10 Tips For Waking Up Early and Refreshed

Waking up on time is an important step toward a productive, happy day.

To help you learn to get up refreshed and early, I shared ten tips a couple weeks ago, and today I am sharing ten more.

With all twenty tips from both articles combined, everyone should be able to find something to fit their particular situation.

#1 Get Enough Sleep

Although this may seem obvious, many people do not truly get enough sleep.

As I discussed in the first article on this topic, people who need to sleep in on the weekends are probably not getting enough sleep during the rest of the week.

In addition, even if it does not force you to sleep in ever, getting just a little less sleep than you need can make you fell perpetually drowse… defeating the goal of waking up early and feeling refreshed.

To maximize your productivity and energy, make sure that you always get enough sleep… but not too much either.

#2 Use Timed Light

Like alarm clocks that wake you up through your sense of sound, timed lights can wake you up through your sense of sight.

Although it would probably be too complicated to make your main ceiling light turn on automatically, you can easily use a timing device to set a table lamp to automatically turn on.

Because this wake up method is not as invasive as a loud alarm clock, it might be a more comfortable way to wake up, or it might not be enough to wake you up. Before you rely on a “light alarm” do a little testing to see how effective it is for you.

#3 Remember Why You Need To Get Up Early

If you remember the reason why you are getting up early (to read your Bible, exercise, etc.), it will help you avoid rationalizing yourself back to bed.

If, for instance, you are planning to read you Bible and eat breakfast before going to work, remembering this will help you avoid sleeping in late because you know that you must get up to avoid getting behind on your daily tasks.

#4 Develop A Pleasant Morning Routine

Even once you know why you need to get up, you might still rationalize sleeping in unless you have a pleasant task that you plan to accomplish.

For instance, you could plan your normal morning routine to include a tasty breakfast… only if you wake up on time. By hanging this carrot in front of your sleepy self, you will have an emotional incentive to practice the difficult discipline of getting out of bed.

By making your morning routine a happy experience, you will encourage your morning self to wake up consistently.

#5 Change Slowly

If you are currently sleeping in until noon, don’t plan on waking up at 5:00 AM tomorrow.

Fast changes are confusing to your body and will need to be completed slowly so that your physical systems can adjust to the new schedule.

Rather than making drastic and sudden changes to your sleep schedule, make incremental but steady changes. For instance, you might find that waking up thirty minutes earlier every week until you reach your goal time gives your body enough time to correct without too much pain. On the other hand, that schedule might be too fast or too slow for you.

Determine your optimal changing speed and slow down if your body rebels.

#6 Never Go Back To Bed

If you consistently build a habit of always getting up and staying up when your alarm goes off, the consistency will make it less difficult to refuse any urges to return to bed.

On the other hand, if you occasionally do give in to the temptation of extra sleep, the difficulty of refusing next time will be much harder.

Good habits are hard to build and easily broken. Be strictly consistent in your sleeping habits to avoid needless difficulty.

#7 Get A Specialty Alarm

If you find that a normal alarm does not work for you (or you simply want some fun), a specialty alarm might be just the thing to help you wake up alert and eager for the day ahead.

Some specialty alarms are really robots that race around your room until you catch them and turn them off. Because they force you to catch them while they race every which way, this type of alarm can help even the sleepiest person wake up completely.

Both for the fun and the extra strength, a specialty alarm clock may be just the thing to wake you up!

#8 Know How Much Sleep You Need

Before you can start getting enough sleep, you need to first know just how much sleep you need.

Although eight to nine hours is a good estimate, “normal” people have a wide range of sleep needs. Rather than planning based on a general estimate, determine your specific needs through testing of your sleep and resulting productivity.

Because your needs will fluctuate based on your activities and time of life, you need to regularly assess your sleep habits and make sure that you are getting enough sleep to stay healthy and productive long-term.

#9 Plan Ahead

In addition to having a regular morning routine, take the time to plan ahead.

I normally plan out my next day briefly just before falling asleep, and this helps me to both be more productive the next day (since I know my goals) and to wake up promptly (since I know am trying to squeeze two day’s work into one day).

If you know how busy or exciting your next day will be, it will make it less difficult for you to wake up quickly when you hear your alarm.

#10 Keep The Temperature Constant

Particularly during the winter, it can be tempting to stay under your warm covers instead of venturing in the chilly air of your bedroom.

By using a thermostat, however, to keep your house, or at least room, at a comfortable temperature, you can eliminate this problem and make it easier to wake up.

ASP.NET Page Life Cycle

A page in an ASP.NET application consists of several server controls. These are the fundamental building blocks of an ASP.NET application. The Life cycle of an ASP.NET page, depends on whether the page is requested for the first time or it is a postback. Postback is a process by which a page can request for itself.

When the Page is requested for the first time

The Life Cycle of a page when requested for the first time:

Initializing: During this phase, the server creates an instance of the server control

Loading: During this phase, the instance of the control is loaded onto the page object in which it is defined.

PreRendering: During this phase, the control is updated with the changes made to it. This prepares the control for rendering.

Saving: During this phase, the state information of the control is saved. For example, if a value is set for the control during the Load event, it is embedded in the HTML tag that will be returned to the browser.

Rendering: During this phase, the server creates the corresponding HTML tag for the control.

Disposing: During this phase, all cleanup tasks, such as closing files and database connections opened by the control are performed.

Unloading: During this phase, all cleanup tasks, such as destroying the instances of server control are performed. This is the final event in the life cycle of a server control

Life cycle when the page processed during a postback event

The processing sequence in which a page is processed during a postback event is:
Initializing: During this phase, the server creates an instance of the server control
Loading view state: During this phase, the view state of the control posted by the client is reloaded into the new instance of the control.
Loading: During this phase, the instance of the control is loaded onto the page object in which it is defined.
Loading the postback data: During this phase, the server searches any data corresponding to the control that is loaded in the data posted by the client.
PreRendering: During this phase, the control is updated with the changes made to it. This prepares the control for rendering.
Saving state: During this phase, the change in the state of control between the current request and the previous request of the page is saved. For each change, the corresponding event is raised. For example, if the text of a textbox is changed, the new text is saved and a text_change event is raised.
Rendering: During this phase, the server creates the corresponding HTML tag for the control.
Disposing: During this phase, all cleanup tasks, such as closing files and database connections opened by the control are performed.
Unloading: During this phase, all cleanup tasks, such as destroying the instances of server control are performed. This is the final event in the life cycle of a server control
The events associated with the relevant page cycle phases are:

• Page Initialization: Page_Init
• View State Loading:LoadViewState
• Postback data processing: LoadPostData
• Page Loading: Page_Load
• PostBack Change Notification: RaisePostDataChangedEvent
• PostBack Event Handling: RaisePostBackEvent
• Page Pre Rendering Phase: Page_PreRender
• View State Saving: SaveViewState
• Page Rendering: Page_Render
• Page Unloading: Page_UnLoad

The following figure illustrates how the server controls on an ASP.NET page is processed by the server:

The SharePoint Security Object Model

This is a class diagram of some standard SharePoint objects available inside the SharePoint object model. As you can see from this object model, there are two internal classes, namely SPMember and SPPrincipal. SPPrincipal inherits from SPMember. In short, anything that can be given a security right within SharePoint in one way or the other inherits from the SPMember base class. Therefore, there are SPGroup, SPUser, and SPRole. These three objects are what can be given permissions inside of SharePoint. As you will see shortly, SPRole has been deprecated since SharePoint 2007.

At the heart of this class diagram is an internal abstract base class called SPSecurableObject.
Anything inside of SharePoint that be given a permission is an SPSecurableObject. Any
SPSecurableObject implements the ISecurableObject interface. Examples of such object are SPWeb, SPSite, SPList, and SPListItem. Let’s take the example of SPWeb. SPWeb inherits from
SPSecurableObject. Therefore, it is an object that permissions can be given to. The next question is how exactly do you give permissions to this object? The SPWeb object has different properties on it. These properties represent the roles (SPRole), the group’s (SPGroup), and the user’s (SPUser) that have access to this particular SPWeb.

There are three properties representing the users that have access to this particular SPWeb. They are SiteUsers, Allusers, and Users.
• Users: Users explicitly added to the SPWeb.
• AllUsers: All users that have anything to do with the SPWeb. Users plus users
SharePoint saw through Groups.
• SiteUsers: Aggregation of AllUsers at the SiteCollection level.

The SiteUsers is a superset of AllUsers is a super set of Users. And all three of these are a collection of the SPUser object. This can be seen in Figure

Obviously, it is the SiteCollection which is the eventual security boundary. All SPWeb inherit the users from SiteCollection, unless of course such inheritance has been broken. Similarly, there are two properties representing groups, which are Groups and SiteGroups. You can probably guess what these are: the groups are also inherited from parent to SPWeb. As before, both Groups and SiteGroups represent collections of the SPGroup object.
Finally, there is also a property called Roles. This is a collection of type SPRole. However, as
mentioned earlier, that SPRole has been deprecated since SharePoint 2007. To replace these, two new objects have been introduced, namely SPRoleDefinition and SPRoleAssignment, which can be seen in the class diagram in Figure

In order to understand these two objects, visit your site collection. In your site collection, go to site settings, and then under users and permissions click site permissions. You should see the various groups and users added to this SiteCollection, along with their associated permission levels. This can be seen in Figure

In the ribbon, you will also find a button called permission levels, so click that button. Clicking this button will show you the defined permission levels inside a SiteCollection, as shown in Figure

Click the full control link and it should show you the various permissions you can configure in any SharePoint permission level. Some of these permissions can be seen in Figure

Specifically, in the object model, the permissions you see as check boxes are represented by an Enumerator called SPBasePermissions. SPRoleDefinition represents the levels such as “Full Control”, “Contribute”, while a Role Assignment contains a collection of Role Definitions.
Any object that inherits from SPPrincipal can be assigned a SPRoleAssignment. This becomes
clearer when you observe all the objects in one single class diagram, as shown in Figure

As you can see, the SPRole assignment object has a property on it called Member that points to an SPPrincipal. Therefore, an SPPrincipal such as an SPUser called “user1″, can have a role assignment that points you to two SPRoleDefinitions, “Full Control” and “Design”, thereby giving you a union of SPBasePermissions between Full Control and Design. Please read the last sentence one more time because it is incredibly important to remember.

Overview of SharePoint Object Model

SharePoint offers a set of structured server-side objects those are widely used to program SharePoint Applications. These objects are hierarchically arranged and you can drill down through the object hierarchy to obtain the object that contains the components of SharePoint Application you need to use in your code.

SharePoint object model can be grouped in two categories:

1. Object model of Server Architecture

2. Object model of Site Architecture

Object model of Server Architecture:

Following diagram shows the Windows SharePoint Services server architecture in relation to the SharePoint objects and collections. All these objects and collections are available in the “Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration” namespace.

SPFarm Object

SPFarm object is the highest object within the Windows SharePoint Services object model hierarchy which represents a WSS farm and used for central configuration settings. It contains global settings for all the servers, services, and solutions that are installed in a WSS farm. With this object you can also access all the servers, services, and solutions that are installed in a WSS farm.

·         Create method can be used to a server farm, its associated configuration database, and a farm account on the local computer based on the specified connection string.

·         Open method can be used to get a remote server farm based on the specified connection string.

·         Servers property of SPFarm object is used to get the collection of all physical computers that are in the server farm. This property returns a SPServerCollection object which is a collection of SPServer objects (one SPServer object for each physical computer in the current server farm).

·         Services property of SPFarm object is used to get the collection of all the services that are in the server farm. This property returns a SPServiceCollection object which is a collection of SPService objects (one SPService object for each Service in the current server farm).

·         Solutions property of SPFarm object is used to get the collection of all the solutions that are in the server farm. This property returns a SPSolutionCollection object which is a collection of SPSolution objects (one SPSolution object for each Solution in the current server farm).

SPServer Object

SPServer object represents a physical computer in the server farm.

ServiceInstances property is used to get the collection of individual service instances that run on the individual computer.

SPService Object

SPService object represents a logical service or application installed in the server farm.

SPSolution Object

SPSolution object represents a SharePoint Solution installed in the server farm.

SPWebService Object

SPWebService object represents a Web service that contains one or more WSS web applications. It can be used to access configuration settings for a specific logical service or web application.

WebApplications property is used to get the collection of all the web applications that are running within this service. It returns SPWebApplicationCollection object which is a collection of SPWebApplication objects (one SPWebApplication object for each web application).

SPServiceInstance Object

SPServiceInstance object represents a single instance of service running in the server computer.ServiceInstances property of the SPServer object can be used to get the SPServiceInstanceCollection object that represents all the service instances that are currently running on a server computer.

Service property is used to get the SPService object that contains the farm-wide settings that apply to the service that this instance implements.

Server property is used to get the SPServer object on which this instance is installed.

SPDatabaseServiceInstance Object

SPDatabaseServiceInstance object represents a single instance of a database service running on the server computer. The SPDatabaseServiceInstance class derives from the SPServiceInstance class and thus inherits the Service property, which provides access to the service or application that the instance implements. TheDatabases property gets the collection of content databases used in the service.

SPWebApplication Object

SPWebApplication object represents a WSS web application and it contains a set of content databases and site collections. The SPWebApplication object provides access to credentials and other server farm wide application settings

SPWebApplication inherits from SPPersistedObject, which means that an object of the class persists in the configuration database.

SPWebApplication class enables administrators to access IIS properties without opening IIS Manager for example with the help of IisSettings and ApplicationPool property, we can access the properties of the IIS application pool to which the WSS Web application is assigned.

Sites property is used to get the collection of site collections within the Web application. It returns SPSiteCollection object which is a collection of SPSite objects.

ContentDatabases property is used to get the collection of content databases used in the Web application. It return SPContentDatabaseCollection object which is a collection of SPContentDatabase objects.

SPDatabase Object

SPDatabase object encapsulates access to Microsoft SQL Server databases. Databases property of theSPDatabaseServiceInstance object can be used to get the collection of databases that support the database service instance.

SPContentDatabase Object

SPContentDatabase object represents a content database that contains user data for a SharePoint web application. ContentDatabases property of the SPWebApplication object can be used to get the collection of all the content databases that are used by the Web application. ContentDatabase property of the SPSiteobject can also be used to get the content database for a site collection.

Sites property is used to get the collection of site collections for which the content database stores data.

WebApplication property is used to get the parent Web application.

SPSiteCollection Object

SPSiteCollection object represents the collection of site collections within the Web application and each site collection is represented by SPSite object.

Object model of Site Architecture:

Following diagram shows the Windows SharePoint Services site architecture in relation to the SharePoint objects and collections. All these objects and collections are available in the “Microsoft.SharePoint” namespace.

SPSite Object

SPSite object represents a collection of sites in a Web application, including a top-level Web site and all its sub sites. This collection of sites is known as “Site Collection”. Each site in the site collection, top-level site as well as all its sub sites is represented by a SPWeb object.

Although a SPSite object represents a collection of sites, the SPSite class is not a collection in the sense of a class that implements ICollection. A SPSiteCollection class implements the latter interface and it represents a collection of SPSite objects.

SPSite object can be instantiated by following methods:

·         SPSite constructor can be used to instantiate a SPSite object for a specific site collection within a console application, or windows application, or on an ASP.NET page

SPSite objSPSite = new SPSite("Absolute_URL");

·         Within an ASP.NET application, Site property of the SPContext class can be used to get the SPSite objectthat represents the current site collection

SPSite objSPSite = SPContext.Current.Site;

·         Get SPSiteCollection object from the Sites property of the SPWebApplication class. This SPSiteCollection represents the collection of site collections in a SharePoint Web application, so just use an indexer to return a single site collection from the collection.

SPSiteCollection objSiteCollection = objWebApplication.Sites;

int index = 0;

SPSite objSite = objSiteCollection[index];

·         RootWeb property of SPSite class returns its child top-level website. In turn, the SPWeb object that represents the top-level Web site has a Webs property that holds all its immediate child sub sites. The AllWebs property of SPSite returns all the sub sites and the top-level Web site.

SPWeb Object

Each SharePoint website is represented by SPWeb object whether it is a top level website or a sub site. SPWeb object has members that can be used to manage a site, including its template and theme, as well as to access files and folders on the site.

SPWeb object can be a child of another SPWeb object or of a SPSite object. If it is the child of a SPSite object, it is the top-level Web site in its site collection. A hierarchy of Web sites always has exactly one top-level Web site. This site is represented by a SPWeb object which is an immediate child of a SPSite object.

SPWeb object has a Webs property that returns a collection of other SPWeb objects; specifically, the immediate child sub sites under it.

The Lists property returns a SPListCollection object that represents all the lists in the site. Each list in a site is represented by SPList object.

SPWeb object can be instantiated by following methods:

·         To get SPWeb object for top level website following code snippet can be used:

1)    SPSite objSPSite = new SPSite("Absolute_URL");

SPWeb objSPWeb = objSPSite.OpenWeb();

OR

2)    SPSite objSPSite = new SPSite("Absolute_URL");

SPWeb objSPWeb = objSPSite.RootWeb();

·         To get SPWeb object for top level website as well as for each sub site, following code snippet can be used:

SPSite objSPSite = new SPSite("Absolute_URL");

SPWeb objSPWeb = objSPSite.AllWebs[index];

·         To get SPWeb object for each sub site only, following code snippet can be used:

SPSite objSPSite = new SPSite("Absolute_URL");

SPWeb objSPWeb = objSPSite.OpenWeb();

SPWeb objSPWeb = objSPWeb.Webs[index];

SPList Object

Each shared list and document library in a SharePoint website is represented by SPList object. SPList object has members that are used to manage the list or access items in the list.

·         GetItems method can be used to perform queries that return specific items.

·         Fields property returns a SPFieldCollection object that represents all the fields, or columns, in the list.

·         Items property returns a SPListItemCollection object that represents all the items, or rows, in the list.

·         Folders property returns the collection of folder items for the list.

·         Lists property can be used to get the parent collection of lists to which the list belongs.

·         ParentWeb property can be used to get the parent Web site for the list.

·         Delete method can be used to delete the list.

·         GetChanges method can be used to get from the change log the collection of changes that have occurred in the list.

·         Update method can be used to update the database with changes that are made to the list.

SPField Object

SPField object represents a field in a list.

·         Title property can be used to get or set the display name for the field.

·         Type property can be used to get or set the type of the field.

·         Delete method can be used to delete the field.

·         Update method can be used to update the database with changes that are made to the field.

SPListItem Object

SPListItem object represents a single row item in the list.

·         Fields property returns the collection of all fields in the parent list of the SPListItem.

·         Delete method can be used to delete a row from the list.

·         Update method can be used to update a row in the list.

·         Following code snippet can be used to add a row in the list:

spListItemObject = spListObject.Items.Add();

//assign values for each column of this row

spListItemObject.Update();