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Introduction to Big Data

Big Data

Data is a precious thing because they last longer than systems – Tim Barnes Lee

Introduction

Big Data, as the name describes itself, it is collection of huge amount of data. Data has always been important to mankind and society by various means.  But during past few years data is collected and used for variety of purposes.  The major factor which differs Big Data from normal Data which can be handled in a DBMS or RDBMS is that; Big Data is very large volume, it has no defined structure, it includes whole lot of data which is being created from various channels like emails or social media like twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.

What can be done with a lot of data?

When we have a gathered data, the best use data can be made by following three ways:

1-      To know what has happened

2-      To understand and explain why it actually happened

3-      Most importantly predict what will happen

Big Data was always around but this term became more popular in the recent time.  Think of a weather forecast system which can predict weather based on data collected. Another great example is traffic support system of a GPS, which is reading data from various satellites to re-direct you to the roads with less traffic or highways etc. If you dig into the details how these systems are being made and trusted is fully based on their capabilities of acquiring, collecting, processing and then doing a predictive analysis with that data to produce results which are almost accurate.

Until past few years forecasting and predictive analysis with data was done by National Weather Labs, Intelligence community etc. but now it is much more since then.

How Big Data is being captured and who contributes to Big Data

Big Data has grown tremendously and it’s increasing like anything in an uncontrollable fashion. Most of the world’s data today approx 90% was generated in last two years. The reason of that is our day to day contribution in various digital forms of data for example, Facebook, tweets, Pictures etc.
    Hence, it won’t be surprising that in fact web does millions of activities per second and so huge chunk of data is being stored in server logs.  You must have heard that goggle stores and some people say steals all the information of your activities. For example, your search strings. This is same with any search engine.

One of the most interesting question is that who actually contributes to thi huge data building process. Well the answer is simple, WE. Yes, we all are helping the various companies to gather, process and then predict via the data which is being contributed on day to day basis by approx over 800 million active Facebook users, approx over  40 billion photos, over 200 million active users on Twitter etc. Just FYI< Facebook’s Big data analytics tool can process more than 20 billion events a day.

So, whatever you do actually adds into the avalanche of data for further processing to serve the mankind with the information they need and most importantly at the right time when they would really need it (an example will follow in the article below).

Two Great Examples where Big Data changed the world

India

You must not have forgotten Amir Khan’s Stayamev Jayate, one of the most popular show released in May 2012, was using Big Data. During the execution of the show 1000+ engineers were working behind the scene to capture all the data that will be created on Facebook, twitter, websites and blogs etc. to actually capture not only the opinion about the show, but category of people, from where including count of positive and negatives etc.

     The producers utilized the technology to define the future episodes, the channel reported traffic of 40,000+ tweets during the 90 minutes of the show.

USA

Obama the President of USA, he was depending on Big Data for his election campaign. His app “Obama for America” connected all the people who were in favor of him and join the campaign. 2+ million joined on this app, and this app will show you people in your neighborhood who likes Obama, their name, age, address and gender etc. including various other personal details.

How Big Data is being used today and what is next

Based on your search in Bing and google, you will observe some advertisements on your social media sites like Facebook which are related to your searches. Companies are working on interesting path which not only utilizes Big Data but also combine various technologies together. Assume, in near future you walked into a store and based on your last purchases made in the store you start getting information about the deals, discounts etc. on your phone, twitter etc.

     To make this possible, store needs to grab all the data including your purchases, your Facebook likes, your searches on various search engines etc. and as soon as you enter into the store they sense you buy your handheld device and start analyzing and processing the data to predict what you might like based on the patterns of your purchase and search history interesting isn’t it?

Article on CLR-Internals- Process and Application Domain

Read my new article on C# Corner about CLR-Internals- Process and Application Domain

I am C# Corner Member of the Month

Operation taking longer than expected - Visual Studio 2012

One of the long lived issue I struggled with was Visual Studio 2012's  "Operation taking longer than expected", as you can see in the screenshot shown below.

















I tried many opetions including the most frustating one- re-install and repair the Visual Studio 2012.

The major problem of this issue is that it doesn't allow you to do many critical things for example "Attching a process during debugging" etc.

The solution to this problem is:

1. Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger
2. Open x64 folder and rename the msvsmon.exe file to msvsmon_old.exe
3. Now, navigate to x86 folder and copy msvsmon.exe and paste it into x64 folder.
4. Restart the Visusl Studio 2012 IDE, and now try attching to process during debugging.

Hope this will help.
 

Default scope of a C# class

Read my full article on default scope of a C# class

 

.NET Serialization

Serialization is another great feature of .NET. This article talks about overall serialization in the .NET Framework and various available types such as binary, XML and SOAP. The prime objective of serialization is to persist and retrieve the state of an object. There are various scenarios where the ability to serialize objects is handy. 

Read the full article here



 

I am a C# Corner MVP

I was awared by C# Corner MVP in Apr 2013. Read the post here

 

 

 

 

Cross Language Interoperability With C# .NET

As you know Microsoft .NET is designed with cross language interoperability. I.e. two .NET compliant languages can interoperate with each other. Which simply means a function in VB .NET can be called by C# and vice-versa.  Read my full article on .NET Cross Language Interoperability at C# Corner

 

Speaker at C# Corner MVP Summit

I presented a talk session in C# Corner MVP Summit on C# 5.0 Asyn Programming. In my talk I covered the Aync Patterns and a code demo of pulling 2 million rows from a sql db table without blocking UI. I.e. asynchronously.

 

Technology used: C# 5.0, Entity Framework 5.0, WPF, Visual Studio 2012, SQL Server 2008 R2.
Pattern use: Async and await

 

 

Difference between various versions of.NET Framework

Each .NET version is released with some significant improvements:

 .NET 1.0 - 2002 Initial version (1st release)
 .NET 1.1 - 2003 Update on 1.0, added provider for Oracle
 .NET 2.0 - 2005 Generics were introduced.
 .NET 3.0 - 2007 WPF, WCF, WF were introduced
 .NET3.5 - 2008  LINQ and ADO .NET Entity Framework
 .NET 4.0 - 2010 Dynamic support for languages (dynamic keyword introduced)
 .NET 4.5 - 2012 Asynchronous programming support (async and await keyword introduced).

Portable Class Library - Visual Studio 2012

Usually a traditional class library in .NET is capable of targeting only one framework ver. But many times you may want to build a class library which can target multiple versions of framework. I.e. the objective is to achieve cross-platform development of .NET Framewok applicatioans. This became a possibility with the release of Visual Studio 2012.

Visual Studio 2012 includes a new project template named Portable Class Library, As you can see in the image below, you can use this project to build portable assemblies that work without modification on multiple platforms like:

1- Windows 7, Windows 8

2- Silverlight

3- Windows Phone, and

4- Xbox 360

T














his project is pretty much like a Class Library project, except its References shows “.NET Portable Subset” instead of individual namespaces.

If you are targeting only one particular framework as many enterprise applications do, then standard Class Library project is the best choice.

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Value of Knowledge

A giant ship engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure out how to fix the engine. Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom. 

Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. 

After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed! 

A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars. “What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!” So they wrote to the old man saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.” 

The man sent a bill that read: 

Tapping with a hammer…… …… ……… $ 2.00

Knowing where to tap……… …… ……… $ 9,998.00 

Moral :- Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference! Keep studying hard. Don’t give up!

 

Why .NET 4.5 doesn't have a Client Profile

In this post I will explain why .NET 4.5 doesn't support and what is the benefit .NET 3.5 and .NET4.0 provides with their supported Client Profile flavor.
As we all know there are many type of applications and hence what is required by one application may not be necessarily required by other type of application. For example, System.Web is only used by ASP .NET / Web apps, this is of no use for Windows Forms app.

Now if you think from a deployment's point of view, you would want your installer to be as optimized and small as possible, so it takes minimum and required on the client machine, and this can be achieved by Client Profile flavor of.NET 3.5 and 4.0.
Let's see how Microsoft made .NET Client Profile.Microsoft removed ASP .NET, MSBuild, Advanced WCF and Data support for Oracle to cut the framework into smaller and optimized footprint.

.NET 4.5 is already optimized and tuned for quicker deployment and takes small disk space. Hence, no more .NET 4.5 Client Profile.

.NET Client Profile Vs. .NET Framework

.NET Client Profile is supported by .NET Ver. 3.5 and 4.0. It is designed for client applications like Windows Forms. Client Profile version of .NET Framework is lightweight subset of Framework. This enables quicker deployment and small installation packages.

Web Application doesn’t support Client Profile version of the Framework.

Microsoft has removed Client Profile from latest version of .NET Framework 4.5 and hence with .NET 4.5 there is no Client Profile as shown in the image below.