TechEd 2013 - Day 4

Last day of TechEd 2013 ended, goodbye Spain. This day ended with a lot of interesting sessions related to Windows 8, Azure and Big data. I discover new ways how we can use Bitlocker for enterprise customers and why different 3rd party prefer to use Bitlocker and give up of their own mechanism.
I think that you heard that the preview version of Windows 8.1 can be downloaded from Microsoft news. Be aware, if you install the preview version of Windows 8.1, moving to the final version of 8.1 will not be so easily. When you go to the preview version, don’t let the installer to update the backup partition also. In this way it will be very easily to go back to 8.0 and install the final version of Windows 8.1. In general I prefer to use install the preview version of any software o virtual machines.
While attending to a session about big data and Hadoop I find out how you can increase the performance of a reduce operation. During the reduce operation it is recommended to have as few as possible. Even if the size of the files is big, it is not important. Having only a few number of files at this step will make the reduce operation faster.
“ASVMITI” is the storage mechanism offered by Microsoft. One of the benefits of this storage is the persistence. The SLA that is offered to the clients will offer us the data persistence and access of all information, even if we will stop or delete our HD. This is great, because after the process of data ends, we will be able to access all this data. Don’t forget that storing data into cloud is very cheap. As input, we can use any kind of data, even archives of type gzip, bz2 or deflate.
The last 5 posts were only a small summary of things that were presents at TechEd Europe. A lot of interesting news and information was shared at TechEd. All the sessions can be viewed on Channel 9.

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TechEd 2013 -Day 3

The 3rd day of TechEd had finished. At the keynote I had the opportunity to see a demo of an application for Windows Store for which I write a part of the code a design it. Also I discover that over 66% of the companies has the bring your own device policy active. For them, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 came with special features that secure and protect their private data. Because of this, companies like SAP will have all their applications for sale force migrated to Windows 8 (until end of 2015).
From the developer perspective, we should try the new  Visual Studio 2013. It has great features especially for load test. Even if in the preview it is pretty stable. Also, if you are starting to develop a client-server application, that will communicate over http/s than… go with  Web.API. Why? Because Microsoft invest and will invest a lot of resources in that area. WCF is good for TCP/IP and other protocols, but for HTTP/S they recommend is Web.API.
The last presentation of the day was very intertying. It started at 5 PM, in the same time with another presentation from the Build, where they announce some new services of Windows Azure. Auto-scaling is not build-in and supported by Azure. From now on we can define the rules directly on Window Azure portal – this is so COOL :D. This feature combined with alerts and notification services will be very useful for the maintenance team. Great job!
That all for today!

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TechEd 2013 - Day 2

Second day of TechEd 2013 has ended. For me, this day was full off interesting information related to SQL Server and Windows Sever. From my perspective, the most interesting sessions of the day where related to security. During this sessions I realize that we are extremely vulnerable to attaches, even if you change the server password every 4 hours. An attack can be made in 5 seconds – the same problem is on the Linux system, not only Windows.
Things that I consider interesting:

• Foca – it is an interesting tool to discover what the public content that is listed by an internet endpoint. It will extract meta-information like the name of the users, machines, software version and so on. 
• It is extremely easy to modify a worm or trojan to make it undetectable and for 100$ you can buy an application that give you the ability to “manage” the infected machine.   
• You should NEVER have an async method that return void, except when you are working with event handler. If an exception occurs, the exception cannot be catch at the code level. Because of this you will have odd behaviors from time to time like: in Windows Phone this exception will disappear and in Windows 8 this error will cause the application to “die” immediately, without a notifications. Another problem with this kind of calls is when the actions end – because the system cannot tell you when the call end. In this cases you should return Task and not void.
• If you want to hide the main menu from Visual Studio, that you could try Hide Main extension. Pressing ALT will show the menu back again.
• When you have Visual Studio open, than ALT + F6 can help you to navigate between Visual Studio windos.
• Don’t forget SHIFT+ALT will give you the ability to make multi-line editing.
• If you are using SignalR and you need to create a small cluster and synchronize different servers with SignalR than Windows Azure Service Bus can be a solution for you. You need to write only one line of code to have Service Bus in the backplane.

That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

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TechEd 2013 - Day 1

First day of TechEd Europe 2013 has just ended. What can I say? Wow. A lot of interesting sessions about Microsoft technology. I participate to a lot of session on different topics like big data, legacy code, loading and performance testing into the cloud and how we can increase the performance of our application.
Let’s see some ideas that I noted and I want to share with you:

• Creating a virtual network with the machines that we have into the cloud we can make remote debugging very easily from Visual Studio.
• With the new version of SQL Server and having in-memory database we can increase our performance with a factor of 6x. If we recreate the store procedures the new SQL Server will create binary code for the store procedure (as DLL) – we can gain up to 26x better performance.
• A testing and reviewed code will contains up to 70% less bugs.
• PerfView is a great tool, I need to check it out.

If you deploy a VM or a web site to Azure you can win a super car (Microsoft content – I hope that they will pay the insurance also).
See you tomorrow.

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TechEd 2013 - Pre-Conference Day

The pre-conference day of TechEd has finished. It was a full day with interesting seminars. For me, this morning was pretty hard to decide at what seminar I want to participate. I wasn’t decide what seminar to choose between “Enterprise Agility is Not an Oxymoron” and “Extending Your Apps and Infrastructure into the Cloud”.
In the end I decided to go to the second presentation, where I found out a lot of cool information related to this topic. In the next part of the post I will enumerate some interesting information that I discovered:

• In this moment, most applications that are hosted on Windows Azure are ON AND OFF or PREDICTABLE BURSTING. To tell you the truth, I didn’t expected the ON AND OFF apps to be on top. 
• Over 98% of organizations use and have virtualization. This is a huge opportunity for cloud providers.
• Be aware of the SLA. If the provider cannot offer the uptime from SLA you will receive the money back for the downtime, but you will not recover the money that you lost during that period of time when your app or service is down.
• You can find a SQL Server VM image on VM library that can be used on the cloud without having to buy your own license for SQL Server.
• For VM you pay per minute and not per hour. First 5 minutes are free :-).

See you tomorrow night.

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WPF - Binding of TextBox in a Grid

Today we will talk about WPF and how we improve the loading time of our window. One of my colleague started to have a performance problem with an application written in WPF. The application has to run on some virtual machines with Windows and .NET 3.5
The application has a window with a grid that contains 200 cells. The model behind the view has an object with 50 property. I know we have too many properties, but this is the model, we need to optimize the loading time of the page and not to make a review.

public class MyModel : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
  public Foo Obj1 { get;  set ...}
}
public class FooModel : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
  public string P1 { get; set ... }
  public string P2 { get; set ... }
  ...
  public string P50 { get; set ... }
}

This model is bind to a grid that contains 4 columns and 50 rows. Each property is bind 4 times to the cell controller. The controller of the cell is a simple TextBox (this is a sample code).  The grid is similar to this:

                   <Grid>
                        <Grid.RowDefinitions> …  </Grid.RowDefinitions>
                        <Grid Grid.Row="0" Grid.Margin="10">
                            …
                            <TextBox Text="{Binding Path=DataObject.P11}" Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1"></TextBox>
                            <TextBox Text="{Binding Path=DataObject.P12}" Grid.Row="2" Grid.Column="1"></TextBox>
                            …

This is a simple binding, but on a virtual machine, under .NET 3.5, the loading time of this window is around 5-6 seconds. We need to find out what is the cause of this problem. After creating a sample project with this problem we discovered the cause of the problem.
It seems that the binding itself is very slow. If we compile the sample project with .NET 4.0 the loading time decreases a lot. But we cannot migrate to .NET 4.0. This is not an option now.
We could try to bind the grid to our model and each cell would be bind directly to the property.

<Grid Source= “Binding Path = DataObject”>
     …
     <TextBox Text="{Binding P1}" Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1"></TextBox>

With this solution the performance is improved with ~1 second. We still have a problem, the windows is loading too slowly.
What we can do? The cause of the problem is the TextBox. The TextBox binding consumes a lot of resources.
Looking over the view we can replace the TextBox with a TextBlock. Running the application again and voila. The loading time of the page is under 1 second.  Before applying this solution we need to check if we need to have the text editable. The good news is NO DON’T NEED that option.
In our case, replacing the TextBox with TextBlock improved the loading time of the page with more then 5 seconds. If we need to have the text editable, then we could register to the click event and replace the TextBlock with a TextBox. To have the same UI, we added a border to the TextBlock also.
The things to remember from this story is to use the most simple and UI base controllers we need. We shouldn’t use a complicated UI controller if don’t need it. The more complicated they are, the more resources will need.

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Topic Isolation - (Part 6) Testing the limits of Windows Azure Service Bus

Some time ago I wrote about how I manage to process millions of messages over Windows Azure Service Bus. I discover that processing millions of messages every hour will increase the latency and response time of our topic.

I wanted to find out what I happening with the topics from the same account and data center when the load of one of them increase drastically. 

To be able to make this tests and discover the answer to my questions I made the following setup:

• Create 3 topics on the same data center. Two on the same account and another one on a different account.
• Create a worker role that will read messages from topics (via subscription) and monitor the delay time. The results will be written to Windows Azure Tables.
• Create 8 worker roles that will push hundreds of thousands of messages in a very short period of time on the same topic (multi-threading rules).
• Create 4 worker roles that will consume messages from our topic (via subscription).

In the end we end up with 12 worker roles that hit the same topic. Of course the latency of that topic increases, but we wanted to see if the rest of the topics are affected. I run this performance test for around 6 hours and …

The results of the test were extremely good. The second and 3rd topic where not affected by this load test. The latency remain the same for this 2 topics during the load test.

I’m very happy with this results. This is a confirmation that we will have a good performance on all of our topics. The topics are 100% isolated are not affected by the rest of out topics.

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