Manjula's Blog : Visual Studio

Choose the right connection string for your data source!

Manjula Perera — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 06:23:00 GMT

Hi friends! I thought of sharing this URL with you all where I usually get information about connection strings. This has been a reference site for me on various connection strings for several years now. It's a great site where it gives a collection of connection strings for most of the databases servers, data files and other data sources in one place. And it gives connection strings for different scenarios (ODBC, OLE DB etc) for the same data source as well.

Check it out.

http://www.connectionstrings.com/

Volta - Get Electrocuted with Visual Studio 2008!

Manjula Perera — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 04:50:00 GMT

Microsoft dudes, slow down! We can't keep up!!! But I'm glad you're trying to reduce the "New Stuff" we have to learn by putting forward this project

Overview

Hot news! This is not about Alessandro Volta. This is something Microsoft has released code named Volta. On December 05th 2007 Microsoft Live Labs has announced about VOLTA. Yet again another new term for our geek vocabulary (but they might change it in future)! Volta, as the name hints it's nothing to do with electricity But I think they are trying to equate it's super fast development cycle to an electric current or trying to bridge the gap between distributed bits and pieces of a distributed web application using a spark/ tool.

Volta is a new set of tools developed by Microsoft to develop distributed multi-tier web applications super fast or may I say, with a minimum learning curve using the existing set of .Net tools. I just came across with this information while surfing the internet and reading through blog entries by the peers in the .Net community. Then I started digging into more information. I would like to share what I've learnt with the users of the user group and the readers of this blog. I'll start with an introduction as usual.

What is Volta?

Developed by Erik Meijer (who has also worked in the LINQ project) and a team of developers @ Microsoft
Used to democratize the internet cloud. What??? Watch and learn!
As I said in the overview Volta is a new set of web development tools developed by Microsoft to develop distributed multi-tier web applications with a minimum learning curve using the existing set of .Net tools, techniques and design patterns without incorporating mixture of technologies, languages and tools.
Tier (execution context) splitting (another new geek term!) system where the details of the tiers aren't of primary importance
Much more than a web technology
This is yet a Community Technical Preview (CTP), it'll take time to get adopted to the .Net web development community. But Volta is going to be a revolution in .Net world and the way we build web applications using .Net compatible languages like C# and VB.Net in future. Therefore it's a must we keep track of the developments around Volta and have some hands on experience. We can download the Volta toolset by clicking on the link shown below
Extension to Visual Studio 2008 and .Net framework 3.5 (and most probably for all above versions to come)
We can postpone the multi tier architecture of the distributed web application till the last critical moment of the development process. I.e. first, we can design and build our application as a .NET client application (single-tier application), then assign the portions of the application to run on the server and the client tiers late in the development process (Tier Splitting). I.e. letting the complier manage creating boilerplate code such as communication between tiers
The compiler will create cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code (redundancy of code) to tie the tiers together
We can still debug and test the application, as if it were still on the client-tier, because Volta's tier-splitting is deeply integrated with Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5
We can target either web browsers (be it IE or Firefox) or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. We don't need to worry about that
Comprises with tools such as end-to-end profiling to make architectural refactoring and optimization simple and quick
We may base tier assignments on any criteria, such as load management, performance, or location of critical assets and capabilities. Because Volta automates the hidden linking code, it is easy for us to experiment with varying assignments of classes and methods to tiers
We can use all the .NET languages, libraries, and tools we already know, including debuggers, profilers, test generators, refactoring, and code analysis tools to develop distributed web applications. Volta will handle the rest

Learn more

There are lot of study material and sample code to start with at Volta home page. Go and grab them.

Summery

Volta extends the .NET platform to distributed software and services applications, by using existing and familiar libraries, languages, tools, and techniques without the need to learn new technologies, languages and usage of tools to bridge the communication gap between distributed code/ Objects.

Download Volta now and get electrocuted!

Coming Up!

An article about Tesla my hero! Get ready to be electrocuted again

References

Volta home page

View introductory video by the creators of Volta - Part 1 - Erik Meijer and team @ Channel 9, MSDN

View introductory video by the creators of Volta - Part 2 - Erik Meijer and team @ Channel 9, MSDN

Erik Meijer's home page @ Microsoft

Erik Meijer's article about Volta - pdf document

About Erik Meijer - by QCon

About Erik Meijer - by Alex Barnett

Erik Meijer talks about LINQ

‘Volta’: Microsoft’s dev platform in the Cloud? - by Mary Jo

Visual Studio 2003/2005 keyboard shortcuts

Manjula Perera — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 12:11:00 GMT

Tip

I just found these interesting articles and thought of sharing with the readers of this blog and the user group members. You could find most of the keyboard shortcuts of Visual Studio here. And you could download a poster of your preffered language here.

Enjoy!

References

Coding Horror - by Jeff Atwood

Rob Caron's Blog

Beware with Math.Round() in C#

Manjula Perera — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 07:44:00 GMT

Problem

Recently I found an issue with the Math.Round() function in C# while working on an enhancement project written in Visual Studio 2003. I.e. this function is using the Banker's method. The users of this system didn't like the way figures are getting rounded and they wanted the method used in Excel (Because they are used to Excel ). I.e. Symmetric Arithmetic Rounding method. E.g

Say we want to round 1234.50000 into the nearest integer value. Then Math.Round() returns 1234 whereas MS Excel gives 1235.

I also found a similar issue in SQL Server 2000 some time back. It seems that Microsoft uses contradictory methods of rounding in their products (Visual Studio, SQL Server, Visual Basic, Excel etc.)

Most of us learnt this banker's method while schooling. But it seems that there are many other ways of rounding. Click here to view all methods of rounding and how you can implement custom rounding procedures.

Solution

Visual Studio 2003 - If we want to use Symmetric Arithmetic Rounding method we have to write our own function instead of using Math.Round(). See below for a working function found in CoderSource.Net.

public static double roundNum(double num, int place)
{

double n;
n = num * Math.Pow(10, place);
n = Math.Sign(n) * Math.Abs(Math.Floor(n + .5));
return n / Math.Pow(10, place);

}

Visual Studio 2005 - This problem is sorted in this version of Visual Studio. We can now select the rounding method in;

System.Math.Round

Rule Of Thumb

Always ask from the users which method of rounding they want during the system requirements gathering stage. This will avoid us being using the default method of rounding in our chosen development language. In this case C#.

References

Wikipedia

Microsoft Help and Support

CoderSource.Net