have you any wool?

Microsoft is currently working on a project called Microsoft Tag that I was introduced to today. The concept is pretty simple and not unlike the barcode readers you currently see on mobile phones like the iPhone. You hold your camera up to a  barcode, snap a picture, and the application downloads pricing information or product details. Handy, right?

Well what if you could do this with anything? That’s what Microsoft Tag allows you to do. You signup for an account on their website and can instantly start creating these Tags. You can type in some free form text, create a vCard or embed a URL. When you’re finished, MS does it’s magic and a simple square image is produced that is filled with a multitude of color triangles. This, in effect, is a barcode.

So how do you read it? Well that’s easy too. MS has produced a Windows Mobile app and an iPhone app that reads these Tags instantly and performs a function. By instantly I mean, you don’t have to *snap* the photo. When the software detects the image pattern, it’ll launch the resulting function automatically. And by function, I mean – it might link your web browser to target the URL, it might dial a phone number, import a vCard into your contacts or just display some free form text that the Tag author inteded you to see. What’s more, you can share these tags with your friends.

So – cool idea, what would I use it for? Oh the possibilities are near limiteless provided MS continues to expand on the concept and it takes hold with consumers, which I think it will. For starters, you’ve got business cards. Put one of these tags on your business card and when it’s scanned, it’ll import your vCard into someone’s phone. No need to type it out. Heck, don’t even PRINT your contact info on the card – just use the tag. That way, your clients are forced to import your vCard to get your info and now you’re in their phonebook and not another business card lying on kitchen counter. You could place a particularly eye catching ad in a magazine with a little Tag that directs people to your website. Your restaurant could place a tag on it’s takeout menu that will launch google maps and give people directions to your location. These are all some of the ideas Microsoft has already posted on their site.

But…..what else could you do? I started thinking up some ideas and suggestions and I may continue to add to this post as more come to mind. Some are probably silly, some already done, but these are just some things I thought would be cool.

• Obviously an API is needed so that you can create tags on the fly in your web applications and would not need to visit Microsofts site to produce them manually.
• Phone Number Validation: If a phone is required to sign up for your webapp, you could use an API to produce a Tag that directs the users phone to call an authentication server of even send a text. You could verify this text came from their entered phone number and you’ve just validated their entry.
• Integration with a push/pull desktop App: This would take MS getting involved, but often if you’re out on the run you don’t have time to stop and smell the roses. So scanning a tag of a movie poster takes you to their official website to view the trailer. Great, but you don’t have time right now. Instead, have it queue up your scanned tags and when you get home you could have a desktop app pull down all the ones you’ve scanned. Or with a push service, have them there already waiting.
• Integration with other reminder or bookmarking services like Evernote. Scanning a tag sends it to evernote so you can check it out later. You could even embed it with geo-location information because you’re taking the pick with your mobile. So if the Tag was as some fancy restaurant you wanted to remember, you’d know where it was.
• Reporting Malicious Tags: I think they need to implement a feature when you can flag a tag as being malicious. Maybe a tag at the local store actually sends you to a porn site. You don’t want your kids inadvertently scanning those.

These are just a few ideas I had. I’ll post some more later. Comment and let me know what you think!

Wordress Tag for Microsoft Tags Blog Post

Where I work, there normally isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not doing something in SQL Management Studio. Creating and altering Tables, writing Stored Procedures, modifying functions or just cranking out query after query in order to produce spreadsheets because someone in the office wants to see the data in a way we just don’t have a report for yet. Our development to production cycle is measured in hours, not months. And it’s not that we’re just that good or that fast. It’s just the necessity of how we operate. Heck, we sometimes make alterations directly in production and then script them back into development. Bad, bad, bad I know. But as much as I’d like to take a stand against how we work, there is no ground to stand on. We do it this way, because it’s been done this way for the last 8 years and that’s how things get done.

So imagine my confusion when the first project I’d ever really tackled from start to finish, purely in development, needed to be pushed to production. Poor habits meant I didn’t have any saved SQL scripts that I could just run to make all my schema changes and populate my seed data. I literally had no idea what I was going to do. I was beginning to imagine I’d have to go table by table to see what changes I had made and then duplicate said changes into production. Which would obviously be daunting, boring and prone to error.

SQL Compare to the rescue! I had fiddled with some of Red-Gate’s other products after seeing them mentioned at IndyTechFest and IndyCodeCamp. More specially I had checked out ANTS Profiler as a way to try and speed up a particularly sluggish section of the Web Application we used internally. So when I stumbled onto SQL Compare searching Google for a solution to nightmare, I figured Red-Gate was a good place to start. Of course, not only was it a good place to start, it was a good place to finish because after using this tool, I didn’t even bother to look for anything else. It’s THAT good.

I won’t get into the nitty gritty details of what all it’s capabale of. You can find that here: SQL Compare. Instead I’ll just tell you it doesn’t disappoint. Not only did it allow me to push my schema changes into production with near zero effort, it also made me aware of some discrepancies in other areas of the database that I wasn’t working with. I’ve now used it on several occassion to push up my development changes and I couldn’t be happier.

My work is planning on purchasing the full SQL Toolbelt suite in the very near future. Personally, I’m seriously contemplating purchasing the SQL Compare suite for my own projects. Highly recommended.

This is fairly basic and not terribly useful, but I found it interesting anyway. I wanted to get a  quick count of how many tables and stored procedures I’ve made in my new database project, so I threw together a simple query to do that. This isn’t really rocket-science, but querying sys.objects for anything isn’t marked ‘MS Shipped’.

Select Type_Desc, Count(*)
From Sys.Objects
Where IS_MS_SHIPPED = 0
Group By Type_Desc

One of the side effects was that I saw that I had defined 42 Tables, but only 39 primary key constraints. Time to find those 3 tables and give them some keys.