That said; I have been busy redesigning my order of battle database recently so that all tables have integer columns as primary keys. The database goes back a few years and some of the reference tables have varchar primary keys.

In order to make writing generic code easier, I decided a while ago to rebuild those tables so that all primary keys (and obviously their related foreign keys) have integers.

Should be easy right?

In fact, it’s a bit more work than one might think, as you have to modify the tables and populate the new columns and set up the foreign key columns as well before you can even think about actually resetting the PK-FK relationships in the database. In addition, you have to modify all code which uses those tables so that you don’t have format conversion issues.

So, all in all, it took me quite a few weeks (part time of course) to change four databases, migrate the data, build and deploy new versions of both the website and the data input tool etc before it was done. Even now, I still have a few bugs to fix in the windows application that I have somehow missed.

On the website development front, my ordersofbattle.com website uses ASP.NET web forms. These were written several years ago in the main when I first built and deployed the web site. They use code-behind and most pages relies upon data-grid controls to actually display the data in a decent format.

Back in 2003-2004, when I wrote the site; web forms were the way to go in ASP.NET.

Now, however, there is an alternative called MVC. MVC stands for Model-View-Controller and it is a design pattern to separate business logic from display formatting.

MVC has been around for a while, but it is only recently that it has become available for ASP.NET. MVC 2 was only released this year with Visual Studio 2010 and is also available as a download for Visual Studio 2008.

I am pretty new to all this, but have started working my way through ASP.NET MVC 2 in Action by Jeffrey Palermo et al published by Manning Publications. It certainly looks like an interesting idea and I am strongly thinking about using it when I rewrite my website.

As I am working in the USA, I am on a visa. As I am Canadian, I am on a TN-1 Visa which is in fact tied to the length of my contract with my client here, so when I get renewed I have to leave the USA and then re-enter; so far I have done this twice.

It is pretty fortunate for me that I am in Seattle as I can either take a bus or train to Vancouver which takes about 4 hours or I can take the Victoria Clipper up Puget Sound to Victoria on Vancouver Island. I have done this twice and it has been a pretty good trip both times.

I am pretty busy at work right now as I am the only person here who can do Siebel, so I basically have to do everything!!Â

I have been working on a contract in Seattle since early March and that has taken some of my attemtion obviously.

Things have been quiet on the Mini-ITX front as all my machines are just sitting in my basement chugging along doing their thing.

I do have a spare box that is not being used for much at the moment, so I am looking at installing an open-source document management system on it as I really need to organise my important paperwork, i.e. invoices, contracts, photographed pages of receipts etc. While I could use Sharepoint, at this point I think that something simpler would probably suit my needs better.

Several things technologically have caught my interest recently.

Siebel is still my bread and butter of course and I am pretty busy at my current client; but at the same time, I do wonder how long Siebel will continue to provide me a career, given that it is part of the mighty Oracle behemoth and given that Oracle has plans to evolve the product towards Java, JMS, Oracle Fusion etc.

The job market for Siebel contractors in both Europe and North America has been pretty tough for the last couple of years and I personally have spent a few months here and there at home looking for my next contract and chasing job leads. It’s always nice to be home, but looking for your next contract is always a little stressful. Rates have also been hit, not surprisingly, and the downward trend of the Euro is not a good thing for me when the Canadian Dollar seems to be lighter than air. Things do seem to be improving a bit now though, at least on the new project front.

SEO, for the uninitiated, is the process by which websites are configured and designed in order to be “attractive” to search-engines, such as Google or Bing, or more specifically to the search-engine spiders which routinely look at web-sites and take note of the site’s content, links, title etc in order to decide the ranking of the aforesaid website.

It goes without saying that the ranking awarded by Google or Bing or anyone else is very important in determining whether users of the vast universe of the internet actually find the website or not. After all, there are millions of websites out there, what makes yours so compelling?

However, there is more to SEO than search-engines and that is the actual design of the website. How it is laid out? What colours are used? Is it visually appealing and attractive or does it resemble an abstract piece of modern art with no discernable function or indeed form?

Webmasters are constantly, so I read, striving to make their site better, more usable, more attractive etc in the hopes of increasing the number of visitors who find the site and more importantly, the number of return visitors.

Which brings me to me. I modified the layout of my web site, www.ordersofbattle.com (sorry, shameless plug there!) a few months ago and I noticed that the number of page impressions in Adsense started to increase quite nicely, as did the monthly income.

Bingo! I thought, I am on the road to internet glory!! 

Not so fast, Trigger!

What was in fact happening was that Adsense was counting each page two or three times because I had adsense ads in inline frames, so to Google they were separate pages.

No wonder my figures went up!!

It took me some time to notice because the ads still seemed pretty relevant. This was because they were using the other content in the frames to drive the ads.

It finally dawned on me what I had done, so I modified the site to use DIVs instead of FRAMES. I also took the opportunity to add a nice graphic as a banner, add a site Title, sign up to the Google Affiliate Network and add some nice colourful ads for various things such as books and I also signed up with Amazon.com as an Associate and added some book ads that were relevant (Military History since you ask).

I then updated the web server and sat back waiting for the money to flow in to my coffers.

Cue, disappointment!

No money flowed into my coffers, my adsense clicks declined massively as did my page impressions!!

What had I done?

I re-arranged things a few times and things recovered a bit but not much. Hardly anyone clicked on my affiliates, no one bought any books and my adsense clicks stayed on the low side.

This became an object lesson in how to screw up a good thing and go backwards. Obviously my visitors were voting with their feet. Either that, or somehow nobody wanted to look at my site in February!!

Time to do research!!

Well, after a bit of digging, I discovered that Affiliates and Adsense may not be ideal partners on the same website. People click on the affiliates rather than adsense; perhaps all the ads were putting people off as my site was obviously far too serious to have all these ads ruining it.

So, now I have removed all the affiliate ads and re-arranged the site and I will put another version live to see if anything improves.

It just goes to show that webmasters must be very careful in what they change. Change things slowly bit by bit rather than wholesale and think very carefully of the possible downside as well as the potential upside before doing anything!!

Here endeth the lesson for today!Â

In between working the phones trying to sort out resumes and interviews; I have been doing a lot of programming, and also a fair bit of web design; something I have not done for quite a while and something which to be frank is not my strong suite.

My wife asked me to build her a web site for a particular project she has been working on and I found some software that could be customised that was written in PHP and MySQL. Customising it involved finding and modifying a suitable “skin” which is something I did a few years back for my Wordpress sites.

Having adopted the “try it and see” method of css editing, I was getting very frustrated at my lack of progress when I smartened up and tried to see if I could find a specialised CSS Editor to save the hassle of doing it in Notepad. 

Fortunately for me, I found a demo copy of Stylizer which was just the ticket as it allows the user to modify the CSS elements of a website on the fly and immediately see the results then and there. It was so good that I fully intend to purchase the professional version Stylizer Ultimate.

Another problem I had to tackle was email. The site needed to be able to send out emails to members. In the past, I have had absolutely zero success at configuring SMTP; which I am sure says a lot about my technical abilities!

Once again, the gods of Open Source smiled upon me because I found a really good Open Source SMTP Server for Windows called hMailServer which did the trick. After a day or so of searching Google for hints, wrestling with my ISP, my Domain provider and my own internal Server settings, I finally got it all working!

So, who says old dogs can’t learn new tricks?

Once again, I apologise for not updating this blog for a while. In Ottawa, I was very busy going to the National Archives almost every night during the week and as it was open until 11 pm that did not leave much time for anything else.

I do not regret it, I took over 27,000 photos of material from 117 boxes of war diaries and analysing that material will be both interesting and time consuming. War Diaries are primary source material and are extremely valuable contentwise, although you have to wade through a lot of trivia to build a full history of the unit concerned.

There are over 300 boxes of war diaries on Canadian infantry battalions so I have a long way to go, but I probably have enough material for at least the first volume of a series of books on units of the Canadian Army in the Second World War that I would like, one day, to write.

In the meantime, some of the material will go onto the http://www.ordersofbattle.com website.

Things have been quiet on the .NET Framework development front, I am working on a set of generic index and record edit forms to handle data from many different tables. At run time, the form sets up the appropriate controls for the table concerned, so adding functionality for a new table is a snap, you just add a constructor for the table concerned and add code to handle the different events.

I have already written something similar for the various unit and person tables, such as Unit History, Appointments, Unit Notes etc. I am now trying to write code for all the other tables such as Unit, Person, Rank, Role, Award etc. 

I am also working on creating a new colour scheme for the ordersofbattle.com website as I feel it is time for a change. I hope to finish this and get it published before New Year.

Obviously, as it is Christmas, I have obligations to fulfill, meals to cook and eat etc so that cuts into my development time.

Ta ta for now

This is both to share my experience with others and to provide me with a scrap book of code that I can re-use in the future.

Personally, I develop in .NET, VB.NET, C#, SQL Server, T-SQL, ADO, LINQ etc and I write about this here on a regular basis.

Professionally, I do both Siebel EAI development and UI configuration in Siebel Tools. Siebel is a CRM Product that was developed by Siebel Systems and is now (like so many technologies) part of the Larry Ellison stable.

EAI stands for Enterprise Application Integration and involves writing Siebel Business Services, Workflows, Integration Objects, Data Maps etc with a goal of enabling Siebel systems to exchange messages and data with other non-Siebel systems, both internal and external to the client. Data can be exchanged via Web Services, Queueing Systems such as MQ or MSMQ, Files via FTP, and/or via HTTP.

The main difference between developing for Siebel as opposed to writing .NET is that in Siebel one does not have any access to the inner workings of the product as it’s functionality is enclosed in C++ Classes. All one can do is “tinker” around the edges using Siebel Tools. The closest one can get to “proper” programming in Siebel is to write new Business Services in eScript or to modify Business Components or Applets in eScript.

However, nowadays it is generally not regarded as good practise to modify Applets and Business Components with eScript unless absolutely necessary. In some sites, the use of any eScript at all is not allowed. 

My personal belief is that eScript has its place but should be used carefully and only when necessary. Sometimes, however, use of eScript is the best solution.

Having said all that, here is your first Siebel tip which I discovered on Friday.

In Siebel Workflow, there is no function for a carriage return line feed so if you want to populate a text field and format the contents so that they appear on separate lines, there is no simple way to do it.

When faced with this in the past, my response has been to write some eScript in a Business Service to return the CRLF escape sequences to the calling routine. The workflow can then call your business service to populate a process property with the CRLF characters and it can then use that process property as and when required.

My current client has a strong policy against eScript except where absolutely necessary so I was please to discover that there exists a “vanilla” Business Service in Siebel 8 which returns CRLF as a return argument.

This Business Service is called  SSSE Address Parser (eScript) and it has one method GetCRLF.

That solved my problem!!

I have now completed the rewrite of the windows client and the middle tier to use LINQ and developed a new LINQ for Entities DLL to replace the old data tier that relied on stored procedures. I have also modified my web site to use LINQ and am busy fixing all the problems so that I can deploy it to the web server very soon.

I have written several Windows Services which manage the flow of data from my client machine to my server databases which use LINQ to query the client database in order to generate outgoing messages, write those messages to file, pass the files up to the server, and update the two databases on the server in turn.

In some cases, I have more than one copy of the same windows service running on a specific machine as they are geared to different databases, which is a little tricky but works OK.

So, all that is left is the completion of the web site and its deployment to my web server.

So, where does that leave us?

Well, that means that I am finally in a situation where I can easily add new screens and pages to both the windows client and the website without (hopefully) having to write major amounts of code at the back end.

There are also other areas of development I want to look at: for example, improving the theme of the website to make it look more professional, using a different database for my client database, building a Wiki to manage my research, implementing reports, implementing some sort of analytics, building a Windows CE client etc etc.

I am also quite interested in learning some other .NET languages such as IronPythor or IronRuby, writing a new implementation of the website to use MVC perhaps.

These are all areas where the website provides me with the opportunity to learn and implement new technologies which is one way of keeping my mind in gear!

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For that reason, this article in Redmond Developer News is very timely and informative. You can find it here. It provides a broad overview of all the new and improved technologies that will be part of the new Framework.