Well it's been a long time coming but it looks as if Microsoft have decided to release a standalone 'crawler-based search engine' (based on its SharePoint offering) set to replace its rather dated (albeit free) file-based index server in the first half of 2008.
There will be two editions plus the full blown Office SharePoint Server.
It is worth investigating the free express edition at least, which looks like it may suffice for smaller projects... you can get the RC version here.
Looks like we all need to get those licenses organised... Visual Studio 2008 (aka 'Orcas' and .Net 3.5) is due end of this month:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/nov07/11-05TechEdDevelopersPR.mspx
Do a book search on Amazon for most .Net topics and you will usually be rewarded with a wealth of doorstops to choose from. Enter the search term “ODP.Net” though and you get erm… one result. This I find a little surprising, especially as, according to Oracle at least, ODP.Net (Oracle’s Data Provider for .Net) offers [probably] the best performance and richness for accessing Oracle back-ends. I've used ODP.Net myself on some fairly large scale developments and find the provider reliable, functionally more rich than Microsoft's offering (see a comparison article on MSDN, albeit now a little dated) and has excellent performance.
Anyhow, the aforementioned Amazon "only resulting" book (entitled ODP.NET Developer's Guide) recently landed on my doormat from the publisher PackT who contacted me to take a peruse at it. I've not had chance to look at it in detail yet but here's a chapter summary in case you are looking for such a volume...
Summary of the content:
Chapter 1: introduces the concept of Oracle Database Extensions for .NET and provides information about Oracle Developer tools for Visual Studio.
Chapter 2: introduces the Provider Independent Model in ADO.NET 2.0 and how it relates to Oracle.
Chapter 3: shows you several methods to retrieve data from an Oracle database. You will work with the core ODP.NET classes like OracleCommand, OracleDataReader, OracleDataAdapter etc.
Chapter 4: is all about CRUD operations but also includes caching, array binding, offline data, transactions and error handling
Chapter 5: PL/SQL stored procedures and executing routines in PL/SQL packages. Array parameters and ref cursors are also covered.
Chapter 6: dedicated to dealing with Large objects in Oracle. This chapter illustrates concepts, configurations, and programming for BFILE, BLOB, and CLOB (or NCLOB) in conjunction with ODP.NET.
Chapter 7: Oracle XML DB. It provides information about generating XML from existing rows in tables, manipulating rows in a table using XML, and working with native XML in the Oracle database.
Chapter 8: a bit of a mix this one. Covers database change notifications, Asynchronous Application development, Web Application development, Web Reporting (including grouping, sub-totals, charts etc.), Object-Oriented Development with ODP.NET and ASP.NET, XML Web Services development using ODP.NET and Smart Device Application development (for clients like the Pocket PC etc.).
Chapter 9: introduces you to Oracle Developer Tools (ODT) for Visual Studio 2005.
All .Net code examples are in VB.Net.
We've recently just upgraded from Visual SourceSafe 6d to 2005. The process was (surprisingly) painless.
This is worth a read before you start: MSDN Visual SourceSafe Install Documentation
Here's the steps I went through:
Server:
Client:
Initial impressions? Firstly, here's the relevant "what's new in VSS 2005":
So far my feeling is that VS integration is better. File access seems quicker (but I doubt by the "3-5 times faster" quoted by Microsoft). Less VS hanging during "get latest" type activities and generally more responsive. Apart from that you are unlikely to notice any major changes.
For those lucky developers supporting .Net 1.1 projects, you still need trusty VS 2003 so it was a relief when I fired VS03 up and the VSS add in worked fine. I successfully fetched an ASP.Net 1.1 project, checked out some files and all seemed normal. Performance was back to VSS 6d standards though.
If I come across any issues I'll post them here.
One much needed feature missing from SQL Server 2005 is the ability to pass "a list of values" from .Net as a parameter to a T-SQL based stored procedure. Loads of scenarios spring to mind but here's a couple of obvious ones:
You get the idea. Taking the INSERT as an example, there are various approaches you can adopt to achieve the desired result:
There are other approaches too (see a detailed description of arrays and lists in sql server by Erland Sommarskog).
Using XML for "list passing" has a number of benefits, in particular the ability to pass lists of more "complex types" rather than just single values. Here's a stored procedure I'm using in a current project (I've stripped out irrelevant code) which takes Study data and inserts it in "one set based query".
CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[Study_SaveData](
@subjectStudyID int,
@entryAB char(1),
@studyDataXML XML
)
AS
BEGIN
INSERT INTO StudyData (subjectStudyID, entryAB, studyParID, tpID, dataValue)
SELECT @subjectStudyID AS SubjectStudyID,
@entryAB AS EntryAB,
StudyTab.StudyCol.value('StudyParID[1]','int') AS StudyParID,
StudyTab.StudyCol.value('TPID[1]','int') AS TPID,
StudyTab.StudyCol.value('DataValue[1]','float') AS DataValue
FROM @studyDataXML.nodes('//StudyDataList/StudyData') AS StudyTab(StudyCol)
END
To call this in T-SQL, you would have something like this:
EXEC [dbo].[Study_SaveData]
@subjectStudyID = 34,
@entryAB = 'A',
@studyDataXML = '<StudyDataList><StudyData><StudyParID>931</StudyParID><TPID>2732</TPID><DataValue>1</DataValue></StudyData>
<StudyData><StudyParID>931</StudyParID><TPID>2733</TPID><DataValue>2</DataValue></StudyData>
<StudyData><StudyParID>931</StudyParID><TPID>2734</TPID><DataValue>3</DataValue></StudyData>
</StudyDataList>'
In your application's DAL layer, your C# calling code could be (again code simplified for brevity):
public static void SaveData(StudyData studyData)
{
DBHelper DBH = new DBHelper();
DBH.AddParameter("@subjectStudyID", studyData.SubjectStudyID);
DBH.AddParameter("@entryAB", studyData.EntryAB);
// pass all data values in one go to avoid 'orrible chatty round trips ;-)
DBH.AddParameter("@studyDataXML", GetStudyDataXMLString(studyData));
DBH.ExecuteNonQuery("Study_SaveData", CommandType.StoredProcedure);
}
which calls the method below to translate the DataValueList property (utilising generics) into an XML string:
private static string GetStudyDataXMLString(StudyData studyData)
{
StringBuilder XMLString = new StringBuilder();
XMLString.AppendFormat("<StudyDataList>");
foreach (KeyValuePair<StudyData.StudyDataKey, double?> SDKV in studyData.DataValueList)
{
XMLString.AppendFormat("<StudyData>");
XMLString.AppendFormat("<StudyParID>{0}</StudyParID>", SDKV.Key.StudyParID);
XMLString.AppendFormat("<TPID>{0}</TPID>", SDKV.Key.TpID);
XMLString.AppendFormat("<DataValue>{0}</DataValue>", SDKV.Value);
XMLString.AppendFormat("</StudyData>");
}
XMLString.AppendFormat("</StudyDataList>");
return XMLString.ToString();
}
You get the idea. studyData.DataValueList contains the "list data" to be passed in and inserted into the database. I used StringBuilder for the xml concatenation as in this case I think it fits the bill but purists might prefer an XmlTextWriter approach.
This will ding dang do then! I don't think the code needs detailed explanation, but comments and queries welcome.
In summary, it performs very well and is adaptable for various lists of objects and more complex structures.
Clarkey
I've talked about the IE developer toolbar before, but at that time it was beta.
MS have now (I say now, it was actually in May but hey I had a baby recently so forgive the delay) released an official version for download so you can feel confident in installing it on your work PC (yeh right). Looks very much like beta 3 to me but apparently there are various bug fixes and it is 'more reliable'. Also Vista compatible.
Download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en
For me, the top features are:
Worth a look.
Here's a good overview (albeit of beta 3) on MSDN if you've not seen it before.
Discussion forums on the web are full of .Net N-tier questions, especially on approaches for achieving loosely coupled layers and lightweight data passing mechanisms. Is it ok to pass a DataSet or DataTable? Should I use Custom classes? This article by Imar Spaanjaars is one of the better ones I have seen on the topic:
http://imar.spaanjaars.com/QuickDocId.aspx?quickdoc=416
He describes the pros/cons of the different approaches. He is a fan of pulling the "data only bit" out of your business layer objects and putting them into separate "business objects" (only containing data). This aids passing of data between tiers and project referencing.
Question though - does pulling the data out of your business layer objects go against pure OO principles? "An object should consist of the data and operations allowed on that data" etc. Abstract data types (ADTs), encapsulation etc bla bla...
Also, I don't like the BO (business object) terminology as it is used, as this implies more than just data... I'd prefer something like CustomerBDO (business data object) or even CustomerEntity. You could then perhaps lose the "*Manager" suffix notation he has adopted for the business logic layer.
Regardless of these points though, I think custom classes are the correct way forward for "passing data", and datatables etc should be saved for when the types of the results are dynamic, e.g. "adhoc reporting" result sets.
