Alexander kuznetsov of sqlblog.com has made a summary of previous posts about defensive database programming,defensive programming is an approach that is designed to ensure high quality of software by eliminating existing bugs and avoiding potential ones. The goal of defensive programming to make sure that software robustly and gracefully handles cases of unintended use. Programming defensively includes the following techniques:
- Explicitly list the assumptions that you made during development
- Whenever feasible, remove assumptions that are not essential
- Ensure that the essential assumptions always hold
- Use all your imagination to come up with cases of unintended use, trying to break your module. Incorporate these cases into your testing suite.
- Lay out your code in short, fully testable, and fully tested modules
- Reuse your code whenever feasible
Read the entire post here:
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/alexander_kuznetsov/archive/2009/03/08/summarizing-previous-posts-about-defensive-database-programming.aspx
Brian Hartman has created a sample apllication with the ReportViewer built-in print functionality, people often wish to implement their own version to provide significant customizations or a deeper integration with their application. Great for all the developers who want more than the default reporting services. Attached to his post is a sample PrintDocument that will programmatically print a given ServerReport or LocalReport.
Read it here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brianhartman/archive/2009/02/27/manually-printing-a-report.aspx
Theo Lachev has uploaded the Reporting Services Tracer (RsTracer) project to CodePlex. RsTracer helps you trace the URL and SOAP traffic to/from a report server. Given the sheer number of Web methods supported by Reporting Services, you might find yourself asking which web method should you choose for the management task at hand and how should you call it? At the same time, it is likely that Report Manager or Management Studio already supports some aspect of the management feature you want to implement.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to peek under the hood and see what APIs Report Manager or a custom application calls? This is exactly what the RsTracer sample was designed to handle. RsTracer intercepts the server calls and outputs them to a trace listener, such as the Microsoft DebugView for Windows. RsTracer helps you see the APIs that a Reporting Services client invokes and what arguments it passes to each interface. It also intercepts the server response. Armed with this information, you can easily reproduce the same feature in your custom management application. You can use RsTracer with SSRS 2000, 2005, and 2008.
Another big implementation with Silverlight that gets my basketball hearth beat faster !
CBS Sports is adding a high-quality viewing option to its March Madness On Demand (MMOD) video player.
The new player uses Microsoft’s Silverlight (CBS has a history with Microsoft and previously used the Windows Media Player). You can stream all 63 tournament games in standard definition at approximately 550kbps, or enjoy a sharper picture with the high-quality player with streams delivered up to 1.5 mbps.
Microsoft’s video technology already proved it can handle big sporting events during last year’s Olympics. Though Silverlight isn’t as ubiquitous as Flash, Microsoft says more than 100 million PCs have installed Silverlight 2.
Source: http://newteevee.com/2009/02/15/cbs-gives-march-madness-gives-a-high-quality-makeover/
Ok and now for something completly different, i found this today at flickr code blog:
A robot intelligence has invaded Flickr. The “blind astrometry server” is a program which monitors the Astrometry group on Flickr, looking for new photos of the night sky. It then analyzes each photo, and from the unique star positions shown it figures out what part of the sky was photographed and what interesting planets, galaxies or nebulae are contained within. Not only does the photographer get a high-quality description of what’s in their photo, but the main Astrometry.net project gets a new image to add to its storehouse of knowledge. Needless to say this is one of the coolest uses of Flickr groups and the API that we’ve ever seen. I recently discussed the project with team member Christopher Stumm, since he was the one who had the idea to hook it into Flickr.
Your scale and rotation invariant hashing algorithm is fiendishly clever. Where does it come from?
It’s an adaptation of an old idea in computer vision — “geometric hashing” — to astronomical images. It was originally created by researchers who were trying to model associative memory; “that shape reminds me of something I’ve seen before”. The idea works great for astronomical pictures, because stars are easy to locate exactly. By adding a fast search method for similar-shaped arrangements of stars, and a check that eliminates coincidental matches, we’re able to match an image against the whole sky, usually in a matter of seconds.
Some people are so smart, i’m realy jealous 
But still time to take out the camera and start shooting the night sky !
We use a closed SharePoint blog for a client with NT security and use the RSS to display the posts on a remote .NET portal. The RSS by default shows items only for a week and uses only 25 items, these setting couldnt be changed so we thought.
but after some extensive SharePoint clicking I finally found the settings page. It wasn’t at the RSS part of the site settings page of the site, it was at the site settings of the List of blog posts. So go to your list, list settings. under Communications you’ll find RSS settings. Here you can edit the “Maximum items to include”, “Maximum days to include” and which Columns to include.
A great sample from MS on how to use the UserName function to restrict data access and control the default member in SSAS, great stuff:
Using UserName to Control Data Access and Default Member in SSAS
I wish the Real world was as easy
