I have been thinking of writing a Nant task for Sandcastle for quite some time so I decided to knock something up . I have been fairly busy at work and havent been able to spend time on this. As i find some time on the train I just finished this piece of code.

I am quite a fan of Nant and the Nant contrib project has a task for NDoc which kind of inspired me to do one for Sandcastle. Sandcastle supports the new frameworks in .Net quite well and most people who were using NDoc would have migrated to Sandcastle due to its capabilities for build purposes.

This task is intended to allow users who do not want to use sandcastle command line builder in there nant scripts as an external process. The logging of this task and the sandcastle output is also streamed into the nant log.

I have based my task schema on the bare minimal that will require direct configuration in nant. In any case you should be able to do all the configuration in the sandcastle project. What’s shown below is purely a because i am a developer and I need these features and so i think everyone is going to be happy with it :). '

The following readme is placed in a text file along side the installer zip file.

The Sandcastle for task is built using the following components
Nant 0.86
Sandcastle Help File Builder
Sandcastle UI Builder

The core components required by the task are installed by the installer.

The installer allows you to install the task into a folder that you choose but does not check to see if Nant is installed in the same directory
Generally C:\Program Files\Nant\bin
Installing the task in the same folder as Nant is the only scenario that has been tested.

The path of nant should be added to the path variable as instructed in the Nant installation instructions

In addition to installing the task the following configuration for the Nant.exe.config file needs to be added.

Under the elements
<configuration>
...<nant>
......<frameworks>
...........<platform>
................<task-assemblies>
                    <!-- Nant sandcastle task-->
                  <include name="NAnt.Contrib.Tasks.Sandcastle.dll"/>
If you wish to add the Sandcastle task into another folder, the Nant probing paths need to be set to look at this folder. It is not recommended however

Source code is also provided and feel free to customise it or edit it , The source code is present at Install folder\sandcastle task\Src

I have tested this on my system by installing sandcastle, nant and this task and it works fine. Obviously i am saying “Works on my machine”, if you see any problems using it please let me know about it.

The Sandcastle task schema for the Nant script should be as below, project and output are the only two required attributes,

<sandcastle 
    project="${Sandcastle project file path}" 
    output="Output location for Sandcastle files">

    <showMissing 
        remarks="false" 
        params="false" 
        returns="false" 
        values="false" 
        namespaces="false" 
        summaries="false">
    </showMissing>
    
    <document 
        internals="false" 
        privates="false" 
        protected"="false" 
        attributes="false"
        copyrightText="" 
        feedbackemail="" 
        footer="">
    </document>
</sandcastle>

e.g Nant build file

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<project name="Hello World" default="build">
    <property name="projfile" value="C:\Documentation.shfb"/>
     <target name="build">
        <sandcastle project="${projfile}" output="C:\Documentation\Help">
<document copyrightText="Copyright@ TSQLDOTNET Limited" feedbackemail="srinivas.s@tsqldotnet.com"/>
 </sandcastle>
    </target>
 </project>

Link: Nant Sandcastle Installer

The download consists of the prerequisites hence it is bulky at 40MB, The prerequistes include Sandcastle installer , Win 3.1 installer and DotnetFx

Now as is all over the news i went about downloading the browser to get a feel of it. The download of the click once installer was about 474 KB so how big is that :) really neat start, then the download of the installer and install takes about 1 minute (4 MB line) and in another minute it imports all settings from IE. Now that was really impressive , two and half minutes all set and up and running.

Features that clearly stand out are the Search history, Dynamic Tabs and the simplicity of book marking pages, there is more but these make be happy already :).

A useful thing is the Search your history box, I have wished for something like this for ages and its nice to see this feature. Hope Google does this for favourites as well.. I having accumulating favourites for the last seven years and i some times wish i could search through surely useful to me :)

The UI is definitely better than the heavy IE7, tabs are not new in a browser these days just checkout the dynamic tabs feature in Google Chrome, it is definitely cool , drag the tab out and see how it works

Bookmarking is easier and the download feature is different to other browsers.

Seems like Google has just started , I am already thinking of using this browser , but i am not sure about any bottle necks .. gotta wait and see

I am quite happy with what the beta offers,  if Google manages to hold off IE , I bet we could see this being used more widely..

If you want to download go to http://tools.google.com/chrome/?hl=en-GB

Armando Prato Armando Prato had written a SQL tip on how to determine a leap year the trick used is pretty neat, His example is in TSQL as below , but i guess we could use the idea in any language

   1: create function dbo.fn_IsLeapYear

   2:  (@year int)

   3: returns bit

   4: as

   5: begin    

   6:    return

   7: (select 

   8:     case datepart(mm, dateadd(dd, 1, cast((cast(@year as varchar(4)) + '0228') as datetime)))     

   9:     when 2 then 1     else 0     

  10:     end

  11: )

  12: end

  13: go

I like the idea of appending 0228 to the year and finding out if it is a leap year, The function takes in the year, appends '0228' to it (for February 28th) and adds a day. If the month of the next day is a 2, then we're still in February so it must be a leap year!  If not, it is not a leap year.

In C# this could be something like , I just thought its worth mentioning this on the blog for my record at the least

   1: bool isLeapYear = ((new DateTime(<int year value>, 02, 28)).AddDays(1).Date.Month.ToString() == "2")

A while ago we were trying to solve a problem by using full Text Indexing and i had to write this guide up on how to setup full text indexing for a customer, Somehow it was then discarded since search functionality used by the application started using another indexing technique in the application level. I managed to retain this document that was created and when i read through it , it did seem like a good general guide to Full Text Indexing and its setup.

There are some recommendations by Microsoft to be followed while setting up full text indexing for optimum performance.

· The virtual memory (PAGEFILE.SYS file) setting for your OS should be set to an amount equal to 3 times the amount of physical RAM in the server. If you have a non-dedicated SQL Server then you will want to add the virtual memory needs of these other applications to the amount calculated above.

· The SQL Server MAX SERVER MEMORY setting should be set manually (dynamic memory allocation is turned off) so that enough virtual memory is left for the Full-Text Search service to run. To achieve this, select a MAX SERVER MEMORY setting that once set, leaves enough virtual memory so that the Full-Text Search service is able to access an amount of virtual memory equal to 1.5 times the amount of physical RAM in the server. This will take some trial and error to achieve this setting.

To find out how much virtual memory is being used by SQL Server and the Full-Text Search Service, you can use the Task Manager

Step by Step setup

The setup process is made of the following steps, be it through Enterprise Manager or TSQL code,

• Enable the database to support full-text indexes
• Create a full-text catalog
• Register the appropriate table(s) for full-text processing
• Add each column that participates in a full-text index
• Create a full-text index
• Start a full population of the full-text catalog

SQL Server has a wizard which works along the lines of the steps listed above, the full text indexing wizard. The real geeky satisfaction is however in not using this wizard and doing it by code

Using TSQL to setup full text indexing

-- Enabling Full Text on the Database 
USE DatabaseName
GO 
EXEC sp_fulltext_database  'enable'

-- Create the Catalog (if does not exist) 
USE DatabaseName
GO 
EXEC sp_fulltext_catalog   'MyCatalog','create'

-- Add a Full Text Index on a Table 
USE DatabaseName
GO 
EXEC sp_fulltext_table     'Products', 'create', 'MyCatalog', 'pk_products' 
EXEC sp_fulltext_table     'Categories', 'create', 'MyCatalog', 'pk_categories' 

-- Add a Column to the Full Text Index 

EXEC sp_fulltext_column    'Products', 'ProductName', 'add' 
EXEC sp_fulltext_column    'Categories', 'Description', 'add' 

-- Activate the Index 
EXEC sp_fulltext_table     'Products','activate' 
EXEC sp_fulltext_table     'Categories','activate' 

-- Start Full Population 

EXEC sp_fulltext_catalog   'MyCatalog', 'start_full' 

-- Usage in T-SQL (CONTAINS and FREETEXT Predicates) 
-- Using the Index in T-SQL
USE Northwind 
GO 
SELECT ProductId, ProductName, UnitPrice 
FROM Products 
WHERE CONTAINS( 
                ProductName, ' "sasquatch " OR "stout" ' 
                ) 
GO 
USE Northwind 
GO 
SELECT CategoryName 
FROM Categories 
FREETEXT ( 
           Description, 'sweetest candy bread and dry meat' 
           ) 
GO 

The comments explain the code I guess, this script is useful during deployment. Something to remember about full text indexes are indexes are updated in full and incremental methodology. .

Change Data Capture has by far been my favourite feature everytime i think about SQL Server 2008. The really neat bit is something I missed during my learning process, There are two flavours to capturing changes, the change itself and the data that has changed, this is what distinguishes Change Data Tracking and Change Data Capture in SQL Server 2008

Change data capture provides historical change information for a user table by capturing both the fact that DML changes were made and the actual data that was changed. Changes are captured by using an asynchronous process that reads the transaction log and has a low impact on the system.. When you want to stage data in logical blocks such as a website publishing engine, or a clearing system this feature could prove very useful. This is mainly because of the granularity of the changes that are captured and the nature in which they are stored providing no coupling to the object whose changes are captured.

Change tracking on the other hand captures the rows in a table that changed, but does not capture the data itself. This allows applications to determine rows that have changed only with the latest row data being available in the user tables. Therefore, change tracking is more limited in the historical questions it can answer compared to change data capture. However, for applications that do not require historical information, there is far less storage overhead because of the changed data not being captured. It is the data captured which causes the database to grow. A synchronous tracking mechanism is used to track the changes and has been designed to have minimal overhead to the DML operations.

Either of these features can be used to synchronize applications or there database engines. Synchronization can be implemented in applications in two directions, one-way and two way.

In One-way synchronization applications, such as a client or mid-tier caching application, can be built that use change tracking. e.g, a caching application requires data to be stored in the database and to be cached in other data stores. In this scenario the application must be able to keep the cache up-to-date with any changes that have been made to the database. There are no changes to pass back to the Database Engine.

In two way synchronization, the data in the Database Engine is synchronized with one or more data stores. The data in those stores can be updated and the changes must be synchronized back to the database. A good example of two-way synchronization is an application which is occasionally connected such as a mobile application. In this type of application, a client application queries and updates a local store. When a connection is available between a client and server, the application will synchronize with a server, and changed data flows in both directions. In two-way synchronization applications must be able to detect conflicts. A conflict would occur if the same data was changed in both data stores in the time between synchronization's. With the ability to detect conflicts, an application can make sure that changes are not lost.

So my misinterpretation that change capture and change tracking meant the same proved to be wrong. This really useful feature could be put to use effectively in a scalable manner by choosing the right flavour of change capture which is based on the needs or nature of your application. There is no denial that applications on SQL Server versions prior to 2005 will need a major overhaul if there is an existing mechanism in place, that said it is best not to underestimate the implementation of Change Data Capture for a existing application. However new applications could base there designs around this feature and seek to benefit rapidly.

On this note a quick note to people who use Log shipping, The feature is useful when batch processing of transactions is to be done on a regular frequency, however it is still limited in not being able to identify each transaction individually, there is no denial however that is the best choice for Disaster Recovery options.