I thought I had the comment spam problem cured.  I thought wrong.

So no more comments.  Wanna comment: get your own blog, put your comment there and link to my post.  It will create a trackback that will show up over here.

Or hit me on my twitter feed – jakew there as well.

The past 3 months have been a freaking grinder.  I’m finishing up another CRM integration project right now and am just now getting to a point where I can see some day light again.

The really cool part: I know CRM’s API’s really well.  I’ve been writing plugins, workflows, workflow actions, WCF web-services.  I’ve been doing jQuery and getting fairly good with the whole AJAX thing.  Heck, I even get CSS sort of. 

Probably to coolest thing though is that I have a new code smith template nearly done.  This template when I finish it (there isn’t a lot left) basically creates a software factory that produces the integration service I built.  All you have to do is point it at your CRM server’s metadata service, fill in a few options, pick the entities you need to integrate with and the template generates a visual studio project with the framework for you to work with.  The CRM Dynamic Entity gets wrapped inside an entity that maps everything out.  Lookups are either the instance of the entity or collections of entities depending upon the lookup type.  Entity factories that load your entities based on whatever criteria you specify.  With this framework in place writing plug-ins or WF activities is a snap.

I’m almost done and should have time to get it finished starting next week.

I recently started hanging out on StackOverflow where I found a great question: Dealing with large number of text strings. My answer to the question is here. I’ve dealt with this type of problem in the past: A program that collects a huge pile of data, does some processing to the data and then stuffs the results in a database. In some ways you could solve the stuffing into the database using an ETL tool like SSIS. However, that would require dumping out a file and then firing up the SSIS package. Not hard, but I don’t like working that way.

The solution in my opinion is to use ADO.NET’s SQLBulkCopy. The only problem is that SQLBulkCopy wants you to setup a data source that closely matches the destination for the data. Not really a big deal but it does take a little work. A further issue is dealing with referential integrity. If the destination table has foreign keys that are requires you’ll need to fill in values for them.

To demonstrate this I used the Adventure Works database and created 2 programs to load up the products table. The first program creates as many products you want to test with and saves them to a CSV file. The second program reads the CSV file, sets up a DataTable and then loads it using SqlBulkCopy. To see how fast it is, the time is taken before and after the bulk copy.

You can grab the code here

Creating the data

Creating the data file isn’t a big deal. The only problem was picking out what fields I’d provide. The rest is just making all of the products.

The file layout

To create the file layout I first looked at the definition for the Product table in Adventure works to see what fields absolutely had to be provided. A few of the required fields could be calculated on the file (date modified for instance), others would just be hard coded to whatever value I chose. This is just a demo after all.

The layout I arrived at is:

1. Name
2. ProductNumber
3. Color
4. Category
5. Cost
6. Listprice
7. Size
8. Sellstartdate

As a matter of convention I went ahead and added the column names to the file header so somebody that picks up the file might have a chance of figuring out what I’ve done.

Creating the file

With the file layout decided on all I have to do is dump everything to a file:

       private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            int numberOfItems = 0;
            string fileName = "";
            int.TryParse(txtProductsCount.Text, out numberOfItems);
            if(0 == numberOfItems)
            {
                return;
            }
            SaveFileDialog sfd = new SaveFileDialog();
            if(true == sfd.ShowDialog())
            {
                fileName = sfd.FileName;                
            }
            else
            {
                return;
            }

            labelStatus.Content = "Status:processing";
            this.Cursor = Cursors.Wait;
            if (true == File.Exists(sfd.FileName))
            {
                File.Delete(sfd.FileName);
            }
            StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(sfd.FileName);

            writer.WriteLine("Name,ProductNumber,Color,category,cost,listprice,size,sellstartdate");
            for(int counter = 0; counter < numberOfItems; counter++)
            {
                
                writer.WriteLine(string.Format("Name{0},Tst{1},Red,Brakes,1,2,sm,1.0,{2}"
                    ,counter, DateTime.Now.ToString("hhmmss")
                    ,DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd")));
            }
            writer.Close();
            labelStatus.Content = "Status:idle";
            this.Cursor = Cursors.Arrow;
        }

Nothing terribly exciting here, but it does generate the test data I want.

Loading the data

The loader itself reads the CSV file and uses the data to create rows in a DataTable. This program is a little more interesting. The first problem is to setup a DataTable that matches the destination. Then you have to load the data and do any adjustments (transforms) to make sure it will load in to the table. Finally you use SQLBulkCopy to move the data in the table to the server.

Setting up the DataTable

SqlBulkCopy can use other data sources as long as they provide an IDataReader interface, but why go through the trouble when DataTable already does what you need? All you have to do is setup your DataTable to match the destination and then fill it up. To setup my DataTable I created a method to create columns for me:

        private static DataColumn GetColumn (string columnType, string columnName)
        {
            DataColumn newColumn = new DataColumn();
            newColumn.DataType = System.Type.GetType(columnType);
            newColumn.ColumnName = columnName;

            return newColumn;
        }

This function just creates a DataColumn using the provided type string and column name. This column is then added to the DataTable:

        private static DataTable CreateTable()
        {
            DataTable newProducts = new DataTable("Products");

            // Add the column objects to the table.                                              col   file  
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.Int32", "ProductID"));                    //0     
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.String", "Name"));                        //1     0
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.String","ProductNumber"));                //2     1
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.String","Color"));                        //3     2
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.Decimal","StandardCost"));                //4     4
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.Decimal","ListPrice"));                   //5     5
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.String","Size"));                         //6     6
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.Decimal","Weight"));                      //7
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.Int32", "ProductCategoryID"));            //8     3
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.Int32", "ProductModelID"));               //9
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.DateTime", "SellStartDate"));             //10    7
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.DateTime", "SellEndDate"));               //11
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.DateTime", "DiscontinuedDate"));          //12
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.Byte[]", "ThumbNailPhoto"));              //13
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.String", "ThumbnailPhotoFileName"));      //14
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.Guid", "rowguid"));                       //15
            newProducts.Columns.Add(GetColumn("System.DateTime", "ModifiedDate"));              //16

            return newProducts;
        }

The DataTable setup is really pretty easy. This matches up the columns and I added columns to help make it easier for me to remember which column in the file goes where in the DataTable.

Transforming the Data

Before actually loading the file I need to have a way to look up the product categories. For this I made a quick EntityFramework model of the AdventureWorks database and then wrote a method to lookup ProductCategories by name:

        private int GetCateogryByName(string categoryName)
        {
            ProductCategory category = (from cat in Categories
                                        where cat.Name == categoryName
                                        select cat).FirstOrDefault<ProductCategory>();
            if(null == category)
            {
                return -1;
            }

            return category.ProductCategoryID;
        }

This method just uses a simple LINQ statement to find a category whose name matches the one provided and then returns the ProductCateogryID. With all of this in place we can now load the file in to the DataTable:

        private int LoadFile(string fileName, DataTable productTable)
        {
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(fileName);

            try
            {
                bool done = false;
                int count = 0;
                reader.ReadLine(); //get rid of the header
                while (!done)
                {
                    string row = reader.ReadLine();
                    if (true == string.IsNullOrEmpty(row))
                    {
                        done = true;
                        break;
                    }
                    DataRow product = productTable.NewRow();
                    GetDataRow(row, product);
                    productTable.Rows.Add(product);
                    count++;
                }
                reader.Close();
                return count;
            }
            catch (Exception exc)
            {
                reader.Close();
                throw;
            }
        }

This has been a million times so it isn’t really worth talking about. Now that we have the data loaded we just call SqlBulkCopy:

        private void BulkLoadProducts()
        {
            SqlConnection connection = GetConnection();
            connection.Open();
            
            SqlCommand countCommand = new SqlCommand("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM SalesLT.Product", connection);
            long count = (int) countCommand.ExecuteScalar();
            listBox1.Items.Add("product count before:" + count.ToString());
            SqlBulkCopy bulkCopy = new SqlBulkCopy(connection);
            bulkCopy.DestinationTableName = "SalesLT.Product";
            DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
            bulkCopy.WriteToServer(ProductTable);
            DateTime end = DateTime.Now;
            TimeSpan diff = end.Subtract(start);
            connection.Close();
            listBox1.Items.Add(string.Format("took {0}ms", diff.Milliseconds));
        }

The magic really takes two three lines: first, create the SqlBulkCopy instance. Second tell it what table it will be loading. Third, call WriteToServer passing in the data. The other stuff in the method is just there to provide us some timing information. On my laptop running everything I’m able to load 1200 rows in about a third of a second. Running on a real server I’d imagine you’d be able to load data even faster.

SqlBulkCopy

For most of us we won’t be using SqlBulkCopy everyday. But on the rare occasions where you need to blast a ton of data in to a database this is a handy object to have around. You can read the MSDN docs here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.sqlclient.sqlbulkcopy.aspx). And David Hayden also has a good write up on SqlBulkCopy here (http://davidhayden.com/blog/dave/archive/2006/03/08/2877.aspx).

I hope you this helps you. Please let me know what you think or if you know of any better alternatives for this situation.

bit slow getting these out.  Day 2 was great.  Service bus rocks and the opportunities that the cloud & Azure offer are really exciting.  Unfortunately by the end of the day I had 0 energy left and today was insanely busy so this took longer to get out than I expected.  Hope you enjoy it.  By the way: all of the materials for the boot camp are available here.  Slide decks, Lab materials.

Thanks to Tracy Bazzell for leading the class.  Great job!

Building a business on Azure

The path:

· Train your people (duh)

· Learn the sales strategies

· Determine your offerings

· Understand how Azure bills

Know Azure (duh) –

· Azure bootcamp

· Development time – MSDN

Where can Azure overcome project challenges? (IT as an adoption blocker) Overcome the challenges: prototypes, startups, leverage no startup costs, cost is below managers spending limit

Nice azure features:

· Reduce project costs

· Improve time to delivery

· New capabilities

Where do the reduced costs come from? Cutting out the need to deploy infrastructure. This can be as much as 25% of a project’s total budget and time.

Determine your offering

Not all things to all people

Understand Billing

· Learn to use the TCO calculator

· Focus on managing services, not servers

· Customers want to shift CapEx -> OpEx

· Low risk, can’t guess wrong. Just delete the stuff and move on.

· Partners receive special pricing

Partner Opportunity

· You get a percentage of the customer’s ongoing monthly charges (18% for year 1, 6% thereafter)

· You aren’t in middle of the billing

· You add value on top of BPOS (MOSS customization, bespoke application developer, etc)

More benefits

· Internal use: 250 seats of BPOS for the first year free of charge, sell 2 deals w/ at least 25 seats

· Get up to 20 demo accounts

· CRM - $19/mo per seat up to 100 users

Basic Worker Roles

Worker role – focuses on backend process. No inbound processes. Basically a windows 2008 hyper V instance to do work. Normal use:

· Batch processing

· Queue processing

· Hosting non HTTP WCF services

· Number crunching

Local storage

· volatile storage. Gets wiped when the instance restarts or moves between servers.

· Can allocate up to 20Gb but cannot be resized.

Local resources are not the same as the XDrive thing you can mount to an instance. Local storage basically give you the ability to work with temp files. First you configure the storage item:

<LocalResources>

<LocalStorage name="Storage1" cleanOnRoleRecycle="false" sizeInMB="5" />

</LocalResources>

Keep in mind that once you’ve hit 5mb in Storage1 you are done. It will not grow. However, don’t go off setting it to 20Gb because you’re going to pay for it. Figure out how much room you really need and go with that. To work with the file you’ll do the following:

LocalResource storage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("Storage1");

string filePath = Path.Combine(storage.RootPath, "tempfile.txt");

StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(filePath);

writer.Write("test data");

writer.Close();

Pretty easy stuff. Just keep in mind that when your process recycles the file will be gone, if the app fabric decides to move your service the file will be gone. Simply put: do not expect that file to be there. Although you might want to check first. :*)

Endpoints for Worker processes

Exposes WCF services to the internet. These end points get enrolled with the Azure load balancer. You can use HTTP, HTTPS and TCP and open as many as you like. You can also open internal WCF endpoints using other protocols. The internal endpoints do not get enrolled with the load balancer.

You must configure the end points in your service’s configuration file. You cannot dynamically open up new end points.

The WCF end points are just WCF so you need to know how to program against WCF’s API.

The sample application includes a chat application that runs in a worker role. The azure specific stuff is pretty easy:

Threads in Workers

You can create threads inside your worker just like normal, however: be careful. AppFabric will allow many instances of your worker to be up and running so you need to write good threadsafe code and think about parallelism. Consider using the parallel extension for .NET.

Given the right problem though, breaking crypto keys for instance, Azure could kick some serious ass.

Other things workers can do

· PHP on Azure

· External Processes (run EXEs)

· Call Native Libraries (call unsafe code)

Diagnostics and Service Management

· Azure will log all the usual stuff (trace, iis logs, perf counters, event log, crash dump, files), but you have to configure it.

· The default vs project already has the basic diagnostic stuff (trace) configured.

· You need a storage account to put the data in. trace goes to a table, iis logs to a blob, events to a table)

· Have to start it up (DiagnosticMonitor.Start("DiagnosticsConnectionString");)

· You can change your configuration for diagnostic on the fly. The change only affects the instance and will go away when the instance gets restarted.

· To trace stuff just call Trace.Information like you would Trace.WriteLine

Service management API

Can do almost everything the Azure portal does

Excludes:

· No access to billing or utilization data

· Azure subscriptions

· Create Storage or compute service accounts

· Deploy management certificates

API Auth uses an x509 certificate

API is built on rest

Can use PowerShell to talk to the API

Csmanage is a command line tool to push packages to Azure

Can swap IP addresses to swap staging and production very quickly

In place upgrades

You can create upgrade domains and azure will manage the process of shutting down the services in each domain, upgrading them and then restarting them.

Autoscaling

Azure does not autoscale

Azure does give you tools to help determine how to scale. Recommend against completely automating the scaling of your service. You don’t want to spin up tons of instances just because the GoogleBot comes a calling.

SQL Azure

It’s mostly just SQL server in the cloud. You talk to it via ADO.NET (actually anything that speaks TDS can use it). So your EntityFramework and NHibernate stuff will still work.

· Database can go up to 10Gb (50Gb in June). You pay for the storage. Clarification you can have 1Gb or 10Gb (apparently they don’t grow the db

· Can hook up with Enterprise Manager 2008R2

· Use SQL Auth so protect that password!

· Setup via the azure portal

· There is a migration wizard that will allow you to move around.

Just use it

App Fabric

Authentication and authorization is hard. The cloud makes it harder

Tokens & Claims

· Token contains a group of claims

· Should be signed to protect against changes

Claims/tokens are better b/c they provide more information than applications typically get (username). This usually requires calls to AD or something else. This way the app tells the client what it wants and the client provides it.

OAuth

· Open standard

· Microsoft, Google, Yahoo

· REST oriented

SWT

· OAuth service authenticates the user

· Creates a SWT Token

· No xml

· Put in request body or on query string

WCF has an ACSTokenValidator

The client just authenticates against an OAuth service that the service trusts. Anybody can create this service. Then the client puts its token in the request headers and calls the service. The service will have to trust the issuer of the token.

Your service will use the ACSTokenValidator to make sure the caller has the token. If they do then your service will use the claims in the token to provide authentication & authorization. This is really awesome.

Service Bus

Basically it is WS-Routing. The services do not have to run in Azure, they just have to register with the Azure service bus. So Service A could be running at Microsoft and Service B could be running at Google and they could communicate with each other by using Azure’s service bus.

Very cool.

It’s just more WCF stuff.

Cloud Computing Scenarios

Only 2 reason for going to the cloud: Improve bottom line or improve strategy

Determine ROI

· Current hosting costs

· Current staff costs

· Cooling/power/space

· Migration costs

· Licensing

AzureROI.CloudApp.net

Common scenarios:

· Dynamic scale/reduce costs – load shunting

· Startups & POCs

· Data in motion

· Mass storage

· Multitenant

Common road blocks

· Security concerns

· Legacy systems

· Regulations & certifications

· Local hardware integration

Available Resources

· BizSpark – for startups (less than $1MM revenue)

· WebSiteSpark – for web design firms

· DreamSpark – for students

· WABCD – boot camp

· Pinpoint – place to register your product or service

· FrontRunner – get access to MSFT products early

· MTC Visit – for partners

· TAP – for customers wanting to use new products

In my notes from Day 1 of Azure Boot Camp I briefly mentioned that my class got hung up on the 30 second expiration of reservations on queue messages. What this means is that your code has a 30 second reservation on a queue message after it gets it. In those 30 seconds you need to complete the processing and then delete the message from the queue. If your code fails to do this the message will be made available again and the next call to Get will be given a reservation to the message. This will prevent the first thread from deleting the message.

For a vast majority of situation this should even be a consideration. The usual work we do in IT land doesn’t require 30 seconds of processing. That’s like an ice age worth of time to the computer. But being programmers we must obsess about edge cases, so lets say we’ve been hired by NSA to break a bunch of 768bit RSA keys. Obviously this is going to take a little more than 30 seconds. Your ‘normal’ queue processing patter would look like:

CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString");
CloudQueueClient queueClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient();
CloudQueue queue = queueClient.GetQueueReference(_MessageQueueName);

if (null == queue)
{
    return;
}

bool done = false;
while (!done)
{
    IEnumerable<CloudQueueMessage> messages = queue.GetMessages(_BlockSize);
    if (_BlockSize > messages.Count())
    {
        done = true;
    }
    foreach (CloudQueueMessage message in messages)
    {
        BreakKey(message);
        queue.DeleteMessage(message);
    }
}

 

Obviously I don’t know how to break RSA keys, but BreakKey is where you would do that work. Once you are finished you would then delete the message from the queue. This is where the small issue pops up.

If the process takes more than the default 30 seconds the lease on the message will have expired so the delete will fail. In addition to not being able to delete the message the message will be available to be picked up by another process. What to do?

1) Change the default setting.

This is a horrible idea. Whatever amount you come up with won’t be enough. It is sort of like the “640Kb will be plenty of memory” idea. Just leave the defaults alone.

2) Use a tracking log

Create a queue manager that first gets the message, put its id and message body in a tracking table and then delete the message from the queue and then return the message to the caller. When the client is done the manager deletes the message from the queue and the table.

If the processor fails the message will still be in the table so it can be recovered. This is similar to BizTalk’s suspended message queue.

3) Just delete the message

A lot of people don’t like this, but frankly it isn’t as risky as they make it sound. Your code is running in the cloud. The servers are guaranteed to have 99.9% so it’s more likely your code is going to fail than the server. So debug your damn code! Get the queue item out of the queue, delete it, then process it and get on with your life.

All the above is pretty irrelevant, but my class still spent a good 15 minutes talk about it. In most cases the processing will be done in less than a seconds so the ‘usual’ pattern of get, process, delete will work just fine.

Setting up your environment

I have a full instance of SQL 2008 and don’t want to screw with Express. The dev fabric stuff by default looks for an express instance to setup. Luckily other people have already chased this down: Activating Azure Storage Service for Non SQL Express. Which basically says to go to the command line and type this:

DSInit /sqlInstance:. /forceCreate

Which can be found in C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.1\bin\devstore

Configuration

Once your environment is up and running you’ll need to fix up the connection strings being used. ServiceConfiguration.cfg will contain settings like DataConnectionString and DataConnectionString which you will need to configure. For development you can just set the value to “UseDevelopmentStorage=true”. When you deploy to the cloud you’ll have to change these settings, but for now this will work. It will look like:

    <ConfigurationSettings>
      <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" />
      <Setting name="DataConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" />
    </ConfigurationSettings>

Queues

Azure Storage Queues are pretty easy. You can store messages up to 8K in size in the queue. Because of the way the API works the message must be XML serializable. So if you want to pass a block of binary data you will need to base64 encode it.

Working with a queue involves three operations: add, get and delete. For example: say you have a system that breaks RSA keys. One program gets the key, stores it in a table and puts a work ticket in the queue. Another program grabs a work ticket from the queue and then proceeds to break the key and store the result in another table. The problem is that breaking a key takes more than 30 seconds and queue items only get reserved for 30 seconds. What to do? 

(ed – I was going to write a long explanation here about how to manage this but I want to focus on the class content so I’ll deal with this in a separate article).

Putting an Item in the queue:

CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount

                            .FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString");
CloudQueueClient queueClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient();
CloudQueue queue = queueClient.GetQueueReference(_MessageQueueName);

These three lines get you the queue that contains the work tickets. To add your work ticket:

CloudQueueMessage msg = new CloudQueueMessage(ticketData);

Once the ticket is added it has 2 weeks to be removed before Azure removes it for you.

The program that actually processes the work ticket just needs to do something like:

bool done = false;
while (!done)
{
   IEnumerable<CloudQueueMessage> messages = queue.GetMessages(_BlockSize);
   if (_BlockSize > messages.Count())
   {
      done = true;
   }
   foreach (CloudQueueMessage message in messages)
   {
      string messageText = message.AsString;
      queue.DeleteMessage(message);
   }
}

Day 2 has just started so I’ll be back.

I’m cleaning out comments and I’m seriously dumbfounded by the crap. 

I’m fine with advertising, but at least get your comment on topic.

In the pile of unapproved comments I approved 3.  However, because I wasnt paying attention 1 of them got nuked in one of the mass deletes (I forgot to include isApproved = 0 as part of the condition).

Anyway, I’m going to write a tool to make this more convenient and get in the habit of doing it at least weekly.

BlogEngine.NET has an invisible captacha that should stop comment spam except for 1 tiny little problem: somebody that goes through the trouble of writing a robot can defeat it. 

I’m not sure how many people use BE.NET, but apparently it is enough to attract spammers.  Somebody had to sent down look at the comment form and write a program that would post it back to the URL end points.  It wouldn’t be too hard to realize that one of the fields being sent to the client also needed to go back.

My solution is to attach a key press event to the comment field.  When somebody types in the field I set some values that get verified on the server side.  It can still be hacked, but because this is unique to my blog I doubt anybody would bother to customize a robot just for little ol’me.

Does it work?  No idea yet.  I’m writing a control panel application to help manage comments.  In my case I approve comments, but BE out of the box requires that I log on to the site and go through my posts to find comments.  I want a program that just shows me all the new unapproved comments and lets me delete them or approve them.  Should be really easy to write.

Windows Azure Platform

This year I’m supposed to spend most of my time working with clients doing Cloud computing. My client is a Microsoft partner so by Cloud computer I mean Windows Azure. I’m actually really excited about because frankly CRM is beginning to bore me.

Anyway, to shorten my ramp up time I grabbed “Windows Azure Platform”. Pretty good book. It does a good job covering the entire core Windows Azure offering: Azure Storage, App Fabric and SQL Azure. All of it is pretty exciting stuff and the book covers it with some sample code.

The samples aren’t really all that great, but they get the point across. For instance: SQL Azure. It’s Microsoft SQL Server! In the cloud! And you treat it pretty much like the Microsoft SQL Server instance you have running on your laptop. The same ADO.NET stuff you have been using for the past decade will still work! So that really cool data grid you wrote for ASP.NET 1.0 back in 2001 – it will still work!

Anyway, if you need a quick ramp up on Azure this book will provide it.

Beginning JavaScript and CSS Development with jQuery

I’m currently building some UI stuff for an application and I needed a better way to my web-pages. As usual I’m about a year behind everybody else so I’ve had the pleasant surprise of getting to know jQuery. Before I’d do all of this stuff by hand without the benefit of a library like jQuery. The really kickass part is the calendar control. jQuery’s calendar control freaking rocks.

Usually for something like this I’d just use the web, but I decided grabbing a book wouldn’t hurt and might speed things up. So I grabbed Richard York’s book and read it last week. Actually, I only read the first 9 chapters and the chapter on the DatePicker and Dialogs. I’ll go read the other chapters as I need.

The book is written well enough to be useful. However, I think it could be slimmed down. A lot. As I’m often likely to do I started to just skim and use the book as a tour guide. I looked over the samples to make sure I understood what was happening and moved on. I don’t need or want long winded explanations.

Something to note: this is not a beginning javascript book as the title might imply. He does not talk about javascript syntax. No chapter on the foreach loop. If that is what you need get a different book.

Overall I think the 3 star Amazon rating is accurate. It’s a good book and it is useful to me as a tour guide. If I had to buy it with my own money would I still have bought it? Yes. It would have taken me more than 4 days to ramp up on all the jQuery stuff the book covered if I just used Google and my project. So it is definitely worth the money.