Category Archives: Community
Houston Area SQL Server User Group – 03/08/11
I attended the March Houston Area SQL Server User Group meeting. Below are my notes.
Announcements
- SQL Saturday – Dallas is April 2/2011
- Tables and Views
- Derived tables
- Common Table Expressions
- Table Value Functions
- Join
- Apply
- Pivot & Unpivot
- Matching records from both tables
- Often used for code lookup
- Can also be used in an Update and Delete statement
- Partial Join (Left or Right) – All records from one table and matching records from another table (example: orders and shipments)
- All records from each table combined where matching
- Null values for columns not matched
- Example: Customer activity combining order and shipments
- Nulls on a full outer join – do not compare
- Every row in one table is joined with every row in another table
- Visualize as a matrix or spreadsheet
- Example: Tally table ( http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/t-sql/62867)
- Right side is evaluated for each record on the left side
- Outer Apply/Cross Apply
- Best used with Table-Value Functions
- Example: Geo-Spatial functons
Houston C# User Group – 01/18/2011
I attended the Houston C# User Group monthly meeting last Tuesday evening. There were about 18 in attendance.
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Below are the notes I took
Book: Accelerated C# 2010 – Trey Nash
Operator Overloading
Common Operator Overloading
- Concatenating strings
- Hooking and unhooking events
Design methods instead of overloading operators
Exception Handling
Bobby demonstrates the basics of exceptions through sample code. He defines the Try, Catch and Finally blocks as well as how to create your own exception.
Who should handle exceptions
Catch where you can fix the problem
Avoid using exceptions to control flow
Exceptions are expensive to generate and handle
void ExceptionNeutralMethod()
{
//block 1 all code that could thro exceptioms
//block 2
//chages are commited
}
Disposable and deterministic destruction
Some system resources need to be returned to the system pool when finished
The garbage collector doesn’t necessarily get around to destroying the resource in a timely manner
Disposable objects can guarantee deterministic destruction. (mostly easily done with a using() statement)
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Gang Of Four – Design Patterns
http://www.dofactory.com/Patterns/Patterns.aspx
Patterns discussed tonight
- Observer
- State
- Strategy
- Template Method
- Visitor
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As always – Free Magazines ![]()

C# Special Interest Group – 11/30/2010
I attended the Houston C# SIG last Tuesday. Alan Stevens did a great presentation titled The Taming of the Code.
In this presentation he talked about the importance of constant learning and refactoring.
Below are some of the high points I picked up.
1. The Goal
- Build the right thing and build it well
- Technical Debt – Shipping the right thing even though it is not perfect
- Do the simplest thing that can possibly work
- Enable change
Build architectural seams or fault lines into your code, so if need be, it can be picked up and “stitched in” somewhere else
*ilities
- Agility
- Testability
- Readability
- Reversability
- Changeability
- Flexibility
- Maintainability
2. The Guidelines
Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) and Separation of Concerns are the yin and yang of Software Development
Examples of Separation of Concerns are MVC, MVP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, (UI+Service+DAL).
- Single Responsibility Principle
- Open Closed Principle
- Liskov Substitution Principle
- Interface Segregation Principle
- Dependancy Inversion Principle
3. The Practice
A feedback loop is needed (code reviews, pair programming)
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Additional Information
- QConn Conferences
- Virtual Brown Bag – Weekly meetings held on Thursdays.
- Time Snapper – Automatic screen shot journal
- XUNIT.NET – Testing framework
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League City Photography Meet up – 08.05.10
I attended my first photography meet up Thursday night. I have to say, the League City Photography Meet up Group is a very welcoming and mentoring group with a passion for taking photos. I learned a lot and hope to participate in more events in the future with this group.
The Third-Annual Worldwide PhotoWalk took place on July 24th.
World-wide Photo Walk – Main site
World-wide Photo Walk – Kemah site
Below is the photo submitted to the next level from the Kemah PhotoWalk
Photo by John Bielick
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David Paulissen demonstrated a nice tip on using Powerpoint 2007 to create a PDF slideshow of your photos. This makes for an easy way to email photo galleries to friends and family.
Start Powerpoint and Select Insert > Photo Album > New Photo Album
Find the folder on your hard-drive containing the photos you want to share and click [Create]
Select a color scheme and add any necessary text to the slides
Select Save As > PDF or XPS
Name your PDF and click [Publish]
The end result is a nicely formatted PDF that anyone can open and enjoy your photos.
Great tip David!
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Software Suggestions
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Links recommended by the group
- League City Photography Group Page
- PhotoSig
- Texas Photo Forum
- DP Review
- DTownTV
- Brazos Bend Facebook page
- SmugMug
- David Paulissen’s Site
- Flickr
- PhotoFocus
- White House Custom Color (WHCC)
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Happy shooting!
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Wizards of Smart Podcast
There is a new podcast in town that I have started listening to. It is called the Wizards of Smart and is hosted by Jonathan Birkholz (@rookieone) and Ryan Riley (@panesofglass) and has kind of a “Stackoverflow-ish” format in which they banter back and forth on a range of topics.
I believe it is a great resource whether you are learning application development or trying to keep up with the ever-changing field. Check it out.
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SHDNUG Meeting – 05/26/10 – Recap
I attended the May South Houston .NET User Group meeting this passed Wednesday. Jason Aubrey did a presentation on iPhone Development Using Monotouch.
High Points Gleaned
Some downfalls of iPhone Development
- Requires a Mac
- XCode/Objective C is difficult to learn
- Objective C is outdated (1986)
- The app store is crowded
- App approval process is painful
Alternatives to Objective C
- XCode is the IDE used to develop for the iPhone.
- Mono – open-source, cross-platform port of .NET
MonoTouch – C#/.NET SDK for iPhone (developed by Novell)
Requirements for MonoTouch
- XCode
- iPhone SDK
- Mac
- Mono for the Mac
- MonoTouch SDK
- Mono Develop–
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Austin Code Camp 2010 – Recap
I attended the 2010 Austin Code Camp and like the previous two years, it did not disappoint. There were six session tracks for a day of learning.
Below are the sessions I attended
Powershell Awesomeness in Your Deployment Scripts
Speaker: Eric Hexter (@ehexter)
High Points
- Powershell is basically a command shell on steroids
- Great for scripting
- MS Deploy
- Web PI – Platform installer
- PSake – Powershell build automation tool
- PStrami – Powershell deployment automation tool
- You can bootstrap Powershell via a batch file
- Powergui – IDE for Powershell
Introduction to MongoDB
Speaker: Chris Edwards
High Points
- NoSQL Movement – A movement promoting a loosely defined class of non-relational data stores.
- SQL is not always the best option, nor is it the only one.
- MongoDB – Document-oriented database, schema free
- MongoDB is commercially supported by 10Gen
Other features of MongoDB
- Document-based queries
- Map reduce
- Grid fs
- Geo-spacial indexing
Sites using MongoDB
- SourceForge
- GitHub
- ShutterFly
- bit.ly
Supported OS: OSX, Linux, Solaris, Windows, FreeBSD
MongoShell – the grammar of the shell is pure JavaScript
Aspect Oriented Programming in .NET
Speaker: Keyvan Nayyeri (@keyvan)
High Points
AOP isolates cross-cutting/supporting functions
It is mainly supported by the Java community
Cross Cutting Concerns
- Logging
- Thread synchronization
- Caching
- Lazy Loading
- Dependency Injection
- Data Binding
Principles of AOP
- Joint-point – points in the codebase where code is executed
- Point-cut – join points using a set theory of advice
- Advice
- Potential Issues – Debugging, efficiency
Weaving – Object oriented code with integrated aspects
Frameworks
- Aspect J
- JAC
- LinFu
- PostSharp
- Spring.Net
- Loom.net
- nAspect
- Links: Slides
Advance Your Debugging Skills with VS 2010
Speaker: Rob Vettor
High Points
Data Tip – Hover over variables and objects for drillable tips in VS2010. There is also a way to keep the tips visible during debug mode. Using the Pin Tips, you can build your own custom debug windows.
Breakpoint enhancements – Add labels to breakpoints and filter based on those values.
Intellitrace is only available with the Ultimate version of Visual Studio.
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Twitter hashtag: #austincodecamp
My Austin Code Camp 2010 Photos
I did not realize until I was leaving, how close I was to where the plane crashed into the Echelon I building here in Austin a few months back.
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Until next year…
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HDLUG Meeting – 05/04/10 – Recap
I attended the April Houston Dynamic Languages User Group Meeting this passed Tuesday. Jeremey Barrett gave a great talk on the Scala language.
High Points Gleaned
- Native on the JVM
- Statically Typed w/type inference
- More concise syntax
- Pure Object Oriented, Mix-ins (traits – kind of like an interface)
- (Sca)lable (La)nguage
- First class functions, closures, etc.
- Erlang-style actors (not distributed)
- Message-passing concurrency
- Operator overloading
- Everything is an object, including functions (functions can be sub-classed)
- Pattern matching – “Structural Typing”
- Java + Ruby + Erlang = Scala
- Lift – Popular web framework written in Scala
- Twitter uses Scala on their backend
Links
- Scala-lang.org – Official website
- Programming Scala: Scalability = Functional Programming + Objects – Book
- Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine – Book
- Programming in Scala: A Comprehensive Step-by-step Guide – Book
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ALT.NET Houston Open Spaces 2010
I attended my first ALT.NET Houston Open Spaces Conference this weekend. It was very different than any tech event I have ever seen. This kind of conference instills a sense of collaboration which is a really cool thing.
The process is quite ingenious if you ask me. On Friday evening, the attendees come together to suggest topics and then vote on the suggested topics. Next, the facilitators basically set up the agenda for the next 2 days.
Four Principles of Open Spaces
- Whoever comes is the right people
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
- Whenever it starts is the right time
- When it’s over, it’s over
The Law Of Two Feet: If, during the course of the gathering, any person finds him or herself in a situation where they are neither learning nor contributing, they must use their two feet and go to some more productive place.
Sessions I attended
- Git
- NoSQL MongoDB
- Virtual Brownbag – One Year Later
- Build Scripts w/Powershell
- Promoting an Atmosphere of Refactoring
- Design Patterns
Links and Resources
I will definitely be attending this conference in the future and highly recommend for any developer.
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HASSUG Meeting – 04/13/10 – Recap
For the first time in a while, I attended the Houston Area SQL Server User Group meeting and I am glad I did. Especially since I walked away with a free (signed) copy of the book SQL In A Nutshell.
The speaker was Kevin Kline (@kekline) and the topic was The Top 10 Mistakes on SQL Server.
High Points Gleaned
10. Disks – Thinking space not IO (insufficient I/O, poor choice of RAID type, not enough spindles, etc.)
09. Ignorance – As an IT professional you should know how SQL Server works at an “internals” level.
08. No trouble-shooting methodology
07. Going with the defaults – Autogrow/autoshrink on DB’s, default filegroups, etc.
06. Security as an afterthought – SQL attacks are the #1 hack on the internet today.
05. Inadequate automation
04. Wrong feature or technique for the job
03. Apathy without change management
02. Inadequate preventative maintenance
01. Backups <> Recovery
Links
Announcements
May Meeting: TUE 5/11 @ 11:30AM – How to Protect SQL Server with DPM 2010 – Presenter: Javier Calvillo, Microsoft
Special Meeting: TUE 5/18 @ 6:30PM – Essential Database Maintenance – Presenters: Kimberly Tripp & Paul Randal, SQLSkills
July Meeting: TUE 7/13 @ 11:30 – Topic TBD – Brent Ozar
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