Steven Wright Blog

I have been working on a project which made use of the spatial data type geography within SQL Server 2008. An issue that I had was how to load the geography data from a KML file into SQL Server 2008. Currently there is no out of the box tools to do this. There is a 3 rd party tool, Safe FME, which offer either their own tool or components which extend integration services. This was overkill for my issues as I only had to do it once. So I wrote a console application which parses the KML file to extract the point data convert it to a SqlGeography type and store it in the database. To use the SqlGeography C# type you need to add reference to the following name space: Microsoft.SqlServer.Types. This can be found in the following dll: Microsoft.SqlServer.Types.dll Then use the following code to create the c# sqlgeography type: 1: // use SqlGeographyBuilder to help create the SqlGeography type 2: SqlGeographyBuilder geographyBuilder = new SqlGeographyBuilder(); 3: s...

I am currently working on a project which is automating a business intelligence process base upon images and image recognition. The process is as follows: Take a photography Put the photography through the image recognition software and record the recognition data. Process the recognition data into meaningful business metrics Produce a report on metrics The part of the process, from above, that I am helping with is processing the recognition data (the hit data) into meaningful business data. This process simply takes the hit data (which is a point), then creates some square blocks, which I use to group the hits data and perform some metric operations. The metrics currently use data about the area and the density of hits within the area. To help process this data I decided to make use of the SQL Server 2008 spatial type: Geometry. Firstly I would like to point out that I didn’t have to use the geometry type. As I am currently dealing with square areas, I can group ...

As I have mention in a previous blog entry I’ve been heavily involved in the Scrum for Team System process template since the start of version 2 and have written the majority of the reports. I have faced, and still do, some challenges while doing this. Some of them have been around how to display the data within reporting services 2005. Now with the release of Team Foundation Server 2008 Service Pack 1, release in August, this enables Team Foundation Server 2008 to be used on a SQL Server 2008 environment. This will make some of reporting challenges I faced with reporting services 2005 disappear. This will due to major changes that been made to reporting services 2008 like Tablix control and wider Dundas chart controls. Within this release we have made a patch which will update some of the reports for reporting services 2008. This to fix some of the reporting services 2005 Patterns and Recipes which became visible. I am currently working looking at how Scrum for Team System can mak...

As I have mention in another blog posts; I’ve been heavily involved in the Scrum for Team System process template since the start of version 2 and to coincide with the release of version 2.2; I would like bring your attention to a new tool, which I help to developed, that has been added to this release. I started creating this tool due to some feedback we got from our beta users for “ TaskBoard for Team system ” tool. The request was to add a demonstration mode into the application which would show things like swimming lane-view and the following reports: Sprint burndown chart; Sprint cumulative flow as these can be view within the application. The reason for the request was create the sense of: "Look guys, this is what we are working on, and this is how we are doing", throughout the day, not only during the scrum meetings. This also happen a lot within our projects which they do something similar as well. Another reason for the tool to separate from the Task Board applic...

Continuing from my previous posted . I’d like to give an overview to the new engineering practices reports included in the Release 2.2. Builds Across a user selected time period (defaulting to the current sprint), this report shows the total builds per day broken down by status. Build Static Analysis and Compile This displays the number of Errors and Warnings either compile or static analysis the last N number of builds. Build Unit Tests Shows the total number of units test run from the last N number of builds. The total is broken down by number status of unit tests for each build. Last Build Unit Test Results This report displays the list of each test that was run for the last build and shows the result of that build. If the unit test failed it will also display the fail message as well. The last build is taken to be the last build within the data warehouse. Code Coverage This report shows the code coverage of and the total of c...

To coincide with the release of version 2.2 of Scrum for Team System, I’d like to bring your attention to the wide range of new reports included in this release. I’ve been heavily involved in the Scrum for Team System process template since the start of version 2 and have written the majority of the new reports and tweaked some of the old ones to improve performance by moving some of the querying to the TFS cube, as well as reflecting user feedback. One such fix, which can be found in release, was to the burn down report which would show a misleading (but accurate) trend line if the task data wasn’t updated on the very first day of the sprint. (This could also be fixed by making your Scrum Master work harder, but I don’t have any control over that so I decided to tweak the report instead). Most of the new reports in this release are focussed on engineering practices, which I will cover another blog post; however there is one new report specifically targeted for Scrum called the vel...

In my other blogs entries I mention that I have been looking into building a Team Foundation Server Data Warehouse Adapter.   After I got my initial proof of concept version working, I started to extend it to get a list of available builds from TFS and then import the output of Source Monitor – a popular free code metrics tool. Now I must state that I am not a natural .NET coder. My normal day-to-day work is based around the SQL Server technology stack. I do have some .NET coding skills but generally just enough for what is need in and around SQL Server. So I asked my colleague, Howard van Rooijen who is one of our top .NET coders, to have a look at my code and give me some hints. This provide me with a great opportunity to learn from Howard about some more advance Design Patterns,  Visual Studio tips and tricks , and how to effectively use some tools I’ve not used before to help me write better code. The first thing Howard did was install the following on my machine: ...

As mentioned in a previous blog I would like to explain some of the steps I took to get my custom data warehouse adapter to work.  I am going to start from the beginning just so that I have an easy starting point.  The code I show here was based upon my POC and written in C#. 1. Create a new C# Class Library project in Visual Studio. Then add references at least to the following assemblies: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.dll, Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll, Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll, Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Warehouse.dll and System.Web. As I need to connect to the build server I added Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Common.dll and Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.dll 2. Then specify the use of the IWarehouseAdapter interface. 3. Implement IWarehouseAdapter.RequestStop which only sets a stop flag to true which can then be tested by the other methods periodically. 4. Implement the IWarehouseAdapter.Initialize. This method this where I need to store objects tha...

I have been investigating a way of adding more metrics about our builds into the Team Foundation Server 2008 warehouse.  This would then allow us to measure quality of our code over time by other metrics than the just method offered by the Team Foundation Server 2008. So my goal was to create a new fact table and link this to build dimension.  The reason for building a fact table was the metrics as I would want to do some aggregation against them; this would mean I need to treat them as measures and measures only live in a fact table.  I also wanted a separate fact table so my adapter doesn’t impact the standard TFS adapters.  As my facts would be generated by builds it would mean that facts would link to the build which why I used the build dimension.  Also I found out later I had to also include the Team Project dimension as well. I managed to find some useful links that helped me write my adapter: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb130342.aspx -...

I have been working on a POC using SQL Server 2008 and Google Maps.  The POC was to use Geo Spatial technology to illustrate our Geo Spatial data easily.   I will talk about this in more detail in another blog post as I would like talk about a problem I faced while creating this POC.  The problem I faced was how could I get my Geo Spatial data, which was stored within SQL Server 2008 using the new geography data type, into  "static" HTML? So I thought that SQL Server HTTP Endpoints for SQL would be great thing to use to solve this problem.   As all I was after was xml document to stream over HTTP.   There was no business logic needed so all the .Net would be is just another layer acting as go between.  Also I didn’t what to waste time on what code which wouldn’t have added any value. So I created my stored procedure to produce an XML document that I found usable by using the For XML Path.  Then I started to look at h...