The Brave Programmer

Web Applications Development – Consider Some Beneficial Tips

robert@integralwebsolutions.co.za (Robert Bravery) — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 05:53:00 GMT

You may all have heard about the web applications that can be easily accessed by using standard browser. Some people think that these are similar to the mobile apps, but it is not the right thing. Well, the web apps are different from mobile apps so you should always keep this thing in mind. Before going to develop these applications, you should consider some important points. With the help of this, it is easy to get success in developing the best web applications for users. Always pay equal attention to the important factors and then make your final decision.

Well, many people prefer to establish an online business due to numerous reasons. You should also develop an app for your business to ease up the task of the customers. It is good to add some quality features to the app in order to make it beneficial for the users. It will make a good impact on them, and there are many other benefits that can be derived. If you can't afford to hire a team of web developers in your company, then you should get help from the web app developers.

Many professionals are out there who are offering quality services at cheap rates. You should find experienced professionals to develop an app for your business. If you are a web app developer, then it is good to take some important things into consideration. In order to read about these tips, you should check out the below post. Using some beneficial tips can help you out to develop a good quality application in a short time without making extra efforts.

Analyze the requirements

If you are a developer, then you may also know about the importance of considering requirements. First of all, you should understand your various requirements and then you can develop an application accordingly. Always spend enough time to understand the various requirements of your business and then work to achieve the right solution. If you know your requirements properly, then it will help you to get success in developing the right application.

In order to determine your requirements, you should ask a few questions; then you should try to find their solutions. In this way, you can make your task easier and develop the app to cater to your business needs.

Design of the app

After determining your requirements, the next step you should take is to set design for the web app. it is important to design web application carefully and after considering a lot of things in mind. You should always design the apps after considering your audience. In this way, you can develop the right app for the users to meet their various requirements. You shouldn't pay attention only to the design of the app because there are many other factors that you should consider.

It is also important to focus on the usability of the app. if you are adding great animations and effects, then it doesn't mean that you are developing an app with highly practical design. Keep the design of your app simple, but try to make it usable.

Choose the right framework

After the section of the best design for your app, there are many other things that you should complete wisely. You should always choose the right framework for web application development. You should choose the framework according to the features that you want. Most of the people don’t know more about the frameworks. Well, these are mainly written on the top of the programming languages.

You can also say that the frameworks use programming language and the core functions related to them. With the help of this, you can enhance the speed of your web app development process and get some other benefits.

Pay attention to database design

It is not good to ignore the main part of the web app development process. Well, this part is all about designing the database that also has great importance. It is important to understand the various requirements, and then you can start designing the database. It is not good to design the whole database at one time because it is not the right thing. Spend enough time and make your best possible efforts to complete this step.

The database is one of the most important parts of an application because it mainly stores all the data. If you are using an optimized database design, then it will also enhance the performance of the web application.

Development approach

After considering all the tips or completing the above-mentioned steps, the next thing you should do is to choose the best development approach. If you are an experienced developer, then you can make use of agile development method with ease. On the other hand, you also have an option to follow the modular development path.

In this type of development approach, you need to divide the whole development project into different numbers of modules. After this, you should develop each module perfectly. By doing this, you can eliminate various issues with ease while developing a web application.

Well, there are many other important tips that should be considered while going to start developing a web application. You should make use of all the above-mentioned tips to make your task easier as well as simple.

Wrapping up

Developing a web application is not a piece of cake so you should follow some beneficial tips to ease up your task. If you are a beginner, then you should pay proper attention to this process because a single mistake can create a lot of issues in the future. Beginners should always take every step wisely, and they can also get assistance from experts. You can consult with experts whenever you need help.

If you are a web developer and facing problems regarding the debt and money management, then you should visit Nationaldebtreliefprograms.com. In this way, you can easily get assistance from experts to cope up with various debt problems quickly.

Guest Post by: Kelly Wilson

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Tags: Web design,Web Development

What is Akka.net

robert@integralwebsolutions.co.za (Robert Bravery) — Sat, 08 Apr 2017 10:21:00 GMT

What exactly is Akka.net? Well, Akka.net started as a line for line port of Akka from Scalar into C# with certain adaptations to bridge differences in language and platform features. Akka.net now is continuing to be developed as an open source C# project with many useful add-ons to help in concurrent and distributed programming.

Akka.net is based around the Actor model. In the Actor model everything is considered as an actor. This is similar in object-orientated programming where everything is considered as an object. In object-orientated programming things are typically executed sequentially, while the Actor model is inherently concurrent.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say in the introduction to what an Actor Model is

The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats "actors" as the universal primitives of concurrent digital computation: in response to a message that it receives, an actor can make local decisions, create more actors, send more messages, and determine how to respond to the next message received.
Source: Actor Model - https://en.wikipedia.org

Actors are like "micro processors". Multiple actors can all execute concurrently on multiple cores built into a laptop or server.

image from https://petabridge.com/blog/akkadotnet-business-case/

To read more about Akka.net Actors go to the Akka.net Docs on Actors

The Actor System

Akka.Net is an actor framework for .NET. Akka.net has a few system level actors which are created automatically for you. You do not have any control over them. They perform the same or similar functions as any other actor. Creating child actors, supervising child actors. These are called Guardian Actors. You have to create an Actor System in order to create your top level and child actors. Below is an example of creating an Actor System.

// make actor system
var MyActorSystem = ActorSystem.Create("MyActorSystem");

// create top-level actors within the actor system
Props commandProps = Props.Create<CommandActor>();

IActorRef commandActor = MyActorSystem.ActorOf(commandProps, "commandActor");

These actors will be supervised by the Akka.net Guardian Actors.

Creating A New Actor with PROPS

Props is an object used to create an actor. You use the Props object to create actors within the Actor System or within the scope of another actor. Props also act as a factory for recreating actors should they die.

There are different ways to create actors with Props. Here are a few examples.

If the actor has a default constructor, we can create an actor like this:

Props commandProps = Props.Create<CommandActor>();

If your actors have constructors that take parameters, then you have to use a different form of Props like this:

Props commandProps = Props.Create(=> new CommandActor(someParameter));

We then need a reference to our new actors. That's where IActorRef comes is. An IActorRef is a handle to an actor within the Actor System. These IActorRef can be passed around the Actor System.

Creating Child Actors

Creating child actors as either a top level actor of the Actor System or as a child actor of other actors we still use Props. We then get an IActorRef reference to the newly created actor. Using a factory method of the Actor System we can create and instantiate the actor. Here is an example:

IActorRef commandActor = MyActorSystem.ActorOf(commandProps, "commandActor");

By using the ActorOf factory method we supply the Props object and a string name of the actor. Once you have an IActorRef you can Tell or Ask the actor things. This is how you pass messages around the actor system.

What is an actor actually? Well it is merely an immutable class. That performs one thing and one thing only. Actors in C# are implemented by extending the ReceiveActor class and configuring what messages to receive using the Receive method. You can have multiple Receive methods. However, each has to have a unique signature. That is the T has to be of a different type. That way the actor knows which message it can handle. Here is an example:

using System;
using Akka.Actor;

namespace SampleActors.Actors
{
internal class CommandActor : ReceiveActor
{
private IActorRef _coordinator;

public CommandActor()
{
Receive<string>(str => StartProcessing(str));
}

private void StartProcessing(string str)
{
Console.WriteLine(str);
}

}

Sending Messages

Actors get stuff done by passing messages around. The simplest way to do this is to Tell or Ask the actor and send it a message. That message has to be immutable. It can be a simple type such as a string object or a custom class that you create yourself. Tell means "fire-and-forget", e.g. send a message asynchronously and return immediately. Ask sends a message asynchronously and returns a Future representing a possible reply. Message ordering is guaranteed on a per-sender basis. I will cover Tell in this post. To find out more read the Akka.net Docs on Working with Actors.

When you Tell or Ask an actor to do stuff by sending it a message, you also have the opportunity of sending your own IActorRef. This will allow the receiver actor to be able to respond to your message, since the sender reference is sent along with the message.

Tell: Fire and Forget

Tell is the preferred way of sending messages. Fire and forget means no blocking or waiting for messages to complete. The parent actor can then carry on doing other stuff while the child actor is doing it's stuff. This gives you the best concurrency and scalability.

Here is an example:

commandActor.Tell("Hello Akka World", Self);

The sender reference is passed along with the message and available within the receiving actor via its Sender property. Inside of an actor it is usually Self who shall be the sender. Inside the receive actor you can access the sender actor via the Sender property. You don't have to pass an IActorRef to the receive actor. This is optional.

The receive actor then processes the message by executing the Receive method. Which method gets used depends on the message type being passed. If a reply is needed outside of the actor use the Ask-Pattern. See Working with Actors for more information.

The Sample App

You can use NuGet to get your Akka.net references for your project. For an introduction to why we need Akka.net see my previous post on Getting Started With Akka.Net. Below is a complete, simple Demo of the concepts we covered above.

using System;
using Akka.Actor;

namespace DemoAkkaConsole
{
class Program
{

static void Main(string[] args)
{
// make actor system
var MyActorSystem = ActorSystem.Create("MyActorSystem");

// create top-level actors within the actor system
Props commandProps = Props.Create<CommandActor>();

IActorRef commandActor = MyActorSystem.ActorOf(commandProps, "commandActor");

commandActor.Tell("Hello Akka World");

Console.ReadLine();

}

internal class CommandActor : ReceiveActor
{
private IActorRef _coordinator;

public CommandActor()
{
Receive<string>(str => StartProcessing(str));
}

private void StartProcessing(string str)
{
Console.WriteLine(str);
}

}

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Getting started with Akka.net

robert@integralwebsolutions.co.za (Robert Bravery) — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 16:50:00 GMT

Computers have come a long way since the early 1960's, 1970's and even the 1980's. Where at one time personal computers were never heard of, and any real computer that could do anything substantial took up a whole room or even a whole floor of an office building.

My first computer I had was in the early 1980's. It was a Sinclair ZX spectrum, with, wait for it, a grand total of 48k ram. I first learned to program using Sinclair Basic. Programming primarily games and some business projects posted in computer magazines which I got from the UK.

Computers were a life saver to many, doing monotonous and various other tasks very fast and very accurate. But no matter how fast computers were, they still only processed one instruction at a time. Admittedly the time to process that instruction was very, very small.

Parallel programming is hard

As more and more people got to use computers, they tried to squeeze as much power out of the computers as they can. But because computers only process one thing at a time, the idea of multi-tasking and multi-threading was a pipe dream. Not only had the hardware not been able to support it, but not many if any programming languages could.

For example, parallel programming was only available to C# programmers from version 5.0. Yes, there were ways to work around the problem and pseudo-multi-tasking options were available, but not true multi-threading.

So one of the ways to make computers faster, work harder and do more was to increase the power and speed of the hardware. Faster CPU's, faster memory, faster Hard Drives, multiple CPU's etc. But still computers are only able to process one thing at a time.

They were smart at it though. Various methods were employed to mimic parallel computing. Like time slicing, time sharing, scheduling, etc.

When so called multi-tasking eventually become main stream, it was very hard. It was hard to understand grasp and hard to execute. You had to worry about things like dead locks, race conditions, memory leaks, memory corruption, synchronisation issues. The list goes on.

But many will argue saying that multi-threading is easy or should be. If it were that easy, then why is it not our go to happy place in programming.

Alas, there is a simpler and better way of doing things. Especially for simple programmers like most of us. I prefer to leave the difficult stuff to guys who have already solved the problem.

A case for Akka.net to solve.

Enter Akka.net. A concurrent, distributed computing framework using the Actor and messaging model.

The actor model is an old technology, originating in 1973 as an approach to parallel computing.

The Actor model is used across many different industries solving the problem of Processing Everything Right Now. Nowadays if you cannot process something in a Nano second, then you might as well give up.

Akka.Net is a port to .Net of Akka. Akka is a framework for developing scalable, fault tolerant and concurrent applications. Its aim is to abstract away the difficult part of multi-threading and parallel programming. Akka.NET is an open-source library for building concurrent, fault-tolerant and scalable systems using the actor model.

Akka.net gives you and I, the programmer some useful benefits.

Simple high level abstraction for concurrent and parallel programming
Asynchronous, non-blocking, high performing event-driven object orientated programming model
Very light weight objects and processes. several million actors per GB of heap memory

Along with this, you also get fault tolerance with a "let it crash and we will recover" attitude. Akka.NET actors give you the ability to build self-healing systems that can recover from failure

Also, you get location transparency. Everything in Akka is designed to work in a distributed environment: all interactions of actors use pure message passing and everything is asynchronous. So it matters not if your computing power is on your laptop at home, or on some PC on the other side of the world. It's all the same to Akka.net.

Actors are like "micros processors". Multiple actors can all execute concurrently on multiple cores built into a laptop or server.

image from https://petabridge.com/blog/akkadotnet-business-case/

Getting started.

Over the next few blog posts we will get into more detail on how to use Akka.net. But here are a few things to whet your appetite and get you started.

Use the nugget package to install the Akka.net dependencies into your project. To install Akka, run the following command in the Package Manager Console. Install-Package Akka.
Download or clone the Akka.net source from github. https://github.com/akkadotnet/akka.net
Complete Akka.NET Bootcamp, which will get you off to a fast start with the actor model's concepts and Akka.NET's implementation.
Read and learn more at Akka.net

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What's The Most Popular Programming Language - July 2016

robert@integralwebsolutions.co.za (Robert Bravery) — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 16:04:00 GMT

Java still king of the hill, according to TIOBE index for July 2016. But does it surprise you that Assembly Language has made it into the top 10. Java, C and C++ have been consistent at the top for about the last 10 years occupying positions 1, 2 and 3.

C is showing signs of dropping and might even give up it's 3rd position soon. It seems to have been in a sharp decline since last year.

C# has sliped one position from last year, but is still a strong contender for the best programming language to use. I was quite surprise that C# was eclipsed by Python.

So why should you worry about the most popular programming language. Well, knowing what the latest trends are will help you to know what skills you would need to update and what new skills you might need to invest in. It might also be of assistance in providing knowledge when deciding what technology to use for your next project. This will give you a good indication as to what is available, what others are using, as well as what the long term trends are.

Jul 2016	Jul 2015	Programming Language	Ratings	Change
1	1	Java	19.804%	+2.08%
2	2	C	12.238%	-3.91%
3	3	C++	6.311%	-2.33%
4	5	Python	4.166%	-0.09%
5	4	C#	3.920%	-1.73%
6	7	PHP	3.272%	+0.38%
7	9	JavaScript	2.643%	+0.45%
8	8	Visual Basic .NET	2.517%	+0.09%
9	11	Perl	2.428%	+0.62%
10	12	Assembly language	2.281%	+0.75%
11	15	Ruby	2.122%	+0.74%
12	13	Delphi/Object Pascal	2.045%	+0.57%
13	10	Visual Basic	2.012%	+0.07%
14	16	Swift	1.960%	+0.73%
15	6	Objective-C	1.881%	-1.46%
16	19	MATLAB	1.558%	+0.35%
17	17	R	1.514%	+0.28%
18	18	PL/SQL	1.456%	+0.24%
19	22	COBOL	1.135%	+0.10%
20	39	Groovy	1.125%	+0.80%

From a long term view, looks like Java, C, C++, C# and Python have a strong hold on the top five. So my guess is that one should up-skill on at least three of the top five. Doing that would do you well as a programmer. It might not even be a bad idea to learn PHP and JavaScript as well if you can

Programming Language	2016	2011	2006	2001	1996	1991	1986
Java	1	1	1	3	21	-	-
C	2	2	2	1	1	1	1
C++	3	3	3	2	2	2	7
C#	4	5	6	11	-	-	-
Python	5	6	7	25	20	-	-
PHP	6	4	4	9	-	-	-
JavaScript	7	9	8	7	23	-	-
Visual Basic .NET	8	103	-	-	-	-	-
Perl	9	8	5	4	3	-	-
Ruby	10	10	22	32	-	-	-
Ada	27	16	15	19	7	3	2
Lisp	28	12	12	15	6	5	3

So what is your favourite programming language? Which one do you think people should up-skill on? Which one do you think is missing from this list? If you had a choice, which one would you put in positions 1,2 and 3?

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Category: Technology

Category: Software

Why do so many people and companies hate Agile?

robert@integralwebsolutions.co.za (Robert Bravery) — Sat, 23 Jul 2016 18:40:00 GMT

Why is it that so many people hate Agile not that they just hate agile, but that they will og out their way to be so vocal about it.

People are often averse to change. When new things come about that threaten there comfortable way of life, they put up a brick wall and defend with all they got. Even if it means they have to make up some ridiculous excuses.

Agile does not care about proper documentation
Agile has no regard for processes and regulations
Agile has no regard for the companies plan and purpose
Agile does not care about the legal processes and clients are not held accountable.
etc, etc

These are some of the most complaints that companies and people have levied against agile and agile methodologies. Will it then surprise you that the things most complained about with regards to agile actually come from the Agile Manifesto and the four values? Which is mostly misunderstood.

So then what is the Agile Manifesto and these four values and why is there so much confusion? Let's look at these four values and try to understand the confusion.

The Agile Manifesto and the four values

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

What many people often forget and overlook is this; while things on the right are important, the things of the left have a higher priority. If there is one thing you take away from this, it is this, it's not about choosing one over the other to the exclusion of either one, but about setting priorities. These priorities will ultimately determine better quality, faster time to market and happier customers.

Lets look at these four points briefly

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

This is all about people. People deliver software, people deliver products. People come up with the ideas, people create the stuff that you and I love and use. Process and tools are there to aid people not to replace them.

However, we should not forget that processes and tools are there to make life easier and to keep things on track. Yes, it is often a huge complaint within large organisations that processes (a.k.a red tape) hampers progress. But the thing to remember is that just the right amount of process and the correct tools to help people achieve the best product.

Don't forget the processes and tools, but remember that people, individuals are more important. When human beings interact with one another you will be surprised as to the achievements that can be realized far more than any process or tool will do.

Working software over comprehensive documentation

This is often a big one. "Agile is against documentation". No. It's just that a working piece of software is way more valuable and important than a 1000 page user manual.

This does not mean that documentation is bad. I completely agree that documentation is important. The key here is "over comprehensive documentation", not no documentation. But you cannot sell documentation to a customer. Working software brings more value to a customer than documentation.

Many agile shops and teams avoid documentation. But this is because of a lack of understanding and bad planning. Documentation is often the last thing to be considered. When in-fact it should be one of the first. But the process of creating great valuable working software should not be overshadowed by the insane idea that documentation is more important.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

How often are we more worried about legal contracts,processes and legal documentation that we forget the people behind those contracts? We forget that clients are also people.

Yes, contract negotiation is very important, but not more important than collaboration. An iterative approach and face to face discussions with customers has a better chance of delivering quality software earlier than a contract that is signed earlier and often cannot be changed.

The inability to change contracts is often the thing that brings many projects to their knees. Changing them is often a big process costing loads of time and money, which leads to projects failing or going over budget and time.

Collaborating with people, brain storming is way better in understanding a problem than some signed documented contract or requirement. Documented requirements are important. But not the most.

A signed contract often brings in a false sense of security, but in reality we don't know what we don't know. An iterative discussion and customer collaboration process is often the best way of finding out what we don't know.

Responding to change over following a plan

How often have you ever had anything go according to plan? Not often right? In fact there is always a work around, a hack. So many times we have to implement plan B, or Plan C or .... plan Z.

Following a plan is important. We do not want a bunch of uncontrollable cowboys running amok. But being flexible and responding to changes gets value and working software out the door sooner.

Those who succeed more often are those who are flexible and have the great ability to respond to change faster and more often. Yes plan ahead, plan for the unexpected.

But what is the unexpected. If you can plan for it, then surely it is not unexpected, since you have planned for it, you expect it.

We are not fortune tellers, but human beings have a great ability to be flexible and are able to respond to change easy. Just look at how we respond to life in general.

Check out this short video:

Conclusion

Agile is not about doing some things at the expense of other things. It's about doing the best for the software or product and customer. It's about bringing the greatest value. It's about what is more important and not about ignoring things that have less importance or less priority.

So don't hate agile just because you don't understand it. But rather embrace it and you will find that it actually works far better and brings more value.

Do you have any ideas or thoughts? Let me know in the comments below.

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Tags: Agile,Agile Manifesto

Category: Technology

Category: Software

Download Visual Studio Professional for Free

robert@integralwebsolutions.co.za (Robert Bravery) — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 06:44:00 GMT

Visual Studio Professional for free. Do my eyes deceive me? Microsoft is now offering free download full edition of Visual Studio Professional. Aptly named, Visual Studio Community Edition. It is the fully featured professional edition with some license limitations for enterprise users.

With all the hype about free and open source software, Microsoft have gotten their fair share of criticism in this area. Microsoft now offers the new Visual Studio Community for Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio 2015 for free. That's right, you read it, for free.

Visual Studio Express

Previous free versions of Visual Studio known as Express were very limiting. First all the languages were in separate downloads and editions

Visual Basic Express
Visual C++ Express
Visual C# Express
Visual J# Express
Visual Web Developer Express
Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone

There are also other limitations like no extensibility, use of third party tools and plugins.

Visual Studio Community Edition

Microsoft have released a new free version of Visual Studio called Visual Studio Community Edition. Some might think that it is just a rebranding of the Visual Studio Express editions. But no! It is in fact Visual Studio Professional. That's right, the community edition has all the same productivity, functionality and features as the professional edition. And it is all free.

Download both Visual Studio Community 2013 and Visual Studio 2015 (preview) here:

Visual Studio Community 2013

Visual Studio 2015

There is a huge difference between Visual Studio Express and the aptly named;Visual Studio Community edition. The new version is extensible, so get access to the over 5,100 extensions now in the Visual Studio ecosystem. It is also a complete full edition with all the included languages. Also, there are no restriction, you can use it to develop commercial and non-commercial products.

While the two editions share the same features today, the licensing terms determine who can use this product. You can use Visual Studio Community Edition in open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios. In the enterprise it is limited to 5 users. Read the licensing terms in the link above.

Check out more information on Visual Studio at VisualStudio.com

Conclusion

Visual Studio, at least for me, is the best IDE out there. With this new free version of Visual Studio, any one can now make use of the full features of Visual Studio Professional.

Now you and I have no excuse. So let's get coding.

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Category: Technology

Category: Software

Entity Framework 5 – Lazy, Eager, Explicit Loading

robert@integralwebsolutions.co.za (Robert Bravery) — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 09:48:20 GMT

A normal database is never just one table. In fact a normal database is a collection of tables. In a relational database we have many tables related to each other. Querying these tables efficiently brings enhanced performance to a database based application.

Entity Framework offers several different ways to load the entities that are related to each other. For example, when you query for SalesOrderDetails, there are different ways that the related Products will be queried and loaded.

The question that one needs to consider when loading related entities is whether to use Lazy Loading or Eager Loading.

Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a design pattern commonly used in computer programming to defer initialization of an object until the point at which it is needed. This means that related objects (child objects) are not loaded automatically with its parent object until they are requested. LINQ supports lazy loading by default.

How does lazy loading help us? If properly and appropriately used, it can boost a programs efficiency and performance, by only loading data when needed. Often times a user might not want to view all related data.

In other words when objects (data) are returned by a query, related objects (data) are not loaded at the same time. Instead they are loaded automatically when the navigation property is accessed. That is when a user, the application, specifically requests this data.

Data is only loaded by EF when the data is actually iterated over. So a query like this does nothing

var p = from s in Products select s;

When looking at SQL Profiler we can see that no SQL query is actually executed. To actually retrieve data we need to iteration over the object returned. So something like this will work.

int cnt = p.Count();

or casting the result to a list will work as well:

var myList = q.ToList();

Taking our example above of selecting SalesOrderDetails and then getting the products when needed we see that the below Linq query only returns SalesOrderDetails data and not the related Products.

var sd = from s in SalesOrderDetails select s;

var mylist = sd.ToList();

Because of lazy loading we cast to a list. This iterates over the object and returns the result.

We can see the SQL produced by the above:

SELECT

[Extent1].[SalesOrderID]
							AS
								[SalesOrderID],

[Extent1].[SalesOrderDetailID]
							AS
								[SalesOrderDetailID],

[Extent1].[OrderQty]
							AS
								[OrderQty],

[Extent1].[ProductID]
							AS
								[ProductID],

[Extent1].[UnitPrice]
							AS
								[UnitPrice],

[Extent1].[UnitPriceDiscount]
							AS
								[UnitPriceDiscount],

[Extent1].[LineTotal]
							AS
								[LineTotal],

[Extent1].[rowguid]
							AS
								[rowguid],

[Extent1].[ModifiedDate]
							AS
								[ModifiedDate]

FROM
					[SalesLT].[SalesOrderDetail]
								AS
									[Extent1]

This might produce something like:

SalesOrderID	SalesOrderDetailID	ProductID	UnitPrice	LineTotal	ModifiedDate
71774	110562	836	356.898	356.898	6/1/2004
71774	110563	822	356.898	356.898	6/1/2004
71776	110567	907	63.9	63.9	6/1/2004
71780	110616	905	218.454	873.816	6/1/2004
71780	110617	983	461.694	923.388	6/1/2004

Say we wanted now to get a list of products from a particular Sale but quering the SalesOrderDetail table and bring back a list of product names.

We could construct a query like:

var p = from s in SalesOrderDetails

where s.SalesOrderID == 71815

select s;
var mylist1 = s.ToList();

But still no product name. Now let's use the object p created above and query the products list

var s2 = from s in p select
				new {

            SalesOrder = s.SalesOrderID,

            SalesOrderDetailID = s.SalesOrderDetailID,

            Product = s.Product.Name

};

var mylist = s2.ToList();

Which now lazy loads the products and we get an output similar to:

SalesOrder	SalesOrderDetailID	Product
71815	111451	LL Road Frame - Black, 52
71815	111452	ML Road Frame-W - Yellow, 44
71815	111453	Racing Socks, M

The SQL Query is as follows:

SELECT

[Extent1].[SalesOrderID]
							AS
								[SalesOrderID],

[Extent1].[SalesOrderDetailID]
							AS
								[SalesOrderDetailID],

[Extent1].[OrderQty]
							AS
								[OrderQty],

[Extent1].[ProductID]
							AS
								[ProductID],

[Extent1].[UnitPrice]
							AS
								[UnitPrice],

[Extent1].[UnitPriceDiscount]
							AS
								[UnitPriceDiscount],

[Extent1].[LineTotal]
							AS
								[LineTotal],

[Extent1].[rowguid]
							AS
								[rowguid],

[Extent1].[ModifiedDate]
							AS
								[ModifiedDate]

FROM
					[SalesLT].[SalesOrderDetail]
								AS
									[Extent1]

WHERE 71815 =
							[Extent1].[SalesOrderID]

GO

SELECT

[Extent1].[SalesOrderID]
							AS
								[SalesOrderID],

[Extent1].[SalesOrderDetailID]
							AS
								[SalesOrderDetailID],

[Extent2].[Name]
							AS
								[Name]

FROM
					[SalesLT].[SalesOrderDetail]
								AS
									[Extent1]

INNER
						JOIN
								[SalesLT].[Product]
											AS
												[Extent2]
													ON
														[Extent1].[ProductID]
																		=
																				[Extent2].[ProductID]

WHERE 71815 =
							[Extent1].[SalesOrderID]

Note that there are two queries. This is because the second query was only executed when we needed it. AKA Lazy Loading.

Eager Loading

Eager loading is the opposite of Lazy. It loads a specific set of related objects along with the objects that were explicitly requested in the query. Eager loading lets you bring all of the data back from the database in one trip. Entity Framework provides the Include method to enable this. Include takes a string representing a navigation path to related data.

How does eager loading help us? Well it cuts down on multiple trips to the database and multiple queries to the database. This also cut down on network traffic. If you know exactly what data will be needed then Eager loading is the best bet.

The following is an example of eager loading using the same example as above.

var p = from s in SalesOrderDetails.Include(i=> i.Product)

where s.SalesOrderID == 71815

select
				new {

            SalesOrder = s.SalesOrderID,

            SalesOrderDetailID = s.SalesOrderDetailID,

            Product = s.Product.Name

};

var mylist = p.ToList();

This produces the same output

SalesOrder	SalesOrderDetailID	Product
71815	111451	LL Road Frame - Black, 52
71815	111452	ML Road Frame-W - Yellow, 44
71815	111453	Racing Socks, M

But the SQL is totally different. Notice that now we have a more concise SQL statement, with only one round trip to the server.

SELECT

[Extent1].[SalesOrderID]
							AS
								[SalesOrderID],

[Extent1].[SalesOrderDetailID]
							AS
								[SalesOrderDetailID],

[Extent2].[Name]
							AS
								[Name]

FROM
					[SalesLT].[SalesOrderDetail]
								AS
									[Extent1]

INNER
						JOIN
								[SalesLT].[Product]
											AS
												[Extent2]
													ON
														[Extent1].[ProductID]
																		=
																				[Extent2].[ProductID]

WHERE 71815 =
							[Extent1].[SalesOrderID]

Explicit Loading

Explicit loading is very similar to Lazy loading in that you only retrieve the data when you explicitly need it. You may want to leave lazy loading disabled and have more explicit control over when related data is loaded. In addition to explicitly loading with Include, the Entity Framework allows you to selectively and explicitly retrieve related data using one of its Load methods.

When objects are returned by a query, related objects are not loaded at the same time. By default, they are not loaded until explicitly requested using the Load method on a navigation property.

In this example we are querying one record:

var x = SalesOrderDetails.Where(w=> w.SalesOrderID == 71815).First();

After some calculation and process we want to get the products related to this SalesOrderDetail. We can explicitly load the products using the Load method. This creates a new SQL Query and another round trip to the database server. The beauty of this method, like Lazy Loading, is that you only load what you need when you need it.

Entry(x).Reference(c=> c.Product).Load();

Now we can refer to the product with normal dot notation and navigate to the product object, as in:

var productName = x.Product.Name;

Which one to use relies on the application and the goal of the application and query. Each option has it's pro's and con's. But used correctly, they will enhance the usability and performance to your application.

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Is access to adequate and reliable broadband a human right?

robert@integralwebsolutions.co.za (Robert Bravery) — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 05:43:12 GMT

Human Rights! What are they? So many issues surrounding Human rights. They are abused, and some are even made up to either puff up our ego or hide some criminal action or intent.

Rights and freedom have existed throughout human history. Most of the time they were generally accepted and implied. Like the right to live, and the right to defend yourself. But in the modern world and in many countries human rights and been legislated into law.

Then we have the right to water and the right to protection. The right to a fair trial, freedom of speech and movement. We have all heard the lines from Holy Wood, “You have the right to remain silent”. Most human rights are aimed at giving humans the right to live, survive, and be happy.

I’m not going to go into all the listed human rights. But what I do want to draw your attention to is this topic of the right to reliable and adequate broadband. The question is, can it be considered a human right? I mean not having it will not harm us in any way, it will not cause us distress. It will not diminish our living conditions. We will not starve or go hungry. What’s all the fuss about.

Are we just turning into a species where we believe we have the right to anything and everything.

United Nations commission made, what many might consider an outlandish statement when it declared, unambiguously, that broadband access is a basic human right, right up there with the right to healthcare, shelter and food.

Now this was not reference to 56k Dial-Up access, but to fast reliable Broadband access.

Now this might be old hat to some of you, but to us here in South Africa, and other parts of the world, where Broadband is still very expensive and only available to a select few, this kind of statement is very important.

Some questions one might ask, should organisation be trying to make loads of money out of a declared human right? Where does one draw the line to the cost of infrastructure and the right to knowledge and broadband?

What about this, is capping and shaping, and disconnecting broadband access a Human Rights Violation? If Access to reliable and fast broadband is a Human Right, then ISP’s and Telecoms companies, should not be doing this and should then answer to their actions of Human Rights Violations.

Here is a clip from 2011 I think.

A report from the Human Rights Council of the United Nations General Assembly declares access to the Internet a basic human right.

My question to you is this. DO you consider access to fast and reliable broadband a basic human right, and what are you doing about it?

Let’s have a debate and conversation about this in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: Human Rights,Broadband

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Off to rAge 2013

robert@integralwebsolutions.co.za (Robert Bravery) — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 06:35:37 GMT

So my junior computer class (where I teach python) convinced me and organised to go to rAge 2013 this year. On top of that it is on a Saturday. I think it is going to be mental.

The continent’s largest technology and gaming exhibition, so I’m told, brought to you by the creators of NAG magazine, is a three-day expo.

Also, rAge 2013 features the mind blowing LAN – an exhilarating 52 hour event where around 2,000 gamers are connected for the largest LAN (local area network) in the southern hemisphere. To do what? play online games of course. Tickets of which were sold out within two hours.

rAge kinda reminds me of the old Computer show we used to attend. Lots of excitement, lots of new toys, but way out of my price range.

picture courtesy of http://www.rageexpo.co.za/

Technorati Tags: rage,gamming,computers

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Keyword Research Tool you Shouldn't Miss

robert@integralwebsolutions.co.za (Robert Bravery) — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 05:32:36 GMT

Making sure to target the right keywords is going to be what makes your content successful and one of the best ways to make sure that you have the right keywords, is to use the right tool. There are hundreds of tools out on the internet that claim they can make your keyword research much more effective but in reality, only a select few are worth investing in. In this article we will go over a tool that has been proven to work called KeywordSpy.

Research your Competition's Keywords

Normal tools usually limit you on what types of information you can get but with KeywordSpy, you get in depth information about all types of things. One of the best aspects of this tool is that it lets you look into your competition like no other tool. You will be able to see which keywords they are targeting, how they are ranked on each keyword, what pay per click terms they are using, how much they are spending on those campaigns, and so much more.

This information can be used in so many different ways to help you build your keyword strategies. You can review what terms they are using and how much effort they put in to get ranked, then determine if you could get ranked higher. The tool also comes with a keyword watch list, so if your competitors start targeting new keywords, you will know. This gives you the advantage to stay on top of new trends that they might already know about. Getting new keyword ideas will never be hard as you can always just look and see what is working for all your competitors.

Some other information you will be able to find on your competitors are how their advertisements look, how much of their traffic is organic versus how much is paid for, and more in depth information about their pay per click campaigns.

Keyword Research

Don't worry, just because we covered the competitor research aspect of the tool first doesn't mean you won't get your own keyword research tool. You will be able to get all the statistics and analytics that are available for the search terms you are looking into. You will see how many people use that particular search term per month, how competitive it is, previous stats to help you determine whether or not it is increasing or decreasing in popularity, and plenty more. Aside from that, you will also get a massive list of suggested similar keywords that you won't be disappointed with.

All this data comes in a easy to read format that you can customize to make it even easier for you and for others to review. You will then be able to store all of the data in an organized fashion for future reference if you ever need it.

Another great part about KeywordSpy is that you will be able to track your keywords, giving you the advantage of getting updated information on a daily basis. You will be able to change certain metrics to make it as beneficial for you as possible, but the overall goal is to get you new information as fast as possible.

Cost

KeywordSpy comes with a free trial, giving you the opportunity to actually try out the program prior to making any decisions. Once you have tried it and are satisfied with the results you have been getting, you have a few different subscription options. You can sign up for the research package for $89.95 a month which offers keyword research and competitor research benefits online. Then you have the option to sign up for the tracking package for $89.95 a month which offers real time tracking in 3 major search engines but doesn't offer any research capabilities. Lastly, you can just sign up for the professional package for $139.95 which offers all of the benefits available.

It is a small price to pay to be able to get all your keyword research needs in one tool. While you might not want to pay any money for a professional tool, you might as well try it out for the free trial, you have nothing to lose.

Ness contributed this guest post on behalf of MakeAWebsite. Check out their website for tips and information on how you can start your own blog.

Technorati Tags: Keywords,Tools,Research

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