Microsoft Certified Professional Transcript
Latest Activity Recorded Sep 29, 2007

SHASHWAT  CHANDRA





Microsoft Certification Status

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Microsoft New Genetaion of Certifications

 

Microsoft has come up with new generation of its certifications.

 

MCTS-->MCPD-->MCTA

 

1) Microsft Certified Techonolgy Specialist (MCTS)

 

    Exam 70-536,Exam 70-528,Exam 70-526,Exam 70-529

 

2) Microsft Certified Proffesional Devloper(MCPD)

 

    MCTS+ Exam 70-549

 

3) Microsft Certified Architect(MCTA)

 

 

For me I have to climb up the ladder from MCTS-->MCPD-->MCTA making it a microsoft way.Dont know when will i start.

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Take you IE favorites with you where ever you go

How many of you have felt that u miss out the favorites that you had in your computer in your previous location or when you were with a previous employer.  how many of you had missed out the favorites when you browsed pages in a Net Cafe.

now you can take your favorites with you. With windows live favorites you can share your favorites in internet and access it where ever you are. try http://favorites.live.com

S.Sundararajan      

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NRIs: Are you still paying for money transfers to India?

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Microsoft enterprise event in the next year - Feb. 27, 2008

“Turner announced that Windows Server® 2008, Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2008 will launch together at an event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008, kicking off hundreds of launch events around the world.” Read more from here. http://dotnetsamplechapters.blogspot.com/2007/07/windows-server-2008-visual-studio-2008.html

During my discussions with a wide variety of architects I have learned that Solution Architects care very much about security, open standards, interoperability, services oriented architecture, relationship between key technologies (for example Workflow Foundation and Biztalk) and productivity. In this article, I have attempted to provide a description of .NET 3.0 in terms of areas that are of significant interest for the architect community.

.NET versions

It has been almost six years since Microsoft released the first version of the .NET Framework. The 3.0 incarnation is the first framework being distributed with the operating system, i.e. with every Windows Vista installation and is also supported on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003. Until .NET 3.0, each version of the .NET framework was also accompanied by a new Common Language Runtime, hereafter referred to as the CLR. Microsoft has not modified the CLR for the 3. 0 version of the .NET framework and this is an important point to understand.

As .NET 2.0 and 3.0 share the same CLR, everything written in .NET 2.0 works in .NET 3.0 which is an important and significant departure from previous versions. In terms of change, for those who love algebra equations the relationship can be summed anecdotally as:

.NET 3.0 = .NET 2.0 + WCF + WPF + WCS + WF

I will provide a definition of each of the acronyms, but anytime you get confused about the relationship between .NET 2.0 and 3.0, keep the above equation foremost in mind. One of the key philosophies behind .NET 3.0 is to provide functionality that can be considered ‘infrastructure plumbing' as part of the framework. This allows you to focus on your key business problem.

The .NET Framework 3.0 achieves this objective through four key standards-based pillars corresponding to areas identified and requested by our customers. It also introduced a key new language called XAML. XAML is a declarative XML-based language that defines objects and their properties in XML allowing customers to develop workflows (WF) and immersive user experiences (WPF) declaratively. Let us explore the key pillars of the .NET 3.0 framework in greater detail.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

WCF allows you to architect services by offering a standards- based framework and a composable architecture. The three key design philosophies for WCF are interoperability, productivity and service-oriented development.

Microsoft provides a number of messaging layer channels and service model layer behaviours that can be added and removed easily. It also allows you to define your own custom instances, for example you can write or buy a custom encoder for ASCII and insert it as a reusable channel in the messaging layer that can be used across various systems. WCF interoperates with existing investments and combines and extends existing Microsoft distributed systems technologies like Enterprise Services, System.Messaging, Microsoft .NET Remoting, ASMX and Web Services Extensions (WSE). This change implies that you can use a single model for different types of application behaviours which significantly reduces the complexity in application development. WCF also offers interoperability with non-Microsoft applications through support of the WS-I basic profile and a number of additional WS-* standards.

Finally in terms of productivity you can get a significant order of magnitude difference in developing secure transactional web services using WCF. Think of WCF as tens of thousands of lines of code that you would need to develop, generate and maintain, but instead are provided now as part of the base framework. WCF offers one of the first core programming frameworks that have been designed from the ground-up for services oriented development.

Windows Workflow (WF)

Workflow Foundation is an enterprise class workflow development framework and engine that has taken declarative workflow mainstream for the first time. WF supports human, system, sequential and state-machine workflows. It provides runtime infrastructure, flexible flow control, long running and stateful work flows and runtime and design time transparency and auditing capabilities for compliance and record management.

Workflow Foundation allows you to define a workflow as a set of activities. Activities are the unit of execution and allow for easy re-use and composition. Basic activities are steps within a workflow while composite activities contain other activities. You can add and remove activities even when a workflow is already in progress allowing you significant flexibility in terms of change. Workflow Foundation provides a base activity library out-of-the-box and a framework for partners and customers to easily author custom activities.

In terms of authoring options, you can use XAML mark-up only, mark-up plus code or code-only. Visual Studio 2005 Designer for Workflow Foundation is available as a downloadable plug-in and provides a drag-and-drop design surface, intuitive graphical tools, integration with the Properties window, debugging and graphic Commenting capabilities.

A number of architects have asked me about the relationship between Workflow Foundation, BizTalk, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, (MOSS 2007) and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).

Workflow Foundation, (WF), was developed by the same team at Microsoft that developed the BizTalk workflow engine and is intended to be utilized by BizTalk Server in future versions. WF provides the foundation for implementing workflow scenarios mostly within an application and between applications in certain cases. BizTalk allows you to automate your business processes, orchestrate processes comprising of systems implemented in different technologies through adapters and provide advance business activity monitoring capabilities.

In terms of MOSS 2007 and WSS, MOSS 2007 is built on top of WF and provides additional functionalities and features using WF for the base functionality. Windows SharePoint Services provides a subset of the functionality of MOSS 2007 as an add-in to Windows Server. Simply put, WSS provides simple document management capabilities and workflow.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

Windows Presentation Foundation attempts to bridge the gap between the immersive user experience typically found in the gaming and entertainment industry and the static and hard-to-use world of business. WPF uses XAML extensively to allow you to develop the next generation of interfaces without becoming a graphic designer yourself.

I would encourage you to see a demonstration of a WPF application to understand what I mean by the next-generation user interface. You can, for example, view fifteen of the most precious books present at the British Library (http://www.bl.uk/ttp2/ttp1.html ) including Mozart and DaVanci hand-written notebooks. This reader is a WPF based application hosted in a Internet Explorer browser session and is referred to as an XBAP, the technology meant to replace ActiveX in the browser functionality-wise. The key differentiator for WPF is not the end product, a wonderfully rich interface, but actually how easy it is to develop and maintain the application code.

From an architectural perspective, WPF maintains a very clear separation between the graphic element and business logic. A designer will use the Expression product line and XAML to build the view, while the developer will use Visual Studio and write code using VB.NET or C#.

Another technology that has received a lot of attention lately is WPF Everywhere, (WPF/E), which is now officially called SilverLight. Please note that SilverLight is not part of the NET 3.0 framework. SilverLight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in with its own runtime for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. You can find out more information about SilverLight and view the demonstrations at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight.

Windows Card Spaces (WCS)

In today's world, everyone carries a number of self asserted and third party issued identities. Examples of these identities include driving licences, credit card, cinema card and others. We have control over the information we use to prove our identity to the requesting party. Windows Card Spaces extends the same concept of user control to the digital world. WCS creates an identity meta-system that can significantly improve the way enterprises manage identities within their organization and between different organizations. To understand the potential, it has been praised by one of Microsoft's prominent critics as "one of the most significant contribution to computer security since cryptology.

In the digital world, identity can be expressed as subject (who), identity claims and security token (digital representation of subject and claims). WCS uses the concept of self-asserted and managed identities, a self asserted digital identity card could be used for signing up with a service like Hotmail whereas a managed identity could be a credit card issued by a bank. The following picture illustrates the protocol that is used to exchange information between the various entities. Please note that in this case the Identity provider could use Kerberos, X509 or a custom mechanism. Similarly the relaying party could use SAML or send the security token using HTTPS post.

WCS provides an overarching framework for various implementations of identity management technologies to work together. At Java One (which is the one of largest Java conferences in the world), Sun and Microsoft did a joint keynote demonstrating interoperability mechanisms based on WS-* standards. I have posted the link to the demonstration and the toolkit at my blog mentioned at the end of this article.

Conclusion

The .NET 3.0 Framework opens up a new world of possibilities for both architects and developers. It is intended to make it significantly easier for you to develop, integrate and maintain application based systems. Microsoft plans to continue this same philosophy of reducing complexity and infrastructure plumbing while concurrently increasing interoperability and standards support for the future version of the .NET framework. For a complete list of support standards and detailed resources on each of the topics described in this article visit http://blogs.msdn.com/mohammadakif and click on the .NET 3.0 category for more details.

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Inside String Concatenation

In this post we will discuss about how the concatenation happens when you call string.concat() and how the concatenation happens when you call Stringbuilder.Append().

Here I have analysed it based on the Rotor .Net V2.0 code (some may not apply to .Net 1.1).

Generally, it is of the opinion that for any 2-4 strings use String.Concat() and for more than 4 strings use stringbuilder.Append(). The only difference that the string builder brings in is that it reduces the number of string allocations during the append operation , thereby reducing the GC effort.

How does a string concat work:-

If two strings are passed as arguments, it will find out the length of the resultant string, allocate memory for it and then copy these strings one by one.

If more than 4 strings are passed, it will consider it as an array of strings to be concatenated, spin through the array elements to find out the length of the resultant string. Then it allocates the memory for the resultant string and copies the strings one by one into that memory location.

For the C# code below:-

string s1="hello";
string s2="world";
string s3=" My";
string s4=" Program";

string result = s1+s2+s3+s4;

it generates the IL code as

IL_0001: ldstr "hello"

IL_0006: stloc.0

IL_0007: ldstr "world"

IL_000c: stloc.1

IL_000d: ldstr " My"

IL_0012: stloc.2

IL_0013: ldstr " Program"

IL_0018: stloc.3

IL_0019: ldloc.0

IL_001a: ldloc.1

IL_001b: ldloc.2

IL_001c: ldloc.3

IL_001d: call string [mscorlib]System.String::Concat(string,

string,

string,

string)

Now when the concatenation changes to

string result = s1+s2+s3+s4+s1+s2;

The IL code results in a call to the overload method of concat.

call string [mscorlib]System.String::Concat(string[])

This is a fastest way of concatenating strings. And thisworks perfectly fine for small number of strings. Then when do we go for stringBuilder.?

You should go for Stringbuilder when you are not sure of how many concatenations are going to happen. i.e., when the string concatenation is going to happen in a loop.

String Concatenation:-

String.Concat(string,string)

1. The inputs are string_A, string_B;

2. Total length of the result string = Length(string_A)+ length(String_b);

3. Call Fast allocate string. What it does is take in the length and allocates memory in the heap and returns a string which is there in that memory.

4. Then it calls the FillStringChecked function. It takes 3 parameters.

1. The end result string

2. Destination position

3. Source string

5. First string A is put in to the result. Then String b is copied into this result from the position length(StringA)

6. This happens in the following way

String.Cs

fixed(char *pDest = &dest.m_firstChar)

fixed (char *pSrc = &src.m_firstChar) {

wstrcpy(pDest + destPos, pSrc, length);

}

pDest contains the address of the first character of the string ‘dest’.

pSrc contains the address of the first character of the string ‘src’.

1. Here fixed key word is used so that , garbage collector does not move the string object when it is half way through the concat operation. This is called pinning and this can be used when the method is marked unsafe.

String Builder:-

String builder class represents a mutable string. It is convenient for situations in which it is desirable to modify a string, perhaps by removing, replacing or inserting characters without creating a new string subsequent to each modification.

What happens when you call the constructor of String Builder:-

stringBuilder strbConcatenation = new stringBuilder(string);

It allocates a memory space of 16 characters by default. However you can initialize the capacity of the string. The max capacity that can be allocated is 2147483647. ( this is nothing but Int32.MaxValue)

Now if the passed on string length is greater than the capacity then the capacity =capacity * 2. This ensures that there is a predicted growth rate. Then the Memory of that capacity is allocated. Then the input string is copied into the start of the new allocated memory and returns the reference to the memory space.

Now what happens when you call StringBuilder.Append(value) :-

Stringbuilder maintains the reference to the allocated memory space. Now it will find out if the value can be appended in place in the same memory space. If it can be allocated in the same memory space, then the wstrcpy happens.

What if the string builder does not have enough space to accommodate the newly concatenated string?.

In that case, it has to allocate a new memory space, copy the old string and also the new string. All this happens in the fixed regions of memory or pinned memory. This is the reason, that providing an optimal capacity when instantiating the string builder, reduces the number of new allocations. This will dramatically improve the performance as the number of garbage collections will be less.

This is more explicit from the SSCLI code

if (NeedsAllocation(currentString,requiredLength)) {

// here it allocates more memory and gets a new string.

String newString = GetNewString(currentString,requiredLength);

newString.AppendInPlace(value,currentLength);

ReplaceString(tid,newString);

} else {

// the append is carried out in place.

currentString.AppendInPlace(value,currentLength);

ReplaceString(tid,currentString);

}

Conclusion:-

1. String builder gives an edge in the performance by the way that it is not going to make more Allocations often and deallocations.

2. String concat is good for small string because the way it concats is pretty much faster when compared to string builder except for the memory allocation overhead and the time required for that memory allocation.

S. Sundararajan
Devauthority | InfyBlogs

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Creating sites with default templates using STSADM.EXE

Another quickie that I thought I would pass along. Thanks to Shane Young for telling me that it would be something I should consider blogging.

 

Here is the problem. When you are creating a site with STSADM.EXE using the -createsite option you only need 3 parameters, ownerlogin, owneremail, and url. No problem right? Well what if you want to use one of the other parameters ownername, lcid, sitetemplate, title, description, or quota? As long as you know the options these should be no problem either, but what if you don't? That is where I suddenly drew a blank. I wanted to create a site using a command like this:

 

stsadm.exe –o createsite –url http:///sites/helpdesk -ownerlogin -owneremail someone@example.com

 

The only catch is that I wanted to make sure I create a team site. No problem, that is exactly what the -sitetemplate parameter is for, so my new command line becomes:

 

stsadm.exe –o createsite –url http:///sites/helpdesk -ownerlogin -owneremail someone@example.com -sitetemplate teamsite?? No that's not it. Teamsite.stp? Nope.

 

So where can you find the name of the default site templates? Maybe if I you use the stsadm -o enumtemplates command? Good try, but it only shows templates that have been added to the global site template catalog. The answer is... you just have to know. I'm sure there is somewhere you can look using SharePoint Designer, or looking in the database tables, etc. to find the name of a particular template, but there is no command or file that will give you a simple list in SharePoint. So I am just going to give you all of the ones I know.(another round of thanks to Mads Nissen of http://weblogs.asp.net/mnissen )

 

Team Site, STS#0
Blank Site, STS#1
Document Workspace, STS#2
Basic Meeting Workspace, MPS#0
Blank Meeting Workspace, MPS#1
Decision Meeting Workspace, MPS#2
Social Meeting Workspace, MPS#3
Multipage Meeting Workspace, MPS#4
Business Activity Services Team Site, BAS#0
SharePoint Portal Server Site, SPS#0
SharePoint Portal Server Personal Space, SPSPERS#0
SharePoint Portal Server My Site, SPSMSITE#0
Contents area Template, SPSTOC#0
Topic area template, SPSTOPIC#0
News area template, SPSNEWS#0
News Home area template, SPSNHOME#0
Site Directory area template, SPSSITES#0
SharePoint Portal Server BucketWeb Template, SPSBWEB#0
Community area template, SPSCOMMU#0

 

So my command line would look like this:

 

stsadm.exe –o createsite –url http:///sites/helpdesk -ownerlogin -owneremail someone@example.com -sitetemplate STS#0

 

Obviously this isn't a complete list, but it is a start, and it answered my question, hopefully it answered yours. Oh, by the way  if you've read through this whole thing in hopes that I may give a list of all of the LCID values, you're in luck I do have a magic URL for that, http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/lcid-all.mspx .

 

The email is Stephen[the long tailed A we call “at”]sharepoint911.com, the job is waiting for you to need me.

 

Stephen - SharePoint Help