grow in size. A database that is allowed to grow large beyond its requirements becomes a burden on the nightly backup, takes longer to restore in the event of a recovery scenario and slows down the development process by preventing developers from testing things out on “live” data.
More often than not I have found that the problem lies with log or analytic tables sometimes this information is liberally logged (which it should be) and then totally ignored without a thought for trimming the data on a regular basis.
SQL Server Management Studio provides a way of looking at the storage usage of tables individually from the properties context menu item of the table.
In large databases this can be laborious, I found a script that will collect this information and present it as a table. I have adapted it a little so that I can see the total size of the table and sort by each column to drill down to the problem tables.
SET NOCOUNT ON CREATE TABLE #spaceused ( name nvarchar(120), ROWS CHAR(11), reserved VARCHAR(18), DATA VARCHAR(18), index_size VARCHAR(18), unused VARCHAR(18) ) DECLARE TablesFromSysObjects CURSOR FOR SELECT name FROM sysobjects WHERE TYPE='U' ORDER BY name ASC OPEN TablesFromSysObjects DECLARE @TABLE VARCHAR(128) FETCH NEXT FROM TablesFromSysObjects INTO @TABLE WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 BEGIN INSERT INTO #spaceused EXEC sp_spaceused @TABLE FETCH NEXT FROM TablesFromSysObjects INTO @TABLE END CLOSE TablesFromSysObjects DEALLOCATE TablesFromSysObjects SELECT name AS TableName, ROWS AS ROWS, CAST(LEFT(reserved, LEN(reserved) - 3) AS INT) AS Reserved, CAST(LEFT(DATA, LEN(DATA) - 3) AS INT) AS DATA, CAST(LEFT(index_size, LEN(index_size) - 3) AS INT) AS IndexSize, CAST(LEFT(unused, LEN(unused) - 3) AS INT) AS Unused, (CAST(LEFT(reserved, LEN(reserved) - 3) AS INT) + CAST(LEFT(DATA, LEN(DATA) - 3) AS INT) + CAST(LEFT(index_size, LEN(index_size) - 3) AS INT) + CAST(LEFT(unused, LEN(unused) - 3) AS INT)) AS Total FROM #spaceused ORDER BY Total DESC DROP TABLE #spaceused |
If you look through the schema of the table we imported in Part 2 there are a number of unused fields and some of the data appears to be missing.
The quality column in Code-Point Open describes the source and reliability of the data, it ranges from the most accurate 10 through to no data 90, when building a system around this data you need to decide at what data is important to your use case. The following query will give you an idea of the quality of the dataset as a whole, I have annotated it based upon the OS Code-Point documentation.
SELECT Quality, COUNT(*) AS COUNT FROM [OSOpenData].[dbo].[CodePointOpenCombined] GROUP BY Quality ORDER BY Quality |
| Quality | Count | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | 1683975 | Within the building of the matched address closest to the postcode mean determined automatically by Ordnance Survey. |
| 20 | 73 | As above, but determined to visual inspection by GROS (General Register Office for Scotland). |
| 30 | 1086 | Approximate to within 50 m of true position. |
| 40 | 52 | The mean of the positions of addresses previously matched in ADDRESS-POINT but which have subsequently been deleted or recoded. |
| 50 | 4395 | Estimated position based on surrounding postcode coordinates, usually to 100 m resolution, but 10 min Scotland. |
| 60 | 93 | Postcode sector mean (direct copy from ADDRESS-POINT). |
| 90 | 6361 | No coordinates available. |
For my purposes I want to use the coordinate data stored in the Eastings and Northings columns, which makes postcodes with no data useless to me, I can remove these with the following SQL script:
DELETE FROM [CodePointOpenCombined] WHERE [Quality] = 90 |
All of the data is in different files; SSIS is capable of extracting data from multiple files however for the purposes of this article I am going to stick to the Import Export Wizard.
To combine all of the files into one (big) file a quick switch to the command prompt is required:
type data\*.csv > .\CodePointOpenCombined.csv
Because none of the data files have headers this works fine, if they did have headers some work would be needed to strip those out.
Create a new database in SQL Server then follow these steps:
If there are problems importing the data you can go back and make changes to the configuration, typically the issue is incorrect data types (too small) or incorrect text delimiters.
You may be asking why we went to tall that trouble, and time, only to let the Import Data Wizard suggest the data types. The reason I wrote the script was the wizard is limited to checking the first 1,000 lines; even if you set the value to 2,000,000 it will default down to 1000 after you move your focus away.
The result being if your data is naturally sorted on a specific column as some of the Ordinance Survey data appears to be the import will fail. Running the schema scanner allows you to scan through all of the data so that you can modify the suggested data types to match the maximum values.