Re: Microsoft acquires Xamarin

[Andrew McGrath]

 Have ventured down the ReactJS path after not getting any response from 
Xamarin regards OEM-ing their compiler for the APaaS platform we wrote, 
despite several attempts to discuss with them.
  
 At least another software tools company (Citrix-funded, Israeli-founded) 
simply changed their licensing agreement to stop us.
  
 Not sure if Unity3D is suitable for our use - essentially a WinForms like 
capability.
  
 Perhaps the situation will change with Microsoft. Any idea who to talk to 
at Microsoft about licensing?
  
 Otherwise, yes, ReactJS is improving by the day.

  


 From: "Scott Barnes" 
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2016 7:30 AM
To: "ozDotNet" 
Subject: Re: Microsoft acquires Xamarin   
License is free if you can live with the unity logo as a splash screen and 
for mobile app devs the prof edition is a bit of an overkill. You also 
would want to target mono subset 2 as it actually has less mono bloat 
(performance profiling crap even etc)   
 Unity3d is one huge IoC as you also don't get framework overheads (ie you 
start with a gameobject which is similiar to a null, you then make additive 
behaviour additions to suite your need). Binding is different to mvvm as it 
makes a lot of the plumbing in mvvm redundant give its natural IoC state (I 
made the mistake trying to drag mvvm into the equation only to realise I 
gained little)
  
 Material is easy enough you can grab some exisiting libraries others have 
made via asset store or roll your own.
  
 I made a "style" class that automatically configures it's visual states 
based on what it's attached to, so it's like baking a resource dictionary 
first then dropping it into a control or object in which it the knows which 
levers to pull in order to achieve the intended visual result (ie t-shirt 
size font settings, colours, button sizes etc)
  
 Animations are controlled via the powerful mechanim (which is used for 3D 
character state switching but is also perfect for 2d). It actually lets you 
visualise the animation lifecycle whilst giving you the ability to "stub" 
your animations to circle back to later should you wish so (it's where I'd 
prefer Blend to have headed to be honest)
  

On Friday, 26 February 2016, David Connors  wrote: 
On Fri, 26 Feb 2016 at 06:57 Scott Barnes  wrote:
  
 [ ... ] 
  We've written two apps so far with it and you not only get "native" 
compilations (it actually generates it via IL2CPP) but you also get less 
restrictions xamarin imposes on UI (ie no forking the visuals per platform 
of any kind)
   
 [ ... ]
  
 This is interesting. I've wondered why people don't use unity for normal 
mobile app dev. Couple of Qs:
 1. What's the licensing like? 
 2. What sort of primatives do you get for building traditional apps? What 
would you do to say build a Material Design looking app?
  
 David. 
  
  
  

 --
 David Connors
da...@connors.com | @davidconnors | LinkedIn | +61 417 189 363

--
---
Regards,
Scott Barnes
http://www.riagenic.com
 

Re: [OT] Unbelievable ad tracking

[Andrew McGrath]

I tried on multiple OSes (Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Mac OSX) and 
multiple browsers on each (IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and nothing worked - 
must have spent 6 hours trying.
I still lodge mine in person by dropping into their office.


From: Mark Hurd markeh...@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, December 22, 2014 5:04 PM
To: ozDotNet ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: Re: [OT] Unbelievable ad tracking

On 22 December 2014 at 17:01, Greg Low (??) g...@greglow.com wrote:
 You can lodge a BAS with the ATO using it. (You can't with IE 11).


That's funny! I never tried to lodge with IE11 but I had to use it
(and not Chrome) to actually set up the authentication/authorization
used by the ATO. I don't recall the problem now, but Chrome didn't
work and IE11 did.

Once it was set up, Chrome worked to actually access bp.ato.gov.au.



 Regards,



 Greg



 Dr Greg Low



 1300SQLSQL (1300 775 775) office | +61 419201410 mobile? +61 3 8676 4913 fax

 SQL Down Under | Web: www.sqldownunder.com


--
Regards,
Mark Hurd, B.Sc.(Ma.)(Hons.)

Re: [OT] Quiet

[Andrew McGrath]

I am in a bit of a bind at the moment on whether to stick with .NET or make the 
JavaScript jump.

Over many years I have built a platform (including drag and drop designer, code 
editor, intellisense, CodeDOM/Roslyn etc - integrated debugging to come soon) 
on top of an Israeli-founded, Citrix (and Microsoft I believe) funded .NET 
WinForm on the web controls provider. I had a conference call with them (they 
are in Boston now) for an hour in late April. I showed them how my platform 
negated the need for their paid Professional edition and that for many use 
cases people could just use my platform with their free Express edition - this 
aspect is a side-effect of the platform rather than the main purpose.

When their next release came out in early July they had stopped providing their 
free Express edition and promised an announcement. Anyway last week they 
announced they had zombified their existing company, formed a new company, 
transferred all staff to the new company, made their controls free for everyone 
whilst slapping on new licensing conditions to say you couldn't create a 
platform that generates systems and competes with them.

Fortunately in June on Twitter I found a link to a Telerik beta program for a 
javascript to native iOS/Android open source toolkit they are developing 
(NativeScript). So I signed up. This allows me to create native iOS apps with 
out requiring a MacBook. They are releasing under Apache 2.0 and when I asked 
if they would pull the rug out from under any platform built on top of it they 
have emphatically said no. They are currently getting Angular and other 
JavaScript frameworks working with these controls.

I have also made enquiries to Xamarin with regards OEM-ing their compiler and 
frameworks but have not received any response other than being added to the 
Xamarin Forms beta when it was live.

One possibility is to migrate the WinForms on the web capability to be ASP.NET 
based but I am fearful that Xamarin might be restrictive in their licensing too 
for the native device side of things.

So it seems a full-blown shift away from .NET to JavaScript is on the cards. 
Some tools like edgejs which allows interoperability between javascript and 
.NET might be useful at least during the transition.

The issue is that regardless of what any other toolset or platform provides, 
the need for continuous enhancement of the underlying platform to create and 
maintain competitive advantage in the marketplace is making relatively 
closed-shop .NET control providers untenable.

Andrew


From: Stephen Price step...@perthprojects.com
Sent: Friday, 19 September 2014 12:14 PM
To: ozDotNet ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: Re: [OT] Quiet

tongue-in-cheek
So that sounds like dll hell will become framework/runtime hell?
/tongue-in-cheek
Seriously though, the future of C# is strong from what I've seen. Xamarin 
supports C# for targeting IOS and Android. Unity supports C# as a scripting 
language for writing games. I am hopeful but my Silverlight burns are still 
healing.
Actually, regarding Silverlight, as a plug in it's gone yeah (it's dead to me), 
but Xaml is alive and well. No one seems to be talking about that.

Making a Difference
Perth, Western Australia+61 (0) 428 028 599step...@lythixdesigns.com 
@lythixdesigns | @lyynxwww.lythixdesigns.comwww.linkedin.com/in/lyynx
On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 10:04 AM, David Kean david.k...@microsoft.com wrote:

We still very much focused on .NET. We've had our head down working on a bunch 
of things over the past 3 years; my two favorite things coming up that I 
believe  will completely change .NET:



.NET Native

ASP.NET vNext (in particular CoreCLR)



There is something very common with both these; a thin componentized 
framework/runtime that ships with your app. Being componentized, we can release 
and version  individual libraries without requiring us to update one giant 
framework. Similar to what we did with Roslyn (the rewritten C#/VB compilers), 
these changes set us up long term to make larger investments without the 
compatibility concern that comes with shipping  a update to 1.8 billion 
machines.



From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On 
Behalf Of Greg Harris
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2014 6:43 PM
To: ozDotNet
Subject: Re: [OT] Quiet



Hi All,



Warning long Friday rant to follow.



In summary the rumours of the demise of C#/.Net are very premature, but keep an 
eye on the patient, health may be slowly declining.



RANT

When I was first at Uni (79-81) the business programming subject taught us 
COBOL along with a few home truths about COBOL such as:

1)  COBOL is the single most popular language by a large margin.

2)  There are now better languages available, so COBOL will soon start 
reducing its market share.

3)  This will take some time because of the huge investment in existing 
COBOL programs.

4)  Do 

re: debugging object

[Andrew McGrath]

Not exactly sure what you are looking for in terms of a nuget package but I 
do the following: 
In the exception handler I call my own Debug.ReportException method to 
which I would pass the properties of the interesting object as 
Liststring, then I include the stack trace by calling this code:
 public Liststring StackTraceToString() { 
Liststring sb = new Liststring(); var frames = new 
System.Diagnostics.StackTrace(true).GetFrames(); for (int i = 
1; i  frames.Length; i++) /* Ignore current StackTraceToString method...*/ 
{ var currFrame = frames[i]; 
var method = currFrame.GetMethod(); 
sb.Add(string.Format({0}:{1}, method.ReflectedType != 
null ? method.ReflectedType.Name : string.Empty, 
method.Name +  Line:  + currFrame.GetFileLineNumber())); }
 return sb; } 
 and finally everything via an email to myself - the email being generated 
via SQL Server via script I found on the web. 
You probably want to add a utility routine to generically grab all the 
object properties as Liststring and then could pick which object to 
interrogate as part of your exception handler.
Andrew


From: anthonyatsmall...@mail.com
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 10:32 AM
To: ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: debugging object

Anyone aware or use any tools to debug code at object level.  Want to be
able to out an object and its property values so i can get more info when 
an
exception occurs in my winforms app?  Maybe a nugget package?

Anthony Salerno | Founder | SmallBiz Australia
Innovation | Web | Software | Developers | Support
+613 8400 4191 | 2Anthony (at) smallbiz.com.au  | Po Box 135, Lower Plenty
3093 ABN : 16 079 706 737

www.smallbiz.com.au http://www.smallbiz.com.au/  |
www.linkedin.com/in/innovativetechnology

RE: GUIDs

[Andrew McGrath]

Hi Anthony,
As part of your discovery process, you might find this CodeProject article 
useful.
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/388157/GUIDs-as-fast-primary-keys-under-multiple-database

Regards
Andrew


From: GregAtGregLowDotCom g...@greglow.com
Sent: Saturday, May 03, 2014 10:18 AM
To: ozDotNet ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: RE: GUIDs

Hi Greg,



I've never seen the point of NEWSEQUENTIALID().



It can only be used as a database default. If you're already round-tripping to 
the database, you might as well pick up an int or a big int. To me, the reason 
for using GUIDs is when you want to generate the IDs in a different tier, 
confident that you can just throw them into the database later. Any of the 
sequential versions (even if client-generated), don't give you that confidence.



The biggest mistake I see people making is assuming that their database 
representation needs to match the layer above. Even if you use a GUID in the 
layers above, there's no need to have them sprinkled throughout the database, 
fragmenting every table and to be joining on them. You could isolate that to 
one table.



Regards,



Greg



Dr Greg Low



1300SQLSQL (1300 775 775) office | +61 419201410 mobile? +61 3 8676 4913 fax

SQL Down Under | Web: www.sqldownunder.com



From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On 
Behalf Of Greg Keogh
Sent: Saturday, 3 May 2014 10:09 AM
To: ozDotNet
Subject: Re: GUIDs



I did read a web page years ago where a chap reported that using sequential 
Guids produced significant performance improvements -- Greg K



On 2 May 2014 23:56, piers.willi...@gmail.com wrote:

Probably worth saying that using guids as a primary key is not for everyone. 
The key is bigger, so that has a size and performance impact on all your 
indexes and foreign keys, and as a clustering key it means new records are 
scattered throughout the file rather than being appended to the tail, leading 
to logical fragmentation.



(But if you need to replicate, synchronize or pre-allocate the key offline in 
the app tier they can make a lot of sense)



From: Michael Ridland
Sent: ?Friday?, ?May? ?2?, ?2014 ?7?:?37? ?PM
To: ozDotNet



Guids are also great for offline distributed clients. AutoInc numbers will be a 
thing of the past.

On Friday, May 2, 2014, Jano Petras jano.pet...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Anthony,

Guids are easiest way forward - due to their uniqueness and native support by 
the DB engine.



The only time I would consider using something else would be if there was a 
requirement for those unique row IDs to be 64bit integers for example or if 
there is a storage space concern - in this case I would consider using 
horizontal partitioning and allocating range of IDs to different instances 
reserving each one with a predefined range of values.







On 2 May 2014 16:16, anthonyatsmall...@mail.com wrote:

Anyone doing database replications, are you using guids?   Have any 
recommendations or experiences?



I don't usually use guids but working on systems that may need to scale, so 
thinking of switching to guids to avoid any future scalability issues





Thanks in advance J



Anthony

re: [OT] twitter, something posting on my behalf

[Andrew McGrath]

You probably need to change your Twitter password.
You've inadvertently clicked on a link somewhere that has captured your 
Twitter authentication token or even password and that is being used by 
some bot to send tweets on your behalf.
That's a roundabout description for it - pretty sure changing your Twitter 
password fixes it - also just make sure via Settings and Apps on Twitter 
that there are no erroneous apps installed.
Good luck,
Andrew


From: Wallace Turner wallacetur...@gmail.com
Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2013 9:18 AM
To: ozDotNet ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: [OT] twitter, something posting on my behalf

i am a twitter noob and this morning while scrolling thru I noticed I 
had apparently tweeted the below:

https://twitter.com/walturner

(the link is to a weight loss program)

How did this happen ?




bdbabgbe.png
Description: Binary data

RE: [OT] Email forwarding

[Andrew McGrath]

xname.org is free (donations accepted too) - have been using them for years 
for many domains without any issues.

Andrew


From: Ken Schaefer k...@adopenstatic.com
Sent: Friday, November 29, 2013 9:48 AM
To: ozDotNet ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: RE: [OT] Email forwarding

GoDaddy provide free DNS hosting for domains registered with them 

ZoneEdit is another provider I use (but only for a couple of domains) 

  

Cheers 

Ken 

  

From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] 
On Behalf Of Greg Keogh
Sent: Friday, 29 November 2013 10:22 AM
To: ozDotNet
Subject: [OT] Email forwarding 



Hello Friday Folks,   



For more than 10 years I've had some DNS records maintained by DynDns. Some 
are free and some are $30/year because they later removed the free service. 
I just received an email from their sales to tell me that if I want MX 
wildcard forwarding  of email from my five domains it will cost $49.95 per 
domain per year. Pardon me, but isn't that a lot for such a piddling little 
facility?!   



Is anyone here using someone else for DNS that has a better and more 
reasonable deal? Searches reveal some companies that do hosting and 
forwarding for free (like  https://www.namecheap.com/), but I find that 
hard to believe and would rather stick to someone reputable for a modest 
cost.   



Greg K   

RE: [OT] Surface Pro 2

[Andrew McGrath]

Why not Visual Studio on an MS Smartwatch, projected up onto the wall?
You could run your unit tests overnight and it can buzz to wake you if a test 
fails.


From: Tony Wright tonyw...@gmail.com
Sent: Saturday, September 07, 2013 3:13 PM
To: Ken Schaefer k...@adopenstatic.com, ozDotNet ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: RE: [OT] Surface Pro 2

 Surface Pro on a phone - plug in a keyboard  mouse, hit a projector button, 
fully fledged windows dev on a phone, now that would truly be cool. They own a 
phone company now, but will they ever have a vision?

Sent from my Windows Phone


From: Ken Schaefer
Sent: 6/09/2013 10:08 AM
To: ozDotNet
Subject: RE: [OT] Surface Pro 2

If you want a laptop that can be used as a tablet, then it's the way to go IMHO.



Cons: it's heavier than my Sony Z2 that it replaced (with the keyboard part), 
and the supplied stylus is rubbish (get a separate  pen - any Wacom Penabled 
compatible pen will work). Otherwise it's good - 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 1080p 
screen, 3G (optional), flexible usage options/configurations. Has a mini-DP 
(one on the base, and one on the tablet part) which is capable of driving large 
 monitors (runs my 2560x1440 monitor without issues). The only thing that I'd 
really want is the ability to buy an additional keyboard section as a spare 
part. Then I could leave one at home and one at work effectively as a docking 
station, and just carry  the tablet bit back and forwards.



Cheers

Ken



From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On 
Behalf Of Corneliu I. Tusnea
Sent: Friday, 6 September 2013 9:18 AM
To: ozDotNet
Subject: Re: [OT] Surface Pro 2



How is the Helix?



On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 9:01 PM, Ken Schaefer k...@adopenstatic.com wrote: 

I replace my Surface Pro with a Lenovo Helix. However the person that has the 
Surface now loves it.  They do a lot of PDF and Word annotations, and find the 
ability to just scribble notes, circle things etc. really handy. Of course, you 
don't need a Surface to do that, but if that's the main thing you use a device 
for, then I can see how it'd be useful.



Cheers

Ken



From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On 
Behalf Of Scott Barnes
Sent: Thursday, 5 September 2013 7:43 PM
To: ozDotNet
Subject: Re: [OT] Surface Pro 2



When Microsoft sent me the Surface Pro I was pretty excited to use it, but 
after a week or so I pretty much stopped using it given the whole usage of it 
just didn't feel comfortable (heavy,  got warm often, stylus was constantly 
being lost etc etc). I then gave it to my a co-worker to use instead thinking 
maybe I'm just to jaded about it all. He then pretty much arrived at the same 
conclusion so he then gave it to our Manager ...and yes, he ditched  as well 
and then gave it to one of his peers and so far that guy's about to ditch it as 
well. ..so it's slowly making the rounds at work and so far it hasn't found a 
home as yet (I keep waiting for that person to say this is awesome so i can 
then pounce  on them, open a notepad  pen and get them to tell me why etc - 
professional curiosity).

I was hoping the next generation would try something different to stimulate a 
re-up or revisit but if they are just making iPad like adjustments to the specs 
then its kind of a weird place to occupy for them given its success today?

---
Regards,
Scott Barnes
http://www.riagenic.com



On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 5:39 PM, Ian Thomas il.tho...@iinet.net.au wrote: 

Yes, it does seem a Surface-killer - more options (storage, RAM), enough ports. 
We await pricing.

I was impressed by recently-announced Lenovo T440 and T240 series ultrabooks. 2 
batteries, up to 17 hours  - a sensible counter to tablets.




Ian Thomas
Victoria Park, Western Australia

From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com  [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On 
Behalf Of Ken Schaefer
Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2013 3:23 PM
To: ozDotNet
Subject: RE: [OT] Surface Pro 2



There's also this just-announced competitor from Sony:

http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/04/sony-vaio-tap-11-hands-on/



Cheers

Ken



From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On 
Behalf Of Ian Thomas
Sent: Thursday, 5 September 2013 5:14 PM
To: ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: [OT] Surface Pro 2



Surface Pro 2 ready to go with an adjustable kickstand and improved battery life

Basically the original Surface Pro is an ultrabook with optional keyboard. Now 
it's getting more RAM,  and the (Intel) Haswell chips, so performance and 
battery life should be greatly improved. The Verge




Ian Thomas
Victoria Park, Western Australia

Re: [OT] FixWPF err.. FixUXPlat?

[Andrew McGrath]

My understanding is that Unity3D doesn't let you produce a web client. So 
we built our own to do web  native from the one codebase.
Tried to talk to Xamarin about licensing just their compiler to integrate 
into the web-based IDE we have built, but they stopped talking about having 
an OEM agreement once they saw some screenshots. (Thought I should state 
that in case anyone else is thinking of heading down that path)
So the plan now is to parse C# to Objective-C for iOS and to Java for 
Androidunless another option pops up.

Perhaps a scripting language on top of C# eventually too, so enable 
part-time programmers to participate toolooks like there might be a 
scriptcs session this Sunday at Microsoft office in Brisbane - so will be 
interesting to see where others are at.
Andrew


From: David Connors da...@connors.com
Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2013 8:47 AM
To: ozDotNet ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: Re: [OT] FixWPF err.. FixUXPlat?

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 8:40 AM, Scott Barnes scott.bar...@gmail.com 
wrote:
  I had not known that stat but based on their other stats it doesn't 
surprise me ..
Until now Flash has been a strong force in the casual gaming scene but 
since adobe announced its discontinuing work on this it will probably 
create more share for unity   
[ ... ] I will say this though if Microsoft can't backfill XNA with their 
own gaming engine the is unity3d that natural choice or is it a case of 
acquire (which I doubt they will sell) or beat? Which already puts them way 
behind in adoption?   
I thought the funding figures for Xamarin were interesting. They have 6 mil 
in cash but also got a recent funding round of 16 mil. I don't know what 
the equity dilution was for that 16 mil nor why you need it if you cash 
spend the cash you have but ... they are a very strategic asset for a 
number of companies. I have no idea why no one has bought them yet. As for 
doubting Xamarin or Unity would sell ... every man has his price. Spending 
500 mil on Xamarin would get MS a lot better return than 7bln for the 
bottom half of Nokia's corpse.
As for XNA ... it is irrelevant. YOu sould have to have rocks in your head 
to invest in it. Great idea for 2001 but in 2013 it would cripple your 
revenue as a game dev. Unity gives you one code based across 
PC/iTard/Android and apparently Sony is on board in a big way for indie 
games on the PS4.   
David. 

Re: occasionally connected application design problem

[Andrew McGrath]

Another option is Microsoft Sync Framework - version 2 also works with non-MS 
data sources.
Andrew


From: David Rhys Jones djones...@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 8:39 PM
To: ozDotNet ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: Re: occasionally connected application design problem

This is just an Idea,
Message Queues, - pick your flavor.
Server and Clients have incoming queues.
the server queue thread turns continuously listing to it's incoming queue and 
post backs all the updates / insert / deletes to the client queues (except the 
one making the update);
the clients connect when they can and pull down as much information possible 
from their queue and make the changes. (* it's in order so shouldn't be a 
problem).
I suppose there is a way to do it with Sql Server, are all the clients working 
with the same version?
 Davy,

The US Congress voted Pizza sauce a vegetable. Don't even try to convince me of 
anything in the states is sane any more!

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Corneliu I. Tusnea corne...@acorns.com.au 
wrote:
  Greg,
I'm sure the SQL guys will tell you about some magical tool that can do all 
of this for you hands free and without any headaches (fingers crossed) but my 
take would be the good old REST API model.
1. For every Table have two columns LastUpdated, LastUploaded and 
LastDownloaded. Every change you do locally you update the LastUpdated to UTC 
now (never use local times!) 2. Keep a table with the sync status of each 
table where all you need to store is the TableName, LastUploaded and 
LastDownloaded.3. Have a background thread that tries to monitor for network 
events (don't continuously try to ping your server as your'll burn the battery 
of those devices).  
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/64975/Detect-Internet-Network-Availability  
 4. When you have connectivity all you need to do is select top 100 from each 
table where LastUpdatd for the Status for the table  LastUpdated of the row.(I 
don't know if I make sense but basically you want to select all the rows that 
were changed since point of your LastUpdated in your Status table).   You then 
try to push those back to your server. For every row that made it to the 
server you update the LastUploaded to UtcNow or even better I would update it 
to the time just before you started the sync.   5. You do the reverse for 
downloading data. You ask the server for all changes since your LastDownload. 
Once all the changes were received, you update your own LastDownload.With a bit 
of reflection and some clear naming conventions you could code all of this 
generically enough that you can simply run it on your database disregarding the 
number of tables  columns.
I'm now going to let the SQL guys deliver their magical tool :)
Regards,Corneliu.

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 8:41 PM, Greg Harris harris.gre...@gmail.com wrote:
   Dear People,
I need some help to get some good ideas for a design issue I am facing.
The application will be geographically dispersed and only occasionally 
connected to the internet with a slow / unreliable connection.  The users at 
remote branch offices are doing daily data entry to their own local databases 
(probably SQL express databases).  On a periodic basis the remote branch 
offices need to synchronise data with head office (probably a full SQL 
database).  Most (99%) of data will travel from the remote branch offices the 
head office some reference data may travel back to the remote branch office. 
There are a couple of design ideas that I have had:
SQL Server Replication: (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms151198.aspx) 
I do not know how well this will work on wires that are of such poor quality.  
Also how easy (hard) it will be to support remotely.
Program based updates: Have a program running in the background at each site 
attempting connection with head office transferring data.  All rows would have 
a transferred status flag, that would be set once successful transfer has been 
acknowledged.
File extracts: Once an hour produce a text file (with check sum) of all data 
entered in the last hour, background job copies file to head office server 
which will then apply updates to head office server.
Please share with me and the group what design ideas and experiences you have 
had that worked well and the ones you would avoid if faced with the same design 
decision again today.
Many thanks  Greg Harris

re: SQLite and SQL Server schemas

[Andrew McGrath]

Are you likely to be replicating information back and forth between SQL 
Server and SQLite?

Am currently investigating using some variation of a GUID to enable good 
replicability between SQL Server and SQLite when using Microsoft's open 
source Sync Framework 4.0 - to replace the previously used IDENTITY 
columns.

Currently leaning towards CombIT (a GUID with built-in date and time) as it 
performs well in larger datasets (a 5% performance hit with large upside on 
the replication front).

http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.aspx?p=25862

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/primary-keys-ids-versus-guids.html



 If replication between devices and SQL Server is likely to come up then 
this might be worth considering (lateral thinking)but if they are going 
to live isolated then perhaps someone else has an answer.

Andrew


 From: Greg Keogh g...@mira.net
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2013 9:20 PM
To: ozDotNet ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: SQLite and SQL Server schemas

Folks, I was considering being able to swap SQLite and SQL 
Server/Compact/Azure as the backend of my app. I use POCOs as the entities 
and I can generate multiple EDXMs for the databases and load them 
dynamically a runtime. It's a bit tricky to keep everything neutral and 
abstract the database away, but it was looking feasible as a good cooding 
exercise.   Then I suddenly reaslised that the POCOs aren't neutral 
because the SQLite IDENTITY columns are 64-bit and the SQL ones are 32-bit. 
I ran a diff on the POCOs and was suddenly reminded of this difference. 
Dammit!   So, do I make all the IDENTITY columns in the SQL databases 
64-bit to match (if that's possible), or perhaps there is some other 
lateral thinking trick I'm missing.   Having a completely replaceable 
database is a lovely thing to have, but tricker in practise than I 
initially thought with EF5 and POCOs. Has anyone attempted this sort of 
thing before?   Greg

RE: Excel in .NET (C# or VB)

[Andrew McGrath]

Using xlsgen to manage situation very similar to yours. Has worked very 
well on a variety of projects.

Website is at http://xlsgen.arstdesign.com/

Andrew



From: etmilis etmi...@iinet.net.au
Sent: Monday, 21 February 2011 3:02 PM
To: ozDotNet ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: RE: Excel in .NET (C# or VB)

Thanks Craig and Arjang,

Concern noted.

We are asked to automate/integrate files (i.e. invoice, inventory, etc.)
received from customer (in Excel via email) with internal system and need 
to
update some databases/tables too.
We will also need to send back the updated Excel file (original file +
added/updated columns) to the customers.

It looks like there are 2 ways to do it, using the Excel object model or 
the
OLEDB, though I am leaning more to the object model.
So, is it a good design if we create a service or a .net assembly with
scheduled job to it? The frequency is pretty low, a few times in a day
during business hours only.

Cheers,
Etmilis

-Original Message-
From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com]
On Behalf Of Arjang Assadi
Sent: Monday, 21 February 2011 3:37 PM
To: ozDotNet
Subject: Re: Excel in .NET (C# or VB)

Hi Etmilis,

as Craig said ( also from personal experience ), do not try reading and
writing excel files on the server, there is no end to problems that need 
to
be solved.

What is the original problem that you think it requires reading and 
writing
to Excel Files?

Regards

Arjang

On 21 February 2011 15:10, etmilis etmi...@iinet.net.au wrote:
 Hi Everyone,

 In the current DNA with .NET, is it much easier now to deal with EXCEL?
 Is COM still in the game?

 What I am after is reading from and writing to an EXCEL file(s).
 Also will it be possible to do it without installing EXCEL at all, for 
 example just referencing some of the EXCEL assemblies???

 Thanks and Regards,
 Etmilis

re: .NET friendly cloud-compute recommendations

[Andrew McGrath]

Am in a similar position to you with the .NET APaaS (Application Platform 
as a Service) we have developed at http://EziAdmin.com.
 So far everything is being kept on a single server but am about to setup 
to deploy across domains etc - am getting some code on this later in the 
week (from a presentation conducted last week) about how to configure 
permissions for this with TFS. 
Yes, Azure doesn't support what you want. Amazon EC2 will be necessary to 
get msbuild running there.

Setting up deployable windows images for clients will be a step to be taken 
next year to take it to the CEAP (Cloud Enabled Application Platform) 
level.

Happy to exchange ideas.

Andrew


 From: Joseph Clark jcl...@atlassian.com
Sent: Monday, 13 December 2010 9:32 AM
To: ozDotNet ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com
Subject: .NET friendly cloud-compute recommendations

Howdy all,

Does anyone have any experience with Windows/.NET friendly cloud-computing 
solutions, specifically for the purpose of farming out compilation and test 
agents?

Internally we've semi-standardised on EC2 for all our java-based builds, 
but from the literature I've read on the tubes, setting up a Windows image 
doesn't sound like very much fun. 

I had a brief skim-read on the Azure platform, but it looks like it doesn't 
provide any bare-bones infrastructure like msbuild.  

Are there any other alternatives?

Cheers,
Joe.