Bytes and Bites of Internet
Gaurang
First thing I would like to write is a question .... Why the hack people write their bio in 3rd person ? I am Gaurang. I work as DBA / DEV for local company in CT. When I am not working, I am either reading other blogs n news OR "researching" / "experimenting" about things that I can do at home / at work OR tinkering with some new hardware/software OR playing games on my desktop. If you ever wanted to contact me, I can be reached by meATgaurangpatel.net
Homepage: http://gaurangpatel.net
Posts by Gaurang
Prototyping using Expression Blend, Sketchflow – Part I
Jun 15th
Prototyping in terms of software development can be seen as a process of modeling concept of a software with some interaction. In some cases it could be totally different than final product but in general it is really helpful process because it gives developers / product owners better idea about what to expect from product and what can be improved. There is another term commonly used among web developers called Wireframing. It is same as software prototyping but it is specifically used for web sites.
As both of these things are very visual they give better idea about product and they are usually worked/reworked to improve final product. There are many many tools available for out of which Axure, Balsamiq and Expression Blend (which is part of Expression Studio Visual Studio 2012) are my favorite.
While back I was involved in a project where I was required to prepare initial concept of application design … it was very early stage of application designing and application itself was more of an idea than actual product. So I was required to create something very basic which gives an idea to developers and product owner how application could look like and how it will be interacted etc … as I had played with Expression Blend before so I ended up using it for my sample prototyping project.
So in this post I probably give basic introduction to the tool of trade and in another post I will actually show to we can use Expression Blend addin Sketchflow to prepare prototype applications in Silverlight or WPF. I am using expression blend show the tool but it has met end of lifecycle and MSFT has integrated it into Visual Studio 2012 but usability vise you probably will not see any difference at all. I personally still prefer to use Expression Blend over Visual Studio because it loads faster and is less resource hungry 
. If you look at screenshots below you will notice that both Blend for VS 2012 and Expression Blend 4 looks almost same.
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Export–Import Windows Firewall Setting using PowerShell
Jun 1st
Something I really hate is to do same thing again and again manually … and so I always try to automate that task using scripting … weather it is simple Batch Script … VB Script … Bash .. or my new favorite PowerShell 
. What I really like about PowerShell is, it exposes whole .NET stack to you and you can do just about anything you can do in any .NET application … but with lot simplicity (should I add … without need to build whole project !)
From past few months I am beginning to get involved in more system preparation tasks for our production and one of the requirement is to configure Windows Firewall to have some rules for our application. And we have to repeat this process on any machine that goes into production. At one point I realized that if you keep doing something repetitively chances are you will make mistake at some point and you will not notice it until you run into some issue and you back trace your steps !!
Then I found that all of these machines have same configuration in them both hardware wise and software wise … and they will also have same firewall exceptions. So it would be nice if I can seamlessly import – export firewall rules from one machine to another machine. Actually this can be done via UI from Windows Firewall with Advance Security (which can be reached by opening up Windows Firewall in control panel and then clicking on “Advanced Settings”). And there you should see two options, Import Policy and Export Policy. And those options does what they say … import / export firewall policy.
Send emails using Database Mail … from SQL Server
May 19th
Back in Pre SQL Server 2005 editions of SQL Server there was nice feature called SQL Mail which basically allowed users to send email from within database server. But that system has many dependencies and major one was requirement of Microsoft Exchange… thus usage was severely limited to enterprise customers who has resources to setup such a system. When MSFT released SQL Server 2005 they introduced new feature called Database Mail which replaced SQL Mail … and they removed all kind of external dependencies. Now all you had to do was to provide just SMTP server and you are all set !!
I always thought that I have blogged about process to setup Database mail but it appears that I never did so today I am going to write about step-by-step process to setup / configure database mail. Since we have moved on from 2005 to 2008 to 2008R2 to 2012 …. I am going to use SQL Server 2012 edition but process remains same for previous editions too.
Database Mail can be found under “Management” group in SQL Server Management Studio. To configure Database Mail right click on it and select “Configure Database Mail” which will start configuration wizard. It will show bunch of options like “Set up Database Mail”, “Manage”, “Change system parameters”. Since we have not setup this before we are going to select first option, “Setup Database Mail by performing following tasks”. And with that selected click next.
Code Camp 6 this weekend
May 12th
Ok, just like every year this year too we have code camp organized by CT .NET user group. If you don’t know what these events are then in one line … think of it as a one day training on different subjects (mostly related to .NET) by subject experts all around CT and near by states 
… I have been going to this camp for past 4 years … and they usually have really great range of subjects.
On a side note, I think I am going to skip this year… because I really don’t find that “interesting” presentation topics … even some are already presented in other events is SQL Saturday or user group meetings …
You can get more details about this event from event website, Code Camp 6
And this time it is going to be held at Saturday, May 18th.
Location is:
New Horizons Learning Center,
340 West Newberry Rd,
Bloomfield, CT 06002 USA
Update: (5/17/13) It looks like that event is sold out !!
Setting up Domain Controller in Virtual System … Part II
May 11th
So after setting up Domain Controller (DC) next step is to configure workstations and add them into newly created Domain. It is actually not that difficult part but during my early trials I spent quite a bit time to make these workstations connect to DC. Because even though they were part of same network they were not able to “see” DC because they had different DNS and it took me while to figure that out.
Anyways, first step is to setup fixed IP of workstation. And make sure that in it’s DNS, use IP of DC.
Setting up Domain Controller in Virtual System … Part I
Apr 28th
If you are like me, who like to “experiment” with random software downloaded from Source Forge, CodePlex or anything alike … on top of working on bunch of side projects in different work environments … and you have a “bug” in your mind which make you learn anything and everything .. then I am sure that you have always craved to have a domain controller of your own .. I mean imagine about trying different networking theories to server-client application development to database management … 
But biggest issue with having personal Domain Controller is you need separate hardware which you can use as a domain controller and it has to be running all the time which could be biggest constraint for many follow IT Professionals and if you are cheapskate like me then you probably have very nice machine but just 1 or 2 machines (not talking about puny laptops … but bigass desktops)… and you want to get as much juice as you can get from that beast (!!) . But if you are not that serious then you can actually use one virtual machine to be as Domain Controller and many other virtual machines as your toys. And in this post I am going to show step by step how to do that ….
To my surprise there are not many “how to” available about setting up domain controller using virtual machines .. hack they don’t have much posts about setting up DC with real hardware !! So it took me real long .. and many tries to have some proper machine to have working domain controller (some were due to unforeseen side effect of using virtual machine). Mainly because this process is not as straight forward as it seems (or that’s what networking guys makes you think 
)… Okey enough babbling … now the process ….
First you need a good clean virtual machine with new SIDs. Alternatively you can create your own clean image using SYSPREP (built into Windows). I can’t stress enough that if you have an existing image of virtual machine make sure that you use this SYSPREP to prepare nice clean image and use THAT image to setup DC otherwise you will run into weird issues and you will spend hours scratching your ….. head 
. I am using evaluation edition Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, because later on I also want to setup 2 node cluster but that will take some time 
for now just stick with current task at hand … setting up virtual Domain Controller.
If the image is created using SYSPREP then once booted, it will do some installation and configuration of OS.
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No Google Store update for my Nexus 7
Apr 14th
Apparently there is update for Google store. And now it has very sleek ‘n sexy UI. I have got this update few days back in my Galaxy Nexus … but it looks like that for some odd reasons my Nexus 7 haven’t received this update till now 
!! Actually there are APKs available for download for store but I am bit of hesitant of install anything from not known resource. I guess I will wait (while someone replies to my question at XDA) and see what happens …
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Or may be I will finally decide to install Cyanogenmod on my Nexus 7 just like my Galaxy Nexus 