Search Results

Search found 1343 results on 54 pages for 'challenge'.

Page 10/54 | < Previous Page | 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17  | Next Page >

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 19, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 19, 2010New Projects[Tool] Vczh Visual Studio UnitTest Coverage Analyzer: Analyzing Visual Studio Unittest Coverage Exported XML filecrudwork is a library of reuseable classes for developing .NET applications: crudwork is a collection of reuseable .NET classes and features. If you searched for StpLibrary and landed here, you're in the right place. Origi...CWU Animated AVL Tree Tutorial: This is a silverlight demo of a self-balancing AVL tree. On the original team were CWU undergraduates Eric Brown, Barend Venter, Nick Rushton, Arry...DotNetNuke® Skin Modern: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Standards" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. The skin utilizes both the telerik...DotNetNuke® Skin Monster: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by Jon Edwards of SlumtownHero.co.za. This package uses totally tab...DotNetNuke® Skin Synapse: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by Exionyte Solutions. This package features 2 colors with 4...earthworm: Earthworm is a pet project intended as a repository of data access logic, including some ORM, state management and bridging the gap between connect...ema: EMA is a place for collaborative effort to implement a PowerGrid game engine. For more info on PowerGrid the board game see: http://www.boardgamege...Extended SharePoint Web Parts: Extending capabilities of existing SharePoint 2007 Web Parts by inheriting and alterFreedomCraft: Craft development siteG.B SecondLife Sculpter: This is a Sculptor for "secondlife"InfoPath Error Viewer: InfoPath Error Viewer provides an intuitive list to show all errors in the entire InfoPath form. You'll no longer have to find the validation error...LEET (LEET Enhances Exploratory Testing): LEET is a capture-replay tool based on Microsoft’s User Interface Automation Framework. It is targeted at agile teams, and provides support for us...Linq To Entity: Linq,Linq to Entity,EntityMACFBTest: This is a test for a Facebook application.MetaProperties: MetaProperties helps you to create event driven architectures in .NET. It saves you time and it helps you avoid mistakes. It's compatible with WPF ...ownztec web: projeto da ownztec.comParallel Programming Guide: Content for the latest patterns & practices book on design patterns for parallel programming. Downloadable book outline and draft chapters as well ...Perseus - Sistema de Matrícula On-Line: Sistema de matrícula desenvolvido pelo 5º período de Desenvolvimento Web da FACECLA.Project Tru Tiên: Project EL tru tiên, ZhuxianProSysPlus.Net Framework: How do I get the ease and efficiency of my work in VFP (R.I.P. 2010)? The answer is here: the ProSysPlus.Net Framework. Why is it open source? Wh...Quick Anime Renamer: Originally included with AniPlayer X, Quick Anime Renamer easily renames your anime files into a "cleaner" format so you wont get retinal detachment.Simple XNA Button: This is a project of a helper for instancing Simple Buttons in XNA with a ButtonPanel. Its got various features like. Load a Panel from a Plain Tex...SteelVersion - Monitor your .NET Application versioning: SteelVersion helps you to find and store versioning information about .NET assemblies ("Explorer" mode). It also makes it easier to continuously ch...Stellar Results: Astronomical Tracking System for IUPUI CSCI506 - Fall 2007, Team2TheHunterGetsTheDeer: first AIwandal: wandalWeb App Data Architect's CodeCAN: Contains different types of code samples to explore different types of technical solutions/patterns from an architect's point of view.Yet Another GPS: Yet another GPS tracker is a very powerful GPS track application for Windows MobileNew ReleasesASP.Net Client Dependency Framework: v1.0 RC1: ASP.Net Client Dependency has progressed to release candidate 1. With the community feedback and bug reports we've been able to make some great upd...C# FTP Library: FTPLib v1.0.1.1: This release has a couple of small bug fixes as well as the new abilities to specify a port to connect to and to create a new directory with the Cr...crudwork is a library of reuseable classes for developing .NET applications: crudwork 2.2.0.1: crudwork 2.2.0.1 (initial version)DotNetNuke® Skin Modern: Modern Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Standards" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. The skin utilizes both the telerik...DotNetNuke® Skinning Extensions: Nav Menu Demo Skins: This very basic skin demonstrates: 1. How to force NAV menu to generate an unordered list menu 2. The creation of a sub menu, both horizontal and ...DotNetNuke® XML: 04.03.05: XML/XSL Module 04.03.05 Release Candidate This is a maintainace release. Full Quallified Namespace avoids conflicts with Namespaces used by Teler...eCommerce by Onex Community Edition: Installer of eCommerce by Onex Community 1.0: Installer of eCommerce by Onex Community 1.0 Last changes: Added integration with Paypal Corrected of adding photos and attachments to products ...eCommerce by Onex Community Edition: Source code of eCommerce by Onex Community 1.0: Changes in version 1.0: Added integration with Paypal Corrected of adding photos and attachments to products Fixed problem with cancellation of...Employee Info Starter Kit: v2.2.0 (Visual Studio 2005-2008): This is a starter kit, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and delete (CRUD) the employee info of a com...Employee Info Starter Kit: v4.0.0.alpha (Visual Studio 2010): Employee Info Starter Kit is a ASP.NET based web application, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and d...Encrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.4: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.4). It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My Documents. Once you have ext...Extended SharePoint Web Parts: ContentQueryAdvanced: This .wsp file contains a single web part ContentQueryAdvanced. This web part inherits from ContentQuery web part and adds a ToolPart field for a ...Extended SharePoint Web Parts: Source Code: Zip file includes all the source code used to extend Content Query Web Part, adding a Tool Part field to insert a CAML query/filter/sortFacebook Developer Toolkit: Version 3.02: Updated copyright. No new functionality. Version 3.1 in the works.fleXdoc: template-based server-side document generator (docx): fleXdoc 1.0 (final): fleXdoc consists of a webservice and a (test)client for the service. Make sure you also download the testclient: you can use it to test the install...InfoPath Error Viewer: InfoPath Error Viewer 1.0: This is an intial version of this tool. You can: 1. View all errors in a list. 2. Locate to a binding control of an error field. 3. See the detai...LEET (LEET Enhances Exploratory Testing): LEET Alpha: The first public release of LEET includes the ability to record tests from running GUIs, assist in writing tests manually from a running GUI, edit ...Linq To Entity: Linq to Entity: The Entity Framework enables developers to work with data in the form of domain-specific objects and properties, such as customers and customer add...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.8.56699: Fixed peformance and memory usage. Fixed Letitbit provider. Added detecting IMDB, NFO, TV.com... links in RSS Monitor. Supported password len...MetaProperties: MetaProperties 1.0.0.0: This is a multi-targeted release of MetaProperties for the desktop and Silverlight versions of the .NET framework. The desktop version is fully ...Nito.KitchenSink: Version 2: Added a cancelable Stream.CopyTo. Depends on Nito.Linq 0.2. Please report any issues via the Issue Tracker.Project Server 2007 Timesheet AutoStatus Plus: AutoStatusPlus 1.0.1.0: AutoStatusPlus 1.0.1.0 Supported Systems x86 and x64 Project Server 2007 deployments with or without MOSS 2007 Recommended Patchlevels WSS 3.0: ...Project Tru Tiên: Elements-test V1: Mô tả Bản elements.data - có full ID của bản Elemens.data Tru tiên 2 VIệt Nam (V37) - có full ID của bản Elements.data server offline tru tiên (hiệ...Quick Anime Renamer: Quick Anime Renamer v0.1: AniPlayer X v1.4.5 - started 3/18/2010Initial Release!QuickieB2B: Quickie v1.0b: QuickieB2B - made for DEV4FUN competition organized by Microsoft CroatiaSilverlight 3.0 Advanced ToolTipService: Advanced ToolTipService v2.0.2: This release is compiled against the Silverlight 3.0 runtime. A demonstration on how to set the ToolTip content to a property of the DataContext o...Simple XNA Button: XNA Button 1.0: The Main Project. this uses XNA 3.0 but it can be build with lower versions of XNA Framework. This was made using Visual Studio 2008.StoryQ: StoryQ 2.0.3 Library and Converter UI: New features in this release: Tagging and a tag-capable rich html report. The code generator is capable of generating entire classes This relea...The Silverlight Hyper Video Player [http://slhvp.com]: Version 1.0: Version 1.0VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30318.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWord Index extracts words or sentences from Word document according to patterns: Word Index 1.0.1.0 (For Word 2007 and Word 2003): Word Index for Word 2007 & 2003 : WordIndex.msi (Win-Installer Setup for Word Index) Source code : wordindex.codeplex.comV1.0.1.0.zip : (Source co...Yet Another GPS: YAGPS-Alfa.1: Yet another GPS tracker is a very powerful GPS track application for Windows MobileMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQOpen Data App Framework (ODAF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETPHPExcelNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

  Read the article

• Oracle’s AutoVue Enables Visual Decision Making

  - by Pam Petropoulos

  That old saying about a picture being worth a thousand words has never been truer.  Check out the latest reports from IDC Manufacturing Insights which highlight the importance of incorporating visual information in all facets of decision making and the role that Oracle’s AutoVue Enterprise Visualization solutions can play. Take a look at the excerpts below and be sure to click on the titles to read the full reports. Technology Spotlight: Optimizing the Product Life Cycle Through Visual Decision Making, August 2012 Manufacturers find it increasingly challenging to make effective product-related decisions as the result of expanded technical complexities, elongated supply chains, and a shortage of experienced workers. These factors challenge the traditional methodologies companies use to make critical decisions. However, companies can improve decision making by the use of visual decision making, which synthesizes information from multiple sources into highly usable visual context and integrates it with existing enterprise applications such as PLM and ERP systems. Product-related information presented in a visual form and shared across communities of practice with diverse roles, backgrounds, and job skills helps level the playing field for collaboration across business functions, technologies, and enterprises. Visual decision making can contribute to manufacturers making more effective product-related decisions throughout the complete product life cycle. This Technology Spotlight examines these trends and the role that Oracle's AutoVue and its Augmented Business Visualization (ABV) solution play in this strategic market. Analyst Connection: Using Visual Decision Making to Optimize Manufacturing Design and Development, September 2012 In today's environments, global manufacturers are managing a broad range of information. Data is often scattered across countless files throughout the product life cycle, generated by different applications and platforms. Organizations are struggling to utilize these multidisciplinary sources in an optimal way. Visual decision making is a strategy and technology that can address this challenge by integrating and widening access to digital information assets. Integrating with PLM and ERP tools across engineering, manufacturing, sales, and marketing, visual decision making makes digital content more accessible to employees and partners in the supply chain. The use of visual decision-making information rendered in the appropriate business context and shared across functional teams contributes to more effective product-related decision making and positively impacts business performance.

  Read the article

• Squeezing hardware

  - by [email protected]

  It's very common that high availability means duplicate hardware so costs grows up.Nowadays, CIOs and DBAs has the main challenge of reduce the money spent increasing the performance and the availability. Since Grid Infrastructure 11gR2, there is a new feature that helps them to afford this challenge: Server PoolsNow, in Grid Infrastructure 11gR2, you can define server pools across the cluster setting up the minimum number of servers, the maximum and how important is the pool.For example:Consider  that "Velasco, Boixeda & co"  has 3 apps in a 6 servers cluster.First One is the main core business appSecond one is Mid RangeAnd third it's a database not very important.We Define the following resource requirements for expected workload:1- Main App 2 servers required2- Mid Range App requires 1 server3- Is not a required app in case of disasterThe we define 3 server pools across the cluster:1- Main pool min two servers, max three servers, importance four2- Mid pool, min one server max two servers, importance two3- test pool,min zero servers, max one server, importance oneSo the initial configuration is:-Main pool has three servers-Mid pool has two servers-Test pool has one serverLogically, we can see the cluster like this:If any server fails, the following algorithm will be applied:1.-The server pool of least importance2.-IF server pools are of the same importance,   THEN then the Server Pool that has more than its defined minimum servers Is chosenHope it helps 

  Read the article

• xcopy file, suppress &ldquo;Does xxx specify a file name&hellip;&rdquo; message

  - by MarkPearl

  Today we had an interesting problem with file copying. We wanted to use xcopy to copy a file from one location to another and rename the copied file but do this impersonating another user. Getting the impersonation to work was fairly simple, however we then had the challenge of getting xcopy to work. The problem was that xcopy kept prompting us with a prompt similar to the following… Does file.xxx specify a file name or directory name on the target (F = file, D = directory)? At which point we needed to press ‘Y’. This seems to be a fairly common challenge with xcopy, as illustrated by the following stack overflow link… One of the solutions was to do the following… echo f | xcopy /f /y srcfile destfile This is fine if you are running from the command prompt, but if you are triggering this from c# how could we daisy chain a bunch of commands…. The solution was fairly simple, we eventually ended up with the following method… public void Copy(string initialFile, string targetFile) { string xcopyExe = @"C:\windows\system32\xcopy.exe"; string cmdExe = @"C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe"; ProcessStartInfo p = new ProcessStartInfo(); p.FileName = cmdExe; p.Arguments = string.Format(@"/c echo f | {2} {0} {1} /Y", initialFile, targetFile, xcopyExe); Process.Start(p); } Where we wrapped the commands we wanted to chain as arguments and instead of calling xcopy directly, we called cmd.exe passing xcopy as an argument.

  Read the article

• How to evaluate a user against optimal performance?

  - by Alex K

  I have trouble coming up with a system of assigning a rating to player's performance. Well, technically there is is a trivial rating system, but I don't like it because it would mean assigning negative scores, which I think most players will be discouraged by. The problem is that I only know the ideal number of actions to get the desired result. The worst case is infinite number of actions, so there is no obvious scale. The trivial way I referred to above is to take score = (#optimal-moves - #players-moves), with ideal score being zero. However, psychologically people like big numbers. No one wants to win by getting a mark of 0. I wonder if there is a system that someone else has come up with before to solve this problem? Essentially I wish to score the players based on: How close they've come to the ideal solution. Different challenges will have different optimal number of actions, so the scoring system needs to take that into account, e.g. Challenge 1 - max 10 points, Challenge 2 - max 20 points. I don't mind giving the players negative scores if they've performed exceptionally badly, I just don't want all scores to be <=0

  Read the article

• Are there good resources for leading documentation for an existing software product having none?

  - by Ben Rose

  Hello. I'm a software developer at a technology company. I have been tasked with leading the documentation effort for the product I work on, both internal to developers as well as spilling over into facilitating the business side of requirements documentation. This internal product has been around for at least 6 years. One challenge is that this software application has no form of documentation other than some small, outdated pieces here and there. There are comments in the code, but they are technical and do not convey any over-arching behavior (even on technical side). As a consequence of having little to no documentation, this product is often unnecessarily complex under the covers adding to the challenge. We are very limited on time that will be given to us to work on documentation. Another thing about me is that I've displayed some ability in writing/communication around the office, but I'm not coming from any sort of documentation or formal writing background (beyond my academic career). Please share your advise or recommend resources, book/website/forum/whatever, for helping me come up with a plan with milestones, best practices, task delegation, templates, buy-in, etc. I'm hoping for a resource targeting or giving special mention of introducing good documentation on existing projects where there previously was none. I would be very grateful for your responses. Ben

  Read the article

• Today in the OTN Lounge (Tuesday October 2, 2012)

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Here's a quick rundown of today's activities in the OTN Lounge:   (OTN Lounge hours today: 8:00 am - 7:00 pm) 9:00 am - 1:00 pm RAC Attack Learn about Oracle Real Application Clustering (RAC) in this collaborative event. You'll work with experts from the IOUG RAC SIG to get an Oracle Database 11gR2 RAC cluster running inside a virtual machine. For more information: RAC attack at Oracle Open World (Pythian Blog) RAC Attack - Oracle Cluster Database at Home/Events (WikiBooks) 4:30 pm - 8:00 pm Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge Office Hours Find information, expertise, and a collaborative work environment for those participating in the OSN Developer Challenge. Click here for more information. 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm Oracle Database / Oracle Fusion Middleware Tweet Meet Free as in beer! Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware tweeters, gather in the OTN Lounge for refreshments and conversation with fellow tweeters and Oracle Database and Middleware experts. The OTN Lounge is located in the Howard St. Tent, between 3rd and 4th, directly between Moscone North and Moscone South. Access to the OTN Lounge requires an Oracle OpenWorld or JavaOne conference badge.

  Read the article

• Future Trends and Challenges for Aircraft Cabins

  - by Bill Evjen

  Ingo Wuggetzer The aircraft cabin changes from the 60s till now has worsened. First class is actually premium / economy is still moving down in quality The challenge is to do efficiency and comfort Graying population is a challenge will be 14% of the world’s population soon Obesity increasingly becoming an all-milieu core societal problem Will have impact on seat sizes Female forces – women will increasingly influence business and lifestyle There are now more women in college than men People want to be green and this reflects into aircrafts. You can now buy carbon-offsets when you buy a ticket in some airlines 20% are willing to pay for green products 13% would like to but are not doing it yet Seamless Connectivity Internet is obviously mainstream and the influence of our daily lives 2 billion users in 2010 One direction is going mobile Another direction is going social computing We have to explore this to use more with our products Convergence of products iPad usage on Finair , Virgin, Jetstar iPhone share 2% Other smartphones – 11% Feature Phone – 87% Plans to invest in technology trends within the next 3 years connectivity to/from aircraft – 21% major investment / 47% R&D nominal investment Web 2.0 – 22% major investment / 57% R&D nominal investment Cabin technical investments Lighting Wireless Sensors Displays People want to use technologies on the plane that they can use on the ground Planes have moved to digital in the last decade – now they are moving to wireless Data volumes are going through the roof – (Moore’s Law)

  Read the article

• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-09-20

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Attend OTN Architect Day – by Architects, for Architects – October 25 You won't need 3D glasses to take in these live presentations (8 sessions, two tracks) on Cloud computing, SOA, and engineered systems. And the ticket price is: Zero. Nothing. Absolutely free. Register now for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles. Thursday October 25, 2012, 8:00am – 5:00pm Sofitel Los Angeles8555 Beverly BoulevardLos Angeles, CA 90048 Loving VirtualBox 4.2… | The ORACLE-BASE Blog Is it wrong for a man to love a technology? Oracle ACE Director Tim Hall has several very good reasons for his feelings… Running RichFaces on WebLogic 12c | Markus Eisele "With all the JMS magic and the different provider checks in the showcase this has become some kind of a challenge to simply build and deploy it," says Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele. His detailed post will help you to meet that challenge. Oracle ADF Coverage at OOW | Frank Nimphius Frank Nimphius shares a comprehensive and well-organized list of Oracle ADF sessions and activities scheduled for Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. OIM 11g R2 Catalog Customization Example | Daniel Gralewski Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Daniel Gralewski's post shows "how OIM catalog can be customized by using OIM UI capabilities such as managed beans and EL expressions. The post first describes the use case and the solution to address the use case; then it describes the solution details as well as provides links to the artifacts." New Book: Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPMN Topics | Mark Nelson Redstack blogger Mark Nelson shares an overview of Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPMN Topics, the new book he co-authored with Tanya Williams. Nelson describes the book as "a concise presentation of both theory and practical examples of the areas of BPMN where we have encountered the most widespread confusion and misunderstanding." Thought for the Day "I strive for an architecture from which nothing can be taken away." — Helmut Jahn Source: Brainy Quote

  Read the article

• When does implementing MVVM not make sense

  - by Kelly Sommers

  I am a big fan of various patterns and enjoy learning new ones all the time however I think with all the evangelism around popular patterns and anti-patterns sometimes this causes blind adoption. I think most things have individual pros and cons and it's important to educate what the cons are and when it doesn't make sense to make a particular choice. The pros are constantly advocated. "It depends" I think applies most times but the industry does a poor job at communicating what it depends ON. Also many patterns surfaced from inheriting values from previous patterns or have derivatives, which each one brings another set of pros and cons to the table. The sooner we are more aware of the trade off's of decisions we make in software architecture the sooner we make better decisions. This is my first challenge to the community. Even if you are a big fan of said pattern, I challenge you to discover the cons and when you shouldn't use it. Define when MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) may not make sense in a particular piece of software and based on what reasons. MVVM has a set of pros and cons. Let's try to define them. GO! :)

  Read the article

• Geekswithblogs.net | Screen Resolutions of our Readers

  - by Jeff Julian

  Yesterday I talked about the Browsers we see being used by our readers driven off of our Google Analytics traffic and today I want to share with you the Screen Resolutions we see.  As a web developer most of my life, it is hard to decide how large you should build your application because typically you have a couple huge high resolution monitors on your desk, but you typical end user is thought to have 1024x768.  With HTML5/CSS3 out, it is a little better coming up with a design that will scale to all resolutions, but it is still nice to know the numbers when it comes to how much real estate do I have on my clients. If you look at these numbers for Geekswithblogs.net, we have a lot of high resolution monitors from users that visit the site.  After a little more investigation of the number you will notice we do not have as much height available as we do width.  If the primary goal of a site is to deliver as much data in the viewable area without scrolling, this becomes a challenge when most of our pages have long pieces of formatted data.  So our challenge is to build skins that use up more of the sides of the content toward the top on larger resolution browsers and then entice the reader to scroll to get the goodies embedded in the content of the posts.  Going to be an interesting battle for sure, but we really need more skin offerings on the site. Technorati Tags: Resolution Statistics,Geekswithblogs.net

  Read the article

• Today in the OTN Lounge (Wednesday October 3, 2012)

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Here's a quick rundown of today's activities in the OTN Lounge: OTN Lounge hours today: 8:00 am - 6:00pm 9:00 am - 1:00 pm RAC Attack Learn about Oracle Real Application Clustering (RAC) in this collaborative event. You'll work with experts from the IOUG RAC SIG to get an Oracle Database 11gR2 RAC cluster running inside a virtual machine. For more information: RAC attack at Oracle Open World (Pythian Blog) RAC Attack - Oracle Cluster Database at Home/Events (WikiBooks) 4:30 pm - 8:00 pm Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge Judging The Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge comes to its conclusion with the final judging on entries and the award of the single prize: $500 in Amazon gift cards. Click here for more information. 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm Oracle ADF / Oracle Fusion Middleware Meet-up Join other Oracle ADF and Oracle Fusion Middleware developers and meet the product managers and engineers behind Oracle ADF, ADF Mobile, and ADF Essentials. Did we mention free beer? The OTN Lounge is located in the Howard St. Tent, between 3rd and 4th, directly between Moscone North and Moscone South. Access to the OTN Lounge requires an Oracle OpenWorld or JavaOne conference badge.

  Read the article

• Is it reasonable to require passwords when users sign into my application through social media accounts?

  - by BrMcMullin

  I've built an application that requires users to authenticate with one or more social media accounts from either Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Edit Once the user has signed in, an 'identity' for them is maintained in the system, to which all content they create is associated. A user can associate one account from each of the supported providers with this identity. I'm concerned about how to protect potential users from connecting the wrong account to their identity in our application. /Edit There are two main scenarios that could happen: User has multiple accounts on one of the three providers, and is not logged into the one s/he desires. User comes to a public or shared computer, in which the previous user left themselves logged into one of the three providers. While I haven't encountered many examples of this myself, I'm considering requiring users to password authenticate with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn whenever they are signing into our application. Is that a reasonable approach, or are there reasons why many other sites and applications don't challenge users to provide a user name and password when authorizing applications to access their social media accounts? Thanks in advance! Edit A clarification, I'm not intending to store anyone's user name and password. Rather, when a user clicks the button to sign in, with Facebook as an example, I'm considering showing an "Is this you?" type window. The idea is that a user would respond to the challenge by either signing into Facebook on the account fetched from the oauth hash, or would sign into the correct account and the oauth callback would run with the new oauth hash data.

  Read the article

• Unique Business Value vs. Unique IT

  - by barry.perkins

  When the age of computing started, technology was new, exciting, full of potential and had a long way to grow. Vendor architectures were proprietary, and limited in function at first, growing in capability and complexity over time. There were few if any "standards", let alone "open standards" and the concepts of "open systems", and "open architectures" were far in the future. Companies employed intelligent, talented and creative people to implement the best possible solutions for their company. At first, those solutions were "unique" to each company. As time progressed, standards emerged, companies shared knowledge, business capability supplied by technology grew, and companies continued to expand their use of technology. Taking advantage of change required companies to struggle through periodic "revolutionary" change cycles, struggling through costly changes that were fraught with risk, resulted in solutions with an increasingly shorter half-life, and frequently required altering existing business processes and retraining employees and partner businesses. The pace of technological invention and implementation grew at an ever increasing rate, making the "revolutionary" approach based upon "proprietary" or "closed" architectures or technologies no longer viable. Concurrent with the advancement of technology, the rate of change in business increased, leading us to the incredibly fast paced, highly charged, and competitive global economy that we have today, where the most successful companies are companies that are good at implementing, leveraging and exploiting change. Fast forward to today, a world where dramatic changes in business and technology happen continually, a world where "evolutionary" change is crucial. Companies can no longer afford to build "unique IT", nor can they afford regular intervals of "revolutionary" change, with the associated costs and risks. Human ingenuity was once again up to the task, turning technology into a platform supporting business through evolutionary change, by employing "open": open standards; open systems; open architectures; and open solutions. Employing "open", enables companies to implement systems based upon technology, capability and standards that will evolve over time, providing a solid platform upon which a company can drive business needs, requirements, functions, and processes down into the technology, rather than exposing technology to the business, allowing companies to focus on providing "unique business value" rather than "unique IT". The big question! Does moving from "older" technology that no longer meets the needs of today's business, to new "open" technology require yet another "revolutionary change"? A "revolutionary" change with a short half-life, camouflaging reality with great marketing? The answer is "perhaps". With the endless options available to choose from, it is entirely possible to implement a solution that may work well today, but in 5 years time will become yet another albatross for the company to bear. Some solutions may look good today, solving a budget challenge by reducing cost, or solving a specific tactical challenge, but result in highly complex environments, that may be difficult to manage and maintain and limit the future potential of your business. Put differently, some solutions might push today's challenge into the future, resulting in a more complex and expensive solution. There is no such thing as a "1 size fits all" IT solution for business. If all companies implemented business solutions based upon technology that required, or forced the same business processes across all businesses in an industry, it would be extremely difficult to show competitive advantage through "unique business value". It would be equally difficult to "evolve" to meet or exceed business needs and keep up with today's rapid pace of change. How does one ensure that they do not jump from one trap directly into another? Or to put it positively, there are solutions available today that can address these challenges and issues. How does one ensure that the buying decision of today will serve the business well for years into the future? Intelligent & Informed decisions - "buying right" In a previous blog entry, we discussed the value of linking tactical to strategic The key is driving the focus to what is best for your business, handling today's tactical issues while also aligning with a roadmap/strategy that is tightly aligned with your strategic business objectives. When considering the plethora of possible options that provide various approaches to solving today's complex business problems, it is extremely important to ensure that vendors supplying those options, focus on what is best for your business, supplying sufficient information, providing adequate answers to questions, addressing challenges, issues, concerns and objections honestly and openly, and focus on supplying solutions that are tailored for, and deliver the most business value possible for your business. Here are a few questions to consider relative to the proposed options that should help ensure that today's solution doesn't become tomorrow's problem. Do the proposed solutions: Solve the problem(s) you are trying to address? Provide a solid foundation upon which to grow/enhance your business? Provide tactical gains that align with and enable your strategic business goals/objectives? Provide an infrastructure that can be leveraged with subsequent projects? Solve problems for the business overall, the lines of business, or just IT? Simplify your current environment Provide the basis for business: Efficiency Agility Clarity governance, risk, compliance real time business visibility and trend analysis Does your IT staff have the knowledge/experience to successfully manage the proposed systems once they are deployed in production? Done well, you will be presented with options tailored to your business, that enable you to drive the "unique business value" necessary to help your business stand out from others, creating a distinct competitive advantage, delivering what your customers need, when they need it, so you can attract new customers, new business, and grow top line revenue, all at a cost that provides a strong Return on Investment/Return on Assets. The net result is growth with managed cost providing significantly improved profit margin and shareholder value.

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #005

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 SQL SERVER – Cursor to Kill All Process in Database I indeed wrote this cursor and when I often look back, I wonder how naive I was to write this. The reason for writing this cursor was to free up my database from any existing connection so I can do database operation. This worked fine but there can be a potentially big issue if there was any important transaction was killed by this process. There is another way to to achieve the same thing where we can use ALTER syntax to take database in single user mode. Read more about that over here and here. 2007 Rules of Third Normal Form and Normalization Advantage – 3NF The rules of 3NF are mentioned here Make a separate table for each set of related attributes, and give each table a primary key. If an attribute depends on only part of a multi-valued key, remove it to a separate table If attributes do not contribute to a description of the key, remove them to a separate table. Correct Syntax for Stored Procedure SP Sometime a simple question is the most important question. I often see in industry incorrectly written Stored Procedure. Few writes code after the most outer BEGIN…END and few writes code after the GO Statement. In this brief blog post, I have attempted to explain the same. 2008 Switch Between Result Pan and Query Pan – SQL Shortcut Many times when I am writing query I have to scroll the result displayed in the result set. Most of the developer uses the mouse to switch between and Query Pane and Result Pane. There are few developers who are crazy about Keyboard shortcuts. F6 is the keyword which can be used to switch between query pane and tabs of the result pane. Interesting Observation – Use of Index and Execution Plan Query Optimization is a complex game and it has its own rules. From the example in the article we have discovered that Query Optimizer does not use clustered index to retrieve data, sometime non clustered index provides optimal performance for retrieving Primary Key. When all the rows and columns are selected Primary Key should be used to select data as it provides optimal performance. 2009 Interesting Observation – TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY If you pull up any application or system where there are more than 100 SQL Server Views are created – I am very confident that at one or two places you will notice the scenario wherein View the ORDER BY clause is used with TOP 100 PERCENT. SQL Server 2008 VIEW with ORDER BY clause does not throw an error; moreover, it does not acknowledge the presence of it as well. In this article we have taken three perfect examples and demonstrated which clause we should use when. Comma Separated Values (CSV) from Table Column A Very common question – How to create comma separated values from a table in the database? The answer is also very common if we use XML. Check out this article for quick learning on the same subject. Azure Start Guide – Step by Step Installation Guide Though Azure portal has changed a quite bit since I wrote this article, the concept used in this article are not old. They are still valid and many of the functions are still working as mentioned in the article. I believe this one article will put you on the track to use Azure! Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution Earlier I have posted a small question on this blog and requested help from readers to participate here and provide a solution. The puzzle was to write a query that will return the size for each index that is on any particular table. We need a query that will return an additional column in the above listed query and it should contain the size of the index. This article presents two of the best solutions from the puzzle. 2010 Well, this week in 2010 was the week of puzzles as I posted three interesting puzzles. Till today I am noticing pretty good interesting in the puzzles. They are tricky but for sure brings a great value if you are a database developer for a long time. I suggest you go over this puzzles and their answers. Did you really know all of the answers? I am confident that reading following three blog post will for sure help you enhance the experience with T-SQL. SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists 2011 DVM sys.dm_os_sys_info Column Name Changed in SQL Server 2012 Have you ever faced a situation where something does not work? When you try to fix it - you enjoy fixing it and started to appreciate the breaking changes. Well, this was exactly I felt yesterday. Before I begin my story, I want to candidly state that I do not encourage anybody to use * in the SELECT statement. Now the disclaimer is over – I suggest you read the original story – you will love it! Get Directory Structure using Extended Stored Procedure xp_dirtree Here is the question to you – why would you do something in SQL Server where you can do the same task in command prompt much easily. Well, the answer is sometime there are real use cases when we have to do such thing. This is a similar example where I have demonstrated how in SQL Server 2012 we can use extended stored procedure to retrieve directory structure. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #006

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 This was my very first year of blogging so I was every day learning something new. As I have said many times, that blogging was never an intention. I had really not understood what exactly I am working on or beginning when I was beginning blogging in 2006. I had never knew that my life was going to change forever, once I started blogging. When I look back all of this year, I am happy that we are here together. 2007 IT Outsourcing to India – Top 10 Reasons Companies Outsource Outsourcing is about trust, collaboration and success. Helping other countries in need has been always the course of mankind, outsourcing is nothing different then that. With information technology and process improvements increasing the complexity, costs and skills required to accomplish routine tasks as well as challenging complex tasks, companies are outsourcing such tasks to providers who have the expertise to perform them at lower costs , with greater value and quality outcome. UDF – Remove Duplicate Chars From String This was a very interesting function I wrote in my early career. I am still using this function when I have to remove duplicate chars from strings. I have yet to come across a scenario where it does not work so I keep on using it till today. Please leave a comment if there is any better solution to this problem. FIX : Error : 3702 Cannot drop database because it is currently in use This is a very generic error when DROP Database is command is executed and the database is not dropped. The common mistake user is kept the connection open with this database and trying to drop the database. The database cannot be dropped if there is any other connection open along with it. It is always a good idea to take database in single user mode before dropping it. Here is the quick tutorial regarding how to bring the database in single user mode: Using T-SQL | Using SSMS. 2008 Install SQL Server 2008 – How to Upgrade to SQL Server 2008 – Installation Tutorial This was indeed one of the most popular articles in SQL Server 2008. Lots of people wanted to learn how to install SQL SErver 2008 but they were facing various issues while installation. I build this tutorial which becomes reference points for many. Default Collation of SQL Server 2008 What is the collation of SQL Server 2008 default installations? I often see this question confusing many experienced developers as well. Well the answer is in following image. Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group Meeting – November 2008 User group meetings are fun, now a days I am going to User Group meetings every week but there was a case when I have been just a beginner on this subject. The bug of the community was caught on me years ago when I started to present in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQ LServer User Groups. 2009 Validate an XML document in TSQL using XSD My friend Jacob Sebastian wrote an excellent article on the subject XML and XSD. Because of the ‘eXtensible’ nature of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), often there is a requirement to restrict and validate the content of an XML document to a pre-defined structure and values. XSD (XML Schema Definition Language) is the W3C recommended language for describing and validating XML documents. SQL Server implements XSD as XML Schema Collections. Star Join Query Optimization At present, when queries are sent to very large databases, millions of rows are returned. Also the users have to go through extended query response times when joining multiple tables are involved with such queries. ‘Star Join Query Optimization’ is a new feature of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. This mechanism uses bitmap filtering for improving the performance of some types of queries by the effective retrieval of rows from fact tables. 2010 These puzzles are very interesting and intriguing – there was lots of interest on this subject. If you have free time this weekend. You may want to try them out. SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint (Solution)  SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal (Solution)  SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists (Open)  Additionally, I had great fun presenting SQL Server Performance Tuning seminar at fantastic locations in Hyderabad. Installing AdventeWorks Database This has been the most popular request I have received on my blog. Here is the quick video about how one can install AdventureWorks. 2011 Effect of SET NOCOUNT on @@ROWCOUNT There was an interesting incident once while I was presenting a session. I wrote a code and suddenly 10 hands went up in the air.  This was a bit surprise to me as I do not know why they all got alerted. I assumed that there should be something wrong with either project, screen or my display. However the real reason was very interesting – I suggest you read the complete blog post to understand this interesting scenario. Error: Deleting Offline Database and Creating the Same Name This is very interesting because once a user deletes the offline database the MDF and LDF file still exists and if the user attempts to create a new database with the same name it will give error. I found this very interesting and the blog explains the concept very quickly. Have you ever faced a similar situation? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for December 18, 2010 -- #1012

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Mark Monster, Kevin Dockx, Jeremy Likness(-2-,-3-), Timmy Kokke, Den Delimarsky, Mike Snow, Samuel Jack(-2-), and Renuka Prasad(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Trigger a Storyboard on ViewModel changes" Mark Monster WP7: "Microsoft Push Notification in Windows Phone 7" Renuka Prasad Shoutouts: SilverlightGal sent me the link to The Silverlight Dossier ... I think it's a pretty good start... additions I'd like to see are ways to submit to the various areas. Michael Crump put up a contest that runs from now to January 1st... Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!... pretty cool, Michael! If you visit WynApse.com, you'll see I have a subscription to LearnVisualStudio.net... and now they have posted a batch of WP7 videos... 64 of them to be exact... wow!: New video series From SilverlightCream.com: Trigger a Storyboard on ViewModel changes Mark Monster has a great post up about triggering Storyboard on ViewModel changes using the DataTrigger from Blend... cool stuff, and you can also do GoToStateAction or other actions or build yourowndang Trigger Action... fun awaits! ... sorry it took a while to post, Mark... been a tad overloaded here! Working with the Silverlight Rich Text Box control Kevin Dockx has had a post up for a while at SilverlightShow where he takes a good look at the RichText control and it's various capabilities, including source so you can give it a dance yourself. Lessons Learned in Personal Web Page Part 3: Custom Panel and Listbox Jeremy Likness's part 3 of his Personal Web Page lessons learned is covering the tres-cool 3D Panel he did... and he's got it all explained out... building from scratch via a custom panel and a Listbox control... A Silverlight MVVM Feed Reader from Scratch in 30 Minutes Jeremy Likness has a video tutorial showing building an MVVM/Silverlight feedreader in 30 minutes ... plus a couple mods that he noticed after the fact... beat that HTML5 :) Jounce Part 8: Raising Property Changed In Jeremy Likness's latest post, he has number 8 in his series on his MVVM platform, Jounce. This time he's explaining the property changed notification, has a very cool way of doing it, and some interesting comments from readers. Dependency Injection, MVVM, Ninject and Silverlight Timmy Kokke has a great tutorial up with associated demo project on Dependency Injection in MVVM and Silverlight. Some hidden features in the Windows Phone 7 emulator Den Delimarsky shows how to get some of the hidden features on your WP7 emulator like the Call History, Call Settings, and Details about the numbers. Playing sound effects on Windows Phone 7 Mike Snow's latest tip is playing sound effects on your WP7 ... a little bit of XNA here and there, and badabing, badaboom, you got sound! Day 3 of my “Build a Windows Phone 7 game in 3 days” Challenge Samuel Jack has a couple more posts up about his 'Build a WP7 game in 3 Days' challenge... first up is Day 3 from 8:50 to 22:30 ... wow... long day! ... but he's got something good going now... some good external links also Day 3.5 of my “Build a Windows Phone 7 game in 3 days” Challenge Samuel Jack's 3rd day ended with another half-day added on to put on some finishing touches... again, some good external links... and he finished with this Say hello to Simon Squared, my 3.5 day old WP7 Game Microsoft Push Notification in Windows Phone 7 Renuka Prasad has a bunch of material up that I've not been aware of (how did that happen, people??) ... here's the first of a couple of his posts on Code Project ... a very nice tutorial on the Push Notification process... great diagrams and external links. Windows Phone 7 – Toast Notification Using Windows Azure Cloud Service Renuka Prasad has another WP7 post on CodeProject... this one on Toast Notification... and he's using Azure and WCF all rolled into it as well... great diagrams, descriptions and all the code. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

  Read the article

• Five Things Learned at the BSR Conference in San Francisco on Nov 2nd-4th

  - by Evelyn Neumayr

  The BSR Conference 2011—“Redefining Leadership”—held from Nov 2nd to Nov 4th in San Francisco, with Oracle as one of the main sponsors, saw senior business executives, civil society representatives, and other experts from around the world gathering to share strategies and insights on the future of sustainability. The general conference sessions kicked off on November 2nd with a plenary address by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Other sessions were presented by CEOs of the caliber of Carl Bass (Autodesk), Brian Dunn (Best Buy), Carlos Brito (Anheuser-Busch InBev) and Ofra Strauss (Strauss Group). Here are five key highlights from the conference: 1.      The main leadership challenge is integrating sustainability into core business functions and overcoming short-termism. The “BSR GlobeScan State of Sustainable Business Poll 2011” - a survey of nearly 500 business leaders from 300 member companies - shows that 84% of respondents are optimistic that global businesses will embrace CSR/sustainability as part of their core strategies and operations in the next five years but consider integrating sustainability into their core business functions the key challenge. It is still difficult for many companies that are committed to the sustainability agenda to find investors that understand the long-term implications and as Al Gore said “Many companies are given the signal by the investors that it is the short term results that matter and that is a terribly debilitating force in the market.” 2.      Companies are required to address increasing compliance requirements and transparency in their supply chain, especially in relation with conflict minerals legislation and water management. The Dodd-Frank legislation, OECD guidelines, and the upcoming Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules require companies to monitor upstream the sourcing of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, but given the complexity of this issue companies need to collaborate and partner with peer companies in their industry as well as in other industries to understand how to address conflict minerals in their supply chains. The Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs’ (IPE) China Water Pollution Map enables the public to access thousands of environmental quality, discharge, and infraction records released by various government agencies. Empowered with this information, the public has the opportunity to place greater pressure on polluting companies to comply with environmental standards and create solutions to improve their performance. 3.      A new standard for reporting on supply chain greenhouse gas emissions is available. The New “Scope 3” Supply Chain Greenhouse Gas Inventory Standard, released on October 4th 2011, is the only international greenhouse gas emissions standard that accounts for the full lifecycle of a company’s products. It provides a framework for companies to account for indirect emissions outside of energy use, such as transportation, manufacturing, and distribution, and it incorporates both upstream and downstream impacts of a product. With key investors now listing supplier vulnerability to rising energy prices and disruptions of service as a key concern, greenhouse gas (GHG) management isn’t just for leading companies but a necessity for any business. 4.      Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) reporting is becoming increasingly important to investors and other stakeholders. While European investors have traditionally driven the ESG agenda, U.S. investors are increasingly including ESG data in their analyses. This trend will likely increase as stakeholders continue to demand that an ESG lens be applied to their investments. Investors are increasingly looking to partner on sustainability, as they see the benefits of ESG providing significant returns on investment. 5.      Software companies are offering an increasing variety of solutions to help drive changes and measure performance internally, in supply chains, and across peer companies. The significant challenge is how to integrate different software systems to facilitate decision-making based on a holistic understanding of trade-offs. Jon Chorley, Chief Sustainability Officer and Vice President, Supply Chain Management Product Strategy at Oracle was a panelist in the “Trends in Sustainability Software” session and commented that, “How we think about our business decisions really comes down to how we think about cost. And as long as we don’t assign a cost to things that have an environmental impact or social impact, then we make decisions based on incomplete information. If we could include that in the process that determines ‘Is this product profitable? we would then have a much better decision.” For more information on BSR visit www.brs.org. You can also view highlights of the plenary session at http://www.bsr.org/en/bsr-conference/session-summaries/2011. Oracle is proud to be a sponsor of this BSR conference. By Elena Avesani, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Oracle          

  Read the article

• .NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’ve run into the  problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy: The .NET WebRequest object has a PreAuthenticate property which sounds like it should force authentication credentials to be sent on the first request. Looking at the MSDN example certainly looks like it does: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.webrequest.preauthenticate.aspx Unfortunately the MSDN sample is wrong. As is the text of the Help topic which incorrectly leads you to believe that PreAuthenticate… wait for it - pre-authenticates. But it doesn’t allow you to set credentials that are sent on the first request. What this property actually does is quite different. It doesn’t send credentials on the first request but rather caches the credentials ONCE you have already authenticated once. Http Authentication is based on a challenge response mechanism typically where the client sends a request and the server responds with a 401 header requesting authentication. So the client sends a request like this: GET /wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus HTTP/1.1 Host: rasnote User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506) Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en,de;q=0.7,en-us;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive and the server responds with: HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 WWW-Authenticate: basic realm=rasnote" X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate WWW-Authenticate: NTLM WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="rasnote" X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:58:20 GMT Content-Length: 5163 plus the actual error message body. The client then is responsible for re-sending the current request with the authentication token information provided (in this case Basic Auth): GET /wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus HTTP/1.1 Host: rasnote User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506) Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en,de;q=0.7,en-us;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive Cookie: TimeTrakker=2HJ1998WH06696; WebLogCommentUser=Rick Strahl|http://www.west-wind.com/|[email protected]; WebStoreUser=b8bd0ed9 Authorization: Basic cgsf12aDpkc2ZhZG1zMA== Once the authorization info is sent the server responds with the actual page result. Now if you use WebRequest (or WebClient) the default behavior is to re-authenticate on every request that requires authorization. This means if you look in  Fiddler or some other HTTP client Proxy that captures requests you’ll see that each request re-authenticates: Here are two requests fired back to back: and you can see the 401 challenge, the 200 response for both requests. If you watch this same conversation between a browser and a server you’ll notice that the first 401 is also there but the subsequent 401 requests are not present. WebRequest.PreAuthenticate And this is precisely what the WebRequest.PreAuthenticate property does: It’s a caching mechanism that caches the connection credentials for a given domain in the active process and resends it on subsequent requests. It does not send credentials on the first request but it will cache credentials on subsequent requests after authentication has succeeded: string url = "http://rasnote/wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus"; HttpWebRequest req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("rick", "secret", "rasnote"); req.AuthenticationLevel = System.Net.Security.AuthenticationLevel.MutualAuthRequested; req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse(); resp.Close(); req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("rstrahl", "secret", "rasnote"); req.AuthenticationLevel = System.Net.Security.AuthenticationLevel.MutualAuthRequested; req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; resp = req.GetResponse(); which results in the desired sequence: where only the first request doesn’t send credentials. This is quite useful as it saves quite a few round trips to the server – bascially it saves one auth request request for every authenticated request you make. In most scenarios I think you’d want to send these credentials this way but one downside to this is that there’s no way to log out the client. Since the client always sends the credentials once authenticated only an explicit operation ON THE SERVER can undo the credentials by forcing another login explicitly (ie. re-challenging with a forced 401 request). Forcing Basic Authentication Credentials on the first Request On a few occasions I’ve needed to send credentials on a first request – mainly to some oddball third party Web Services (why you’d want to use Basic Auth on a Web Service is beyond me – don’t ask but it’s not uncommon in my experience). This is true of certain services that are using Basic Authentication (especially some Apache based Web Services) and REQUIRE that the authentication is sent right from the first request. No challenge first. Ugly but there it is. Now the following works only with Basic Authentication because it’s pretty straight forward to create the Basic Authorization ‘token’ in code since it’s just an unencrypted encoding of the user name and password into base64. As you might guess this is totally unsecure and should only be used when using HTTPS/SSL connections (i’m not in this example so I can capture the Fiddler trace and my local machine doesn’t have a cert installed, but for production apps ALWAYS use SSL with basic auth). The idea is that you simply add the required Authorization header to the request on your own along with the authorization string that encodes the username and password: string url = "http://rasnote/wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus"; HttpWebRequest req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; string user = "rick"; string pwd = "secret"; string domain = "www.west-wind.com"; string auth = "Basic " + Convert.ToBase64String(System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(user + ":" + pwd)); req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.AuthenticationLevel = System.Net.Security.AuthenticationLevel.MutualAuthRequested;req.Headers.Add("Authorization", auth); req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse(); resp.Close(); This works and causes the request to immediately send auth information to the server. However, this only works with Basic Auth because you can actually create the authentication credentials easily on the client because it’s essentially clear text. The same doesn’t work for Windows or Digest authentication since you can’t easily create the authentication token on the client and send it to the server. Another issue with this approach is that PreAuthenticate has no effect when you manually force the authentication. As far as Web Request is concerned it never sent the authentication information so it’s not actually caching the value any longer. If you run 3 requests in a row like this: string url = "http://rasnote/wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus"; HttpWebRequest req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; string user = "ricks"; string pwd = "secret"; string domain = "www.west-wind.com"; string auth = "Basic " + Convert.ToBase64String(System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(user + ":" + pwd)); req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Headers.Add("Authorization", auth); req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse(); resp.Close(); req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(user, pwd, domain); req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; resp = req.GetResponse(); resp.Close(); req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(user, pwd, domain); req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; resp = req.GetResponse(); you’ll find the trace looking like this: where the first request (the one we explicitly add the header to) authenticates, the second challenges, and any subsequent ones then use the PreAuthenticate credential caching. In effect you’ll end up with one extra 401 request in this scenario, which is still better than 401 challenges on each request. Getting Access to WebRequest in Classic .NET Web Service Clients If you’re running a classic .NET Web Service client (non-WCF) one issue with the above is how do you get access to the WebRequest to actually add the custom headers to do the custom Authentication described above? One easy way is to implement a partial class that allows you add headers with something like this: public partial class TaxService { protected NameValueCollection Headers = new NameValueCollection(); public void AddHttpHeader(string key, string value) { this.Headers.Add(key,value); } public void ClearHttpHeaders() { this.Headers.Clear(); } protected override WebRequest GetWebRequest(Uri uri) { HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest) base.GetWebRequest(uri); request.Headers.Add(this.Headers); return request; } } where TaxService is the name of the .NET generated proxy class. In code you can then call AddHttpHeader() anywhere to add additional headers which are sent as part of the GetWebRequest override. Nice and simple once you know where to hook it. For WCF there’s a bit more work involved by creating a message extension as described here: http://weblogs.asp.net/avnerk/archive/2006/04/26/Adding-custom-headers-to-every-WCF-call-_2D00_-a-solution.aspx. FWIW, I think that HTTP header manipulation should be readily available on any HTTP based Web Service client DIRECTLY without having to subclass or implement a special interface hook. But alas a little extra work is required in .NET to make this happen Not a Common Problem, but when it happens… This has been one of those issues that is really rare, but it’s bitten me on several occasions when dealing with oddball Web services – a couple of times in my own work interacting with various Web Services and a few times on customer projects that required interaction with credentials-first services. Since the servers determine the protocol, we don’t have a choice but to follow the protocol. Lovely following standards that implementers decide to ignore, isn’t it? :-}© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in .NET  CSharp  Web Services  

  Read the article

• Rolling back database changes

  - by justin

  Hi, I work in team which uses Work flow management tool. I was presented with a challenge where the user should be able to roll back the changes made anytime during the flow to a certain point in the past. Surely the toll can handle it but the additional database calls that may have made during these activities have to be manually rolled back. the challenge is that there are multiple parallel paths and there different permutations of external database calls. So is there a frame work or a way to keep track of these DB calls and rollback them?. thank you, Justin

  Read the article

• Taking Responsibilites too early - danger or boon?

  - by narresh

  Just I am only six months experienced guy in software industry.Due to recession season,a large volume of employees from our company are asked to leave.This impact affects the new inexperienced guys. The problem is We have to interact with the client directly to gather the requirement We have to design all HLD and LLD ,use cases and DB Diagrams ,that should staisfy the customers who keeping the high software insdutry standards In this do or die situation (Client gives us narrow dead line),we spend most of time with interacting client (only less time is available for development and testing,even sit out for 24 X 7 won't help us to finish our task) If task will not be finished with in the expected time frame ,that will trigger poor performance ration to our profile There are two important questions flashing in our mind : (1) Quit the job and do other business (2) Face the challenge : (if the option is to face the challenge ,What are all the tools should we follow to automate requirement gathering,testing,DB diagram,Code review and the rest.(We are working on ASP.NET 3.5 with SQL Server 2005).

  Read the article

• Security review of an authenticated Diffie Hellman variant

  - by mtraut

  EDIT I'm still hoping for some advice on this, i tried to clarify my intentions... When i came upon device pairing in my mobile communication framework i studied a lot of papers on this topic and and also got some input from previous questions here. But, i didn't find a ready to implement protocol solution - so i invented a derivate and as i'm no crypto geek i'm not sure about the security caveats of the final solution: The main questions are Is SHA256 sufficient as a commit function? Is the addition of the shared secret as an authentication info in the commit string safe? What is the overall security of the 1024 bit group DH I assume at most 2^-24 bit probability of succesful MITM attack (because of 24 bit challenge). Is this plausible? What may be the most promising attack (besides ripping the device out off my numb, cold hands) This is the algorithm sketch For first time pairing, a solution proposed in "Key agreement in peer-to-peer wireless networks" (DH-SC) is implemented. I based it on a commitment derived from: A fix "UUID" for the communicating entity/role (128 bit, sent at protocol start, before commitment) The public DH key (192 bit private key, based on the 1024 bit Oakley group) A 24 bit random challenge Commit is computed using SHA256 c = sha256( UUID || DH pub || Chall) Both parties exchange this commitment, open and transfer the plain content of the above values. The 24 bit random is displayed to the user for manual authentication DH session key (128 bytes, see above) is computed When the user opts for persistent pairing, the session key is stored with the remote UUID as a shared secret Next time devices connect, commit is computed by additionally hashing the previous DH session key before the random challenge. For sure it is not transfered when opening. c = sha256( UUID || DH pub || DH sess || Chall) Now the user is not bothered authenticating when the local party can derive the same commitment using his own, stored previous DH session key. After succesful connection the new DH session key becomes the new shared secret. As this does not exactly fit the protocols i found so far (and as such their security proofs), i'd be very interested to get an opinion from some more crypto enabled guys here. BTW. i did read about the "EKE" protocol, but i'm not sure what the extra security level is.

  Read the article

• Newbie programmer looking for a fun, small project (pref. C++/Python)

  - by Francisco P.

  Hello everyone, I have some experience in Scheme and C++ (read: a semester of each) I know the very basics of Python (used it for physics simulations with the Visual Python module). Can you recommend me some fun and small (i.e. don't take much time) projects on either Python or C++? I have no real preferences, just that it is fun :P Thanks for your time! PS: I've tried projecteuler and python challenge. Euler is good, but more about math than coding, and py challenge just didn't work for me.

  Read the article

• Confusion using MYSQLI

  - by user1020069

  I just started using mysqli API for PHP. Apparently, every time an object of the class MYSQLI is instantiated, it can setup a connection to the database as it connects to the server unlike mysql_connect, which connects to the server first and then you are required to specify the database to query. Now this is a good problem if the db exists, in my case, the db does not exist on the first ever connection to the server/execution of the problem, hence I must connect without specifying the database, which is fine, since the msyqli constructor does not make this database mandatory. My challenge is essentially, how do I check if the database exists before attempting the first connection. The only way to really do this would be to establish a conection to the server and then use the result of the following query to gauge if the database exists: SELECT COUNT(*) AS `exists` FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA WHERE SCHEMATA.SCHEMA_NAME="dbname" ; If this returns true, then the database exists, but now the challenge is how do I get the mysqli object to query this database rather than having to prefix the name of the database in the query. Thanks much

  Read the article

• How to set credential persistence permanent on Android

  - by doreamon

  My app has save login credential feature, so I store cookies for the next use after succeeding to sign in. However, after a time period, the session will be time out and cannot log in with the cookies any more. On iOS, after setting credential persistence to permanent, the app works nicely even after restarting the phone: [[challenge sender] useCredential:[NSURLCredential credentialWithUser:username password:password persistence:NSURLCredentialPersistencePermanent] forAuthenticationChallenge:challenge]; On Android, I cannot find out such kind of this option. Here is from my HttpHelper class: ((AbstractHttpClient) HttpHelper.client).getAuthSchemes().register("ntlm",new NTLMSchemeFactory()); NTCredentials creds = new NTCredentials(user, pass, "", domain); ((AbstractHttpClient) HttpHelper.client).getCredentialsProvider().setCredentials(AuthScope.ANY, creds); The server is SharePoint so I have to deal with ntlm authentication by following this instruction If you have idea, please let me know. Thank you.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17  | Next Page >