“Dryad” by Microsoft Research

Dryad is a Microsoft Research project – they refer to it as its own “infrastructure” actually – that allows programmers to target hugely-clustered platforms without having to change anything about the way in which they author their software.  In their introductory article explaining the project, they cite advantages such as executing code on thousands of machines across and enterprise or even entire datacenter. 

Here’s their summary of the project’s objectives:

Dryad is an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs. A Dryad programmer can use thousands of machines, each of them with multiple processors or cores, without knowing anything about concurrent programming.

I would imagine the supercomputers downstairs are probably off limits to us on the Apps team.  But even in much smaller (by comparison) environments, a cluster of n number of computers could be leveraged to run code across a clustered environment, and that clustering and parallelism would be transparent to us as developers. 

In the article, I found it particularly interesting that they mention Dryad being used with familiar technologies such as SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services), and LINQ. 

You can check out the full article here:

http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/Dryad/

Enabling Remote Errors in SQL Reporting Services

Recently working with reporting services, I ran into this error:

“For more information about this error, navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors.”

The scenario is that reporting services lives on a different box than the SharePoint installation.  The fix is to simply set a flag in a configuration table in the Reporting Services database on the report server.  Pull up a new query in SQL Server Management Studio and run the following UPDATE statement and you should be good to go! 

USE ReportServer
GO

update configurationinfo
set value = 'True'
where name = 'EnableRemoteErrors'
GO

Performance Update Roll-Up for WSS 3.0

Microsoft dropped an Infrastructure Update today (7/15/2008) that addresses some key performance-related aspects of WSS 3.0.

According to the post:

Overview

The Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) includes the latest performance updates and fixes for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
Key updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 include:

• Platform performance improvements and fixes.
• Several backup and restore fixes.
• Several core Workflow fixes.

It is strongly recommended that you install this update.

I have installed it on my DEV environment with no issue.  To be safe, it wouldn’t hurt to shut down your VPC, make a backup, then apply the update.  The link is here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=256ce3c3-6a42-4953-8e1b-e0bf27fd465b&DisplayLang=en

Determine if Your Web Part is in Design Mode

Credit for this goes to David Bond and Rick Phillips, I’m just posting because David mentioned it and I think it’s a helpful tip.  This is being used in PTS web part projects as well as the new RHACS solution.  I think David made a great point in the meeting Tuesday by stating if you’re in design mode, there’s probably no reason you need to be pinging a database or web service, etc.

Here’s the code:

WebPartManager wpm = WebPartManager.GetCurrentWebPartManager(this.Page);
webPartIsInDesignMode = wpm.DisplayMode.AllowPageDesign;