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• How to access SQL CE 3.5 from VB6

  - by Masterfu

  We have a .NET 3.5 SP1 application written in C# that stores data in an SQL CE 3.5 Database. We also need to access (read only) this very data from a legacy VB6 application. I don't know if this is at all possible. There are several approaches to this problem that I can think of. 1) I have read about ADOCE Connections, but this seems to be an option for embedded Visual Basic only 2) I can't seem to get a connection working using ADODB.Connection Objects like so Dim MyConnObj As New ADODB.Connection ' Microsoft.SQLSERVER.CE.OLEDB.3.5 ' Microsoft.SQLSERVER.MOBILE.OLEDB.3.0 MyConnObj.ConnectionString = "Provider=SQLOLEDB;Data Source=c:\test.sdf" MyConnObj.Open Maybe this is just a bad choice of providers? I also tried the providers that appear as comments above and different connection strings, but to no avail. Both providers are not installed on my dev machine and won't be installed on my customer's machine. 3) Maybe there is a way to use a more generic approach like ODBC? But I believe this would result in setup / deployment work, right? Does anyone have any experience with this scenario? As you can see, I am really looking for some good starting points. I also accept answers like "This is drop dead simple and so are you" as long as they come with some guiding directions ;-)

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• Stubbing an ActsAs Rails Plugin

  - by Rabbott

  I need to create a plugin much like Authlogic (or even just add on to Authlogic), but due to requirements beyond my control I need my plugin to authenticate using SOAP. Basically the plugin would require that anyone accessing the controller (before_filter would be fine) would have to authenticate first. I have ZERO control over the login page, or the SOAP server, I am simply a client attempting to authenticate to the providers SOAP Web Service. Here is what happens.. before_filter realizes that no session[:credential] is set, and forwards the user to the url on the providers servers. The user enters their credentials, and once authenticated, the web service forwards the user to a URL that has been entered by their sysadmins, attaching a token to the url on its way back. I need to take that token, append it to some parameters stored in a local YAML file, and make the SOAP call to the providers server. If all goes as planned, I need to set session[:credential] to the result of the SOAP call, and forward the user to the root page. Subsequent calls to the before_filter will not make the SOAP call, because session[:credential] is set. Ideally I think this would be awesome to slap on top of Authlogic, but I'm not sure how to do this, So I started to create my own acts_as_soap_authentic plugin, which isn't causing errors, but doesn't do anything.. Anyone have any pointers, or tips as to how I can get the ball rolling here? It seems simple, but is proving not to be..

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• Response.Redirect not firing due to code to prevent re-submission

  - by Marco

  I have an event which needs to contact some third party providers before performing a redirect (think 'final payment page on ecommerce site') and hence has some lag associated with its processing. It is very important that these third party providers are not contacted more than once, and sometimes impatient users may try and refresh the page (hence re-submitting the data). The general code structure is: If Session("orderStatus") <> 'processing' Then Session("orderStatus") = 'processing' DoThirdPartyStuffThatTakesSomeTime() Response.Redirect("confirmationPage.asp", True) End If The problem is, if the user refreshes the page, the response.redirect does not happen (even though the rest of the code will run before the redirect from the original submission). It seems that the new submission creates a new thread for the browser which takes precedence - it skips this bit of code obviously to prevent the third party providers being contacted a second time, and since there is no redirect, just comes back to the same page. The whole second submission may have completed before the first submission has finished its job. Any help on how I can still ignore all of the subsequent submissions of the page, but still make the redirect work...? Thanks

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• How to create custom omniauth provider (how to return data)

  - by user2803917

  I searched all around the net, how to create a custom provider for omniauth.. and i succedded partly.. I created a gem, and it worked perfectly, except the part, that i cant understand how to return the gathered data to sessions controller, like other providers do.. here is the code in auth gem: require 'multi_json' require 'digest/md5' require 'rest-client' module OmniAuth module Strategies class Providername < OmniAuth::Strategies::OAuth attr_accessor :app_id, :api_key, :auth def initialize(app, app_id = nil, api_key = nil, options = {}) super(app, :providername) @app_id = app_id @api_key = api_key end protected def request_phase redirect "http://valid_url" end def callback_phase if request.params['code'] && request.params['status'] == 'ok' response = RestClient.get("http://valid_url2/?code=#{request.params['auth_code']}") auth = MultiJson.decode(response.to_s) unless auth['error'] @auth_data = auth if @auth_data @return_data = OmniAuth::Utils.deep_merge(super, { 'uid' => @auth_data['uid'], 'nickname' => @auth_data['nick'], 'user_info' => { 'first_name' => @auth_data['name'], 'last_name' => @auth_data['surname'], 'location' => @auth_data['place'], }, 'credentials' => { 'apikey' => @auth_data['apikey'] }, 'extra' => {'user_hash' => @auth_data} }) end end else fail!(:invalid_request) end rescue Exception => e fail!(:invalid_response, e) end end end end and here i call it in my initializers: Rails.application.config.middleware.use OmniAuth::Builder do provider "providername", Settings.providers.providername.app_id, Settings.providers.providername.app_secret end in this code, everything works fine so far, the provider gets called, i get the info from provider, i create a hash (@auth_data) with info, but how do i return it

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• Active Directory Membership Provider - how to expand on this?

  - by Jaxidian

  I'm working on getting an MVC app up and running via AD Membership Provider and I'm having some issues figuring this out. I have a base configuration setup and working when I login as [email protected] + password. <connectionStrings> <add name="MyConnString" connectionString="LDAP://domaincontroller/OU=Product Users,DC=my,DC=domain,DC=com" /> </connectionStrings> <membership defaultProvider="MyProvider"> <providers> <clear /> <add name="MyProvider" connectionStringName="MyConnString" connectionUsername="my.domain.com\service_account" connectionPassword="biguglypassword" type="System.Web.Security.ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" /> </providers> </membership> However, I'd LIKE to do some other things and I'm not sure how to go about them. Login without typing the domain (i.e. the "@my.domain.com"). I realize that this could only work if I limit myself to just one domain - that's fine. Organize users in up to N different OUs within a single OU. As you can tell from my current connection string, I'm authenticating users in my Product Users OU. I would LIKE to create OUs for various companies within this OU and put the users into those OUs. How can I authenticate across all of these different OUs? I'm trying to figure out how the Active Directory Membership Provider ties in with the Profile and Role providers. Are there AD versions of those too or am I stuck with SQL, home-grown, or finding something somebody else has coded up? Many thanks!!

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• Passing data between Drupal module callback, preprocess and template

  - by rob5408

  I've create a module called finder that I want to take parameters from a url, crunch them and then display results via a tpl file. here's the relevant functions... function finder_menu() { $items = array(); $items['finder'] = array( 'page callback' => 'finder_view', 'access callback' => TRUE, ); return $items; } function finder_theme($existing, $type, $theme, $path) { return array( 'finder_view' => array( 'variables' => array('providers' => null), 'template' => 'results', ), ); } function finder_preprocess_finder_view(&$variables) { // put my data into $variables } function finder_view($zipcode = null) { // Get Providers from Zipcode return theme('finder_view', $providers); } Now I know finder_view is being called. I also know finder_preprocess_finder_view is being called. Finally, I know that result.tpl.php is being used to output. But I cannot wrap my head around how to do meaningful work in the callback, somehow make that data available in the preprocessor to add to "variables" so that i can access in the tpl file. in a situation where you are using a tpl file is the callback even useful for anything? I've done this in the past where the callback does all the work and passes to a theming function, but i want to use a file for output instead this time. Thanks...

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• In an Android application, should I have one content provider per table or only one for the entire a

  - by Andrew Dyer

  I have years of experience with Microsoft .NET development (primarily C#) and have been working to come up to speed on Android and Java. So far, I've built a small application with a couple screens and a working content provider. All of the examples I've seen for developing content providers typically work with a single table, so I got the impression that this was the convention. I built a couple more content providers for other tables and ran into the "Unknown URI" IllegalArgumentException when I tried to test them. The exception is being thrown by one of my content providers, but not the one I was intending to call. It appears that my application is using the first content provider in the AndroidManifest.xml file, which now has me wondering if I should only have a single content provider for the entire application. Are there any best practices and/or examples for working with multiple tables in an Android application? Should I have one content provider per table or only one for the entire application? If the former, how do I resolve URIs to the proper provider? If the latter, how do I keep my content provider code from being polluted with switch statements?

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• Drupal module for complex hours of operation / office hours

  - by Eronarn

  Background: I am building a website in Drupal that links together a wide variety of social service providers for the purposes of discovery, collaboration, and all that good stuff. The goal is to make a website that is simple to browse for consumers of these services and simple to update for providers of these services. The beta has been very well received, but I want to switch to a different information schema before the site goes live. Specific question: I am looking for a module (or other solution) that... Stores this data in Drupal (i.e., no GCal) Supports a wide variety of repeats Is intuitive for people editing the node (no Cron-style interfaces, please!) I have looked into several modules on drupal.org and none seem to meet all of these criteria. I've also searched here, and while this question is similar: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2794149/drupal-create-a-node-with-employee-working-hours my needs are too complex for the offered solution. Some of these providers have "hours" such as "the third Wednesday of every month", or "open during Winter months", or separate hotline & office hours. Likewise, the Date Repeat module doesn't cut it as stands currently. I'm comfortable hacking what I need into an existing module - I just don't want to duplicate effort! If you have a suggestion on what module might be a good starting point, I'd appreciate that input, too. Thanks. <3

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• Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix

  - by ScottGu

  I’m excited to announce the release today of several products: ASP.NET MVC 3 NuGet IIS Express 7.5 SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Orchard 1.0 WebMatrix 1.0 The above products are all free. They build upon the .NET 4 and VS 2010 release, and add a ton of additional value to ASP.NET (both Web Forms and MVC) and the Microsoft Web Server stack. ASP.NET MVC 3 Today we are shipping the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3.  You can download and install ASP.NET MVC 3 here.  The ASP.NET MVC 3 source code (released under an OSI-compliant open source license) can also optionally be downloaded here. ASP.NET MVC 3 is a significant update that brings with it a bunch of great features.  Some of the improvements include: Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine).  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type.  You can learn more about Razor from some of the blog posts I’ve done about it over the last 6 months Introducing Razor New @model keyword in Razor Layouts with Razor Server-Side Comments with Razor Razor’s @: and <text> syntax Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor Layouts and Sections with Razor Today’s release supports full code intellisense support for Razor (both VB and C#) with Visual Studio 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. JavaScript Improvements ASP.NET MVC 3 enables richer JavaScript scenarios and takes advantage of emerging HTML5 capabilities. The AJAX and Validation helpers in ASP.NET MVC 3 now use an Unobtrusive JavaScript based approach.  Unobtrusive JavaScript avoids injecting inline JavaScript into HTML, and enables cleaner separation of behavior using the new HTML 5 “data-“ attribute convention (which conveniently works on older browsers as well – including IE6). This keeps your HTML tight and clean, and makes it easier to optionally swap out or customize JS libraries.  ASP.NET MVC 3 now includes built-in support for posting JSON-based parameters from client-side JavaScript to action methods on the server.  This makes it easier to exchange data across the client and server, and build rich JavaScript front-ends.  We think this capability will be particularly useful going forward with scenarios involving client templates and data binding (including the jQuery plugins the ASP.NET team recently contributed to the jQuery project).  Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC included the core jQuery library.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also now ships the jQuery Validate plugin (which our validation helpers use for client-side validation scenarios).  We are also now shipping and including jQuery UI by default as well (which provides a rich set of client-side JavaScript UI widgets for you to use within projects). Improved Validation ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a bunch of validation enhancements that make it even easier to work with data. Client-side validation is now enabled by default with ASP.NET MVC 3 (using an onbtrusive javascript implementation).  Today’s release also includes built-in support for Remote Validation - which enables you to annotate a model class with a validation attribute that causes ASP.NET MVC to perform a remote validation call to a server method when validating input on the client. The validation features introduced within .NET 4’s System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace are now supported by ASP.NET MVC 3.  This includes support for the new IValidatableObject interface – which enables you to perform model-level validation, and allows you to provide validation error messages specific to the state of the overall model, or between two properties within the model.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also supports the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class in .NET 4.  ValidationAttribute now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated.  This enables richer scenarios where you can validate the current value based on another property of the model.  We’ve shipped a built-in [Compare] validation attribute  with ASP.NET MVC 3 that uses this support and makes it easy out of the box to compare and validate two property values. You can use any data access API or technology with ASP.NET MVC.  This past year, though, we’ve worked closely with the .NET data team to ensure that the new EF Code First library works really well for ASP.NET MVC applications.  These two posts of mine cover the latest EF Code First preview and demonstrates how to use it with ASP.NET MVC 3 to enable easy editing of data (with end to end client+server validation support).  The final release of EF Code First will ship in the next few weeks. Today we are also publishing the first preview of a new MvcScaffolding project.  It enables you to easily scaffold ASP.NET MVC 3 Controllers and Views, and works great with EF Code-First (and is pluggable to support other data providers).  You can learn more about it – and install it via NuGet today - from Steve Sanderson’s MvcScaffolding blog post. Output Caching Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC supported output caching content at a URL or action-method level. With ASP.NET MVC V3 we are also enabling support for partial page output caching – which allows you to easily output cache regions or fragments of a response as opposed to the entire thing.  This ends up being super useful in a lot of scenarios, and enables you to dramatically reduce the work your application does on the server.  The new partial page output caching support in ASP.NET MVC 3 enables you to easily re-use cached sub-regions/fragments of a page across multiple URLs on a site.  It supports the ability to cache the content either on the web-server, or optionally cache it within a distributed cache server like Windows Server AppFabric or memcached. I’ll post some tutorials on my blog that show how to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC 3’s new output caching support for partial page scenarios in the future. Better Dependency Injection ASP.NET MVC 3 provides better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers. With ASP.NET MVC 3 you no longer need to author custom ControllerFactory classes in order to enable DI with Controllers.  You can instead just register a Dependency Injection framework with ASP.NET MVC 3 and it will resolve dependencies not only for Controllers, but also for Views, Action Filters, Model Binders, Value Providers, Validation Providers, and Model Metadata Providers that you use within your application. This makes it much easier to cleanly integrate dependency injection within your projects. Other Goodies ASP.NET MVC 3 includes dozens of other nice improvements that help to both reduce the amount of code you write, and make the code you do write cleaner.  Here are just a few examples: Improved New Project dialog that makes it easy to start new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects from templates. Improved Add->View Scaffolding support that enables the generation of even cleaner view templates. New ViewBag property that uses .NET 4’s dynamic support to make it easy to pass late-bound data from Controllers to Views. Global Filters support that allows specifying cross-cutting filter attributes (like [HandleError]) across all Controllers within an app. New [AllowHtml] attribute that allows for more granular request validation when binding form posted data to models. Sessionless controller support that allows fine grained control over whether SessionState is enabled on a Controller. New ActionResult types like HttpNotFoundResult and RedirectPermanent for common HTTP scenarios. New Html.Raw() helper to indicate that output should not be HTML encoded. New Crypto helpers for salting and hashing passwords. And much, much more… Learn More about ASP.NET MVC 3 We will be posting lots of tutorials and samples on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the weeks ahead.  Below are two good ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials available on the site today: Build your First ASP.NET MVC 3 Application: VB and C# Building the ASP.NET MVC 3 Music Store We’ll post additional ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials and videos on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the future. Visit it regularly to find new tutorials as they are published. How to Upgrade Existing Projects ASP.NET MVC 3 is compatible with ASP.NET MVC 2 – which means it should be easy to update existing MVC projects to ASP.NET MVC 3.  The new features in ASP.NET MVC 3 build on top of the foundational work we’ve already done with the MVC 1 and MVC 2 releases – which means that the skills, knowledge, libraries, and books you’ve acquired are all directly applicable with the MVC 3 release.  MVC 3 adds new features and capabilities – it doesn’t obsolete existing ones. You can upgrade existing ASP.NET MVC 2 projects by following the manual upgrade steps in the release notes.  Alternatively, you can use this automated ASP.NET MVC 3 upgrade tool to easily update your  existing projects. Localized Builds Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 release is available in English.  We will be releasing localized versions of ASP.NET MVC 3 (in 9 languages) in a few days.  I’ll blog pointers to the localized downloads once they are available. NuGet Today we are also shipping NuGet – a free, open source, package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use open source libraries in your projects. It works with all .NET project types (including ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WinForms, Silverlight, and Class Libraries).  You can download and install it here. NuGet enables developers who maintain open source projects (for example, .NET projects like Moq, NHibernate, Ninject, StructureMap, NUnit, Windsor, Raven, Elmah, etc) to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable.  The client-side NuGet tools – which include full Visual Studio integration – make it trivial for any .NET developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on. NuGet handles dependency management between libraries (for example: library1 depends on library2). It also makes it easy to update (and optionally remove) libraries from your projects later. It supports updating web.config files (if a package needs configuration settings). It also allows packages to add PowerShell scripts to a project (for example: scaffold commands). Importantly, NuGet is transparent and clean – and does not install anything at the system level. Instead it is focused on making it easy to manage libraries you use with your projects. Our goal with NuGet is to make it as simple as possible to integrate open source libraries within .NET projects.  NuGet Gallery This week we also launched a beta version of the http://nuget.org web-site – which allows anyone to easily search and browse an online gallery of open source packages available via NuGet.  The site also now allows developers to optionally submit new packages that they wish to share with others.  You can learn more about how to create and share a package here. There are hundreds of open-source .NET projects already within the NuGet Gallery today.  We hope to have thousands there in the future. IIS Express 7.5 Today we are also shipping IIS Express 7.5.  IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that is optimized for developer scenarios.  It works for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC project types. We think IIS Express combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server (aka Cassini) currently built-into Visual Studio today with the full power of IIS.  Specifically: It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all) It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk.  It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios.  You can also optionally redistribute IIS Express with your own applications if you want a lightweight web-server.  The standard IIS Express EULA now includes redistributable rights. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for IIS Express.  Read my VS 2010 SP1 and IIS Express blog post to learn more about what it enables.  SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Today we are also shipping SQL Server Compact Edition 4 (aka SQL CE 4).  SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it.  You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine.  No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded.  SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax.  This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE.  This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios.  With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET).  This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments.  Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE.  It is also totally free. Tooling Support with VS 2010 SP1 Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for SQL CE 4 and ASP.NET Projects.  Read my VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE 4 blog post to learn more about what it enables.  Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Today we are also releasing Microsoft Web Deploy V2 and Microsoft Web Farm Framework V2.  These services provide a flexible and powerful way to deploy ASP.NET applications onto either a single server, or across a web farm of machines. You can learn more about these capabilities from my previous blog posts on them: Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy Visit the http://iis.net website to learn more and install them. Both are free. Orchard 1.0 Today we are also releasing Orchard v1.0.  Orchard is a free, open source, community based project.  It provides Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging System support out of the box, and makes it possible to easily create and manage web-sites without having to write code (site owners can customize a site through the browser-based editing tools built-into Orchard).  Read these tutorials to learn more about how you can setup and manage your own Orchard site. Orchard itself is built as an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using Razor view templates (and by default uses SQL CE 4 for data storage).  Developers wishing to extend an Orchard site with custom functionality can open and edit it as a Visual Studio project – and add new ASP.NET MVC Controllers/Views to it.  WebMatrix 1.0 WebMatrix is a new, free, web development tool from Microsoft that provides a suite of technologies that make it easier to enable website development.  It enables a developer to start a new site by browsing and downloading an app template from an online gallery of web applications (which includes popular apps like Umbraco, DotNetNuke, Orchard, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla).  Alternatively it also enables developers to create and code web sites from scratch. WebMatrix is task focused and helps guide developers as they work on sites.  WebMatrix includes IIS Express, SQL CE 4, and ASP.NET - providing an integrated web-server, database and programming framework combination.  It also includes built-in web publishing support which makes it easy to find and deploy sites to web hosting providers. You can learn more about WebMatrix from my Introducing WebMatrix blog post this summer.  Visit http://microsoft.com/web to download and install it today. Summary I’m really excited about today’s releases – they provide a bunch of additional value that makes web development with ASP.NET, Visual Studio and the Microsoft Web Server a lot better.  A lot of folks worked hard to share this with you today. On behalf of my whole team – we hope you enjoy them! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• asterisk/freeswitch in nat/no-nat setup

  - by pQd

  hi, my current setup - i use bunch of sip hard-phones around few offices. all devices have two sip accounts configured - one on internal sip proxy [for calls between the branches], another - at 3rd party voip providers [ since it's in different countries - those are different providers, but that's irrelevant ]. i was thinking about terminating sip calls on something like asterisk/freeswitch server and having all sip-devices log on just once to such server[s] - mostly to provide things like voicemail, groupcalls, redirections etc. it seems perfectly doable but there is one problem - i cannot find examples how to prepare for nat/no nat. for calls routed to from/to 3rd party voip operator - i'll need handling for nat/stun etc, but for handling of internal calls - i do not want any nat, all traffic should go via vpns to different branches. can you provide me some hints how to configure it? any tutorials? thanks!

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• hyperv vss writer unexpected error

  - by Eric Martin

  I am using Mozy Pro to backup our Hyperv servers. I am doing this without any issues on a 2nd server but this box hasn't backed up sucessfully yet. I was told by the support tech at Mozy to type: vssadmin list providers >c:\providers.txt vssadmin list writers >c:\writers.txt Writers.txt: vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool (C) Copyright 2001-2013 Microsoft Corp. Writer name: 'Task Scheduler Writer' Writer Id: {d61d61c8-d73a-4eee-8cdd-f6f9786b7124} Writer Instance Id: {1bddd48e-5052-49db-9b07-b96f96727e6b} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error Writer name: 'VSS Metadata Store Writer' Writer Id: {75dfb225-e2e4-4d39-9ac9-ffaff65ddf06} Writer Instance Id: {088e7a7d-09a8-4cc6-a609-ad90e75ddc93} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error Writer name: 'Performance Counters Writer' Writer Id: {0bada1de-01a9-4625-8278-69e735f39dd2} Writer Instance Id: {f0086dda-9efc-47c5-8eb6-a944c3d09381} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error Writer name: 'System Writer' Writer Id: {e8132975-6f93-4464-a53e-1050253ae220} Writer Instance Id: {506e7d9c-ded3-4edf-824a-4dd9af7f7538} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error Writer name: 'ASR Writer' Writer Id: {be000cbe-11fe-4426-9c58-531aa6355fc4} Writer Instance Id: {1de438e4-09de-487c-9ea8-eeafbe3fd210} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error Writer name: 'COM+ REGDB Writer' Writer Id: {542da469-d3e1-473c-9f4f-7847f01fc64f} Writer Instance Id: {511d23d9-4cbb-400f-b739-e6e0a8ecdbee} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error Writer name: 'Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer' Writer Id: {66841cd4-6ded-4f4b-8f17-fd23f8ddc3de} Writer Instance Id: {32f41185-2b20-41ff-a7aa-92c262f578cd} State: [1] Stable Last error: Unexpected error Writer name: 'Registry Writer' Writer Id: {afbab4a2-367d-4d15-a586-71dbb18f8485} Writer Instance Id: {fa328ece-623f-43cc-9888-e897e108c40e} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error Writer name: 'Shadow Copy Optimization Writer' Writer Id: {4dc3bdd4-ab48-4d07-adb0-3bee2926fd7f} Writer Instance Id: {7b582861-7f7f-4c10-adb1-5106bcab3902} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error Writer name: 'WMI Writer' Writer Id: {a6ad56c2-b509-4e6c-bb19-49d8f43532f0} Writer Instance Id: {d2f73a0f-c19a-44cc-bcd2-6c84ac6e516b} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error Writer name: 'MSMQ Writer (MSMQ)' Writer Id: {7e47b561-971a-46e6-96b9-696eeaa53b2a} Writer Instance Id: {95ea6efc-c00c-47ca-90d1-28fbe6d7a8d0} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error Writer name: 'IIS Config Writer' Writer Id: {2a40fd15-dfca-4aa8-a654-1f8c654603f6} Writer Instance Id: {d5a32f43-0675-400d-8502-cdece4c867e1} State: [1] Stable Last error: No error Providers.txt: vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool (C) Copyright 2001-2013 Microsoft Corp. Provider name: 'Microsoft File Share Shadow Copy provider' Provider type: Fileshare Provider Id: {89300202-3cec-4981-9171-19f59559e0f2} Version: 1.0.0.1 Provider name: 'Microsoft Software Shadow Copy provider 1.0' Provider type: System Provider Id: {b5946137-7b9f-4925-af80-51abd60b20d5} Version: 1.0.0.7 The tech said I needed to resolve this issue: Writer name: 'Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer' Writer Id: {66841cd4-6ded-4f4b-8f17-fd23f8ddc3de} Writer Instance Id: {32f41185-2b20-41ff-a7aa-92c262f578cd} State: [1] Stable Last error: Unexpected error I checked the event viewer and this is the only thing I found related to hyperv: I don't know where to start to resolve this or to find out where the issue is at. I know nothing of the vss writer for hyperv so any input would be greatly appreciated.

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• One network, two macbooks, one is fast and the other is slow

  - by Brendan

  I really need help for my friend. I know next to nothing about computers. My roommate and I both have macbook pros from the same year running OS X, are both connecting wirelessly to the same xfinity wifi, and while mine runs perfectly fine, my roommate complains that his works very slowly and times out every few seconds. I can't seem to figure out why this is. He is trying to get me to switch internet providers because he is convinced that it is their problem, but this cannot possibly be the issue since it works great on mine. He has an xbox hooked up to the wifi that he says also works poorly. I really can't see switching providers given that I am experiencing absolutely zero problems. How can I help my friend?

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• Is there a SIP provider in the UK which provides the P-Asserted-Identity header?

  - by nbolton

  In the US, Flowroute (low cost SIP trunking provider) provides P-Asserted-Identity in the SIP invite request header (example screenshots). It also allows you to set the caller ID for outgoing calls, for example by using the follow in extensions.conf for Asterisk: exten => id,n,Set(CALLERID(all)=123) However, in the UK, I've tried a couple of SIP providers and none of them let me do either of those things (see P-Asserted-Identity or set the caller-ID). Is this because of some sort of restriction in the UK phone networks, or is it only available to really expensive SIP trunking providers?

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• Xmail shows error at Gmail

  - by Karthik Malla

  Hello I am using Xmail server at IP 65.75.241.26 hosted at www.softmail.me using which I can send and receive email to/from all email service providers but unable to receive back from Gmail. This error lies only with Gmail. Experts says that Gmail requires proper working MX records where as for other emailing providers do not bother much. Is MX records the solution for my problem? Or is there any other issue? My mailserver outgoing at softmail.me:25 My mailserver incoming at softmail.me:110 Please help me how to get rid of this issue.

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• Domain provider for all Country Code TLDs?

  - by 8k_of_power

  I find it very disturbing to buy some domains from one domain provider than when I have to buy a Country Code TLD that is not supported, I have to buy from another domain provider, and thus ending up having multiple domain providers for all my domains. I have looked at Gandi and GoDaddy. They both lack some Country Code TLDs the other one has. Is there domain providers that has all (or almost all) Country Code TLDs? If not, how do you guys do to get all (or almost all) domains under in one place? Also, it would be good if someone could suggest some of the big players of domain providing besides Gandi and GoDaddy, cause I'm new to the international domain market (have only used a couple in Sweden).

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• Redirect all subdomains to subfolders

  - by alfonso

  I'd like to add a rule so that all subdomains get redirected to a subfolder. For example: app1.example.com -> example.com/app1 app2.example.com -> example.com/app2 something.example.com -> example.com/something All subdomains will only be one level deep. Questions Which DNS providers allow me to do this? Are these alternatives feasible? Redirect them all to a special webapp with a static IP that redirects to the proper subfolder. How can I know from which subdomain they came from? Programatically create each rule when I need it. Which DNS providers have API access to add rules? I think Amazon Route 53 might be the answer here.

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• equivalent to CDN but for dynamical content?

  - by ajsie

  so i know for serving static elements (css, js, images, videos etc) you should use CDN since they are spread out throughout the world. but how could i spread out by apache servers? is there an equivalent to CDN but for dynamical pages? or is it the traditional LAMP way. if so, i guess my best option is to find an international hosting provider that hosts in different countries, so the content will be served from the country located nearest the client machine. any suggestions of such hosting providers? or is it best practice to contact different hosting providers in different countries that do not relate to each other. what is the right way to go?

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• Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

  - by raul.goycoolea

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Abstract   Reference architecture provides needed architectural information that can be provided in advance to an enterprise to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps business owners to actualize their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. It evaluates the IT systems, based on Reference Architecture goals, principles, and standards. It helps to reduce IT costs by increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc. Telecom Reference Architecture provides customers with the flexibility to view bundled service bills online with the provision of multiple services. It provides real-time, flexible billing and charging systems, to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Enterprises. It lays the foundation for a Telecom Reference Architecture by articulating the requirements, drivers, and pitfalls for telecom service providers. It describes generic reference architecture for telecom enterprises and moves on to explain how to achieve Enterprise Reference Architecture by using SOA.   Introduction   A Reference Architecture provides a methodology, set of practices, template, and standards based on a set of successful solutions implemented earlier. These solutions have been generalized and structured for the depiction of both a logical and a physical architecture, based on the harvesting of a set of patterns that describe observations in a number of successful implementations. It helps as a reference for the various architectures that an enterprise can implement to solve various problems. It can be used as the starting point or the point of comparisons for various departments/business entities of a company, or for the various companies for an enterprise. It provides multiple views for multiple stakeholders.   Major artifacts of the Enterprise Reference Architecture are methodologies, standards, metadata, documents, design patterns, etc.   Purpose of Reference Architecture   In most cases, architects spend a lot of time researching, investigating, defining, and re-arguing architectural decisions. It is like reinventing the wheel as their peers in other organizations or even the same organization have already spent a lot of time and effort defining their own architectural practices. This prevents an organization from learning from its own experiences and applying that knowledge for increased effectiveness.   Reference architecture provides missing architectural information that can be provided in advance to project team members to enable consistent architectural best practices.   Enterprise Reference Architecture helps an enterprise to achieve the following at the abstract level:   ·       Reference architecture is more of a communication channel to an enterprise ·       Helps the business owners to accommodate to their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. ·       Evaluates the IT systems based on Reference Architecture Principles ·       Reduces IT spending through increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc ·       A Real-time Integration Model helps to reduce the latency of the data updates Is used to define a single source of Information ·       Provides a clear view on how to manage information and security ·       Defines the policy around the data ownership, product boundaries, etc. ·       Helps with cost optimization across project and solution portfolios by eliminating unused or duplicate investments and assets ·       Has a shorter implementation time and cost   Once the reference architecture is in place, the set of architectural principles, standards, reference models, and best practices ensure that the aligned investments have the greatest possible likelihood of success in both the near term and the long term (TCO).     Common pitfalls for Telecom Service Providers   Telecom Reference Architecture serves as the first step towards maturity for a telecom service provider. During the course of our assignments/experiences with telecom players, we have come across the following observations – Some of these indicate a lack of maturity of the telecom service provider:   ·       In markets that are growing and not so mature, it has been observed that telcos have a significant amount of in-house or home-grown applications. In some of these markets, the growth has been so rapid that IT has been unable to cope with business demands. Telcos have shown a tendency to come up with workarounds in their IT applications so as to meet business needs. ·       Even for core functions like provisioning or mediation, some telcos have tried to manage with home-grown applications. ·       Most of the applications do not have the required scalability or maintainability to sustain growth in volumes or functionality. ·       Applications face interoperability issues with other applications in the operator's landscape. Integrating a new application or network element requires considerable effort on the part of the other applications. ·       Application boundaries are not clear, and functionality that is not in the initial scope of that application gets pushed onto it. This results in the development of the multiple, small applications without proper boundaries. ·       Usage of Legacy OSS/BSS systems, poor Integration across Multiple COTS Products and Internal Systems. Most of the Integrations are developed on ad-hoc basis and Point-to-Point Integration. ·       Redundancy of the business functions in different applications • Fragmented data across the different applications and no integrated view of the strategic data • Lot of performance Issues due to the usage of the complex integration across OSS and BSS systems   However, this is where the maturity of the telecom industry as a whole can be of help. The collaborative efforts of telcos to overcome some of these problems have resulted in bodies like the TM Forum. They have come up with frameworks for business processes, data, applications, and technology for telecom service providers. These could be a good starting point for telcos to clean up their enterprise landscape.   Industry Trends in Telecom Reference Architecture   Telecom reference architectures are evolving rapidly because telcos are facing business and IT challenges.   “The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21st Century.... Instead, there are probably hundreds – perhaps thousands – of niche applications.... And the only way to find which of these works for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.” – Martin Creaner President & CTO TM Forum.   The following trends have been observed in telecom reference architecture:   ·       Transformation of business structures to align with customer requirements ·       Adoption of more Internet-like technical architectures. The Web 2.0 concept is increasingly being used. ·       Virtualization of the traditional operations support system (OSS) ·       Adoption of SOA to support development of IP-based services ·       Adoption of frameworks like Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem ·       (IMS) to enable seamless deployment of various services over fixed and mobile networks ·       Replacement of in-house, customized, and stove-piped OSS/BSS with standards-based COTS products ·       Compliance with industry standards and frameworks like eTOM, SID, and TAM to enable seamless integration with other standards-based products   Drivers of Reference Architecture   The drivers of the Reference Architecture are Reference Architecture Goals, Principles, and Enterprise Vision and Telecom Transformation. The details are depicted below diagram. @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Figure 1. Drivers for Reference Architecture @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Today’s telecom reference architectures should seamlessly integrate traditional legacy-based applications and transition to next-generation network technologies (e.g., IP multimedia subsystems). This has resulted in new requirements for flexible, real-time billing and OSS/BSS systems and implications on the service provider’s organizational requirements and structure.   Telecom reference architectures are today expected to:   ·       Integrate voice, messaging, email and other VAS over fixed and mobile networks, back end systems ·       Be able to provision multiple services and service bundles • Deliver converged voice, video and data services ·       Leverage the existing Network Infrastructure ·       Provide real-time, flexible billing and charging systems to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. ·       Support charging of advanced data services such as VoIP, On-Demand, Services (e.g.  Video), IMS/SIP Services, Mobile Money, Content Services and IPTV. ·       Help in faster deployment of new services • Serve as an effective platform for collaboration between network IT and business organizations ·       Harness the potential of converging technology, networks, devices and content to develop multimedia services and solutions of ever-increasing sophistication on a single Internet Protocol (IP) ·       Ensure better service delivery and zero revenue leakage through real-time balance and credit management ·       Lower operating costs to drive profitability   Enterprise Reference Architecture   The Enterprise Reference Architecture (RA) fills the gap between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the reference model and the implementation. Reference architecture provides detailed architectural information in a common format such that solutions can be repeatedly designed and deployed in a consistent, high-quality, supportable fashion. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Application Usage and how to achieve the Enterprise Level Reference Architecture using SOA.   • Telecom Reference Architecture • Enterprise SOA based Reference Architecture   Telecom Reference Architecture   Tele Management Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) is an architectural framework for organizing, integrating, and implementing telecom systems. NGOSS is a component-based framework consisting of the following elements:   ·       The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a business process framework. ·       The Shared Information Data (SID) model provides a comprehensive information framework that may be specialized for the needs of a particular organization. ·       The Telecom Application Map (TAM) is an application framework to depict the functional footprint of applications, relative to the horizontal processes within eTOM. ·       The Technology Neutral Architecture (TNA) is an integrated framework. TNA is an architecture that is sustainable through technology changes.   NGOSS Architecture Standards are:   ·       Centralized data ·       Loosely coupled distributed systems ·       Application components/re-use  ·       A technology-neutral system framework with technology specific implementations ·       Interoperability to service provider data/processes ·       Allows more re-use of business components across multiple business scenarios ·       Workflow automation   The traditional operator systems architecture consists of four layers,   ·       Business Support System (BSS) layer, with focus toward customers and business partners. Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information. ·       Operations Support System (OSS) layer, built around product, service, and resource inventories. ·       Networks layer – consists of Network elements and 3rd Party Systems. ·       Integration Layer – to maximize application communication and overall solution flexibility.   Reference architecture for telecom enterprises is depicted below. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 2. Telecom Reference Architecture   The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture are as follows:   1. Customer Relationship Management   CRM encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering, and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty.   CRM also includes the collection of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise.   The key functionalities related to Customer Relationship Management are   ·       Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer request for products. ·       Create and manage customer profiles. ·       Manage all interactions with customers – inquiries, requests, and responses. ·       Provide updates to Billing and other south bound systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation, deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit limits through Middleware. ·       Work with Order Management System, Product, and Service Management components within CRM. ·       Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.). ·       Support single interface for customer contact details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions.   CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points like portals, point-of-sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc. The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing system for ordering processing.   2. Billing and Revenue Management   Billing and Revenue Management handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also supports prepayment for services.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and invoices delivered appropriately to customers. ·       To manage customers’ billing accounts, process their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the account balance. ·       To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment of all customer bill inquiries and complaints. ·       Collect the usage records from mediation and ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing. ·       Support revenue sharing; split charging where usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer. ·       Support prepaid and post-paid rating. ·       Send notification on approach / exceeding the usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the customer. ·       Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa. ·       Support different billing function requirements like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off, account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning, account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract violation penalty, etc. ·       Initiate direct debit to collect payment against an invoice outstanding. ·       Send notification to Middleware on different events; for example, payment receipt, pre-suspension, threshold exceed, etc.   Billing systems typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM systems. Convergent and real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements.   3. Mediation   Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating purposes.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution.   ·       Collect Usage Data Records from different data sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and interfaces. ·       Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will process Usage Data Records as per the source format. ·       Validate Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application. ·       Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the aggregation rule if any from different sources. ·       Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc. ·       Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of mediation process. ·       Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files for a given time window.   4. Fulfillment   This area is responsible for providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and provisioning applications fall into this category.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       Issuing new customer orders, modifying open customer orders, or canceling open customer orders; ·       Verifying whether specific non-standard offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable; ·       Checking the credit worthiness of customers as part of the customer order process; ·       Testing the completed offering to ensure it is working correctly; ·       Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or cancelled; ·       Assigning and tracking customer provisioning activities; ·       Managing customer provisioning jeopardy conditions; and ·       Reporting progress on customer orders and other processes to customer.   These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders.   5. Enterprise Management   This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole. They encompass all business management processes that   ·       Are necessary to support the whole of the enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management, regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc.;   ·       Are responsible for setting corporate policies, strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas, such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and development of the business;   ·       Occur throughout the enterprise, including processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments, etc.     (i) Enterprise Risk Management:   Enterprise Risk Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as security threats/violations and fraud attempts. Two key areas covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are:   ·       Revenue Assurance: Revenue assurance system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end solution. o   Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded. o   Interconnect bill verification. o   Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed. o   Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems. o   Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for. o   Find leakage where field service, CRM, and network build-out are not optimized.   ·       Fraud Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator.   The key roles and responsibilities of the system component are as follows:   o   Fraud management system will capture and monitor high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number of calls for each subscriber. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. o   Fraud management will be able to detect the unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls which are not billed. o   The solution will be to have an alarm management system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs. o   The Fraud Management system will be capable of interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems   (ii) Knowledge Management   This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions.   Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to   ·       Maintain knowledge base – Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis. ·       Search knowledge base – Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse ·       Maintain metadata – Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and search. ·       Run report generator. ·       Provide content – Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational manual, etc.   (iii) Document Management   It focuses on maintaining a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant to the enterprise using a system.   (iv) Data Management   It manages data as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality, and database management.   Key responsibilities of Data Management are   ·       Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing, web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data, customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse. ·       Management of data traceability with source, data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data reconciliation, competitors data – storage for all the enterprise data (customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.) ·       Get online update through night time replication or physical backup process at regular frequency. ·       Provide the data access to business intelligence and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use.   (v) Business Intelligence   It uses the Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers due to the offers, and SLAs. It will generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ons for the customers.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level:   ·       It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem. ·       It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis, data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns on offers, products, service and revenue generation against services and customer segments. ·       It will do Performance (business, system, and forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis. ·       It will support for online and offline analysis, and report drill down capability. ·       It will collect, store, and report various SLA data. ·       It will provide the necessary intelligence for marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and predictions.   It will advise on customer promotions with additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer   ·       It will Interface with Enterprise Data Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence.   (vi) Stakeholder and External Relations Management   It manages the enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and Public Relations.   (vii) Enterprise Resource Planning   It is used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment.   The key roles and responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below:   ·        It will handle responsibilities such as core accounting, financial, and management reporting. ·       It will interface with CRM for capturing customer account and details. ·       It will interface with billing to capture the billing revenue and other financial data. ·       It will be responsible for executing the dunning process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning. ·       It will interface with the CRM and Billing through batch interfaces. Enterprise management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges.   6. External Interfaces/Touch Points   The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including:   ·       Exchange of emails or faxes ·       Call Centers ·       Web Portals ·       Business-to-Business (B2B) automated transactions   These applications provide an Internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or partially automated service to external parties through various touch points.   Typical characteristics of these touch points are   ·       Pre-integrated self-service system, including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine ·       Self services layer exposing atomic web services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment ·       Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application   These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests, inquiries, and responses.   7. Middleware   The component will be primarily responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution.   ·       As an integration framework, covering to and fro interfaces ·       Provide a web service framework with service registry. ·       Support SOA framework with SOA service registry. ·       Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of data points. ·       Receive data from the caller / activate and/or forward the data to the recipient system in XML format. ·       Use standard XML for data exchange. ·       Provide the response back to the service/call initiator. ·       Provide a tracking until the response completion. ·       Keep a store transitional data against each call/transaction. ·       Interface through Middleware to get any information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc. ·       Provide the data in a common unified format to the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive. ·       Provide an audit trail for all transactions being handled by the component.   8. Network Elements   The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features, functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission, routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service.   Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register (HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center (SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk (PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc.   Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom devices for any kind of usage. These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment.   9. 3rd Party Applications   3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the Government.   Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM, provisioning, and billing will be done.   10. Service Delivery Platform   A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application development, and network abstraction.   SOA Reference Architecture   SOA concept is based on the principle of developing reusable business service and building applications by composing those services, instead of building monolithic applications in silos. It’s about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business-aligned IT services, using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques.   In an SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. We can choreograph these services into composite applications and invoke them through standard protocols. SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables:   ·       The business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services ·       Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interface ·       A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs ·       Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services ·       Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of change ·       Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services   ·       A Cloud Computing paradigm, using web services technologies, that makes possible service outsourcing on an on-demand, utility-like, pay-per-usage basis   The following section represents the Reference Architecture of logical view for the Telecom Solution. The new custom built application needs to align with this logical architecture in the long run to achieve EA benefits.   Packaged implementation applications, such as ERP billing applications, need to expose their functions as service providers (as other applications consume) and interact with other applications as service consumers.   COT applications need to expose services through wrappers such as adapters to utilize existing resources and at the same time achieve Enterprise Architecture goal and objectives.   The following are the various layers for Enterprise level deployment of SOA. This diagram captures the abstract view of Enterprise SOA layers and important components of each layer. Layered architecture means decomposition of services such that most interactions occur between adjacent layers. However, there is no strict rule that top layers should not directly communicate with bottom layers.   The diagram below represents the important logical pieces that would result from overall SOA transformation. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 3. Enterprise SOA Reference Architecture 1.          Operational System Layer: This layer consists of all packaged applications like CRM, ERP, custom built applications, COTS based applications like Billing, Revenue Management, Fulfilment, and the Enterprise databases that are essential and contribute directly or indirectly to the Enterprise OSS/BSS Transformation.   ERP holds the data of Asset Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain, and Advanced Procurement and Human Capital Management, etc.   CRM holds the data related to Order, Sales, and Marketing, Customer Care, Partner Relationship Management, Loyalty, etc.   Content Management handles Enterprise Search and Query. Billing application consists of the following components:   ·       Collections Management, Customer Billing Management, Invoices, Real-Time Rating, Discounting, and Applying of Charges ·       Enterprise databases will hold both the application and service data, whether structured or unstructured.   MDM - Master data majorly consists of Customer, Order, Product, and Service Data.     2.          Enterprise Component Layer:   This layer consists of the Application Services and Common Services that are responsible for realizing the functionality and maintaining the QoS of the exposed services. This layer uses container-based technologies such as application servers to implement the components, workload management, high availability, and load balancing.   Application Services: This Service Layer enables application, technology, and database abstraction so that the complex accessing logic is hidden from the other service layers. This is a basic service layer, which exposes application functionalities and data as reusable services. The three types of the Application access services are:   ·       Application Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application level functionalities as a reusable service between BSS to BSS and BSS to OSS integration. This layer is enabled using disparate technology such as Web Service, Integration Servers, and Adaptors, etc.   ·       Data Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application data services as a reusable reference data service. This is done via direct interaction with application data. and provides the federated query.   ·       Network Access Service: This Service Layer exposes provisioning layer as a reusable service from OSS to OSS integration. This integration service emphasizes the need for high performance, stateless process flows, and distributed design.   Common Services encompasses management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as information services, portal services, interaction services, infrastructure services, and security services, etc.   3.          Integration Layer:   This consists of service infrastructure components like service bus, service gateway for partner integration, service registry, service repository, and BPEL processor. Service bus will carry the service invocation payloads/messages between consumers and providers. The other important functions expected from it are itinerary based routing, distributed caching of routing information, transformations, and all qualities of service for messaging-like reliability, scalability, and availability, etc. Service registry will hold all contracts (wsdl) of services, and it helps developers to locate or discover service during design time or runtime.   • BPEL processor would be useful in orchestrating the services to compose a complex business scenario or process. • Workflow and business rules management are also required to support manual triggering of certain activities within business process. based on the rules setup and also the state machine information. Application, data, and service mediation layer typically forms the overall composite application development framework or SOA Framework.   4.          Business Process Layer: These are typically the intermediate services layer and represent Shared Business Process Services. At Enterprise Level, these services are from Customer Management, Order Management, Billing, Finance, and Asset Management application domains.   5.          Access Layer: This layer consists of portals for Enterprise and provides a single view of Enterprise information management and dashboard services.   6.          Channel Layer: This consists of various devices; applications that form part of extended enterprise; browsers through which users access the applications.   7.          Client Layer: This designates the different types of users accessing the enterprise applications. The type of user typically would be an important factor in determining the level of access to applications.   8.          Vertical pieces like management, monitoring, security, and development cut across all horizontal layers Management and monitoring involves all aspects of SOA-like services, SLAs, and other QoS lifecycle processes for both applications and services surrounding SOA governance.     9.          EA Governance, Reference Architecture, Roadmap, Principles, and Best Practices:   EA Governance is important in terms of providing the overall direction to SOA implementation within the enterprise. This involves board-level involvement, in addition to business and IT executives. At a high level, this involves managing the SOA projects implementation, managing SOA infrastructure, and controlling the entire effort through all fine-tuned IT processes in accordance with COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology).   Devising tools and techniques to promote reuse culture, and the SOA way of doing things needs competency centers to be established in addition to training the workforce to take up new roles that are suited to SOA journey.   Conclusions   Reference Architectures can serve as the basis for disparate architecture efforts throughout the organization, even if they use different tools and technologies. Reference architectures provide best practices and approaches in the independent way a vendor deals with technology and standards. Reference Architectures model the abstract architectural elements for an enterprise independent of the technologies, protocols, and products that are used to implement an SOA. Telecom enterprises today are facing significant business and technology challenges due to growing competition, a multitude of services, and convergence. Adopting architectural best practices could go a long way in meeting these challenges. The use of SOA-based architecture for communication to each of the external systems like Billing, CRM, etc., in OSS/BSS system has made the architecture very loosely coupled, with greater flexibility. Any change in the external systems would be absorbed at the Integration Layer without affecting the rest of the ecosystem. The use of a Business Process Management (BPM) tool makes the management and maintenance of the business processes easy, with better performance in terms of lead time, quality, and cost. Since the Architecture is based on standards, it will lower the cost of deploying and managing OSS/BSS applications over their lifecycles.

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• Globe Trotters: Asian Healthcare CIOs need ‘Security Inside Out’ Approach

  - by Tanu Sood

  In our second edition of Globe trotters, wanted to share a feature article that was recently published in Enterprise Innovation. EnterpriseInnovation.net, part of Questex Media Group, is Asia's premier business and technology publication. The article featured MOH Holdings (a holding company of Singapore’s Public Healthcare Institutions) and highlighted the project around National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) system currently being deployed within Singapore.  According to the feature, the NEHR system was built to facilitate seamless exchanges of medical information as patients move across different healthcare settings and to give healthcare providers more timely access to patient’s healthcare records in Singapore. The NEHR consolidates all clinically relevant information from patients’ visits across the healthcare system throughout their lives and pulls them in as a single record. It allows for data sharing, making it accessible to authorized healthcare providers, across the continuum of care throughout the country. In healthcare, patient data privacy is critical as is the need to avoid unauthorized access to the electronic medical records. As Alan Dawson, director for infrastructure and operations at MOH Holdings is quoted in the feature, “Protecting the perimeter is no longer enough. Healthcare CIOs today need to adopt a ‘security inside out’ approach that protects information assets all the way from databases to end points.” Oracle has long advocated the ‘Security Inside Out’ approach. From operating systems, infrastructure to databases, middleware all the way to applications, organizations need to build in security at every layer and between these layers. This comprehensive approach to security has never been as important as it is today in the social, mobile, cloud (SoMoClo) world. To learn more about Oracle’s Security Inside Out approach, visit our Security page. And for more information on how to prevent unauthorized access, streamline user administration, bolster security and enforce compliance in healthcare, learn more about Oracle Identity Management.

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• Awesome Read: Buck Woody&rsquo;s post on the proper use of the Windows Azure VM Role

  - by Enrique Lima

  I have heard some service providers (or cloud providers), hosting companies and such complain, criticize or even venture to call foul on Microsoft’s Azure VM Role.  The problem:  None of them have gone through the effort of truly understanding (or perhaps not wanting to know) what is going on there.  Many have jumped right into the “purist” definition of IaaS, or PaaS for that matter. Ok, Buck’s post is a true gem (my opinion) in the sense it gives you parallels of what the VM Role is and is not.  And it brings Hyper-V and SCVMM to the forefront explaining what it is and what it also offers to the IaaS Microsoft offers. Here is an excerpt of the summary, but please go on over to read his post it will clear a lot if you are wondering when and how to use the Windows Azure VM Role. The excerpt: “Virtualizing servers alone has limitations of scale, availability and recovery. Microsoft’s offering in this area is Hyper-V and System Center, not the VM Role. The VM Role is still used for running Stateless code, just like the Web and Worker Roles, with the exception that it allows you more control over the environment of where that code runs.” The source and post:  Buck Woody -http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2010/12/28/the-proper-use-of-the-vm-role-in-windows-azure.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

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• Standards Corner: OAuth WG Client Registration Problem

  - by Tanu Sood

  Phil Hunt is an active member of multiple industry standards groups and committees (see brief bio at the end of the post) and has spearheaded discussions, creation and ratifications of  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} industry standards including the Kantara Identity Governance Framework, among others. Being an active voice in the industry standards development world, we have invited him to share his discussions, thoughts, news & updates, and discuss use cases, implementation success stories (and even failures) around industry standards on this monthly column. Author: Phil Hunt This afternoon, the OAuth Working Group will meet at IETF88 in Vancouver to discuss some important topics important to the maturation of OAuth. One of them is the OAuth client registration problem.OAuth (RFC6749) was initially developed with a simple deployment model where there is only monopoly or singleton cloud instance of a web API (e.g. there is one Facebook, one Google, on LinkedIn, and so on). When the API publisher and API deployer are the same monolithic entity, it easy for developers to contact the provider and register their app to obtain a client_id and credential.But what happens when the API is for an open source project where there may be 1000s of deployed copies of the API (e.g. such as wordpress). In these cases, the authors of the API are not the people running the API. In these scenarios, how does the developer obtain a client_id? An example of an "open deployed" API is OpenID Connect. Connect defines an OAuth protected resource API that can provide personal information about an authenticated user -- in effect creating a potentially common API for potential identity providers like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, or Oracle. In Oracle's case, Fusion applications will soon have RESTful APIs that are deployed in many different ways in many different environments. How will developers write apps that can work against an openly deployed API with whom the developer can have no prior relationship?At present, the OAuth Working Group has two proposals two consider: Dynamic RegistrationDynamic Registration was originally developed for OpenID Connect and UMA. It defines a RESTful API in which a prospective client application with no client_id creates a new client registration record with a service provider and is issued a client_id and credential along with a registration token that can be used to update registration over time.As proof of success, the OIDC community has done substantial implementation of this spec and feels committed to its use. Why not approve?Well, the answer is that some of us had some concerns, namely: Recognizing instances of software - dynamic registration treats all clients as unique. It has no defined way to recognize that multiple copies of the same client are being registered other then assuming if the registration parameters are similar it might be the same client. Versioning and Policy Approval of open APIs and clients - many service providers have to worry about change management. They expect to have approval cycles that approve versions of server and client software for use in their environment. In some cases approval might be wide open, but in many cases, approval might be down to the specific class of software and version. Registration updates - when does a client actually need to update its registration? Shouldn't it be never? Is there some characteristic of deployed code that would cause it to change? Options lead to complexity - because each client is treated as unique, it becomes unclear how the clients and servers will agree on what credentials forms are acceptable and what OAuth features are allowed and disallowed. Yet the reality is, developers will write their application to work in a limited number of ways. They can't implement all the permutations and combinations that potential service providers might choose. Stateful registration - if the primary motivation for registration is to obtain a client_id and credential, why can't this be done in a stateless fashion using assertions? Denial of service - With so much stateful registration and the need for multiple tokens to be issued, will this not lead to a denial of service attack / risk of resource depletion? At the very least, because of the information gathered, it would difficult for service providers to clean up "failed" registrations and determine active from inactive or false clients. There has yet to be much wide-scale "production" use of dynamic registration other than in small closed communities. Client Association A second proposal, Client Association, has been put forward by Tony Nadalin of Microsoft and myself. We took at look at existing use patterns to come up with a new proposal. At the Berlin meeting, we considered how WS-STS systems work. More recently, I took a review of how mobile messaging clients work. I looked at how Apple, Google, and Microsoft each handle registration with APNS, GCM, and WNS, and a similar pattern emerges. This pattern is to use an existing credential (mutual TLS auth), or client bearer assertion and swap for a device specific bearer assertion.In the client association proposal, the developer's registration with the API publisher is handled by having the developer register with an API publisher (as opposed to the party deploying the API) and obtaining a software "statement". Or, if there is no "publisher" that can sign a statement, the developer may include their own self-asserted software statement.A software statement is a special type of assertion that serves to lock application registration profile information in a signed assertion. The statement is included with the client application and can then be used by the client to swap for an instance specific client assertion as defined by section 4.2 of the OAuth Assertion draft and profiled in the Client Association draft. The software statement provides a way for service provider to recognize and configure policy to approve classes of software clients, and simplifies the actual registration to a simple assertion swap. Because the registration is an assertion swap, registration is no longer "stateful" - meaning the service provider does not need to store any information to support the client (unless it wants to). Has this been implemented yet? Not directly. We've only delivered draft 00 as an alternate way of solving the problem using well-known patterns whose security characteristics and scale characteristics are well understood. Dynamic Take II At roughly the same time that Client Association and Software Statement were published, the authors of Dynamic Registration published a "split" version of the Dynamic Registration (draft-richer-oauth-dyn-reg-core and draft-richer-oauth-dyn-reg-management). While some of the concerns above are addressed, some differences remain. Registration is now a simple POST request. However it defines a new method for issuing client tokens where as Client Association uses RFC6749's existing extension point. The concern here is whether future client access token formats would be addressed properly. Finally, Dyn-reg-core does not yet support software statements. Conclusion The WG has some interesting discussion to bring this back to a single set of specifications. Dynamic Registration has significant implementation, but Client Association could be a much improved way to simplify implementation of the overall OpenID Connect specification and improve adoption. In fairness, the existing editors have already come a long way. Yet there are those with significant investment in the current draft. There are many that have expressed they don't care. They just want a standard. There is lots of pressure on the working group to reach consensus quickly.And that folks is how the sausage is made.Note: John Bradley and Justin Richer recently published draft-bradley-stateless-oauth-client-00 which on first look are getting closer. Some of the details seem less well defined, but the same could be said of client-assoc and software-statement. I hope we can merge these specs this week. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} About the Writer: Phil Hunt joined Oracle as part of the November 2005 acquisition of OctetString Inc. where he headed software development for what is now Oracle Virtual Directory. Since joining Oracle, Phil works as CMTS in the Identity Standards group at Oracle where he developed the Kantara Identity Governance Framework and provided significant input to JSR 351. Phil participates in several standards development organizations such as IETF and OASIS working on federation, authorization (OAuth), and provisioning (SCIM) standards.  Phil blogs at www.independentid.com and a Twitter handle of @independentid.

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• Membership e Authentication no ASP.NET 4.5

  - by renatohaddad

  Vejam que boa notícia. Para quem desenvolve em asp.net e usa autenticação com membership terá uma grande novidade na hora de autenticar. Na versão 4.5 poderemos autenticar o usuário usando a rede social, ou seja, o login poderá ser feito usando os serviços do Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter e Windows Live. Isto tudo será possível pq teremos novos providers OAuth e OpenID para authentication.1.No site "developer website for Windows Live, Facebook, or Twitter", crie uma app e registre uma chave (key=minhaChave) com o valor "curso asp.net 4.5".2. No seu site altere o arquivo _AppStart.cshtml e crie o código do provider do Facebook:OAuthWebSecurity.RegisterOAuthClient(     BuiltInOAuthClient.Facebook, consumerKey: "", minhaChave: "");3. No arquivo ~/Account/Login.cshtml descomente o bloco do fieldset para habilitar o provider.<fieldset>     <legend>Log in using another service</legend>     <input type="submit" name="provider" id="facebook"value="Facebook"         title="Log in using your Facebook account." />     <input type="submit" name="provider" id="twitter" value="Twitter"         title="Log in using your Twitter account." />     <input type="submit" name="provider" id="windowsLive"         value="WindowsLive"         title="Log in using your Windows Live account." /> </fieldset>4. Por fim, no arquivo ~/Account/AssociateServiceAccount.cshtml descomente o bloco do fieldset e pronto, na autenticação serão exibidos todos os providers.

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• T-Mobile releases an App to unlock mobile devices

  - by Gopinath

  T-Mobile is in no mood to stop innovating and outsmarting its rival wireless network providers in USA. Its been talk of the wireless community and rightly deserves the space for its push to make wireless providers more consumer friendly in USA. Just couple of days after US Government passed a law that made unlocking smartphones legal in USA, T-Mobile released an Android App to make unlocking smartphone as easy as few taps. The app aptly named Device Unlock is available in Android Play Store and at the moment it can unlock only Samsung Galaxy Avant smartphones. The app lets you either temporarily unlock your smartphone for 30 days(very helpful for those who travel and wants to use their phone with other carriers) or send a request to T-Mobile to permanently unlock the device for ever. When user tries to unlock the device, the App verifies the user account to make sure that the account complies with T-Mobile rules. If the rule check passes, the app automatically unlocks the phone. The process is very simple and T-Mobile users are going to love this; the other carrier users would envy to have such a simple process to unlock smartphones. Though this app is available for just Android Play Store and works only Samsung Galaxy Avant smartphone, it looks T-Mobile is testing out this feature on small set of users first to learn and improve unlocking process. Hope to see this app able unlock all T-Mobile devices soon.

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• Problem running Qreator on Xubuntu-14.04

  - by Seyed Mohammad

  I installed Qreator using apt-get on Xubuntu-14.04: $ sudo apt-get install qreator But the application fails to start! When I try to run it via Terminal, the following error messages are printed and the program aborts: $ qreator ** (qreator:3859): WARNING **: Couldn't connect to accessibility bus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-Gh2FPHrMr2: Connection refused No handlers could be found for logger "qreator_lib" Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/qreator", line 47, in <module> qreator.main() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/qreator/__init__.py", line 63, in main window = QreatorWindow.QreatorWindow() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/qreator_lib/Window.py", line 48, in __new__ new_object.finish_initializing(builder) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/qreator/QreatorWindow.py", line 79, in finish_initializing self.init_qr_types() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/qreator/QreatorWindow.py", line 135, in init_qr_types self.qr_types = [d(self.update_qr_code) for d in QRCodeType.dataformats] File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/qreator/qrcodes/QRCodeType.py", line 71, in __init__ self.create_widget() # pylint: disable=E1101 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/qreator/qrcodes/QRCodeLocation.py", line 29, in create_widget self.widget = QRCodeLocationGtk(self.qr_code_update_func) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/qreator/qrcodes/QRCodeLocationGtk.py", line 49, in __init__ latitude, longitude = get_current_location() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/qreator/qrcodes/QRCodeLocationGtk.py", line 109, in get_current_location '/org/freedesktop/Geoclue/Providers/Hostip') File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/dbus/bus.py", line 241, in get_object follow_name_owner_changes=follow_name_owner_changes) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/dbus/proxies.py", line 248, in __init__ self._named_service = conn.activate_name_owner(bus_name) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/dbus/bus.py", line 180, in activate_name_owner self.start_service_by_name(bus_name) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/dbus/bus.py", line 278, in start_service_by_name 'su', (bus_name, flags))) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/dbus/connection.py", line 651, in call_blocking message, timeout) dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.Geoclue.Providers.Hostip was not provided by any .service files How can I fix this ?

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• Roadmap for Thinktecture IdentityServer

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  I got asked today if I could publish a roadmap for thinktecture IdentityServer (idrsv in short). Well – I got a lot of feedback after B1 and one of the biggest points here was the data access layer. So I made two changes: I moved to configuration database access code to EF 4.1 code first. That makes it much easier to change the underlying database. So it is now just a matter of changing the connection string to use real SQL Server instead of SQL Compact. Important when you plan to do scale out. I included the ASP.NET Universal Providers in the download. This adds official support for SQL Azure, SQL Server and SQL Compact for the membership, roles and profile features. Unfortunately the Universal Provider use a different schema than the original ASP.NET providers (that sucks btw!) – so I made them optional. If you want to use them go to web.config and uncomment the new provider. Then there are some other small changes: The relying party registration entries now have added fields to add extra data that you want to couple with the RP. One use case could be to give the UI a hint how the login experience should look like per RP. This allows to have a different look and feel for different relying parties. I also included a small helper API that you can use to retrieve the RP record based on the incoming WS-Federation query string. WS-Federation single sign out is now conforming to the spec. I made certificate based endpoint identities for SSL endpoints optional. This caused some problems with configuration and versioning of existing clients. I hope I can release the RC in the next days. If there are no major issues, there will be RTM very soon!

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