SQLServerCentral sends out a daily email and today had an interesting offer to take a survey from redgate.  They were asking questions of Visual Studio developers that heavily use/interact with databases.

If you fit into this crowd help out by taking their survey here.

Initially I really distrust the idea of having SSMS like functionality within VS.  I know it is already there but I just have really avoided them, though I try to use them from time to time just to give them the benefit of the doubt.

For some reason Microsoft tends to like to dumb down anything in VS that’s not strictly developer oriented.  This is a huge separation from their current “give the power to the programmer” mentality when it comes to features like VS Add-Ins, NuGet, T4 templates, EF4 Code First, etc.  For some reason DBA tools have fallen into this “black magic, we’ll hide it for you” dark side of VS.  So, since VS 2003 and probably a little before, any database interaction was kept at a very high level.  You simply couldn’t dive right into necessary tools like T-SQL easily.

Consequently I’ve always developed with VS and SSMS side by side.  So, I’m in that old school stick in the mud crowd waiving my cane in the air shouting, “I’ll give you my SSMS when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!” Call me old fashioned.

As SSMS just continues to improve (throw SSMS Tools and other indispensible add-ons in the mix) I have had no desire to even attempt DBA functions within VS.  Honestly, SSMS is becoming so nice to use it is pretty much on par with my respect of VS 2010 as the developers IDE.  SSMS is the DBA’s tool of choice for me and quite happily so.

If they literally took SSMS and put it into VS I think I’d still avoid it.  The need to Alt-Tab between the two really creates a mental context switch in my head that helps my productivity.  Read my post on Alt-Tab Aids My Mental Context-Switching for more info on this, but it is a real productivity asset to think about.

If switching between SSMS and VS tools (literally and mentally) all inside the IDE were any more complicated than a simple Alt-Tab I would not be inclined to switch. 

It would need to offer enough extra "can’t live without" features to overcome the current simplicity of Alt-Tabbing between VS and SSMS.  For instance, I would love the idea of being able to code against a dev database and having the IDE help generate a change script, all which would be kept in source control.  The entire database design should be kept in my source control as well, so that when I add a column or an index the change script and create script are entered on the next commit.

A recent blog post about combining the functionality of SQL Server Management Studio within the Visual Studio IDE got me really thinking.

Any any given moment I have at least 6-8 applications running, usually quite a bit more.  When developing an app I usually have a work environment consisting of VS 2010, SSMS, Firefox (with at least 6 tabs open), Outlook, Word, etc.  Each application is only an Alt-Tab away.

I initially rebel at putting SSMS DBA features into VS2010 (yes, I know they are already there, I just don’t use them).  Much of this has to do with the fact that historically these tools have lacked functionality, but I now realize a large part is the mental context switching that Alt-Tab provides.

If someone walks into my office or a phone call grabs my attention I can easily Alt-Tab to another app, or simply Ctrl-T to open a new tab in Firefox (which starts at Google) ready to handle that particular request.  It doesn’t matter what I was doing before.  For some reason Alt-Tab simply puts my current mental state on the stack (forgive the metaphor ) ready to be called up when I Alt-Tab back sometime in the future.

Switching between different duties using Alt-Tab seems to really trigger a context switch in my head.  All this happens in the .2 seconds it takes to press Alt-Tab.

While DBA duties are really integrated into my development process (in my work I am the developer and DBA) I love the clean separation of concerns when I Alt-Tab between VS and SSMS.  Even if SSMS were completely duplicated within VS I don’t think I’d care for it.  There is just such a satisfaction with mentally putting on my DBA hat for SSMS work, even if it is simply for 20 seconds while I add a column to a table.  It just seems cleaner.  Unless the integration of the two tools really provides support that each tool individually couldn’t accomplish I actually see less value in combining these.  Additional features, such as integrating source control over my database assets and generating data migration scripts, would prepare me to mentally believe these two tools really should be combined.

Now I guess I need to start to evaluating add-ons and other tools based on how easily I can task-switch the context in my head when I need to use them.

We use iPads within our organization and the use is growing.  This starts to present IT support concerns, especially when major iOS updates like iOS 5 come out. 

iCloud is touted as being a great answer to several issues because it allows you to backup devices over the Internet.  I agree that this is a great idea for consumers and potentially for enterprises, but at the moment it doesn’t live up to the desire initially. 

Doesn’t Work for the Enterprise Yet

Unfortunately iCloud really doesn’t seem to be a solution for enterprise. 

iCloud might work for carts if:
•    It wasn’t limited to 10 devices (Apple doesn’t intend this for enterprise use? Not even a single cart?)
•    It could back up a single image to the cloud, that could be restored to any number of devices, such as 30 devices in a cart.  No sense in backing up numerous duplicate images.
•    Restores could be done in batch without having to start it from each iPad individually (now we’re back to using iTunes on the cart)

Doesn’t Work for the Average Consumer Yet

Regarding both the enterprise and consumer points of view iCloud’s initial 5GB may seem generous compared to other cloud offerings that typically only give 2GB, but for a standard iPad that holds 16GB the initial 5GB gets filled quickly.  Worse yet it gets filled without any real knowledge of what’s going on.  With Dropbox and others I am quite aware when I put large files into it.  With my iPad I may download a few apps, take a few videos, and suddenly my iCloud storage is out of space when I had a gig available yesterday.

It gets worse when our users are backing their phone and iPad to the same iCloud account. Quite quickly they are subjected to needing to upgrade their iCloud storage.  $100 a year (for one iPhone and one iPad) is pretty hefty. 

Not to say that Apple’s pricing isn’t in line with other similar cloud storage vendors, it just doesn’t seem to translate well to “iDevices”.

Works for the 1% (Occasional Low-End User)

The iPad is great for my grandparents, who currently have a WebTV.  They get around the Internet great but I don’t want to give them a computer that you have to update, keep the latest codecs, prone to failure, etc.).  An iPad would be a great fit.

They probably won’t be power users, will play with occasional apps and would get a great kick out of sharing a photostream or using FaceTime.  I think they would easily fit into the 5GB iCloud capacity and take great advantage of updating to future OS versions over the air.  Right now I think this is the best target market for iCloud.  Unfortunately it’s a very small target market.

I hope that Apple will address these issues in some way in the next few “versions” of their iCloud support.  I have no doubt that they can and will.  As the next couple of years go by cloud vendors will offer more and more space and lower prices and interoperability with more devices.

At my district we use Aeries, our Student Information System from Eagle Software.  We also use Destiny, our district-wide library system from Follett Software.  Both are great products and, better yet, both are housed on our Microsoft SQL Servers.  This allows us another level of integration since we can get to the raw database for various needs.

One way we take advantage of this is how we load our student photos into Destiny.  Destiny takes a zip file, which contains jpeg files of the students as well as a idlink.txt file, which is an index file that ties the jpeg to the student’s record.

I’m subscribed to the Follett Talk list serve, which is an email list that several Follett Destiny administrators are a part of and every day there are great discussions and help from various users around the country.

When I mentioned that we had a script to help out when updating student photos in Destiny, several were interested .  I’ve been trying to write up a formal blog post on this with great screenshots and directions but, alas, I haven’t had the time.

Anyway, one of our neighboring libraries politely called me about it this morning and I thought I should just put it out there as is for anyone who can use it.

The SQL script file and a quick documentation document are attached to this post.  Get them below.

What it does is grab all the photos (from the school sites you designate) from the server you store your Aeries photos on (this used to be our ABI server but is now our Aeries.Net server), generates the idlink.txt file and puts them all in a zip file for you.  Since it pulls the photos straight from the information in Aeries and also generates the idlink.txt automatically I always get the latest photos (such as from a picture makeup day or newly enrolled students) and also any corrections that may have been put into Aeries.

The script runs in less than a minute for our entire district and then I have a nice easy zip file to upload to Destiny.

There is a little documentation attached but whomever will do this procedure at your site will need some foundational knowledge of Aeries and SQL.  This is not for a librarian at a site that does not have knowledge/access to the Aeries server.

This does not write to any data in the Aeries database so there is no harm in running it.  If there is an error in the script (for instance, you forgot to add your proper school sites and server name) it will simply give you an error but will not cause any changes to data, so don’t worry. 

I hope this helps!

P.S. For those of you who also use BlueBear I had two extra lines of code on the script.  We use BlueBear as our ASB accounting system for our high schools.  It takes photos in the same way but needs them unzipped, all just stored in a single folder.  The last line in my script would unzip the results from above into a folder per school site for our high schools.  This way I would just run the Student Photo Update process in BlueBear and point it at the folder for the correct site.

If you have BlueBear here are the two extra lines I use:
print ‘ECHO Extracting photos for Blue Bear…’
select distinct ‘”c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe” e c:\pics\’ + cast(stu.sc as varchar) + ‘Pics.zip -oc:\pics\’ + cast(stu.sc as varchar) + ‘  >nul 2>&1′
from stu
join #pics on (stu.sc = #pics.sc and stu.bm = #pics.shortname)
where del = ” and tg = ” and bm <> ”
and stu.sc in (310, 320, 410, 430)

Destiny Student Photo Import Quick Documentation

Student Photo Queries.sql

To print from an iPad, find the closest copy machine, place the iPad face down on the glass and press Copy.

Voila! Wireless printing!

Here’s a great article that I recently was referred to:

Citrix: Virtual desktops about to become cheaper than physical ones

In it Citrix is helping to develop yet another lower cost zero-client device.  These are literally just a small box about the size of a deck of cards that have ports for a monitor, Ethernet and USB.  No moving parts, very slim, reliable and inexpensive. However, I still maintain that the savings of Virtual Desktop (VDI) are not in the hardware.

I think the real savings are in staffing and time.  Unfortunately these are much harder to measure but well worth the move in my opinion.

You can already use the hardware you have for VDI so new zero-clients only save you money for new installations or when you are replacing a desktop that is completely dead. 

You still need a keyboard, mouse and monitor (video) to hook up to zero-clients and Windows/Office & CAL licenses.  If you subtract the cost of the license & kvm these days you can purchase a reliable desktop for probably about $500, and even less if you plan to purchase refurbished and replace them more often.

So, initially you do probably save $300-$400.  However, you must move these virtual desktops to a server you never had to have before in the data center.  More than likely you are moving them to a high-capacity set of servers, much like the Cisco UCS system we are rolling out out my district.  This is very expensive.

It doesn’t stop there.  My network manager and I attended a VDI training and learned that you have to make sure your network can also withstand the high traffic all the way from the data center to the user’s “desktop”.  It was fine if a user had to wait a few seconds to open a Word doc but waiting a few seconds to click a mouse is unacceptable.  Suddenly you may have to upgrade much of your entire network infrastructure.  This is much the same issue you encounter when you first migrate to IP phones.

Oh, and what about disaster recovery?  With Virtual Desktop you have effectively moved their “desktop” to a data center.  Right now at our district if a desktop dies we advise the user to log onto another one nearby and schedule a tech to replace their desktop within 24 hours.  With Virtual Desktop, if the connection to the data center goes down there is no nearby desktop to go to.  So you have to have a disaster recovery data center (i.e. at our District Office).

This starts sounding really expensive really quick.  Fortunately VMware (et al) have great tools that let you leverage the most out of your equipment.  A classic disaster recovery site is unused most of the year and only kicks in when you have an emergency.  From a business cost perspective it is a loss until those few minutes it is in use.  VMware lets you cluster your data centers together effectively using them in tandem for full production load balancing.  If one were to go down the other would simply take the entire load.  You still have to purchase double the equipment but it is used much more efficiently.

I would imagine that as you scale the costs start becoming more relative.  I would think that if you implemented VDI on 90% of the computers at a site it is much more economical than, say, 50%.

Like I said above, I think the real savings are in staff and time.  If you can reduce the amount of equipment you have to service while increasing its reliability you don’t have to hire additional techs as you grow your desktop base and your current techs can also deal with higher level issues.  Same thing with your network services staff at the data center.  In addition, your users as a whole experience far less downtime and a far more reliable working environment.

How do you measure those benefits?  Theoretically you can measure the amount of technology growth vs. payroll, but you really can’t measure downtime for the users unless you have a very sophisticated ticket system where you can somehow quantize and compare downtime for users.

Sometimes it’s the little tools that really make your day.

I finally got fed up with my growing JavaScript files and thought it would be great if Visual Studio allowed me to collapse functions just like it does with c# and other source files.  So I did a Google search.

Well, Velio Ivanov created a great little Add on that does just this and for CSS too!  Thanks Velio!!!

Check it out: http://jsoutlining.codeplex.com/

Quartz.Net is an awesome and robust framework for scheduling jobs within .Net.  It is based on the very popular Quartz for Java.

Once you start using Quartz.Net very quickly you will want some sort of dashboard interface where you can view all the jobs that are running and other metrics.

Well, before you go developing your own there are already a few out there.  While most are full ASP.Net WebForms or MVC apps there are a couple of axd dashboards which allow you to easily embed them in your website with only a few changes to your Web.Config.  Take a look at CrystalQuartz or QuartzNetWebConsole.

After looking at both I chose CrystalQuartz because it seemed to be easier to implement with  my particular site and I liked the dashboard a little better.  I encourage you to look at the latest version of both and make your own decision.

Unfortunately I was using the beta version 2 of Quartz.net.  This is a great version and if you are just starting out I recommend it because it is much more intuitive than the current 1.0 release. 

That being said, CrystalQuartz (nor QuartzNetWebConsole) is not compatible with Quartz.Net v2.  So I made a few tweaks to the code and now it works great.

Feel free to download my version here:

CrystalQuartz Compatible with Quarts.Net v2.zip

I’ve contacted the CrystalQuartz team about adding my additions to their project but I have not heard anything back.  I’d love to fold my changes into their codebase so that it can be properly maintained and help others out.  However, in the mean time I’ve received a few requests for my changes so I’m making them available here.  I am not planning on maintaining this so if there are breaking changes as Quartz.Net v2 nears production then I may or may not have the time to update my copy of CrystalQuartz.  I do expect the CrystalQuartz team to come out with a v2 version that works with Quartz.Net when it is finally released.

Enjoy!

At my school district we are starting to deploy iPads just as many others are.  While managing the vast number of iPads is still a difficult task there are several solutions and I hope that in a year a robust solution will be available.

However, what I haven’t seen is a decent business case for iPads.  When you have administrators that have all their documents in a folder on the server, shared documents in their department networked folders and a wealth of sensitive data that needs to be used by various people there just doesn’t seem to be an easy way to tackle this with an iPad.

Beyond simply email, calendar and Internet access how can we make these devices more useful in an everyday environment?  My Assistant Superintendent of Education Services has a goal of getting principals and assistant principals out of their office and more intimately involved in the daily activities of their schools.  To this end they have been given iPads to use in their job.  However, when the iTunes store is the first place users look for apps to utilize, syncing data with iTunes on their desktop computers, non-networked file access, etc this becomes a real challenge.

To this end I have attempted to find out how we may get tools in the hands (forgive the pun) of our staff that take advantage of our networked file infrastructure, Active Directory for authentication and authorization and vast wireless access across our school sites.

Check out my video where I presented our model to the CETPA CTO Mentor Program, of which I meet once a month in Sacramento with other education CTO and IT staff members.

http://vimeo.com/mattpenner/ipadsforadmins

We have had a lot of great interest in our model from the various school districts as well as Apple and Microsoft.

Next week I will be presenting the same topic geared towards developers at the Inland Empire .Net Users Group, of which I also am a member.  At that presentation I will be getting into the nitty-gritty detail of how it all works.  Plus you will see a production ready implementation rather than the proof of concept in the above presentation.  I’ll record this one as well and post it as soon as I can.

More as it comes!

Ugh, while the title of this post doesn’t sound like that much of an issue chalk this one up to an experience I hope someone else doesn’t have to deal with.

We had an issue with our A/C unit in our data center last night and several of our servers were shut down due to excessive temperatures.  We are slowly brining them up as we are managing the cooling and they are all fairly coming up as normal. Some of the older servers reported errors with batteries or failed drives but these are fairly routine.

However, we had one of our brand new servers start up with seemingly no issues but IIS 7 was not responding to web requests.

This server serves up only two web applications over SSL and has worked fine for the last month that it has been in service.

Looking at the IIS logs, event viewer and any other sort of diagnostic tool we could think of reported no errors at all…and no connection attempts either.  Connecting from the local host offered no error messages.  Connecting through Fiddler2 only showed the cryptic message, “the server has actively closed the connection”.

Finally after restarting the entire server, the IIS service, the web site and the app pools we were grasping at straws.  Bindings were correct, permissions were correct, doing a “netstat –an” revealed the server was indeed listening on port 443.

In the end, what solved it is in the binding settings the Certificate dropdown showed None.  I selected the self-signed server certificate and the whole thing suddenly came alive.  I attempted to set the SSL certificate back to None, which wasn’t an option anymore.

Of course that makes sense.  How can you serve up SSL traffic when there is no certificate to authenticate the request with?  However, why a server restart caused the certificate to no longer be selected is beyond me. 

And why did IIS never throw an event or some type of log error that said, “Hey, you’re trying to serve SSL but no certificate is selected!”???

Anyway, hopefully this will show up on a Google search for someone else.  Cheers.