Programmatically posting data to a traditional ASP page is an extremely useful and well-known technique. However, I recently discovered that posting data to an ASP .NET Web application from another program is not well understood and requires several new programming tricks. In this article I'll show you how to use the HttpWebRequest class and the ASP .NET ViewState mechanism to programmatically send form data to an ASP .NET Web application and then capture the response. This will provide you with a powerful new way to write utility programs for your Web applications. (Note: This article assumes you are familiar with creating ASP .NET Web applications, using classes in the .NET Framework, and have intermediate familiarity with the C# language.) The best way to demonstrate what we will accomplish is with two screenshots. Figure 1 shows a simple ASP .NET Web applicatio... (more)

Application Performance Management Done Right

What is Application Performance Management (APM)? Like a lot of good questions, it depends on your business needs.  What is the goal of an ideal APM?  Does it mean 99.999% availability?  Perhaps it is a favorable overall end user experience when using the application but, as compared to what? My point is that Application Performance Management / Monitoring means different things to different businesses and it can even depend on the application involved. What is the Goal of APM “Begin with the goal in mind.” I wish I could take credit for that quote.  What is the goal of the APM? Have you listed out the objectives you hope to obtain from your APM strategy?  This approach will help your team ensure satisfaction with the final solution chosen.  Here are some examples. Minimum of 99.999% availability with lower Mean Time To Know (MTTK) and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) Less ... (more)

Adaptivity “Platinum Plus Sponsor” of Cloud Expo

SYS-CON Events announced today that Adaptivity, the IT transformation company, has been named "Platinum Plus Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 5th International Cloud Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. Adaptivity's CEO Tony Bishop (http://tonybishop.ulitzer.com) will be offering major thought leadership on Day Two of the 3-day event in a Morning Keynote. Read Exclusive Cloud Computing Journal Q&A; with Tony Bishop here. Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term "cloud computing" was coined. That same year, the first Cloud Expo took place in New York City with 450 delegates. Next April, Cloud Expo is returning to New York City with more than 5,000 delegates and over 100 sponsors and exhibitors. The three-day event will attract more than 5,000 delegates from 48 co... (more)

Legendary Citizen Journalist Ron Ross Becomes Ulitzer Author

Dr. Ron Ross joined today Ulitzer as a citizen journalist columnist and blogger. His first Ulitzer column "Citizen Journalists are Passionate about Freedom of the Press" was publish under Ulitzer's Citizen Journalism topic. Ron Ross' first job was as a newspaper delivery boy for the Omaha World Herald in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He earned his first byline front-page story as a writer for his high school newspaper. While in high school, he served as a Citizen Journalist by reporting all of his high school sports scores to a local radio station. After high school, he entered college and graduated from Nebraska Christian College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1965. He pastored church in Kansas, and then took his wife and two children to Zambia (in central Africa) for seven years of in-service to his denomination as a missionary. Upon return to the United States he pasto... (more)

Microsoft Named “Gold Sponsor” of Cloud Expo 2010 April 19-21 Javits Center

Microsoft Session at Cloud Expo SYS-CON Events announced today that Microsoft has been named "Gold Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 5th International (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. Register Today and Save $800 ! Explore Sponsorship Opportunities ! Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event since 2007, and is held five times a year, in New York City, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Microsoft cloud services mean freedom for businesses. The freedom to access the technology you want, where and when you want it. The freedom to take advantage of the latest technology as a capital expense, or an operational one. The freedom to focus on running your business - not running IT systems. Microsoft cloud services are Microsoft by extension: Giving you the ability to m... (more)

Best Practices for Integrating Different Big Data Sources

Choosing when to adopt a data warehouse largely depends on how easily and effectively your organization can manage multiple data sources. When you do decide to combine all data sources into one central location, the decisions become more uniform. You can, of course, approach the integration of all data sources into a data warehouse in your own way, but if you’re not careful, you could create more problems than you solve. To extract your data and load it into the new data warehouse, there are some basic must-follow rules that help avoid problems down the road. This process is often abbreviated to ETL, or Extract, Transform, Load. Let’s take a look at the steps and examine the best practices for each. Extraction There are quite a few things that could go wrong during the extraction process. This is when you’ll copy all the data from every data source in your company,... (more)

Microsoft "Deeply Saddened," Pledges $1M In Cash and Encourages Giving at MSN.com

'Every one of us at Microsoft is deeply saddened by the destruction of property and personal lives in the wake of Hurricane Katrina,' says a statement on the Microsoft web site, 'and our hearts go out to the hundreds of thousands of people who have been affected by the storm and its aftermath.' As reported earlier at SYS-CON.com, Microsoft has pledged $1 million in cash to relief organizations, including the American Red Cross. Microsoft and its employees are contributing to the relief efforts in a variety of additional ways. Its business teams are working with local and state governments, businesses, and educational institutions to help them repair their information technology systems as quickly as possible; the company is matching employee donations to nonprofit organizations; three of Microsoft's senior technologists have been deployed to Red Cross operations in ... (more)

.NET News: Microsoft Announces Plans for July 2008 Transition for Bill Gates

Microsoft has announced that effective July 2008 Bill Gates, Chairman, will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The company announced a two-year transition process to ensure that there is a smooth and orderly transfer of Gates’ daily responsibilities, and said that after July 2008 Gates would continue to serve as the company’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects. The company announced that Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie will immediately assume the title of chief software architect and begin working side by side with Gates on all technical architecture and product oversight responsibilities, to ensure a smooth transition. Similarly, Chief Technical Officer Craig Mundie will immediately take the new title of chief research an... (more)

Mary Jo Foley Thinks Leopard is a Photocopy of Vista - Film at 11

Kevin Hoffman's Blog Let's take a look at Mary's points one by one, shall we? New desktop. I'm not sure why she thinks this looks like Aero... Vista's sidebar doesn't do nearly the amount of stuff that Leopard's dock does. The sidebar is not a place for maintaining current tasks and open documents... in short, Vista's sidebar has NOTHING to do with Leopard's dock - they serve two different purposes. Coverflow looks identical to Flip3d. Obviously Mary Jo Foley doesn't spend too much time looking at user interfaces. With Flip 3D, I can see one item clearly, and all the rest are obscured. With Cover Flow, I can see one item clearly, and many nearby items clearly, with a hint at what is on the outskirts. One is a really painful UI paradigm (Flip 3d) and one is a really enabling UI paradigm (Cover Flow). Thumbnail preview capability in Vista is NOT interactive. With Quickl... (more)

Running a production site on the Amazon EC2 / SDB / S3 services stack

Over the past few months or so I’ve been working on rewriting my web application engine to go from running on a virtual dedicated server at a hosting company to running an instance on Amazon EC2 instance. Additionally, I decided to take a risk on Amazon SDB and despite its many flaws, eschew MySQL completely and utterly. One thing I like a lot about Amazon’s service stack is that it forces you to think about scalability problems right up front. If you design with MySQL on a VPS, it’s easy to get into using a lot of the features that don’t scale – so you make a mess for yourself down the road. There were several challenges to running a site completely on Amazon’s stack: Amazon has a large distance between their small nodes and the next size up node. – The small nodes are pretty weak by themselves, you wouldn’t want to base a website on a single node by itself. This ... (more)

How to Create Your Own Bootable ESXi USB Stick

  Arnold Veenema a colleague of mine wrote an interesting item on his website about how to create your own bootable USB stick with ESXi (Previous called ESX 3i) using the download of the ESXi installable ISO-image. In twelve easy steps you will be able to use your own USB stick with ESXi! Take a look at it here: http://www.veenema.net/index.php?Virtualization:HOW_TO_Create_your_own_bootable_ESX_3i_usb_stick   Technorati Tags: VMware, ESXi, USB, HOWTO ... (more)