Search Results

Search found 11178 results on 448 pages for 'syntax checking'.

Page 106/448 | < Previous Page | 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 | Next Page >

XML Rules Engine and Validation Tutorial with NIEM

- by drrwebber

Our new XML Validation Framework tutorial video is now available. See how to easily integrate code-free adaptive XML validation services into your web services using the Java CAMV validation engine. CAMV allows you to build fault tolerant content checking with XPath that optionally use SQL data lookups. This can provide warnings as well as error conditions to tailor your validation layer to exactly meet your business application needs. Also available is developing test suites using Apache ANT scripting of validations. This allows a community to share sets of conformance checking test and tools . On the technical XML side the video introduces XPath validation rules and illustrates and the concepts of XML content and structure validation. CAM validation templates allow contextual parameter driven dynamic validation services to be implemented compared to using a static and brittle XSD schema approach.The SQL table lookup and code list validation are discussed and examples presented.Features are highlighted along with a demonstration of the interactive generation of actual live XML data from a SQL data store and then validation processing complete with errors and warnings detection.The presentation provides a primer for developing web service XML validation and integration into a SOA approach along with examples and resources. Also alignment with the NIEM IEPD process for interoperable information exchanges is discussed along with NIEM rules services.The CAMV engine is a high performance scalable Java component for rapidly implementing code-free validation services and methods. CAMV is a next generation WYSIWYG approach that builds from older Schematron coding based interpretative runtime tools and provides a simpler declarative metaphor for rules definition. See: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCAMeditor

Read the article
Dom U Installation on Ubuntu 11.10

- by sridutt

I am trying to add a DomU Operating system on Ubuntu 11.10. I have successfully installed Xen. Verified with xm info virsh-version which returns: Compiled against library: libvir 0.9.2 Using library: libvir 0.9.2 Using API: Xen 3.0.1 Running hypervisor: Xen 4.1. Now when I tried to install Dom0 it said: unable to connect to 'localhost:8000': , in VMM. So, I followed this bug link. I could now start adding DomU. When adding DomU, in last stage, it gives the following error: Unable to complete install: 'POST operation failed: xend_post: error from xen daemon: (xend.err "Error creating domain: device model '/usr/lib/xen/bin/qemu-dm' not found")' Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 44, in cb_wrapper callback(asyncjob, *args, **kwargs) File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/create.py", line 1899, in do_install guest.start_install(False, meter=meter) File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/virtinst/Guest.py", line 1223, in start_install noboot) File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/virtinst/Guest.py", line 1291, in _create_guest dom = self.conn.createLinux(start_xml or final_xml, 0) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/libvirt.py", line 1686, in createLinux if ret is None:raise libvirtError('virDomainCreateLinux() failed', conn=self) libvirtError: POST operation failed: xend_post: error from xen daemon: (xend.err "Error creating domain: device model '/usr/lib/xen/bin/qemu-dm' not found") I tried following this bug link that said, the bug is solved in the below package. When I run ./configure in this, I am getting an error: checking for LIBXML... no checking libxml2 xml2-config >= 2.6.0 ... configure: error: Could not find libxml2 anywhere (see config.log for details). What is the problem?

Read the article
How to Downgrade Razor 3 and fix the issue that CSHTML not work in VS10,12 ?

- by Anirudha

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/anirugu/archive/2013/11/04/how-to-downgrade-razor-3-and-fix-the-issue-that.aspxFew days ago I migrate a project to MVC 4 and suddenly I have seen that MVC project’s cshtml file is no longer working. The problem happen because my project is now based on Razor 3 RC and VS12 doesn’t even have support it. (Remember that VS team will ship support in VS update 4). My migration update it to Razor 3 (which is not related to MVC 4, MVC 4 used old version of Razor 2). So how to fix the problem. Since VS update 4 in development and MVC 3 support exist in both old Version of VS (10,12) then better to migrate back our Razor to old version so we can use our project in VS 10 or 12. If your project have Razor 3 and it seem that Syntax highlighting doesn’t work for you then I suggest you to try this Nuget package https://www.nuget.org/packages/UpgradeMvc3ToMvc4 Remember that this will not be succeed. What you need to do is delete package folder in your project and now open the packages.config remove all entry of package now. Now Run this command PM> Install-Package UpgradeMvc3ToMvc4 If this is failed then see what thing make error in console. simply remove the reference and try again. Now run it and see this will work. After run this you will see that WebGrease Dll have a version number issue. Simply update it to version 1.5.2 and now you have ready your project to run it in .net 4. If you do bin deployment then you don’t need to have installed MVC 4 on server either. Remember that MVC 5 is based on .net 4.5 which simply means you can’t run it in VS10. until VS12 update 4 MVC 5 cshtml page will be work as simple html pages (syntax highlighting and intellisense). Thanks for read my post

Read the article
Using 2d collision with 3d objects

- by Lyise

I'm planning to write a fairly basic scrolling shoot 'em up, however, I have run into a query with regards to checking for collision. I plan to have a fixed top down view, where the player and enemies are all 3d objects on a fixed plane, and when the enemy or player fires at the other, their shots will also be along this fixed plane. In order to handle the collision, I have read up a bit on collision detection in 3d, as it is not something I have looked into previously, but I'm not sure what would be ideal for this situation. My options appear to be: Sphere collision, however, this lacks the pixel precision I would like Detection using all vertexes and planes of each object, but this seems overly convoluted for a fixed plane of play Rendering the play screen in black and white (where white is an object, black is empty space), once for enemies and once for the player, and checking for collisions that way (if a pixel is white on both, there is a collision) Which of these would be the best approach, or is there another option that I am missing? I have done this previously using 2d sprites, however I can't use the same thinking here as I don't have the image to refer to.

Read the article
Android: Not able to experiment on own?

- by user221287

I have just started learning Android App Development a few days ago, with prior knowledge of C/C++, HTML and CSS. This is the situation I am facing Repeatedly: I am learning from a Video Tutorial Series, after each video, or each few videos, I say myself: Let's use what I have just learnt in the simple (and also "meaningless") app that I have made so far by watching the tutorials. I start implementing it, but then after a few minutes, I realize that I cannot do it because I do not know a few other syntax related to the particular thing, (or) I do not know whether these things can be combined with these other things by the use of . (dot). Whatever I try, I get either an error in eclipse or "Sorry...the app com.example.simple has stopped unexpectedly...." when the app runs. Then I search StackOverflow, Google and learn that what I want to implement requires learning about a few more classes, syntax and creating a few more java classes. I am not able to experiment on my own. Is it normal? Is it the HARD-WAY in which one is supposed to learn? Should I first learn Java and then come back to Android - would that be helpful?

Read the article
Do there exist programming languages where a variable can truly know its own name?

- by Job

In PHP and Python one can iterate over the local variables and, if there is only once choice where the value matches, you could say that you know what the variable's name is, but this does not always work. Machine code does not have variable names. C compiles to assembly and does not have any native reflection capabilities, so it would not know it's name. (Edit: per Anton's answer the pre-processor can know the variable's name). Do there exist programming languages where a variable would know it's name? It gets tricky if you do something like b = a and b does not become a copy of a but a reference to the same place. EDIT: Why in the world would you want this? I can think of one example: error checking that can survive automatic refactoring. Consider this C# snippet: private void CheckEnumStr(string paramName, string paramValue) { if (paramName != "pony" && paramName != "horse") { string exceptionMessage = String.Format( "Unexpected value '{0}' of the parameter named '{1}'.", paramValue, paramName); throw new ArgumentException(exceptionMessage); } } ... CheckEnumStr("a", a); // Var 'a' does not know its name - this will not survive naive auto-refactoring There are other libraries provided by Microsoft and others that allow to check for errors (sorry the names have escaped me). I have seen one library which with the help of closures/lambdas can accomplish error checking that can survive refactoring, but it does not feel idiomatic. This would be one reason why I might want a language where a variable knows its name.

Read the article
share code between check and process methods

- by undu

My job is to refactor an old library for GIS vector data processing. The main class encapsulates a collection of building outlines, and offers different methods for checking data consistency. Those checking functions have an optional parameter that allows to perform some process. For instance: std::vector<Point> checkIntersections(int process_mode = 0); This method tests if some building outlines are intersecting, and return the intersection points. But if you pass a non null argument, the method will modify the outlines to remove the intersection. I think it's pretty bad (at call site, a reader not familiar with the code base will assume that a method called checkSomething only performs a check and doesn't modifiy data) and I want to change this. I also want to avoid code duplication as check and process methods are mostly similar. So I was thinking to something like this: // a private worker std::vector<Point> workerIntersections(int process_mode = 0) { // it's the equivalent of the current checkIntersections, it may perform // a process depending on process_mode } // public interfaces for check and process std::vector<Point> checkIntersections() /* const */ { workerIntersections(0); } std::vector<Point> processIntersections(int process_mode /*I have different process modes*/) { workerIntersections(process_mode); } But that forces me to break const correctness as workerIntersections is a non-const method. How can I separate check and process, avoiding code duplication and keeping const-correctness?

Read the article
Using the West Wind Web Toolkit to set up AJAX and REST Services

- by Rick Strahl

I frequently get questions about which option to use for creating AJAX and REST backends for ASP.NET applications. There are many solutions out there to do this actually, but when I have a choice - not surprisingly - I fall back to my own tools in the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. I've talked a bunch about the 'in-the-box' solutions in the past so for a change in this post I'll talk about the tools that I use in my own and customer applications to handle AJAX and REST based access to service resources using the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. Let me preface this by saying that I like things to be easy. Yes flexible is very important as well but not at the expense of over-complexity. The goal I've had with my tools is make it drop dead easy, with good performance while providing the core features that I'm after, which are: Easy AJAX/JSON Callbacks Ability to return any kind of non JSON content (string, stream, byte[], images) Ability to work with both XML and JSON interchangeably for input/output Access endpoints via POST data, RPC JSON calls, GET QueryString values or Routing interface Easy to use generic JavaScript client to make RPC calls (same syntax, just what you need) Ability to create clean URLS with Routing Ability to use standard ASP.NET HTTP Stack for HTTP semantics It's all about options! In this post I'll demonstrate most of these features (except XML) in a few simple and short samples which you can download. So let's take a look and see how you can build an AJAX callback solution with the West Wind Web Toolkit. Installing the Toolkit Assemblies The easiest and leanest way of using the Toolkit in your Web project is to grab it via NuGet: West Wind Web and AJAX Utilities (Westwind.Web) and drop it into the project by right clicking in your Project and choosing Manage NuGet Packages from anywhere in the Project. When done you end up with your project looking like this: What just happened? Nuget added two assemblies - Westwind.Web and Westwind.Utilities and the client ww.jquery.js library. It also added a couple of references into web.config: The default namespaces so they can be accessed in pages/views and a ScriptCompressionModule that the toolkit optionally uses to compress script resources served from within the assembly (namely ww.jquery.js and optionally jquery.js). Creating a new Service The West Wind Web Toolkit supports several ways of creating and accessing AJAX services, but for this post I'll stick to the lower level approach that works from any plain HTML page or of course MVC, WebForms, WebPages. There's also a WebForms specific control that makes this even easier but I'll leave that for another post. So, to create a new standalone AJAX/REST service we can create a new HttpHandler in the new project either as a pure class based handler or as a generic .ASHX handler. Both work equally well, but generic handlers don't require any web.config configuration so I'll use that here. In the root of the project add a Generic Handler. I'm going to call this one StockService.ashx. Once the handler has been created, edit the code and remove all of the handler body code. Then change the base class to CallbackHandler and add methods that have a [CallbackMethod] attribute. Here's the modified base handler implementation now looks like with an added HelloWorld method: using System; using Westwind.Web; namespace WestWindWebAjax { /// <summary> /// Handler implements CallbackHandler to provide REST/AJAX services /// </summary> public class SampleService : CallbackHandler { [CallbackMethod] public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } } } Notice that the class inherits from CallbackHandler and that the HelloWorld service method is marked up with [CallbackMethod]. We're done here. Services Urlbased Syntax Once you compile, the 'service' is live can respond to requests. All CallbackHandlers support input in GET and POST formats, and can return results as JSON or XML. To check our fancy HelloWorld method we can now access the service like this: http://localhost/WestWindWebAjax/StockService.ashx?Method=HelloWorld&name=Rick which produces a default JSON response - in this case a string (wrapped in quotes as it's JSON): (note by default JSON will be downloaded by most browsers not displayed - various options are available to view JSON right in the browser) If I want to return the same data as XML I can tack on a &format=xml at the end of the querystring which produces: <string>Hello Rick. Time is: 11/1/2011 12:11:13 PM</string> Cleaner URLs with Routing Syntax If you want cleaner URLs for each operation you can also configure custom routes on a per URL basis similar to the way that WCF REST does. To do this you need to add a new RouteHandler to your application's startup code in global.asax.cs one for each CallbackHandler based service you create: protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { CallbackHandlerRouteHandler.RegisterRoutes<StockService>(RouteTable.Routes); } With this code in place you can now add RouteUrl properties to any of your service methods. For the HelloWorld method that doesn't make a ton of sense but here is what a routed clean URL might look like in definition: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="stocks/HelloWorld/{name}")] public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } The same URL I previously used now becomes a bit shorter and more readable with: http://localhost/WestWindWebAjax/HelloWorld/Rick It's an easy way to create cleaner URLs and still get the same functionality. Calling the Service with $.getJSON() Since the result produced is JSON you can now easily consume this data using jQuery's getJSON method. First we need a couple of scripts - jquery.js and ww.jquery.js in the page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <link href="Css/Westwind.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script src="scripts/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="scripts/ww.jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> Next let's add a small HelloWorld example form (what else) that has a single textbox to type a name, a button and a div tag to receive the result: <fieldset> <legend>Hello World</legend> Please enter a name: <input type="text" name="txtHello" id="txtHello" value="" /> <input type="button" id="btnSayHello" value="Say Hello (POST)" /> <input type="button" id="btnSayHelloGet" value="Say Hello (GET)" /> <div id="divHelloMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display:none;width: 450px;" > </div> </fieldset> Then to call the HelloWorld method a little jQuery is used to hook the document startup and the button click followed by the $.getJSON call to retrieve the data from the server. <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnSayHelloGet").click(function () { $.getJSON("SampleService.ashx", { Method: "HelloWorld", name: $("#txtHello").val() }, function (result) { $("#divHelloMessage") .text(result) .fadeIn(1000); }); });</script> .getJSON() expects a full URL to the endpoint of our service, which is the ASHX file. We can either provide a full URL (SampleService.ashx?Method=HelloWorld&name=Rick) or we can just provide the base URL and an object that encodes the query string parameters for us using an object map that has a property that matches each parameter for the server method. We can also use the clean URL routing syntax, but using the object parameter encoding actually is safer as the parameters will get properly encoded by jQuery. The result returned is whatever the result on the server method is - in this case a string. The string is applied to the divHelloMessage element and we're done. Obviously this is a trivial example, but it demonstrates the basics of getting a JSON response back to the browser. AJAX Post Syntax - using ajaxCallMethod() The previous example allows you basic control over the data that you send to the server via querystring parameters. This works OK for simple values like short strings, numbers and boolean values, but doesn't really work if you need to pass something more complex like an object or an array back up to the server. To handle traditional RPC type messaging where the idea is to map server side functions and results to a client side invokation, POST operations can be used. The easiest way to use this functionality is to use ww.jquery.js and the ajaxCallMethod() function. ww.jquery wraps jQuery's AJAX functions and knows implicitly how to call a CallbackServer method with parameters and parse the result. Let's look at another simple example that posts a simple value but returns something more interesting. Let's start with the service method: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="stocks/{symbol}")] public StockQuote GetStockQuote(string symbol) { Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.UtcNow.Add(new TimeSpan(0, 2, 0))); StockServer server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid Symbol passed."); return quote; } This sample utilizes a small StockServer helper class (included in the sample) that downloads a stock quote from Yahoo's financial site via plain HTTP GET requests and formats it into a StockQuote object. Lets create a small HTML block that lets us query for the quote and display it: <fieldset> <legend>Single Stock Quote</legend> Please enter a stock symbol: <input type="text" name="txtSymbol" id="txtSymbol" value="msft" /> <input type="button" id="btnStockQuote" value="Get Quote" /> <div id="divStockDisplay" class="errordisplay" style="display:none; width: 450px;"> <div class="label-left">Company:</div> <div id="stockCompany"></div> <div class="label-left">Last Price:</div> <div id="stockLastPrice"></div> <div class="label-left">Quote Time:</div> <div id="stockQuoteTime"></div> </div> </fieldset> The final result looks something like this: Let's hook up the button handler to fire the request and fill in the data as shown: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [$("#txtSymbol").val()], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").show().fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, HH:mm EST")); }, onPageError); }); So we point at SampleService.ashx and the GetStockQuote method, passing a single parameter of the input symbol value. Then there are two handlers for success and failure callbacks. The success handler is the interesting part - it receives the stock quote as a result and assigns its values to various 'holes' in the stock display elements. The data that comes back over the wire is JSON and it looks like this: { "Symbol":"MSFT", "Company":"Microsoft Corpora", "OpenPrice":26.11, "LastPrice":26.01, "NetChange":0.02, "LastQuoteTime":"2011-11-03T02:00:00Z", "LastQuoteTimeString":"Nov. 11, 2011 4:20pm" } which is an object representation of the data. JavaScript can evaluate this JSON string back into an object easily and that's the reslut that gets passed to the success function. The quote data is then applied to existing page content by manually selecting items and applying them. There are other ways to do this more elegantly like using templates, but here we're only interested in seeing how the data is returned. The data in the object is typed - LastPrice is a number and QuoteTime is a date. Note about the date value: JavaScript doesn't have a date literal although the JSON embedded ISO string format used above ("2011-11-03T02:00:00Z") is becoming fairly standard for JSON serializers. However, JSON parsers don't deserialize dates by default and return them by string. This is why the StockQuote actually returns a string value of LastQuoteTimeString for the same date. ajaxMethodCallback always converts dates properly into 'real' dates and the example above uses the real date value along with a .formatDate() data extension (also in ww.jquery.js) to display the raw date properly. Errors and Exceptions So what happens if your code fails? For example if I pass an invalid stock symbol to the GetStockQuote() method you notice that the code does this: if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid Symbol passed."); CallbackHandler automatically pushes the exception message back to the client so it's easy to pick up the error message. Regardless of what kind of error occurs: Server side, client side, protocol errors - any error will fire the failure handler with an error object parameter. The error is returned to the client via a JSON response in the error callback. In the previous examples I called onPageError which is a generic routine in ww.jquery that displays a status message on the bottom of the screen. But of course you can also take over the error handling yourself: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [$("#txtSymbol").val()], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, hh:mmt")); }, function (error, xhr) { $("#divErrorDisplay").text(error.message).fadeIn(1000); }); }); The error object has a isCallbackError, message and stackTrace properties, the latter of which is only populated when running in Debug mode, and this object is returned for all errors: Client side, transport and server side errors. Regardless of which type of error you get the same object passed (as well as the XHR instance optionally) which makes for a consistent error retrieval mechanism. Specifying HttpVerbs You can also specify HTTP Verbs that are allowed using the AllowedHttpVerbs option on the CallbackMethod attribute: [CallbackMethod(AllowedHttpVerbs=HttpVerbs.GET | HttpVerbs.POST)] public string HelloWorld(string name) { … } If you're building REST style API's this might be useful to force certain request semantics onto the client calling. For the above if call with a non-allowed HttpVerb the request returns a 405 error response along with a JSON (or XML) error object result. The default behavior is to allow all verbs access (HttpVerbs.All). Passing in object Parameters Up to now the parameters I passed were very simple. But what if you need to send something more complex like an object or an array? Let's look at another example now that passes an object from the client to the server. Keeping with the Stock theme here lets add a method called BuyOrder that lets us buy some shares for a stock. Consider the following service method that receives an StockBuyOrder object as a parameter: [CallbackMethod] public string BuyStock(StockBuyOrder buyOrder) { var server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(buyOrder.Symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid or missing stock symbol."); return string.Format("You're buying {0} shares of {1} ({2}) stock at {3} for a total of {4} on {5}.", buyOrder.Quantity, quote.Company, quote.Symbol, quote.LastPrice.ToString("c"), (quote.LastPrice * buyOrder.Quantity).ToString("c"), buyOrder.BuyOn.ToString("MMM d")); } public class StockBuyOrder { public string Symbol { get; set; } public int Quantity { get; set; } public DateTime BuyOn { get; set; } public StockBuyOrder() { BuyOn = DateTime.Now; } } This is a contrived do-nothing example that simply echoes back what was passed in, but it demonstrates how you can pass complex data to a callback method. On the client side we now have a very simple form that captures the three values on a form: <fieldset> <legend>Post a Stock Buy Order</legend> Enter a symbol: <input type="text" name="txtBuySymbol" id="txtBuySymbol" value="GLD" />   Qty: <input type="text" name="txtBuyQty" id="txtBuyQty" value="10" style="width: 50px" />   Buy on: <input type="text" name="txtBuyOn" id="txtBuyOn" value="<%= DateTime.Now.ToString("d") %>" style="width: 70px;" /> <input type="button" id="btnBuyStock" value="Buy Stock" /> <div id="divStockBuyMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display:none"></div> </fieldset> The completed form and demo then looks something like this: The client side code that picks up the input values and assigns them to object properties and sends the AJAX request looks like this: $("#btnBuyStock").click(function () { // create an object map that matches StockBuyOrder signature var buyOrder = { Symbol: $("#txtBuySymbol").val(), Quantity: $("#txtBuyQty").val() * 1, // number Entered: new Date() } ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "BuyStock", [buyOrder], function (result) { $("#divStockBuyMessage").text(result).fadeIn(1000); }, onPageError); }); The code creates an object and attaches the properties that match the server side object passed to the BuyStock method. Each property that you want to update needs to be included and the type must match (ie. string, number, date in this case). Any missing properties will not be set but also not cause any errors. Pass POST data instead of Objects In the last example I collected a bunch of values from form variables and stuffed them into object variables in JavaScript code. While that works, often times this isn't really helping - I end up converting my types on the client and then doing another conversion on the server. If lots of input controls are on a page and you just want to pick up the values on the server via plain POST variables - that can be done too - and it makes sense especially if you're creating and filling the client side object only to push data to the server. Let's add another method to the server that once again lets us buy a stock. But this time let's not accept a parameter but rather send POST data to the server. Here's the server method receiving POST data: [CallbackMethod] public string BuyStockPost() { StockBuyOrder buyOrder = new StockBuyOrder(); buyOrder.Symbol = Request.Form["txtBuySymbol"]; ; int qty; int.TryParse(Request.Form["txtBuyQuantity"], out qty); buyOrder.Quantity = qty; DateTime time; DateTime.TryParse(Request.Form["txtBuyBuyOn"], out time); buyOrder.BuyOn = time; // Or easier way yet //FormVariableBinder.Unbind(buyOrder,null,"txtBuy"); var server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(buyOrder.Symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid or missing stock symbol."); return string.Format("You're buying {0} shares of {1} ({2}) stock at {3} for a total of {4} on {5}.", buyOrder.Quantity, quote.Company, quote.Symbol, quote.LastPrice.ToString("c"), (quote.LastPrice * buyOrder.Quantity).ToString("c"), buyOrder.BuyOn.ToString("MMM d")); } Clearly we've made this server method take more code than it did with the object parameter. We've basically moved the parameter assignment logic from the client to the server. As a result the client code to call this method is now a bit shorter since there's no client side shuffling of values from the controls to an object. $("#btnBuyStockPost").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "BuyStockPost", [], // Note: No parameters - function (result) { $("#divStockBuyMessage").text(result).fadeIn(1000); }, onPageError, // Force all page Form Variables to be posted { postbackMode: "Post" }); }); The client simply calls the BuyStockQuote method and pushes all the form variables from the page up to the server which parses them instead. The feature that makes this work is one of the options you can pass to the ajaxCallMethod() function: { postbackMode: "Post" }); which directs the function to include form variable POST data when making the service call. Other options include PostNoViewState (for WebForms to strip out WebForms crap vars), PostParametersOnly (default), None. If you pass parameters those are always posted to the server except when None is set. The above code can be simplified a bit by using the FormVariableBinder helper, which can unbind form variables directly into an object: FormVariableBinder.Unbind(buyOrder,null,"txtBuy"); which replaces the manual Request.Form[] reading code. It receives the object to unbind into, a string of properties to skip, and an optional prefix which is stripped off form variables to match property names. The component is similar to the MVC model binder but it's independent of MVC. Returning non-JSON Data CallbackHandler also supports returning non-JSON/XML data via special return types. You can return raw non-JSON encoded strings like this: [CallbackMethod(ReturnAsRawString=true,ContentType="text/plain")] public string HelloWorldNoJSON(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } Calling this method results in just a plain string - no JSON encoding with quotes around the result. This can be useful if your server handling code needs to return a string or HTML result that doesn't fit well for a page or other UI component. Any string output can be returned. You can also return binary data. Stream, byte[] and Bitmap/Image results are automatically streamed back to the client. Notice that you should set the ContentType of the request either on the CallbackMethod attribute or using Response.ContentType. This ensures the Web Server knows how to display your binary response. Using a stream response makes it possible to return any of data. Streamed data can be pretty handy to return bitmap data from a method. The following is a method that returns a stock history graph for a particular stock over a provided number of years: [CallbackMethod(ContentType="image/png",RouteUrl="stocks/history/graph/{symbol}/{years}")] public Stream GetStockHistoryGraph(string symbol, int years = 2,int width = 500, int height=350) { if (width == 0) width = 500; if (height == 0) height = 350; StockServer server = new StockServer(); return server.GetStockHistoryGraph(symbol,"Stock History for " + symbol,width,height,years); } I can now hook this up into the JavaScript code when I get a stock quote. At the end of the process I can assign the URL to the service that returns the image into the src property and so force the image to display. Here's the changed code: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { var symbol = $("#txtSymbol").val(); ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [symbol], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, hh:mmt")); // display a stock chart $("#imgStockHistory").attr("src", "stocks/history/graph/" + symbol + "/2"); },onPageError); }); The resulting output then looks like this: The charting code uses the new ASP.NET 4.0 Chart components via code to display a bar chart of the 2 year stock data as part of the StockServer class which you can find in the sample download. The ability to return arbitrary data from a service is useful as you can see - in this case the chart is clearly associated with the service and it's nice that the graph generation can happen off a handler rather than through a page. Images are common resources, but output can also be PDF reports, zip files for downloads etc. which is becoming increasingly more common to be returned from REST endpoints and other applications. Why reinvent? Obviously the examples I've shown here are pretty basic in terms of functionality. But I hope they demonstrate the core features of AJAX callbacks that you need to work through in most applications which is simple: return data, send back data and potentially retrieve data in various formats. While there are other solutions when it comes down to making AJAX callbacks and servicing REST like requests, I like the flexibility my home grown solution provides. Simply put it's still the easiest solution that I've found that addresses my common use cases: AJAX JSON RPC style callbacks Url based access XML and JSON Output from single method endpoint XML and JSON POST support, querystring input, routing parameter mapping UrlEncoded POST data support on callbacks Ability to return stream/raw string data Essentially ability to return ANYTHING from Service and pass anything All these features are available in various solutions but not together in one place. I've been using this code base for over 4 years now in a number of projects both for myself and commercial work and it's served me extremely well. Besides the AJAX functionality CallbackHandler provides, it's also an easy way to create any kind of output endpoint I need to create. Need to create a few simple routines that spit back some data, but don't want to create a Page or View or full blown handler for it? Create a CallbackHandler and add a method or multiple methods and you have your generic endpoints. It's a quick and easy way to add small code pieces that are pretty efficient as they're running through a pretty small handler implementation. I can have this up and running in a couple of minutes literally without any setup and returning just about any kind of data. Resources Download the Sample NuGet: Westwind Web and AJAX Utilities (Westwind.Web) ajaxCallMethod() Documentation Using the AjaxMethodCallback WebForms Control West Wind Web Toolkit Home Page West Wind Web Toolkit Source Code © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET jQuery AJAX Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

Read the article
What’s New in ASP.NET 4.0 Part Two: WebForms and Visual Studio Enhancements

- by Rick Strahl

In the last installment I talked about the core changes in the ASP.NET runtime that I’ve been taking advantage of. In this column, I’ll cover the changes to the Web Forms engine and some of the cool improvements in Visual Studio that make Web and general development easier. WebForms The WebForms engine is the area that has received most significant changes in ASP.NET 4.0. Probably the most widely anticipated features are related to managing page client ids and of ViewState on WebForm pages. Take Control of Your ClientIDs Unique ClientID generation in ASP.NET has been one of the most complained about “features” in ASP.NET. Although there’s a very good technical reason for these unique generated ids - they guarantee unique ids for each and every server control on a page - these unique and generated ids often get in the way of client-side JavaScript development and CSS styling as it’s often inconvenient and fragile to work with the long, generated ClientIDs. In ASP.NET 4.0 you can now specify an explicit client id mode on each control or each naming container parent control to control how client ids are generated. By default, ASP.NET generates mangled client ids for any control contained in a naming container (like a Master Page, or a User Control for example). The key to ClientID management in ASP.NET 4.0 are the new ClientIDMode and ClientIDRowSuffix properties. ClientIDMode supports four different ClientID generation settings shown below. For the following examples, imagine that you have a Textbox control named txtName inside of a master page control container on a WebForms page. <%@Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Site.Master" CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.WebForm2" %> <asp:Content ID="content" ContentPlaceHolderID="content" runat="server" ClientIDMode="Static" > <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtName" /> </asp:Content> The four available ClientIDMode values are: AutoID This is the existing behavior in ASP.NET 1.x-3.x where full naming container munging takes place. <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text" id="ctl00_content_txtName" /> This should be familiar to any ASP.NET developer and results in fairly unpredictable client ids that can easily change if the containership hierarchy changes. For example, removing the master page changes the name in this case, so if you were to move a block of script code that works against the control to a non-Master page, the script code immediately breaks. Static This option is the most deterministic setting that forces the control’s ClientID to use its ID value directly. No naming container naming at all is applied and you end up with clean client ids: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text" id="txtName" /> Note that the name property which is used for postback variables to the server still is munged, but the ClientID property is displayed simply as the ID value that you have assigned to the control. This option is what most of us want to use, but you have to be clear on that because it can potentially cause conflicts with other controls on the page. If there are several instances of the same naming container (several instances of the same user control for example) there can easily be a client id naming conflict. Note that if you assign Static to a data-bound control, like a list child control in templates, you do not get unique ids either, so for list controls where you rely on unique id for child controls, you’ll probably want to use Predictable rather than Static. I’ll write more on this a little later when I discuss ClientIDRowSuffix. Predictable The previous two values are pretty self-explanatory. Predictable however, requires some explanation. To me at least it’s not in the least bit predictable. MSDN defines this value as follows: This algorithm is used for controls that are in data-bound controls. The ClientID value is generated by concatenating the ClientID value of the parent naming container with the ID value of the control. If the control is a data-bound control that generates multiple rows, the value of the data field specified in the ClientIDRowSuffix property is added at the end. For the GridView control, multiple data fields can be specified. If the ClientIDRowSuffix property is blank, a sequential number is added at the end instead of a data-field value. Each segment is separated by an underscore character (_). The key that makes this value a bit confusing is that it relies on the parent NamingContainer’s ClientID to build its own ClientID value. This effectively means that the value is not predictable at all but rather very tightly coupled to the parent naming container’s ClientIDMode setting. For my simple textbox example, if the ClientIDMode property of the parent naming container (Page in this case) is set to “Predictable” you’ll get this: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text" id="content_txtName" /> which gives an id that based on walking up to the currently active naming container (the MasterPage content container) and starting the id formatting from there downward. Think of this as a semi unique name that’s guaranteed unique only for the naming container. If, on the other hand, the Page is set to “AutoID” you get the following with Predictable on txtName: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text" id="ctl00_content_txtName" /> The latter is effectively the same as if you specified AutoID because it inherits the AutoID naming from the Page and Content Master Page control of the page. But again - predictable behavior always depends on the parent naming container and how it generates its id, so the id may not always be exactly the same as the AutoID generated value because somewhere in the NamingContainer chain the ClientIDMode setting may be set to a different value. For example, if you had another naming container in the middle that was set to Static you’d end up effectively with an id that starts with the NamingContainers id rather than the whole ctl000_content munging. The most common use for Predictable is likely to be for data-bound controls, which results in each data bound item getting a unique ClientID. Unfortunately, even here the behavior can be very unpredictable depending on which data-bound control you use - I found significant differences in how template controls in a GridView behave from those that are used in a ListView control. For example, GridView creates clean child ClientIDs, while ListView still has a naming container in the ClientID, presumably because of the template container on which you can’t set ClientIDMode. Predictable is useful, but only if all naming containers down the chain use this setting. Otherwise you’re right back to the munged ids that are pretty unpredictable. Another property, ClientIDRowSuffix, can be used in combination with ClientIDMode of Predictable to force a suffix onto list client controls. For example: <asp:GridView runat="server" ID="gvItems" AutoGenerateColumns="false" ClientIDMode="Static" ClientIDRowSuffix="Id"> <Columns> <asp:TemplateField> <ItemTemplate> <asp:Label runat="server" id="txtName" Text='<%# Eval("Name") %>' ClientIDMode="Predictable"/> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> <asp:TemplateField> <ItemTemplate> <asp:Label runat="server" id="txtId" Text='<%# Eval("Id") %>' ClientIDMode="Predictable" /> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> </Columns> </asp:GridView> generates client Ids inside of a column in the master page described earlier: <td> <span id="txtName_0">Rick</span> </td> where the value after the underscore is the ClientIDRowSuffix field - in this case “Id” of the item data bound to the control. Note that all of the child controls require ClientIDMode=”Predictable” in order for the ClientIDRowSuffix to be applied, and the parent GridView controls need to be set to Static either explicitly or via Naming Container inheritance to give these simple names. It’s a bummer that ClientIDRowSuffix doesn’t work with Static to produce this automatically. Another real problem is that other controls process the ClientIDMode differently. For example, a ListView control processes the Predictable ClientIDMode differently and produces the following with the Static ListView and Predictable child controls: <span id="ctrl0_txtName_0">Rick</span> I couldn’t even figure out a way using ClientIDMode to get a simple ID that also uses a suffix short of falling back to manually generated ids using <%= %> expressions instead. Given the inconsistencies inside of list controls using <%= %>, ids for the ListView might not be a bad idea anyway. Inherit The final setting is Inherit, which is the default for all controls except Page. This means that controls by default inherit the parent naming container’s ClientIDMode setting. For more detailed information on ClientID behavior and different scenarios you can check out a blog post of mine on this subject: http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/54760.aspx. ClientID Enhancements Summary The ClientIDMode property is a welcome addition to ASP.NET 4.0. To me this is probably the most useful WebForms feature as it allows me to generate clean IDs simply by setting ClientIDMode="Static" on either the page or inside of Web.config (in the Pages section) which applies the setting down to the entire page which is my 95% scenario. For the few cases when it matters - for list controls and inside of multi-use user controls or custom server controls) - I can use Predictable or even AutoID to force controls to unique names. For application-level page development, this is easy to accomplish and provides maximum usability for working with client script code against page controls. ViewStateMode Another area of large criticism for WebForms is ViewState. ViewState is used internally by ASP.NET to persist page-level changes to non-postback properties on controls as pages post back to the server. It’s a useful mechanism that works great for the overall mechanics of WebForms, but it can also cause all sorts of overhead for page operation as ViewState can very quickly get out of control and consume huge amounts of bandwidth in your page content. ViewState can also wreak havoc with client-side scripting applications that modify control properties that are tracked by ViewState, which can produce very unpredictable results on a Postback after client-side updates. Over the years in my own development, I’ve often turned off ViewState on pages to reduce overhead. Yes, you lose some functionality, but you can easily implement most of the common functionality in non-ViewState workarounds. Relying less on heavy ViewState controls and sticking with simpler controls or raw HTML constructs avoids getting around ViewState problems. In ASP.NET 3.x and prior, it wasn’t easy to control ViewState - you could turn it on or off and if you turned it off at the page or web.config level, you couldn’t turn it back on for specific controls. In short, it was an all or nothing approach. With ASP.NET 4.0, the new ViewStateMode property gives you more control. It allows you to disable ViewState globally either on the page or web.config level and then turn it back on for specific controls that might need it. ViewStateMode only works when EnableViewState="true" on the page or web.config level (which is the default). You can then use ViewStateMode of Disabled, Enabled or Inherit to control the ViewState settings on the page. If you’re shooting for minimal ViewState usage, the ideal situation is to set ViewStateMode to disabled on the Page or web.config level and only turn it back on particular controls: <%@Page Language="C#" CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs" Inherits="Westwind.WebStore.WebForm2" ClientIDMode="Static" ViewStateMode="Disabled" EnableViewState="true" %>  <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtName" ViewStateMode="Enabled" />  <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtAddress" /> Note that the EnableViewState="true" at the Page level isn’t required since it’s the default, but it’s important that the value is true. ViewStateMode has no effect if EnableViewState="false" at the page level. The main benefit of ViewStateMode is that it allows you to more easily turn off ViewState for most of the page and enable only a few key controls that might need it. For me personally, this is a perfect combination as most of my WebForm apps can get away without any ViewState at all. But some controls - especially third party controls - often don’t work well without ViewState enabled, and now it’s much easier to selectively enable controls rather than the old way, which required you to pretty much turn off ViewState for all controls that you didn’t want ViewState on. Inline HTML Encoding HTML encoding is an important feature to prevent cross-site scripting attacks in data entered by users on your site. In order to make it easier to create HTML encoded content, ASP.NET 4.0 introduces a new Expression syntax using <%: %> to encode string values. The encoding expression syntax looks like this: <%: "<script type='text/javascript'>" + "alert('Really?');</script>" %> which produces properly encoded HTML: <script type='text/javascript' >alert('Really?');</script> Effectively this is a shortcut to: <%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode( "<script type='text/javascript'>" + "alert('Really?');</script>") %> Of course the <%: %> syntax can also evaluate expressions just like <%= %> so the more common scenario applies this expression syntax against data your application is displaying. Here’s an example displaying some data model values: <%: Model.Address.Street %> This snippet shows displaying data from your application’s data store or more importantly, from data entered by users. Anything that makes it easier and less verbose to HtmlEncode text is a welcome addition to avoid potential cross-site scripting attacks. Although I listed Inline HTML Encoding here under WebForms, anything that uses the WebForms rendering engine including ASP.NET MVC, benefits from this feature. ScriptManager Enhancements The ASP.NET ScriptManager control in the past has introduced some nice ways to take programmatic and markup control over script loading, but there were a number of shortcomings in this control. The ASP.NET 4.0 ScriptManager has a number of improvements that make it easier to control script loading and addresses a few of the shortcomings that have often kept me from using the control in favor of manual script loading. The first is the AjaxFrameworkMode property which finally lets you suppress loading the ASP.NET AJAX runtime. Disabled doesn’t load any ASP.NET AJAX libraries, but there’s also an Explicit mode that lets you pick and choose the library pieces individually and reduce the footprint of ASP.NET AJAX script included if you are using the library. There’s also a new EnableCdn property that forces any script that has a new WebResource attribute CdnPath property set to a CDN supplied URL. If the script has this Attribute property set to a non-null/empty value and EnableCdn is enabled on the ScriptManager, that script will be served from the specified CdnPath. [assembly: WebResource( "Westwind.Web.Resources.ww.jquery.js", "application/x-javascript", CdnPath = "http://mysite.com/scripts/ww.jquery.min.js")] Cool, but a little too static for my taste since this value can’t be changed at runtime to point at a debug script as needed, for example. Assembly names for loading scripts from resources can now be simple names rather than fully qualified assembly names, which make it less verbose to reference scripts from assemblies loaded from your bin folder or the assembly reference area in web.config: <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" id="Id" EnableCdn="true" AjaxFrameworkMode="disabled"> <Scripts> <asp:ScriptReference Name="Westwind.Web.Resources.ww.jquery.js" Assembly="Westwind.Web" /> </Scripts> </asp:ScriptManager> The ScriptManager in 4.0 also supports script combining via the CompositeScript tag, which allows you to very easily combine scripts into a single script resource served via ASP.NET. Even nicer: You can specify the URL that the combined script is served with. Check out the following script manager markup that combines several static file scripts and a script resource into a single ASP.NET served resource from a static URL (allscripts.js): <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" id="Id" EnableCdn="true" AjaxFrameworkMode="disabled"> <CompositeScript Path="~/scripts/allscripts.js"> <Scripts> <asp:ScriptReference Path="~/scripts/jquery.js" /> <asp:ScriptReference Path="~/scripts/ww.jquery.js" /> <asp:ScriptReference Name="Westwind.Web.Resources.editors.js" Assembly="Westwind.Web" /> </Scripts> </CompositeScript> </asp:ScriptManager> When you render this into HTML, you’ll see a single script reference in the page: <script src="scripts/allscripts.debug.js" type="text/javascript"></script> All you need to do to make this work is ensure that allscripts.js and allscripts.debug.js exist in the scripts folder of your application - they can be empty but the file has to be there. This is pretty cool, but you want to be real careful that you use unique URLs for each combination of scripts you combine or else browser and server caching will easily screw you up royally. The script manager also allows you to override native ASP.NET AJAX scripts now as any script references defined in the Scripts section of the ScriptManager trump internal references. So if you want custom behavior or you want to fix a possible bug in the core libraries that normally are loaded from resources, you can now do this simply by referencing the script resource name in the Name property and pointing at System.Web for the assembly. Not a common scenario, but when you need it, it can come in real handy. Still, there are a number of shortcomings in this control. For one, the ScriptManager and ClientScript APIs still have no common entry point so control developers are still faced with having to check and support both APIs to load scripts so that controls can work on pages that do or don’t have a ScriptManager on the page. The CdnUrl is static and compiled in, which is very restrictive. And finally, there’s still no control over where scripts get loaded on the page - ScriptManager still injects scripts into the middle of the HTML markup rather than in the header or optionally the footer. This, in turn, means there is little control over script loading order, which can be problematic for control developers. MetaDescription, MetaKeywords Page Properties There are also a number of additional Page properties that correspond to some of the other features discussed in this column: ClientIDMode, ClientTarget and ViewStateMode. Another minor but useful feature is that you can now directly access the MetaDescription and MetaKeywords properties on the Page object to set the corresponding meta tags programmatically. Updating these values programmatically previously required either <%= %> expressions in the page markup or dynamic insertion of literal controls into the page. You can now just set these properties programmatically on the Page object in any Control derived class on the page or the Page itself: Page.MetaKeywords = "ASP.NET,4.0,New Features"; Page.MetaDescription = "This article discusses the new features in ASP.NET 4.0"; Note, that there’s no corresponding ASP.NET tag for the HTML Meta element, so the only way to specify these values in markup and access them is via the @Page tag: <%@Page Language="C#" CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs" Inherits="Westwind.WebStore.WebForm2" ClientIDMode="Static" MetaDescription="Article that discusses what's new in ASP.NET 4.0" MetaKeywords="ASP.NET,4.0,New Features" %> Nothing earth shattering but quite convenient. Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements for Web Development For Web development there are also a host of editor enhancements in Visual Studio 2010. Some of these are not Web specific but they are useful for Web developers in general. Text Editors Throughout Visual Studio 2010, the text editors have all been updated to a new core engine based on WPF which provides some interesting new features for various code editors including the nice ability to zoom in and out with Ctrl-MouseWheel to quickly change the size of text. There are many more API options to control the editor and although Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t yet use many of these features, we can look forward to enhancements in add-ins and future editor updates from the various language teams that take advantage of the visual richness that WPF provides to editing. On the negative side, I’ve noticed that occasionally the code editor and especially the HTML and JavaScript editors will lose the ability to use various navigation keys like arrows, back and delete keys, which requires closing and reopening the documents at times. This issue seems to be well documented so I suspect this will be addressed soon with a hotfix or within the first service pack. Overall though, the code editors work very well, especially given that they were re-written completely using WPF, which was one of my big worries when I first heard about the complete redesign of the editors. Multi-Targeting Visual Studio now targets all versions of the .NET framework from 2.0 forward. You can use Visual Studio 2010 to work on your ASP.NET 2, 3.0 and 3.5 applications which is a nice way to get your feet wet with the new development environment without having to make changes to existing applications. It’s nice to have one tool to work in for all the different versions. Multi-Monitor Support One cool feature of Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to drag windows out of the Visual Studio environment and out onto the desktop including onto another monitor easily. Since Web development often involves working with a host of designers at the same time - visual designer, HTML markup window, code behind and JavaScript editor - it’s really nice to be able to have a little more screen real estate to work on each of these editors. Microsoft made a welcome change in the environment. IntelliSense Snippets for HTML and JavaScript Editors The HTML and JavaScript editors now finally support IntelliSense scripts to create macro-based template expansions that have been in the core C# and Visual Basic code editors since Visual Studio 2005. Snippets allow you to create short XML-based template definitions that can act as static macros or real templates that can have replaceable values that can be embedded into the expanded text. The XML syntax for these snippets is straight forward and it’s pretty easy to create custom snippets manually. You can easily create snippets using XML and store them in your custom snippets folder (C:\Users\rstrahl\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Code Snippets\Visual Web Developer\My HTML Snippets and My JScript Snippets), but it helps to use one of the third-party tools that exist to simplify the process for you. I use SnippetEditor, by Bill McCarthy, which makes short work of creating snippets interactively (http://snippeteditor.codeplex.com/). Note: You may have to manually add the Visual Studio 2010 User specific Snippet folders to this tool to see existing ones you’ve created. Code snippets are some of the biggest time savers and HTML editing more than anything deals with lots of repetitive tasks that lend themselves to text expansion. Visual Studio 2010 includes a slew of built-in snippets (that you can also customize!) and you can create your own very easily. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to spend a little time examining your coding patterns and find the repetitive code that you write and convert it into snippets. I’ve been using CodeRush for this for years, but now you can do much of the basic expansion natively for HTML and JavaScript snippets. jQuery Integration Is Now Native jQuery is a popular JavaScript library and recently Microsoft has recently stated that it will become the primary client-side scripting technology to drive higher level script functionality in various ASP.NET Web projects that Microsoft provides. In Visual Studio 2010, the default full project template includes jQuery as part of a new project including the support files that provide IntelliSense (-vsdoc files). IntelliSense support for jQuery is now also baked into Visual Studio 2010, so unlike Visual Studio 2008 which required a separate download, no further installs are required for a rich IntelliSense experience with jQuery. Summary ASP.NET 4.0 brings many useful improvements to the platform, but thankfully most of the changes are incremental changes that don’t compromise backwards compatibility and they allow developers to ease into the new features one feature at a time. None of the changes in ASP.NET 4.0 or Visual Studio 2010 are monumental or game changers. The bigger features are language and .NET Framework changes that are also optional. This ASP.NET and tools release feels more like fine tuning and getting some long-standing kinks worked out of the platform. It shows that the ASP.NET team is dedicated to paying attention to community feedback and responding with changes to the platform and development environment based on this feedback. If you haven’t gotten your feet wet with ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010, there’s no reason not to give it a shot now - the ASP.NET 4.0 platform is solid and Visual Studio 2010 works very well for a brand new release. Check it out. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET

Read the article
A C# implementation of the CallStream pattern

- by Bertrand Le Roy

Dusan published this interesting post a couple of weeks ago about a novel JavaScript chaining pattern: http://dbj.org/dbj/?p=514 It’s similar to many existing patterns, but the syntax is extraordinarily terse and it provides a new form of friction-free, plugin-less extensibility mechanism. Here’s a JavaScript example from Dusan’s post: CallStream("#container") (find, "div") (attr, "A", 1) (css, "color", "#fff") (logger); The interesting thing here is that the functions that are being passed as the first argument are arbitrary, they don’t need to be declared as plug-ins. Compare that with a rough jQuery equivalent that could look something like this: $.fn.logger = function () { /* ... */ } $("selector") .find("div") .attr("A", 1) .css("color", "#fff") .logger(); There is also the “each” method in jQuery that achieves something similar, but its syntax is a little more verbose. Of course, that this pattern can be expressed so easily in JavaScript owes everything to the extraordinary way functions are treated in that language, something Douglas Crockford called “the very best part of JavaScript”. One of the first things I thought while reading Dusan’s post was how I could adapt that to C#. After all, with Lambdas and delegates, C# also has its first-class functions. And sure enough, it works really really well. After about ten minutes, I was able to write this: CallStreamFactory.CallStream (p => Console.WriteLine("Yay!")) (Dump, DateTime.Now) (DumpFooAndBar, new { Foo = 42, Bar = "the answer" }) (p => Console.ReadKey()); Where the Dump function is: public static void Dump(object options) { Console.WriteLine(options.ToString()); } And DumpFooAndBar is: public static void DumpFooAndBar(dynamic options) { Console.WriteLine("Foo is {0} and bar is {1}.", options.Foo, options.Bar); } So how does this work? Well, it really is very simple. And not. Let’s say it’s not a lot of code, but if you’re like me you might need an Advil after that. First, I defined the signature of the CallStream method as follows: public delegate CallStream CallStream (Action<object> action, object options = null); The delegate define a call stream as something that takes an action (a function of the options) and an optional options object and that returns a delegate of its own type. Tricky, but that actually works, a delegate can return its own type. Then I wrote an implementation of that delegate that calls the action and returns itself: public static CallStream CallStream (Action<object> action, object options = null) { action(options); return CallStream; } Pretty nice, eh? Well, yes and no. What we are doing here is to execute a sequence of actions using an interesting novel syntax. But for this to be actually useful, you’d need to build a more specialized call stream factory that comes with some sort of context (like Dusan did in JavaScript). For example, you could write the following alternate delegate signature that takes a string and returns itself: public delegate StringCallStream StringCallStream(string message); And then write the following call stream (notice the currying): public static StringCallStream CreateDumpCallStream(string dumpPath) { StringCallStream str = null; var dump = File.AppendText(dumpPath); dump.AutoFlush = true; str = s => { dump.WriteLine(s); return str; }; return str; } (I know, I’m not closing that stream; sure; bad, bad Bertrand) Finally, here’s how you use it: CallStreamFactory.CreateDumpCallStream(@".\dump.txt") ("Wow, this really works.") (DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString()) ("And that is all."); Next step would be to combine this contextual implementation with the one that takes an action parameter and do some really fun stuff. I’m only scratching the surface here. This pattern could reveal itself to be nothing more than a gratuitous mind-bender or there could be applications that we hardly suspect at this point. In any case, it’s a fun new construct. Or is this nothing new? You tell me… Comments are open :)

Read the article
Check Your Spelling, Grammar, and Style in Firefox and Chrome

- by Matthew Guay

Are you tired of making simple writing mistakes that get past your browser’s spell-check? Here’s how you can get advanced grammar check and more in Firefox and Chrome with After the Deadline. Microsoft Word has spoiled us with grammar, syntax, and spell checking, but the default spell check in Firefox and Chrome still only does basic checks. Even webapps like Google Docs don’t check more than basic spelling errors. However, WordPress.com is an exception; it offers advanced spelling, grammar, and syntax checking with its After the Deadline proofing system. This helps you keep from making embarrassing mistakes on your blog posts, and now, thanks to a couple free browser plugins, it can help you keep from making these mistakes in any website or webapp. After the Deadline in Google Chrome Add the After the Deadline extension (link below) to Chrome as usual. As soon as it’s installed, you’re ready to start improving your online writing. To check spelling, grammar, and more, click the ABC button that you’ll now see at the bottom of most text boxes online. After a quick scan, grammar mistakes are highlighted in green, complex expressions and other syntax problems are highlighted in blue, and spelling mistakes are highlighted in red as would be expected. Click on an underlined word to choose one of its recommended changes or ignore the suggestion. Or, if you want more explanation about what was wrong with that word or phrase, click Explain for more info. And, if you forget to run an After the Deadline scan before submitting a text entry, it will automatically check to make sure you still want to submit it. Click Cancel to go back and check your writing first. To change the After the Deadline settings, click its icon in the toolbar and select View Options. Additionally, if you want to disable it on the site you’re on, you can click Disable on this site directly from the popup. From the settings page, you can choose extra things to check for such as double negatives and redundant phrases, as well as add sites and words to ignore. After the Deadline in Firefox Add the After the Deadline add-on to Firefox (link below) as normal. After the Deadline basically the same in Firefox as it does in Chrome. Select the ABC icon in the lower right corner of textboxes to check them for problems, and After the Deadline will underline the problems as it did in Chrome. To view a suggested change in Firefox, right-click on the underlined word and select the recommended change or ignore the suggestion. And, if you forget to check, you’ll see a friendly reminder asking if you’re sure you want to submit your text like it is. You can access the After the Deadline settings in Firefox from the menu bar. Click Tools, then select AtD Preferences. In Firefox, the settings are in a options dialog with three tabs, but it includes the same options as the Chrome settings page. Here you can make After the Deadline as correction-happy as you like. Conclusion The web has increasingly become an interactive place, and seldom does a day go by that we aren’t entering text in forms and comments that may stay online forever. Even our insignificant tweets are being archived in the Library of Congress. After the Deadline can help you make sure that your permanent internet record is as grammatically correct as possible. Even though it doesn’t catch every problem, and even misses some spelling mistakes, it’s still a great help. Links Download the After the Deadline extension for Google Chrome Download the After the Deadline add-on for Firefox Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Disable Favicons in FirefoxStupid Geek Tricks: Duplicate a Tab with a Shortcut Key in Chrome or FirefoxHow to Disable the New Geolocation Feature in Google ChromeStupid Geek Tricks: Compare Your Browser’s Memory Usage with Google ChromeStop YouTube Videos from Automatically Playing in Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Easily Search Food Recipes With Recipe Chimp Tech Fanboys Field Guide Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools

Read the article
What Counts For a DBA: Simplicity

- by Louis Davidson

Too many computer processes do an apparently simple task in a bizarrely complex way. They remind me of this strip by one of my favorite artists: Rube Goldberg. In order to keep the boss from knowing one was late, a process is devised whereby the cuckoo clock kisses a live cuckoo bird, who then pulls a string, which triggers a hat flinging, which in turn lands on a rod that removes a typewriter cover…and so on. We rely on creating automated processes to keep on top of tasks. DBAs have a lot of tasks to perform: backups, performance tuning, data movement, system monitoring, and of course, avoiding being noticed. Every day, there are many steps to perform to maintain the database infrastructure, including: checking physical structures, re-indexing tables where needed, backing up the databases, checking those backups, running the ETL, and preparing the daily reports and yes, all of these processes have to complete before you can call it a day, and probably before many others have started that same day. Some of these tasks are just naturally complicated on their own. Other tasks become complicated because the database architecture is excessively rigid, and we often discover during “production testing” that certain processes need to be changed because the written requirements barely resembled the actual customer requirements. Then, with no time to change that rigid structure, we are forced to heap layer upon layer of code onto the problematic processes. Instead of a slight table change and a new index, we end up with 4 new ETL processes, 20 temp tables, 30 extra queries, and 1000 lines of SQL code. Report writers then need to build reports and make magical numbers appear from those toxic data structures that are overly complex and probably filled with inconsistent data. What starts out as a collection of fairly simple tasks turns into a Goldbergian nightmare of daily processes that are likely to cause your dinner to be interrupted by the smartphone doing the vibration dance that signifies trouble at the mill. So what to do? Well, if it is at all possible, simplify the problem by either going into the code and refactoring the complex code to simple, or taking all of the processes and simplifying them into small, independent, easily-tested steps. The former approach usually requires an agreement on changing underlying structures that requires countless mind-numbing meetings; while the latter can generally be done to any complex process without the same frustration or anger, though it will still leave you with lots of steps to complete, the ability to test each step independently will definitely increase the quality of the overall process (and with each step reporting status back, finding an actual problem within the process will be definitely less unpleasant.) We all know the principle behind simplifying a sequence of processes because we learned it in math classes in our early years of attending school, starting with elementary school. In my 4 years (ok, 9 years) of undergraduate work, I remember pretty much one thing from my many math classes that I apply daily to my career as a data architect, data programmer, and as an occasional indentured DBA: “show your work”. This process of showing your work was my first lesson in simplification. Each step in the process was in fact, far simpler than the entire process. When you were working an equation that took both sides of 4 sheets of paper, showing your work was important because the teacher could see every step, judge it, and mark it accordingly. So often I would make an error in the first few lines of a problem which meant that the rest of the work was actually moving me closer to a very wrong answer, no matter how correct the math was in the subsequent steps. Yet, when I got my grade back, I would sometimes be pleasantly surprised. I passed, yet missed every problem on the test. But why? While I got the fact that 1+1=2 wrong in every problem, the teacher could see that I was using the right process. In a computer process, the process is very similar. We take complex processes, show our work by storing intermediate values, and test each step independently. When a process has 100 steps, each step becomes a simple step that is tested and verified, such that there will be 100 places where data is stored, validated, and can be checked off as complete. If you get step 1 of 100 wrong, you can fix it and be confident (that if you did your job of testing the other steps better than the one you had to repair,) that the rest of the process works. If you have 100 steps, and store the state of the process exactly once, the resulting testable chunk of code will be far more complex and finding the error will require checking all 100 steps as one, and usually it would be easier to find a specific needle in a stack of similarly shaped needles. The goal is to strive for simplicity either in the solution, or at least by simplifying every process down to as many, independent, testable, simple tasks as possible. For the tasks that really can’t be done completely independently, minimally take those tasks and break them down into simpler steps that can be tested independently. Like working out division problems longhand, have each step of the larger problem verified and tested.

Read the article
PASS Summit 2011 – Part III

- by Tara Kizer

Well we’re about a month past PASS Summit 2011, and yet I haven’t finished blogging my notes! Between work and home life, I haven’t been able to come up for air in a bit. Now on to my notes… On Thursday of the PASS Summit 2011, I attended Klaus Aschenbrenner’s (blog|twitter) “Advanced SQL Server 2008 Troubleshooting”, Joe Webb’s (blog|twitter) “SQL Server Locking & Blocking Made Simple”, Kalen Delaney’s (blog|twitter) “What Happened? Exploring the Plan Cache”, and Paul Randal’s (blog|twitter) “More DBA Mythbusters”. I think my head grew two times in size from the Thursday sessions. Just WOW! I took a ton of notes in Klaus' session. He took a deep dive into how to troubleshoot performance problems. Here is how he goes about solving a performance problem: Start by checking the wait stats DMV System health Memory issues I/O issues I normally start with blocking and then hit the wait stats. Here’s the wait stat query (Paul Randal’s) that I use when working on a performance problem. He highlighted a few waits to be aware of such as WRITELOG (indicates IO subsystem problem), SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD (indicates CPU problem), and PAGEIOLATCH_XX (indicates an IO subsystem problem or a buffer pool problem). Regarding memory issues, Klaus recommended that as a bare minimum, one should set the “max server memory (MB)” in sp_configure to 2GB or 10% reserved for the OS (whichever comes first). This is just a starting point though! Regarding I/O issues, Klaus talked about disk partition alignment, which can improve SQL I/O performance by up to 100%. You should use 64kb for NTFS cluster, and it’s automatic in Windows 2008 R2. Joe’s locking and blocking presentation was a good session to really clear up the fog in my mind about locking. One takeaway that I had no idea could be done was that you can set a timeout in T-SQL code view LOCK_TIMEOUT. If you do this via the application, you should trap error 1222. Kalen’s session went into execution plans. The minimum size of a plan is 24k. This adds up fast especially if you have a lot of plans that don’t get reused much. You can use sys.dm_exec_cached_plans to check how often a plan is being reused by checking the usecounts column. She said that we can use DBCC FLUSHPROCINDB to clear out the stored procedure cache for a specific database. I didn’t know we had this available, so this was great to hear. This will be less intrusive when an emergency comes up where I’ve needed to run DBCC FREEPROCCACHE. Kalen said one should enable “optimize for ad hoc workloads” if you have an adhoc loc. This stores only a 300-byte stub of the first plan, and if it gets run again, it’ll store the whole thing. This helps with plan cache bloat. I have a lot of systems that use prepared statements, and Kalen says we simulate those calls by using sp_executesql. Cool! Paul did a series of posts last year to debunk various myths and misconceptions around SQL Server. He continues to debunk things via “DBA Mythbusters”. You can get a PDF of a bunch of these here. One of the myths he went over is the number of tempdb data files that you should have. Back in 2000, the recommendation was to have as many tempdb data files as there are CPU cores on your server. This no longer holds true due to the numerous cores we have on our servers. Paul says you should start out with 1/4 to 1/2 the number of cores and work your way up from there. BUT! Paul likes what Bob Ward (twitter) says on this topic: 8 or less cores –> set number of files equal to the number of cores Greater than 8 cores –> start with 8 files and increase in blocks of 4 One common myth out there is to set your MAXDOP to 1 for an OLTP workload with high CXPACKET waits. Instead of that, dig deeper first. Look for missing indexes, out-of-date statistics, increase the “cost threshold for parallelism” setting, and perhaps set MAXDOP at the query level. Paul stressed that you should not plan a backup strategy but instead plan a restore strategy. What are your recoverability requirements? Once you know that, now plan out your backups. As Paul always does, he talked about DBCC CHECKDB. He said how fabulous it is. I didn’t want to interrupt the presentation, so after his session had ended, I asked Paul about the need to run DBCC CHECKDB on your mirror systems. You could have data corruption occur at the mirror and not at the principal server. If you aren’t checking for data corruption on your mirror systems, you could be failing over to a corrupt database in the case of a disaster or even a planned failover. You can’t run DBCC CHECKDB against the mirrored database, but you can run it against a snapshot off the mirrored database.

Read the article
Clean way to use mutable implementation of Immutable interfaces for encapsulation

- by dsollen

My code is working on some compost relationship which creates a tree structure, class A has many children of type B, which has many children of type C etc. The lowest level class, call it bar, also points to a connected bar class. This effectively makes nearly every object in my domain inter-connected. Immutable objects would be problematic due to the expense of rebuilding almost all of my domain to make a single change to one class. I chose to go with an interface approach. Every object has an Immutable interface which only publishes the getter methods. I have controller objects which constructs the domain objects and thus has reference to the full objects, thus capable of calling the setter methods; but only ever publishes the immutable interface. Any change requested will go through the controller. So something like this: public interface ImmutableFoo{ public Bar getBar(); public Location getLocation(); } public class Foo implements ImmutableFoo{ private Bar bar; private Location location; @Override public Bar getBar(){ return Bar; } public void setBar(Bar bar){ this.bar=bar; } @Override public Location getLocation(){ return Location; } } public class Controller{ Private Map<Location, Foo> fooMap; public ImmutableFoo addBar(Bar bar){ Foo foo=fooMap.get(bar.getLocation()); if(foo!=null) foo.addBar(bar); return foo; } } I felt the basic approach seems sensible, however, when I speak to others they always seem to have trouble envisioning what I'm describing, which leaves me concerned that I may have a larger design issue then I'm aware of. Is it problematic to have domain objects so tightly coupled, or to use the quasi-mutable approach to modifying them? Assuming that the design approach itself isn't inherently flawed the particular discussion which left me wondering about my approach had to do with the presence of business logic in the domain objects. Currently I have my setter methods in the mutable objects do error checking and all other logic required to verify and make a change to the object. It was suggested that this should be pulled out into a service class, which applies all the business logic, to simplify my domain objects. I understand the advantage in mocking/testing and general separation of logic into two classes. However, with a service method/object It seems I loose some of the advantage of polymorphism, I can't override a base class to add in new error checking or business logic. It seems, if my polymorphic classes were complicated enough, I would end up with a service method that has to check a dozen flags to decide what error checking and business logic applies. So, for example, if I wanted to have a childFoo which also had a size field which should be compared to bar before adding par my current approach would look something like this. public class Foo implements ImmutableFoo{ public void addBar(Bar bar){ if(!getLocation().equals(bar.getLocation()) throw new LocationException(); this.bar=bar; } } public interface ImmutableChildFoo extends ImmutableFoo{ public int getSize(); } public ChildFoo extends Foo implements ImmutableChildFoo{ private int size; @Override public int getSize(){ return size; } @Override public void addBar(Bar bar){ if(getSize()<bar.getSize()){ throw new LocationException(); super.addBar(bar); } My colleague was suggesting instead having a service object that looks something like this (over simplified, the 'service' object would likely be more complex). public interface ImmutableFoo{ ///original interface, presumably used in other methods public Location getLocation(); public boolean isChildFoo(); } public interface ImmutableSizedFoo implements ImmutableFoo{ public int getSize(); } public class Foo implements ImmutableSizedFoo{ public Bar bar; @Override public void addBar(Bar bar){ this.bar=bar; } @Override public int getSize(){ //default size if no size is known return 0; } @Override public boolean isChildFoo return false; } } public ChildFoo extends Foo{ private int size; @Override public int getSize(){ return size; } @Override public boolean isChildFoo(); return true; } } public class Controller{ Private Map<Location, Foo> fooMap; public ImmutableSizedFoo addBar(Bar bar){ Foo foo=fooMap.get(bar.getLocation()); service.addBarToFoo(foo, bar); returned foo; } public class Service{ public static void addBarToFoo(Foo foo, Bar bar){ if(foo==null) return; if(!foo.getLocation().equals(bar.getLocation())) throw new LocationException(); if(foo.isChildFoo() && foo.getSize()<bar.getSize()) throw new LocationException(); foo.setBar(bar); } } } Is the recommended approach of using services and inversion of control inherently superior, or superior in certain cases, to overriding methods directly? If so is there a good way to go with the service approach while not loosing the power of polymorphism to override some of the behavior?

Read the article
Physics System ignores collision in some rare cases

- by Gajoo

I've been developing a simple physics engine for my game. since the game physics is very simple I've decided to increase accuracy a little bit. Instead of formal integration methods like fourier or RK4, I'm directly computing the results after delta time "dt". based on the very first laws of physics : dx = 0.5 * a * dt^2 + v0 * dt dv = a * dt where a is acceleration and v0 is object's previous velocity. Also to handle collisions I've used a method which is somehow different from those I've seen so far. I'm detecting all the collision in the given time frame, stepping the world forward to the nearest collision, resolving it and again check for possible collisions. As I said the world consist of very simple objects, so I'm not loosing any performance due to multiple collision checking. First I'm checking if the ball collides with any walls around it (which is working perfectly) and then I'm checking if it collides with the edges of the walls (yellow points in the picture). the algorithm seems to work without any problem except some rare cases, in which the collision with points are ignored. I've tested everything and all the variables seem to be what they should but after leaving the system work for a minute or two the system the ball passes through one of those points. Here is collision portion of my code, hopefully one of you guys can give me a hint where to look for a potential bug! void PhysicalWorld::checkForPointCollision(Vec2 acceleration, PhysicsComponent& ball, Vec2& collisionNormal, float& collisionTime, Vec2 target) { // this function checks if there will be any collision between a circle and a point // ball contains informations about the circle (it's current velocity, position and radius) // collisionNormal is an output variable // collisionTime is also an output varialbe // target is the point I want to check for collisions Vec2 V = ball.mVelocity; Vec2 A = acceleration; Vec2 P = ball.mPosition - target; float wallWidth = mMap->getWallWidth() / (mMap->getWallWidth() + mMap->getHallWidth()) / 2; float r = ball.mRadius / (mMap->getWallWidth() + mMap->getHallWidth()); // r is ball radius scaled to match actual rendered object. if (A.any()) // todo : I need to first correctly solve the collisions in case there is no acceleration return; if (V.any()) // if object is not moving there will be no collisions! { float D = P.x * V.y - P.y * V.x; float Delta = r*r*V.length2() - D*D; if(Delta < eps) return; Delta = sqrt(Delta); float sgnvy = V.y > 0 ? 1: (V.y < 0?-1:0); Vec2 c1(( D*V.y+sgnvy*V.x*Delta) / V.length2(), (-D*V.x+fabs(V.y)*Delta) / V.length2()); Vec2 c2(( D*V.y-sgnvy*V.x*Delta) / V.length2(), (-D*V.x-fabs(V.y)*Delta) / V.length2()); float t1 = (c1.x - P.x) / V.x; float t2 = (c2.x - P.x) / V.x; if(t1 > eps && t1 <= collisionTime) { collisionTime = t1; collisionNormal = c1; } if(t2 > eps && t2 <= collisionTime) { collisionTime = t2; collisionNormal = c2; } } } // this function should step the world forward by dt. it doesn't check for collision of any two balls (components) // it just checks if there is a collision between the current component and 4 points forming a rectangle around it. void PhysicalWorld::step(float dt) { for (unsigned i=0;i<mObjects.size();i++) { PhysicsComponent &current = *mObjects[i]; Vec2 acceleration = current.mForces * current.mInvMass; float rt=dt; // stores how much more the world should advance while(rt > eps) { float collisionTime = rt; Vec2 collisionNormal = Vec2(0,0); float halfWallWidth = mMap->getWallWidth() / (mMap->getWallWidth() + mMap->getHallWidth()) / 2; // we check if there is any collision with any of those 4 points around the ball // if there is a collision both collisionNormal and collisionTime variables will change // after these functions collisionTime will be exactly the value of nearest collision (if any) // and if there was, collisionNormal will report in which direction the ball should return. checkForPointCollision(acceleration,current,collisionNormal,collisionTime,Vec2(floor(current.mPosition.x) + halfWallWidth,floor(current.mPosition.y) + halfWallWidth)); checkForPointCollision(acceleration,current,collisionNormal,collisionTime,Vec2(floor(current.mPosition.x) + halfWallWidth, ceil(current.mPosition.y) - halfWallWidth)); checkForPointCollision(acceleration,current,collisionNormal,collisionTime,Vec2( ceil(current.mPosition.x) - halfWallWidth,floor(current.mPosition.y) + halfWallWidth)); checkForPointCollision(acceleration,current,collisionNormal,collisionTime,Vec2( ceil(current.mPosition.x) - halfWallWidth, ceil(current.mPosition.y) - halfWallWidth)); // either if there is a collision or if there is not we step the forward since we are sure there will be no collision before collisionTime current.mPosition += collisionTime * (collisionTime * acceleration * 0.5 + current.mVelocity); current.mVelocity += collisionTime * acceleration; // if the ball collided with anything collisionNormal should be at least none zero in one of it's axis if (collisionNormal.any()) { collisionNormal *= Dot(collisionNormal, current.mVelocity) / collisionNormal.length2(); current.mVelocity -= 2 * collisionNormal; // simply reverse velocity along collision normal direction } rt -= collisionTime; } // reset all forces for current object so it'll be ready for later game event current.mForces.zero(); } }

Read the article
Example: Controlling randomizer using code contracts

- by DigiMortal

One cool addition to Visual Studio 2010 is support for code contracts. Code contracts make sure that all conditions under what method is supposed to run correctly are met. Those who are familiar with unit tests will find code contracts easy to use. In this posting I will show you simple example about static contract checking (example solution is included). To try out code contracts you need at least Visual Studio 2010 Standard Edition. Also you need code contracts package. You can download package from DevLabs Code Contracts page. NB! Speakers, you can use the example solution in your presentations as long as you mention me and this blog in your sessions. Solution has readme.txt file that gives you steps to go through when presenting solution in sessions. This blog posting is companion posting for Visual Studio solution referred below. As an example let’s look at the following class. public class Randomizer { public static int GetRandomFromRange(int min, int max) { var rnd = new Random(); return rnd.Next(min, max); } public static int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max) { Contract.Requires(min < max, "Min must be less than max"); var rnd = new Random(); return rnd.Next(min, max); } } GetRandomFromRange() method returns results without any checking. GetRandomFromRangeContracted() uses one code contract that makes sure that minimum value is less than maximum value. Now let’s run the following code. class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var random1 = Randomizer.GetRandomFromRange(0, 9); Console.WriteLine("Random 1: " + random1); var random2 = Randomizer.GetRandomFromRange(1, 1); Console.WriteLine("Random 2: " + random2); var random3 = Randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(5, 5); Console.WriteLine("Random 3: " + random3); Console.WriteLine(" "); Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit ..."); Console.ReadKey(); } } As we have not turned on support for code contracts the code runs without any problems and we get no warnings by Visual Studio that something is wrong. Now let’s turn on static checking for code contracts. As you can see then code still compiles without any errors but Visual Studio warns you about possible problems with contracts. Click on image to see it at original size. When we open Error list and run our application we get the following output to errors list. Note that these messages are not shown immediately. There is little delay between application starting and appearance of these messages. So wait couple of seconds before going out of your mind. Click on image to see it at original size. If you look at these warnings you can see that warnings show you illegal calls and also contracts against what they are going. Third warning points to GetRandomFromRange() method and shows that there should be also problem that can be detected by contract. Download Code Contracts example VS2010 solution | 30KB

Read the article
java.util.zip.ZipException: Error opening file When Deploying an Application to Weblogic Server

- by lmestre

The latest weeks we had a hard time trying to solve a deployment issue.* WebLogic Server 10.3.6* Target: WLS Cluster<21-10-2013 05:29:40 PM CLST> <Error> <Console> <BEA-240003> <Console encountered the following error weblogic.management.DeploymentException: at weblogic.servlet.internal.WarDeploymentFactory.findOrCreateComponentMBeans(WarDeploymentFactory.java:69) at weblogic.application.internal.MBeanFactoryImpl.findOrCreateComponentMBeans(MBeanFactoryImpl.java:48) at weblogic.application.internal.MBeanFactoryImpl.createComponentMBeans(MBeanFactoryImpl.java:110) at weblogic.application.internal.MBeanFactoryImpl.initializeMBeans(MBeanFactoryImpl.java:76) at weblogic.management.deploy.internal.MBeanConverter.createApplicationMBean(MBeanConverter.java:89) at weblogic.management.deploy.internal.MBeanConverter.createApplicationForAppDeployment(MBeanConverter.java:67) at weblogic.management.deploy.internal.MBeanConverter.setupNew81MBean(MBeanConverter.java:315) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.ActivateOperation.compatibilityProcessor(ActivateOperation.java:81) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.AbstractOperation.setupPrepare(AbstractOperation.java:295) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.ActivateOperation.doPrepare(ActivateOperation.java:97) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.AbstractOperation.prepare(AbstractOperation.java:217) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.handleDeploymentPrepare(DeploymentManager.java:747) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.prepareDeploymentList(DeploymentManager.java:1216) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.handlePrepare(DeploymentManager.java:250) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentServiceDispatcher.prepare(DeploymentServiceDispatcher.java:159) at weblogic.deploy.service.internal.targetserver.DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.doPrepareCallback(DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.java:171) at weblogic.deploy.service.internal.targetserver.DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.access$000(DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.java:13) at weblogic.deploy.service.internal.targetserver.DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer$1.run(DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.java:46) at weblogic.work.SelfTuningWorkManagerImpl$WorkAdapterImpl.run(SelfTuningWorkManagerImpl.java:545) at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.execute(ExecuteThread.java:256) at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.run(ExecuteThread.java:221)Caused by: java.util.zip.ZipException: Error opening file - C:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\domains\MyDomain\servers\MyServer\stage\myapp\myapp.war Message - error in opening zip file at weblogic.servlet.utils.WarUtils.existsInWar(WarUtils.java:87) at weblogic.servlet.utils.WarUtils.isWebServices(WarUtils.java:76) at weblogic.servlet.internal.WarDeploymentFactory.findOrCreateComponentMBeans(WarDeploymentFactory.java:61) So the first idea you have with that error is that the war file is corrupted or has incorrect privileges. We tried:1. Unzipping the war file, the file was perfect.2. Checking the size, same size as in other environments.3. Checking the ownership of the file, same as in other environments.4. Checking the permissions of the file, same as other applications.Then we accepted the file was fine, so we tried enabling some deployment debugs, but no clues.We also tried:1. Delete all contents of <MyDomain/servers/<MyServer>/tmp> a and <MyDomain/servers/<MyServer>/cache> folders, the issue persisted.2. When renaming the application the deployment was sucessful3. When targeting to the Admin Server, deployment was also working.4. Using 'Copy this application onto every target for me' didn't help either.Finally, my friend 'Test Case' solved the issue again.I saw this name in the config.xml<jdbc-system-resource> <name>myapp</name> <target></target> <descriptor-file-name>jdbc/myapp-jdbc.xml</descriptor-file-name> </jdbc-system-resource> So, it turned out that customer had created a DataSource with the same name as the application 'myapp' in the above example.By deleting the datasource and created another exact DataSource with a different name the issue was solved.At this point, Do you know Why 'java.util.zip.ZipException: Error opening file' was occurring?Because all names is WebLogic Server need to be unique.References: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/web.1111/e13709/setup.htm"Assigning Names to WebLogic Server ResourcesMake sure that each configurable resource in your WebLogic Server environment has a unique name. Each, domain, server, machine, cluster, JDBC data source, virtual host, or other resource must have a unique name." Enjoy!

Read the article
Applications: The Mathematics of Movement, Part 3

- by TechTwaddle

Previously: Part 1, Part 2 As promised in the previous post, this post will cover two variations of the marble move program. The first one, Infinite Move, keeps the marble moving towards the click point, rebounding it off the screen edges and changing its direction when the user clicks again. The second version, Finite Move, is the same as first except that the marble does not move forever. It moves towards the click point, rebounds off the screen edges and slowly comes to rest. The amount of time that it moves depends on the distance between the click point and marble. Infinite Move This case is simple (actually both cases are simple). In this case all we need is the direction information which is exactly what the unit vector stores. So when the user clicks, you calculate the unit vector towards the click point and then keep updating the marbles position like crazy. And, of course, there is no stop condition. There’s a little more additional code in the bounds checking conditions. Whenever the marble goes off the screen boundaries, we need to reverse its direction. Here is the code for mouse up event and UpdatePosition() method, //stores the unit vector double unitX = 0, unitY = 0; double speed = 6; //speed times the unit vector double incrX = 0, incrY = 0; private void Form1_MouseUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) { double x = e.X - marble1.x; double y = e.Y - marble1.y; //calculate distance between click point and current marble position double lenSqrd = x * x + y * y; double len = Math.Sqrt(lenSqrd); //unit vector along the same direction (from marble towards click point) unitX = x / len; unitY = y / len; timer1.Enabled = true; } private void UpdatePosition() { //amount by which to increment marble position incrX = speed * unitX; incrY = speed * unitY; marble1.x += incrX; marble1.y += incrY; //check for bounds if ((int)marble1.x < MinX + marbleWidth / 2) { marble1.x = MinX + marbleWidth / 2; unitX *= -1; } else if ((int)marble1.x > (MaxX - marbleWidth / 2)) { marble1.x = MaxX - marbleWidth / 2; unitX *= -1; } if ((int)marble1.y < MinY + marbleHeight / 2) { marble1.y = MinY + marbleHeight / 2; unitY *= -1; } else if ((int)marble1.y > (MaxY - marbleHeight / 2)) { marble1.y = MaxY - marbleHeight / 2; unitY *= -1; } } So whenever the user clicks we calculate the unit vector along that direction and also the amount by which the marble position needs to be incremented. The speed in this case is fixed at 6. You can experiment with different values. And under bounds checking, whenever the marble position goes out of bounds along the x or y direction we reverse the direction of the unit vector along that direction. Here’s a video of it running; Finite Move The code for finite move is almost exactly same as that of Infinite Move, except for the difference that the speed is not fixed and there is an end condition, so the marble comes to rest after a while. Code follows, //unit vector along the direction of click point double unitX = 0, unitY = 0; //speed of the marble double speed = 0; private void Form1_MouseUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) { double x = 0, y = 0; double lengthSqrd = 0, length = 0; x = e.X - marble1.x; y = e.Y - marble1.y; lengthSqrd = x * x + y * y; //length in pixels (between click point and current marble pos) length = Math.Sqrt(lengthSqrd); //unit vector along the same direction as vector(x, y) unitX = x / length; unitY = y / length; speed = length / 12; timer1.Enabled = true; } private void UpdatePosition() { marble1.x += speed * unitX; marble1.y += speed * unitY; //check for bounds if ((int)marble1.x < MinX + marbleWidth / 2) { marble1.x = MinX + marbleWidth / 2; unitX *= -1; } else if ((int)marble1.x > (MaxX - marbleWidth / 2)) { marble1.x = MaxX - marbleWidth / 2; unitX *= -1; } if ((int)marble1.y < MinY + marbleHeight / 2) { marble1.y = MinY + marbleHeight / 2; unitY *= -1; } else if ((int)marble1.y > (MaxY - marbleHeight / 2)) { marble1.y = MaxY - marbleHeight / 2; unitY *= -1; } //reduce speed by 3% in every loop speed = speed * 0.97f; if ((int)speed <= 0) { timer1.Enabled = false; } } So the only difference is that the speed is calculated as a function of length when the mouse up event occurs. Again, this can be experimented with. Bounds checking is same as before. In the update and draw cycle, we reduce the speed by 3% in every cycle. Since speed is calculated as a function of length, speed = length/12, the amount of time it takes speed to reach zero is directly proportional to length. Note that the speed is in ‘pixels per 40ms’ because the timeout value of the timer is 40ms. The readability can be improved by representing speed in ‘pixels per second’. This would require you to add some more calculations to the code, which I leave out as an exercise. Here’s a video of this second version,

Read the article
Efficient Way to Draw Grids in XNA

- by sm81095

So I am working on a game right now, using Monogame as my framework, and it has come time to render my world. My world is made up of a grid (think Terraria but top-down instead of from the side), and it has multiple layers of grids in a single world. Knowing how inefficient it is to call SpriteBatch.Draw() a lot of times, I tried to implement a system where the tile would only be drawn if it wasn't hidden by the layers above it. The problem is, I'm getting worse performance by checking if it's hidden than when I just let everything draw even if it's not visible. So my question is: how to I efficiently check if a tile is hidden to cut down on the draw() calls? Here is my draw code for a single layer, drawing floors, and then the tiles (which act like walls): public void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { int drawAmt = 0; int width = Tile.TILE_DIM; int startX = (int)_parent.XOffset; int startY = (int)_parent.YOffset; //Gets the starting tiles and the dimensions to draw tiles, so only onscreen tiles are drawn, allowing for the drawing of large worlds int tileDrawWidth = ((CIGame.Instance.Graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth / width) + 4); int tileDrawHeight = ((CIGame.Instance.Graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight / width) + 4); int tileStartX = (int)MathHelper.Clamp((-startX / width) - 2, 0, this.Width); int tileStartY = (int)MathHelper.Clamp((-startY / width) - 2, 0, this.Height); #region Draw Floors and Tiles CIGame.Instance.GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(_worldTarget); CIGame.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Black); CIGame.Instance.SpriteBatch.Begin(); //Draw floors for (int x = tileStartX; x < (int)MathHelper.Clamp(tileStartX + tileDrawWidth, 0, this.Width); x++) { for (int y = tileStartY; y < (int)MathHelper.Clamp(tileStartY + tileDrawHeight, 0, this.Height); y++) { //Check if this tile is hidden by layer above it bool visible = true; for (int i = this.LayerNumber; i <= _parent.ActiveLayer; i++) { if (this.LayerNumber != (_parent.Layers - 1) && (_parent.GetTileAt(x, y, i + 1).Opacity >= 1.0f || _parent.GetFloorAt(x, y, i + 1).Opacity >= 1.0f)) { visible = false; break; } } //Only draw if visible under the tile above it if (visible && this.GetTileAt(x, y).Opacity < 1.0f) { Texture2D tex = WorldTextureManager.GetFloorTexture((Floor)_floors[x, y]); Rectangle source = WorldTextureManager.GetSourceForIndex(((Floor)_floors[x, y]).GetTextureIndexFromSurroundings(x, y, this), tex); Rectangle draw = new Rectangle(startX + x * width, startY + y * width, width, width); CIGame.Instance.SpriteBatch.Draw(tex, draw, source, Color.White * ((Floor)_floors[x, y]).Opacity); drawAmt++; } } } //Draw tiles for (int x = tileStartX; x < (int)MathHelper.Clamp(tileStartX + tileDrawWidth, 0, this.Width); x++) { for (int y = tileStartY; y < (int)MathHelper.Clamp(tileStartY + tileDrawHeight, 0, this.Height); y++) { //Check if this tile is hidden by layers above it bool visible = true; for (int i = this.LayerNumber; i <= _parent.ActiveLayer; i++) { if (this.LayerNumber != (_parent.Layers - 1) && (_parent.GetTileAt(x, y, i + 1).Opacity >= 1.0f || _parent.GetFloorAt(x, y, i + 1).Opacity >= 1.0f)) { visible = false; break; } } if (visible) { Texture2D tex = WorldTextureManager.GetTileTexture((Tile)_tiles[x, y]); Rectangle source = WorldTextureManager.GetSourceForIndex(((Tile)_tiles[x, y]).GetTextureIndexFromSurroundings(x, y, this), tex); Rectangle draw = new Rectangle(startX + x * width, startY + y * width, width, width); CIGame.Instance.SpriteBatch.Draw(tex, draw, source, Color.White * ((Tile)_tiles[x, y]).Opacity); drawAmt++; } } } CIGame.Instance.SpriteBatch.End(); Console.WriteLine(drawAmt); CIGame.Instance.GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); //TODO: Change to new rendertarget instead of null #endregion } So I was wondering if this is an efficient way, but I'm going about it wrongly, or if there is a different, more efficient way to check if the tiles are hidden. EDIT: For example of how much it affects performance: using a world with three layers, allowing everything to draw no matter what gives me 60FPS, but checking if its visible with all of the layers above it gives me only 20FPS, while checking only the layer immediately above it gives me a fluctuating FPS between 30 and 40FPS.

Read the article
Using JSON.NET for dynamic JSON parsing

- by Rick Strahl

With the release of ASP.NET Web API as part of .NET 4.5 and MVC 4.0, JSON.NET has effectively pushed out the .NET native serializers to become the default serializer for Web API. JSON.NET is vastly more flexible than the built in DataContractJsonSerializer or the older JavaScript serializer. The DataContractSerializer in particular has been very problematic in the past because it can't deal with untyped objects for serialization - like values of type object, or anonymous types which are quite common these days. The JavaScript Serializer that came before it actually does support non-typed objects for serialization but it can't do anything with untyped data coming in from JavaScript and it's overall model of extensibility was pretty limited (JavaScript Serializer is what MVC uses for JSON responses). JSON.NET provides a robust JSON serializer that has both high level and low level components, supports binary JSON, JSON contracts, Xml to JSON conversion, LINQ to JSON and many, many more features than either of the built in serializers. ASP.NET Web API now uses JSON.NET as its default serializer and is now pulled in as a NuGet dependency into Web API projects, which is great. Dynamic JSON Parsing One of the features that I think is getting ever more important is the ability to serialize and deserialize arbitrary JSON content dynamically - that is without mapping the JSON captured directly into a .NET type as DataContractSerializer or the JavaScript Serializers do. Sometimes it isn't possible to map types due to the differences in languages (think collections, dictionaries etc), and other times you simply don't have the structures in place or don't want to create them to actually import the data. If this topic sounds familiar - you're right! I wrote about dynamic JSON parsing a few months back before JSON.NET was added to Web API and when Web API and the System.Net HttpClient libraries included the System.Json classes like JsonObject and JsonArray. With the inclusion of JSON.NET in Web API these classes are now obsolete and didn't ship with Web API or the client libraries. I re-linked my original post to this one. In this post I'll discus JToken, JObject and JArray which are the dynamic JSON objects that make it very easy to create and retrieve JSON content on the fly without underlying types. Why Dynamic JSON? So, why Dynamic JSON parsing rather than strongly typed parsing? Since applications are interacting more and more with third party services it becomes ever more important to have easy access to those services with easy JSON parsing. Sometimes it just makes lot of sense to pull just a small amount of data out of large JSON document received from a service, because the third party service isn't directly related to your application's logic most of the time - and it makes little sense to map the entire service structure in your application. For example, recently I worked with the Google Maps Places API to return information about businesses close to me (or rather the app's) location. The Google API returns a ton of information that my application had no interest in - all I needed was few values out of the data. Dynamic JSON parsing makes it possible to map this data, without having to map the entire API to a C# data structure. Instead I could pull out the three or four values I needed from the API and directly store it on my business entities that needed to receive the data - no need to map the entire Maps API structure. Getting JSON.NET The easiest way to use JSON.NET is to grab it via NuGet and add it as a reference to your project. You can add it to your project with: PM> Install-Package Newtonsoft.Json From the Package Manager Console or by using Manage NuGet Packages in your project References. As mentioned if you're using ASP.NET Web API or MVC 4 JSON.NET will be automatically added to your project. Alternately you can also go to the CodePlex site and download the latest version including source code: http://json.codeplex.com/ Creating JSON on the fly with JObject and JArray Let's start with creating some JSON on the fly. It's super easy to create a dynamic object structure with any of the JToken derived JSON.NET objects. The most common JToken derived classes you are likely to use are JObject and JArray. JToken implements IDynamicMetaProvider and so uses the dynamic keyword extensively to make it intuitive to create object structures and turn them into JSON via dynamic object syntax. Here's an example of creating a music album structure with child songs using JObject for the base object and songs and JArray for the actual collection of songs:[TestMethod] public void JObjectOutputTest() { // strong typed instance var jsonObject = new JObject(); // you can explicitly add values here using class interface jsonObject.Add("Entered", DateTime.Now); // or cast to dynamic to dynamically add/read properties dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; album.Artist = "AC/DC"; album.YearReleased = 1976; album.Songs = new JArray() as dynamic; dynamic song = new JObject(); song.SongName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; song.SongLength = "4:11"; album.Songs.Add(song); song = new JObject(); song.SongName = "Love at First Feel"; song.SongLength = "3:10"; album.Songs.Add(song); Console.WriteLine(album.ToString()); } This produces a complete JSON structure: { "Entered": "2012-08-18T13:26:37.7137482-10:00", "AlbumName": "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", "Artist": "AC/DC", "YearReleased": 1976, "Songs": [ { "SongName": "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", "SongLength": "4:11" }, { "SongName": "Love at First Feel", "SongLength": "3:10" } ] } Notice that JSON.NET does a nice job formatting the JSON, so it's easy to read and paste into blog posts :-). JSON.NET includes a bunch of configuration options that control how JSON is generated. Typically the defaults are just fine, but you can override with the JsonSettings object for most operations. The important thing about this code is that there's no explicit type used for holding the values to serialize to JSON. Rather the JSON.NET objects are the containers that receive the data as I build up my JSON structure dynamically, simply by adding properties. This means this code can be entirely driven at runtime without compile time restraints of structure for the JSON output. Here I use JObject to create a album 'object' and immediately cast it to dynamic. JObject() is kind of similar in behavior to ExpandoObject in that it allows you to add properties by simply assigning to them. Internally, JObject values are stored in pseudo collections of key value pairs that are exposed as properties through the IDynamicMetaObject interface exposed in JSON.NET's JToken base class. For objects the syntax is very clean - you add simple typed values as properties. For objects and arrays you have to explicitly create new JObject or JArray, cast them to dynamic and then add properties and items to them. Always remember though these values are dynamic - which means no Intellisense and no compiler type checking. It's up to you to ensure that the names and values you create are accessed consistently and without typos in your code. Note that you can also access the JObject instance directly (not as dynamic) and get access to the underlying JObject type. This means you can assign properties by string, which can be useful for fully data driven JSON generation from other structures. Below you can see both styles of access next to each other:// strong type instance var jsonObject = new JObject(); // you can explicitly add values here jsonObject.Add("Entered", DateTime.Now); // expando style instance you can just 'use' properties dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; JContainer (the base class for JObject and JArray) is a collection so you can also iterate over the properties at runtime easily:foreach (var item in jsonObject) { Console.WriteLine(item.Key + " " + item.Value.ToString()); } The functionality of the JSON objects are very similar to .NET's ExpandObject and if you used it before, you're already familiar with how the dynamic interfaces to the JSON objects works. Importing JSON with JObject.Parse() and JArray.Parse() The JValue structure supports importing JSON via the Parse() and Load() methods which can read JSON data from a string or various streams respectively. Essentially JValue includes the core JSON parsing to turn a JSON string into a collection of JsonValue objects that can be then referenced using familiar dynamic object syntax. Here's a simple example:public void JValueParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"{""Name"":""Rick"",""Company"":""West Wind"", ""Entered"":""2012-03-16T00:03:33.245-10:00""}"; dynamic json = JValue.Parse(jsonString); // values require casting string name = json.Name; string company = json.Company; DateTime entered = json.Entered; Assert.AreEqual(name, "Rick"); Assert.AreEqual(company, "West Wind"); } The JSON string represents an object with three properties which is parsed into a JObject class and cast to dynamic. Once cast to dynamic I can then go ahead and access the object using familiar object syntax. Note that the actual values - json.Name, json.Company, json.Entered - are actually of type JToken and I have to cast them to their appropriate types first before I can do type comparisons as in the Asserts at the end of the test method. This is required because of the way that dynamic types work which can't determine the type based on the method signature of the Assert.AreEqual(object,object) method. I have to either assign the dynamic value to a variable as I did above, or explicitly cast ( (string) json.Name) in the actual method call. The JSON structure can be much more complex than this simple example. Here's another example of an array of albums serialized to JSON and then parsed through with JsonValue():[TestMethod] public void JsonArrayParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"[ { ""Id"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""AlbumName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""Artist"": ""AC/DC"", ""YearReleased"": 1976, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2810521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61kTaH-uZBL._AA115_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/…ASIN=B00008BXJ4"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""SongLength"": ""4:11"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Love at First Feel"", ""SongLength"": ""3:10"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Big Balls"", ""SongLength"": ""2:38"" } ] }, { ""Id"": ""7b919432"", ""AlbumName"": ""End of the Silence"", ""Artist"": ""Henry Rollins Band"", ""YearReleased"": 1992, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2800521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FO3rb1tuL._SL160_AA160_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/End-Silence-Rollins-Band/dp/B0000040OX/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1302232195&sr=8-5"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Low Self Opinion"", ""SongLength"": ""5:24"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Grip"", ""SongLength"": ""4:51"" } ] } ]"; JArray jsonVal = JArray.Parse(jsonString) as JArray; dynamic albums = jsonVal; foreach (dynamic album in albums) { Console.WriteLine(album.AlbumName + " (" + album.YearReleased.ToString() + ")"); foreach (dynamic song in album.Songs) { Console.WriteLine("\t" + song.SongName); } } Console.WriteLine(albums[0].AlbumName); Console.WriteLine(albums[0].Songs[1].SongName); } JObject and JArray in ASP.NET Web API Of course these types also work in ASP.NET Web API controller methods. If you want you can accept parameters using these object or return them back to the server. The following contrived example receives dynamic JSON input, and then creates a new dynamic JSON object and returns it based on data from the first:[HttpPost] public JObject PostAlbumJObject(JObject jAlbum) { // dynamic input from inbound JSON dynamic album = jAlbum; // create a new JSON object to write out dynamic newAlbum = new JObject(); // Create properties on the new instance // with values from the first newAlbum.AlbumName = album.AlbumName + " New"; newAlbum.NewProperty = "something new"; newAlbum.Songs = new JArray(); foreach (dynamic song in album.Songs) { song.SongName = song.SongName + " New"; newAlbum.Songs.Add(song); } return newAlbum; } The raw POST request to the server looks something like this: POST http://localhost/aspnetwebapi/samples/PostAlbumJObject HTTP/1.1User-Agent: FiddlerContent-type: application/jsonHost: localhostContent-Length: 88 {AlbumName: "Dirty Deeds",Songs:[ { SongName: "Problem Child"},{ SongName: "Squealer"}]} and the output that comes back looks like this: { "AlbumName": "Dirty Deeds New", "NewProperty": "something new", "Songs": [ { "SongName": "Problem Child New" }, { "SongName": "Squealer New" } ]} The original values are echoed back with something extra appended to demonstrate that we're working with a new object. When you receive or return a JObject, JValue, JToken or JArray instance in a Web API method, Web API ignores normal content negotiation and assumes your content is going to be received and returned as JSON, so effectively the parameter and result type explicitly determines the input and output format which is nice. Dynamic to Strong Type Mapping You can also map JObject and JArray instances to a strongly typed object, so you can mix dynamic and static typing in the same piece of code. Using the 2 Album jsonString shown earlier, the code below takes an array of albums and picks out only a single album and casts that album to a static Album instance.[TestMethod] public void JsonParseToStrongTypeTest() { JArray albums = JArray.Parse(jsonString) as JArray; // pick out one album JObject jalbum = albums[0] as JObject; // Copy to a static Album instance Album album = jalbum.ToObject<Album>(); Assert.IsNotNull(album); Assert.AreEqual(album.AlbumName,jalbum.Value<string>("AlbumName")); Assert.IsTrue(album.Songs.Count > 0); } This is pretty damn useful for the scenario I mentioned earlier - you can read a large chunk of JSON and dynamically walk the property hierarchy down to the item you want to access, and then either access the specific item dynamically (as shown earlier) or map a part of the JSON to a strongly typed object. That's very powerful if you think about it - it leaves you in total control to decide what's dynamic and what's static. Strongly typed JSON Parsing With all this talk of dynamic let's not forget that JSON.NET of course also does strongly typed serialization which is drop dead easy. Here's a simple example on how to serialize and deserialize an object with JSON.NET:[TestMethod] public void StronglyTypedSerializationTest() { // Demonstrate deserialization from a raw string var album = new Album() { AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", Artist = "AC/DC", Entered = DateTime.Now, YearReleased = 1976, Songs = new List<Song>() { new Song() { SongName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", SongLength = "4:11" }, new Song() { SongName = "Love at First Feel", SongLength = "3:10" } } }; // serialize to string string json2 = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(album,Formatting.Indented); Console.WriteLine(json2); // make sure we can serialize back var album2 = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Album>(json2); Assert.IsNotNull(album2); Assert.IsTrue(album2.AlbumName == "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"); Assert.IsTrue(album2.Songs.Count == 2); } JsonConvert is a high level static class that wraps lower level functionality, but you can also use the JsonSerializer class, which allows you to serialize/parse to and from streams. It's a little more work, but gives you a bit more control. The functionality available is easy to discover with Intellisense, and that's good because there's not a lot in the way of documentation that's actually useful. Summary JSON.NET is a pretty complete JSON implementation with lots of different choices for JSON parsing from dynamic parsing to static serialization, to complex querying of JSON objects using LINQ. It's good to see this open source library getting integrated into .NET, and pushing out the old and tired stock .NET parsers so that we finally have a bit more flexibility - and extensibility - in our JSON parsing. Good to go! Resources Sample Test Project http://json.codeplex.com/© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET Web Api AJAX Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

Read the article
ASP.NET MVC 3: Layouts and Sections with Razor

- by ScottGu

This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features: Introducing Razor (July 2nd) New @model keyword in Razor (Oct 19th) Layouts with Razor (Oct 22nd) Server-Side Comments with Razor (Nov 12th) Razor’s @: and <text> syntax (Dec 15th) Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor (Dec 16th) Layouts and Sections with Razor (Today) In today’s post I’m going to go into more details about how Layout pages work with Razor. In particular, I’m going to cover how you can have multiple, non-contiguous, replaceable “sections” within a layout file – and enable views based on layouts to optionally “fill in” these different sections at runtime. The Razor syntax for doing this is clean and concise. I’ll also show how you can dynamically check at runtime whether a particular layout section has been defined, and how you can provide alternate content (or even an alternate layout) in the event that a section isn’t specified within a view template. This provides a powerful and easy way to customize the UI of your site and make it clean and DRY from an implementation perspective. What are Layouts? You typically want to maintain a consistent look and feel across all of the pages within your web-site/application. ASP.NET 2.0 introduced the concept of “master pages” which helps enable this when using .aspx based pages or templates. Razor also supports this concept with a feature called “layouts” – which allow you to define a common site template, and then inherit its look and feel across all the views/pages on your site. I previously discussed the basics of how layout files work with Razor in my ASP.NET MVC 3: Layouts with Razor blog post. Today’s post will go deeper and discuss how you can define multiple, non-contiguous, replaceable regions within a layout file that you can then optionally “fill in” at runtime. Site Layout Scenario Let’s look at how we can implement a common site layout scenario with ASP.NET MVC 3 and Razor. Specifically, we’ll implement some site UI where we have a common header and footer on all of our pages. We’ll also add a “sidebar” section to the right of our common site layout. On some pages we’ll customize the SideBar to contain content specific to the page it is included on: And on other pages (that do not have custom sidebar content) we will fall back and provide some “default content” to the sidebar: We’ll use ASP.NET MVC 3 and Razor to enable this customization in a nice, clean way. Below are some step-by-step tutorial instructions on how to build the above site with ASP.NET MVC 3 and Razor. Part 1: Create a New Project with a Layout for the “Body” section We’ll begin by using the “File->New Project” menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 Project. We’ll create the new project using the “Empty” template option: This will create a new project that has no default controllers in it: Creating a HomeController We will then right-click on the “Controllers” folder of our newly created project and choose the “Add->Controller” context menu command. This will bring up the “Add Controller” dialog: We’ll name the new controller we create “HomeController”. When we click the “Add” button Visual Studio will add a HomeController class to our project with a default “Index” action method that returns a view: We won’t need to write any Controller logic to implement this sample – so we’ll leave the default code as-is. Creating a View Template Our next step will be to implement the view template associated with the HomeController’s Index action method. To implement the view template, we will right-click within the “HomeController.Index()” method and select the “Add View” command to create a view template for our home page: This will bring up the “Add View” dialog within Visual Studio. We do not need to change any of the default settings within the above dialog (the name of the template was auto-populated to Index because we invoked the “Add View” context menu command within the Index method). When we click the “Add” Button within the dialog, a Razor-based “Index.cshtml” view template will be added to the \Views\Home\ folder within our project. Let’s add some simple default static content to it: Notice above how we don’t have an <html> or <body> section defined within our view template. This is because we are going to rely on a layout template to supply these elements and use it to define the common site layout and structure for our site (ensuring that it is consistent across all pages and URLs within the site). Customizing our Layout File Let’s open and customize the default “_Layout.cshtml” file that was automatically added to the \Views\Shared folder when we created our new project: The default layout file (shown above) is pretty basic and simply outputs a title (if specified in either the Controller or the View template) and adds links to a stylesheet and jQuery. The call to “RenderBody()” indicates where the main body content of our Index.cshtml file will merged into the output sent back to the browser. Let’s modify the Layout template to add a common header, footer and sidebar to the site: We’ll then edit the “Site.css” file within the \Content folder of our project and add 4 CSS rules to it: And now when we run the project and browse to the home “/” URL of our project we’ll see a page like below: Notice how the content of the HomeController’s Index view template and the site’s Shared Layout template have been merged together into a single HTML response. Below is what the HTML sent back from the server looks like: Part 2: Adding a “SideBar” Section Our site so far has a layout template that has only one “section” in it – what we call the main “body” section of the response. Razor also supports the ability to add additional "named sections” to layout templates as well. These sections can be defined anywhere in the layout file (including within the <head> section of the HTML), and allow you to output dynamic content to multiple, non-contiguous, regions of the final response. Defining the “SideBar” section in our Layout Let’s update our Layout template to define an additional “SideBar” section of content that will be rendered within the <div id=”sidebar”> region of our HTML. We can do this by calling the RenderSection(string sectionName, bool required) helper method within our Layout.cshtml file like below: The first parameter to the “RenderSection()” helper method specifies the name of the section we want to render at that location in the layout template. The second parameter is optional, and allows us to define whether the section we are rendering is required or not. If a section is “required”, then Razor will throw an error at runtime if that section is not implemented within a view template that is based on the layout file (which can make it easier to track down content errors). If a section is not required, then its presence within a view template is optional, and the above RenderSection() code will render nothing at runtime if it isn’t defined. Now that we’ve made the above change to our layout file, let’s hit refresh in our browser and see what our Home page now looks like: Notice how we currently have no content within our SideBar <div> – that is because the Index.cshtml view template doesn’t implement our new “SideBar” section yet. Implementing the “SideBar” Section in our View Template Let’s change our home-page so that it has a SideBar section that outputs some custom content. We can do that by opening up the Index.cshtml view template, and by adding a new “SiderBar” section to it. We’ll do this using Razor’s @section SectionName { } syntax: We could have put our SideBar @section declaration anywhere within the view template. I think it looks cleaner when defined at the top or bottom of the file – but that is simply personal preference. You can include any content or code you want within @section declarations. Notice above how I have a C# code nugget that outputs the current time at the bottom of the SideBar section. I could have also written code that used ASP.NET MVC’s HTML/AJAX helper methods and/or accessed any strongly-typed model objects passed to the Index.cshtml view template. Now that we’ve made the above template changes, when we hit refresh in our browser again we’ll see that our SideBar content – that is specific to the Home Page of our site – is now included in the page response sent back from the server: The SideBar section content has been merged into the proper location of the HTML response : Part 3: Conditionally Detecting if a Layout Section Has Been Implemented Razor provides the ability for you to conditionally check (from within a layout file) whether a section has been defined within a view template, and enables you to output an alternative response in the event that the section has not been defined. This provides a convenient way to specify default UI for optional layout sections. Let’s modify our Layout file to take advantage of this capability. Below we are conditionally checking whether the “SideBar” section has been defined without the view template being rendered (using the IsSectionDefined() method), and if so we render the section. If the section has not been defined, then we now instead render some default content for the SideBar: Note: You want to make sure you prefix calls to the RenderSection() helper method with a @ character – which will tell Razor to execute the HelperResult it returns and merge in the section content in the appropriate place of the output. Notice how we wrote @RenderSection(“SideBar”) above instead of just RenderSection(“SideBar”). Otherwise you’ll get an error. Above we are simply rendering an inline static string (<p>Default SideBar Content</p>) if the section is not defined. A real-world site would more likely refactor this default content to be stored within a separate partial template (which we’d render using the Html.RenderPartial() helper method within the else block) or alternatively use the Html.Action() helper method within the else block to encapsulate both the logic and rendering of the default sidebar. When we hit refresh on our home-page, we will still see the same custom SideBar content we had before. This is because we implemented the SideBar section within our Index.cshtml view template (and so our Layout rendered it): Let’s now implement a “/Home/About” URL for our site by adding a new “About” action method to our HomeController: The About() action method above simply renders a view back to the client when invoked. We can implement the corresponding view template for this action by right-clicking within the “About()” method and using the “Add View” menu command (like before) to create a new About.cshtml view template. We’ll implement the About.cshtml view template like below. Notice that we are not defining a “SideBar” section within it: When we browse the /Home/About URL we’ll see the content we supplied above in the main body section of our response, and the default SideBar content will rendered: The layout file determined at runtime that a custom SideBar section wasn’t present in the About.cshtml view template, and instead rendered the default sidebar content. One Last Tweak… Let’s suppose that at a later point we decide that instead of rendering default side-bar content, we just want to hide the side-bar entirely from pages that don’t have any custom sidebar content defined. We could implement this change simply by making a small modification to our layout so that the sidebar content (and its surrounding HTML chrome) is only rendered if the SideBar section is defined. The code to do this is below: Razor is flexible enough so that we can make changes like this and not have to modify any of our view templates (nor make change any Controller logic changes) to accommodate this. We can instead make just this one modification to our Layout file and the rest happens cleanly. This type of flexibility makes Razor incredibly powerful and productive. Summary Razor’s layout capability enables you to define a common site template, and then inherit its look and feel across all the views/pages on your site. Razor enables you to define multiple, non-contiguous, “sections” within layout templates that can be “filled-in” by view templates. The @section {} syntax for doing this is clean and concise. Razor also supports the ability to dynamically check at runtime whether a particular section has been defined, and to provide alternate content (or even an alternate layout) in the event that it isn’t specified. This provides a powerful and easy way to customize the UI of your site - and make it clean and DRY from an implementation perspective. Hope this helps, 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

Read the article
Continuous Integration for SQL Server Part II – Integration Testing

- by Ben Rees

My previous post, on setting up Continuous Integration for SQL Server databases using GitHub, Bamboo and Red Gate’s tools, covered the first two parts of a simple Database Continuous Delivery process: Putting your database in to a source control system, and, Running a continuous integration process, each time changes are checked in. However there is, of course, a lot more to to Continuous Delivery than that. Specifically, in addition to the above: Putting some actual integration tests in to the CI process (otherwise, they don’t really do much, do they!?), Deploying the database changes with a managed, automated approach, Monitoring what you’ve just put live, to make sure you haven’t broken anything. This post will detail how to set up a very simple pipeline for implementing the first of these (continuous integration testing). NB: A lot of the setup in this post is built on top of the configuration from before, so it might be difficult to implement this post without running through part I first. There’ll then be a third post on automated database deployment followed by a final post dealing with the last item – monitoring changes on the live system. In the previous post, I used a mixture of Red Gate products and other 3rd party software – GitHub and Atlassian Bamboo specifically. This was partly because I believe most people work in an heterogeneous environment, using software from different vendors to suit their purposes and I wanted to show how this could work for this process. For example, you could easily substitute Atlassian’s BitBucket or Stash for GitHub, depending on your needs, or use an alternative CI server such as TeamCity, TFS or Jenkins. However, in this, post, I’ll be mostly using Red Gate products only (other than tSQLt). I would do this, firstly because I work for Red Gate. However, I also think that in the area of Database Delivery processes, nobody else has the offerings to implement this process fully – so I didn’t have any choice! Background on Continuous Delivery For me, a great source of information on what makes a proper Continuous Delivery process is the Jez Humble and David Farley classic: Continuous Delivery – Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation This book is not of course, primarily about databases, and the process I outline here and in the previous article is a gross simplification of what Jez and David describe (not least because it’s that much harder for databases!). However, a lot of the principles that they describe can be equally applied to database development and, I would argue, should be. As I say however, what I describe here is a very simple version of what would be required for a full production process. A couple of useful resources on handling some of these complexities can be found in the following two references: Refactoring Databases – Evolutionary Database Design, by Scott J Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage Versioning Databases – Branching and Merging, by Scott Allen In particular, I don’t deal at all with the issues of multiple branches and merging of those branches, an issue made particularly acute by the use of GitHub. The other point worth making is that, in the words of Martin Fowler: Continuous Delivery is about keeping your application in a state where it is always able to deploy into production. I.e. we are not talking about continuously delivery updates to the production database every time someone checks in an amendment to a stored procedure. That is possible (and what Martin calls Continuous Deployment). However, again, that’s more than I describe in this article. And I doubt I need to remind DBAs or Developers to Proceed with Caution! Integration Testing Back to something practical. The next stage, building on our set up from the previous article, is to add in some integration tests to the process. As I say, the CI process, though interesting, isn’t enormously useful without some sort of test process running. For this we’ll use the tSQLt framework, an open source framework designed specifically for running SQL Server tests. tSQLt is part of Red Gate’s SQL Test found on http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/ or can be downloaded separately from www.tsqlt.org - though I’ll provide a step-by-step guide below for setting this up. Getting tSQLt set up via SQL Test Click on the link http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/ and click on the blue Download button to download the Red Gate SQL Test product, if not already installed. Follow the install process for SQL Test to install the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) plugin on to your machine, if not already installed. Open SSMS. You should now see SQL Test under the Tools menu: Clicking this link will give you the basic SQL Test dialogue: As yet, though we’ve installed the SQL Test product we haven’t yet installed the tSQLt test framework on to any particular database. To do this, we need to add our RedGateApp database using this dialogue, by clicking on the + Add Database to SQL Test… link, selecting the RedGateApp database and clicking the Add Database link: In the next screen, SQL Test describes what will be installed on the database for the tSQLt framework. Also in this dialogue, uncheck the “Add SQL Cop tests” option (shown below). SQL Cop is a great set of pre-defined tests that work within the tSQLt framework to check the general health of your SQL Server database. However, we won’t be using them in this particular simple example: Once you’ve clicked on the OK button, the changes described in the dialogue will be made to your database. Some of these are shown in the left-hand-side below: We’ve now installed the framework. However, we haven’t actually created any tests, so this will be the next step. But, before we proceed, we’ve made an update to our database so should, again check this in to source control, adding comments as required: Also worth a quick check that your build still runs with the new additions!: (And a quick check of the RedGateAppCI database shows that the changes have been made). Creating and Testing a Unit Test There are, of course, a lot of very interesting unit tests that you could and should set up for a database. The great thing about the tSQLt framework is that you can write these in SQL. The example I’m going to use here is pretty Mickey Mouse – our database table is going to include some email addresses as reference data and I want to check whether these are all in a correct email format. Nothing clever but it illustrates the process and hopefully shows the method by which more interesting tests could be set up. Adding Reference Data to our Database To start, I want to add some reference data to my database, and have this source controlled (as well as the schema). First of all I need to add some data in to my solitary table – this can be done a number of ways, but I’ll do this in SSMS for simplicity: I then add some reference data to my table: Currently this reference data just exists in the database. For proper integration testing, this needs to form part of the source-controlled version of the database – and so needs to be added to the Git repository. This can be done via SQL Source Control, though first a Primary Key needs to be added to the table. Right click the table, select Design, then right-click on the first “id” row. Then click on “Set Primary Key”: NB: once this change is made, click Save to save the change to the table. Then, to source control this reference data, right click on the table (dbo.Email) and selecting the following option: In the next screen, link the data in the Email table, by selecting it from the list and clicking “save and close”: We should at this point re-commit the changes (both the addition of the Primary Key, and the data) to the Git repo. NB: From here on, I won’t show screenshots for the GitHub side of things – it’s the same each time: whenever a change is made in SQL Source Control and committed to your local folder, you then need to sync this in the GitHub Windows client (as this is where the build server, Bamboo is taking it from). An interesting point to note here, when these changes are committed in SQL Source Control (right-click database and select “Commit Changes to Source Control..”): The display gives a warning about possibly needing a migration script for the “Add Primary Key” step of the changes. This isn’t actually necessary in this case, but this mechanism would allow you to create override scripts to replace the default change scripts created by the SQL Compare engine (which runs underneath SQL Source Control). Ignoring this message (!), we add a comment and commit the changes to Git. I then sync these, run a build (or the build gets run automatically), and check that the data is being deployed over to the target RedGateAppCI database: Creating and Running the Test As I mention, the test I’m going to use here is a very simple one - are the email addresses in my reference table valid? This isn’t of course, a full test of email validation (I expect the email addresses I’ve chosen here aren’t really the those of the Fab Four) – but just a very basic check of format used. I’ve taken the relevant SQL from this Stack Overflow article. In SSMS select “SQL Test” from the Tools menu, then click on + New Test: In the next screen, give your new test a name, and also enter a name in the Test Class box (test classes are schemas that help you keep things organised). Also check that the database in which the test is going to be created is correct – RedGateApp in this example: Click “Create Test”. After closing a couple of subsequent dialogues, you’ll see a dummy script for the test, that needs filling in: We now need to define the SQL for our test. As mentioned before, tSQLt allows you to write your unit tests in T-SQL, and the code I’m going to use here is as below. This needs to be copied and pasted in to the query window, to replace the default given by tSQLt: – Basic email check test ALTER PROCEDURE [MyChecks].[test Check Email Addresses] AS BEGIN SET NOCOUNT ON Declare @Output VarChar(max) Set @Output = ” SELECT @Output = @Output + Email +Char(13) + Char(10) FROM dbo.Email WHERE email NOT LIKE ‘%_@__%.__%’ If @Output > ” Begin Set @Output = Char(13) + Char(10) + @Output EXEC tSQLt.Fail@Output End END; Once this script is entered, hit execute to add the Stored Procedure to the database. Before committing the test to source control, it’s worth just checking that it works! For a positive test, click on “SQL Test” from the Tools menu, then click Run Tests. You should see output like the following: - a green tick to indicate success! But of course, what we also need to do is test that this is actually doing something by showing a failed test. Edit one of the email addresses in your table to an incorrect format: Now, re-run the same SQL Test as before and you’ll see the following: Great – we now know that our test is really doing something! You’ll also see a useful error message at the bottom of SSMS: (leave the email address as invalid for now, for the next steps). The next stage is to check this new test in to source control again, by right-clicking on the database and checking in the changes with a commit message (and not forgetting to sync in the GitHub client): Checking that the Tests are Running as Integration Tests After the changes above are made, and after a build has run on Bamboo (manual or automatic), looking at the Stored Procedures for the RedGateAppCI, the SPROC for the new test has been moved over to the database. However this is not exactly what we were after. We didn’t want to just copy objects from one database to another, but actually run the tests as part of the build/integration test process. I.e. we’re continuously checking any changes we make (in this case, to the reference data emails), to ensure we’re not breaking a test that we’ve set up. The behaviour we want to see is that, if we check in static data that is incorrect (as we did in step 9 above) and we have the tSQLt test set up, then our build in Bamboo should fail. However, re-running the build shows the following: - sadly, a successful build! To make sure the tSQLt tests are run as part of the integration test, we need to amend a switch in the Red Gate CI config file. First, navigate to file sqlCI.targets in your working folder: Edit this document, make the following change, save the document, then commit and sync this change in the GitHub client:    <enableTsqlt>true</enableTsqlt> Now, if we re-run the build in Bamboo (NB: I’ve moved to a new server here, hence different address and build number): - superb, a broken build!! The error message isn’t great here, so to get more detailed info, click on the full build log link on this page (below the fold). The interesting part of the log shown is towards the bottom. Pulling out this part: 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 Build FAILED. 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 "C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj" (default target) (1) -> 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 (sqlCI target) -> 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: RedGate.Deploy.SqlServerDbPackage.Shared.Exceptions.InvalidSqlException: Test Case Summary: 1 test case(s) executed, 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 errored. [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: [MyChecks].[test Check Email Addresses] failed: [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: ringo.starr@beatles [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: +----------------------+ [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: |Test Execution Summary| [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] As a final check, we should make sure that, if we now fix this error, the build succeeds. So in SSMS, I’m going to correct the invalid email address, then check this change in to SQL Source Control (with a comment), commit to GitHub, and re-run the build: This should have fixed the build: It worked! Summary This has been a very quick run through the implementation of CI for databases, including tSQLt tests to test whether your database updates are working. The next post in this series will focus on automated deployment – we’ve tested our database changes, how can we now deploy these to target sites?

Read the article
encfs error while decoding the data

- by migrator

I have installed encfs and started using it to secure all my personal & office data and it was working absolutely fine until 2 hours back. The setup is like this. I have a folder in Copy folder called OfficeData which gets synchronized with my Copy folder When I login into the system I use the command encfs ~/Copy/OfficeData ~/Documents/OfficeData Once my work is over I dismount with the command fusermount -u ~/Documents/OfficeData All this data get synchronized with my desktop and with my mobile phone (as a backup) Today when I mounted, the folder got mounted by no directories and files present in that folder. I was worried and read man encfs which gave me to run the command encfs -v -f ~/Copy/OfficeData ~/Documents/OfficeData 2> encfs-OfficeData-report.txt. The below is the output of the file encfs-OfficeData-report.txt. The directory "/home/sri/Documents/OfficeData" does not exist. Should it be created? (y,n) 13:16:26 (main.cpp:523) Root directory: /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:26 (main.cpp:524) Fuse arguments: (fg) (threaded) (keyCheck) encfs /home/sri/Documents/OfficeData -f -s -o use_ino -o default_permissions 13:16:26 (FileUtils.cpp:177) version = 20 13:16:26 (FileUtils.cpp:181) found new serialization format 13:16:26 (FileUtils.cpp:199) subVersion = 20100713 13:16:26 (Interface.cpp:165) checking if ssl/aes(3:0:2) implements ssl/aes(3:0:0) 13:16:26 (SSL_Cipher.cpp:370) allocated cipher ssl/aes, keySize 32, ivlength 16 13:16:26 (Interface.cpp:165) checking if ssl/aes(3:0:2) implements ssl/aes(3:0:0) 13:16:26 (SSL_Cipher.cpp:370) allocated cipher ssl/aes, keySize 32, ivlength 16 13:16:26 (FileUtils.cpp:1620) useStdin: 0 13:16:46 (Interface.cpp:165) checking if ssl/aes(3:0:2) implements ssl/aes(3:0:0) 13:16:46 (SSL_Cipher.cpp:370) allocated cipher ssl/aes, keySize 32, ivlength 16 13:16:49 (FileUtils.cpp:1628) cipher key size = 52 13:16:49 (Interface.cpp:165) checking if nameio/block(3:0:1) implements nameio/block(3:0:0) 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/UWbT-M-UKk1JpvNfN5uvOhGn: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (CipherFileIO.cpp:105) in setIV, current IV = 0, new IV = 4188221457101129840, fileIV = 0 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/UWbT-M-UKk1JpvNfN5uvOhGn 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/UWbT-M-UKk1JpvNfN5uvOhGn 13:16:49 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/UWbT-M-UKk1JpvNfN5uvOhGn: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:138) getattr error: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/o94olxB3orqarqyFviHKZ,ZF: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (CipherFileIO.cpp:105) in setIV, current IV = 0, new IV = 16725694203599486310, fileIV = 0 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/o94olxB3orqarqyFviHKZ,ZF 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/o94olxB3orqarqyFviHKZ,ZF 13:16:49 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/o94olxB3orqarqyFviHKZ,ZF: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:138) getattr error: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/tVglci2rgp9o8qE-m9AvX6JNj1lQs-ER0OvnxfOb30Z,3,: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (CipherFileIO.cpp:105) in setIV, current IV = 0, new IV = 1354483141023495884, fileIV = 0 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/tVglci2rgp9o8qE-m9AvX6JNj1lQs-ER0OvnxfOb30Z,3, 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/tVglci2rgp9o8qE-m9AvX6JNj1lQs-ER0OvnxfOb30Z,3, 13:16:49 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/tVglci2rgp9o8qE-m9AvX6JNj1lQs-ER0OvnxfOb30Z,3,: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:138) getattr error: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/r1KIEqVkz-,7-6CobavHCSNn: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (CipherFileIO.cpp:105) in setIV, current IV = 0, new IV = 16720606331386655431, fileIV = 0 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/r1KIEqVkz-,7-6CobavHCSNn 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/r1KIEqVkz-,7-6CobavHCSNn 13:16:49 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/r1KIEqVkz-,7-6CobavHCSNn: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:138) getattr error: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:16:49 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:16:49 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:16:49 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:16:49 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/r1KIEqVkz-,7-6CobavHCSNn: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (CipherFileIO.cpp:105) in setIV, current IV = 0, new IV = 16720606331386655431, fileIV = 0 13:16:49 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/r1KIEqVkz-,7-6CobavHCSNn 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/r1KIEqVkz-,7-6CobavHCSNn 13:16:49 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/r1KIEqVkz-,7-6CobavHCSNn: No such file or directory 13:16:49 (encfs.cpp:138) getattr error: No such file or directory 13:19:31 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:19:31 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:19:31 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:19:31 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:19:31 (encfs.cpp:685) doing statfs of /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData 13:19:32 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:19:32 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:19:32 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/LuT8R,DlpRnNH9b,fjWiKHKc: No such file or directory 13:19:32 (CipherFileIO.cpp:105) in setIV, current IV = 0, new IV = 13735228085838055696, fileIV = 0 13:19:32 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/LuT8R,DlpRnNH9b,fjWiKHKc 13:19:32 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/LuT8R,DlpRnNH9b,fjWiKHKc 13:19:32 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/LuT8R,DlpRnNH9b,fjWiKHKc: No such file or directory 13:19:32 (encfs.cpp:138) getattr error: No such file or directory 13:19:32 (encfs.cpp:685) doing statfs of /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData 13:19:32 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:19:32 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:19:32 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/UWbT-M-UKk1JpvNfN5uvOhGn: No such file or directory 13:19:32 (CipherFileIO.cpp:105) in setIV, current IV = 0, new IV = 4188221457101129840, fileIV = 0 13:19:32 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/UWbT-M-UKk1JpvNfN5uvOhGn 13:19:32 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/UWbT-M-UKk1JpvNfN5uvOhGn 13:19:32 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/UWbT-M-UKk1JpvNfN5uvOhGn: No such file or directory 13:19:32 (encfs.cpp:138) getattr error: No such file or directory 13:19:32 (MACFileIO.cpp:75) fs block size = 1024, macBytes = 8, randBytes = 0 13:19:32 (FileNode.cpp:127) calling setIV on (null) 13:19:32 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/o94olxB3orqarqyFviHKZ,ZF: No such file or directory 13:19:32 (CipherFileIO.cpp:105) in setIV, current IV = 0, new IV = 16725694203599486310, fileIV = 0 13:19:32 (DirNode.cpp:770) created FileNode for /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/o94olxB3orqarqyFviHKZ,ZF 13:19:32 (encfs.cpp:134) getattr /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/o94olxB3orqarqyFviHKZ,ZF 13:19:32 (RawFileIO.cpp:191) getAttr error on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/o94olxB3orqarqyFviHKZ,ZF: No such file or directory 13:19:32 (encfs.cpp:138) getattr error: No such file or directory 13:19:32 (encfs.cpp:213) getdir on /home/sri/Copy/OfficeData/ 13:19:32 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 208, 16, -192 13:19:32 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: eWJrLh2dRFAY-7Brbsc,mTqf 13:19:32 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: .encfs6.xml 13:19:32 (BlockNameIO.cpp:185) padding, _bx, finalSize = 218, 16, -202 13:19:32 (DirNode.cpp:132) error decoding filename: pvph9DkZ0BMPg2vN4UcfwuNU 13:24:10 (openssl.cpp:48) Allocating 41 locks for OpenSSL Please help me Thanks in advance.

Read the article
VS 2012 Code Review – Before Check In OR After Check In?

- by Tarun Arora

“Is Code Review Important and Effective?” There is a consensus across the industry that code review is an effective and practical way to collar code inconsistency and possible defects early in the software development life cycle. Among others some of the advantages of code reviews are, Bugs are found faster Forces developers to write readable code (code that can be read without explanation or introduction!) Optimization methods/tricks/productive programs spread faster Programmers as specialists "evolve" faster It's fun “Code review is systematic examination (often known as peer review) of computer source code. It is intended to find and fix mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving both the overall quality of software and the developers' skills. Reviews are done in various forms such as pair programming, informal walkthroughs, and formal inspections.” Wikipedia No where does the definition mention whether its better to review code before the code has been committed to version control or after the commit has been performed. No matter which side you favour, Visual Studio 2012 allows you to request for a code review both before check in and also request for a review after check in. Let’s weigh the pros and cons of the approaches independently. Code Review Before Check In or Code Review After Check In? Approach 1 – Code Review before Check in Developer completes the code and feels the code quality is appropriate for check in to TFS. The developer raises a code review request to have a second pair of eyes validate if the code abides to the recommended best practices, will not result in any defects due to common coding mistakes and whether any optimizations can be made to improve the code quality. Image 1 – code review before check in Pros Everything that gets committed to source control is reviewed. Minimizes the chances of smelly code making its way into the code base. Decreases the cost of fixing bugs, remember, the earlier you find them, the lesser the pain in fixing them. Cons Development Code Freeze – Since the changes aren’t in the source control yet. Further development can only be done off-line. The changes have not been through a CI build, hard to say whether the code abides to all build quality standards. Inconsistent! Cumbersome to track the actual code review process. Not every change to the code base is worth reviewing, a lot of effort is invested for very little gain. Approach 2 – Code Review after Check in Developer checks in, random code reviews are performed on the checked in code. Image 2 – Code review after check in Pros The code has already passed the CI build and run through any code analysis plug ins you may have running on the build server. Instruct the developer to ensure ZERO fx cop, style cop and static code analysis before check in. Code is cleaner and smell free even before the code review. No Offline development, developers can continue to develop against the source control. Cons Bad code can easily make its way into the code base. Since the review take place much later in the cycle, the cost of fixing issues can prove to be much higher. Approach 3 – Hybrid Approach The community advocates a more hybrid approach, a blend of tooling and human accountability quotient. Image 3 – Hybrid Approach 1. Code review high impact check ins. It is not possible to review everything, by setting up code review check in policies you can end up slowing your team. More over, the code that you are reviewing before check in hasn't even been through a green CI build either. 2. Tooling. Let the tooling work for you. By running static analysis, fx cop, style cop and other plug ins on the build agent, you can identify the real issues that in my opinion can't possibly be identified using human reviews. Configure the tooling to report back top 10 issues every day. Mandate the manual code review of individuals who keep making it to this list of shame more often. 3. During Merge. I would prefer eliminating some of the other code issues during merge from Main branch to the release branch. In a scrum project this is still easier because cheery picking the merges is a possibility and the size of code being reviewed is still limited. Let the tooling work for you, if some one breaks the CI build often, put them on a gated check in build course until you see improvement. If some one appears on the top 10 list of shame generated via the build then ensure that all their code is reviewed till you see improvement. At the end of the day, the goal is to ensure that the code being delivered is top quality. By enforcing a code review before any check in, you force the developer to work offline or stay put till the review is complete. What do the experts say? So I asked a few expects what they thought of “Code Review quality gate before Checking in code?" Terje Sandstrom | Microsoft ALM MVP You mean a review quality gate BEFORE checking in code????? That would mean a lot of code staying either local or in shelvesets, and not even been through a CI build, and a green CI build being the main criteria for going further, f.e. to the review state. I would not like code laying around with no checkin’s. Having a requirement that code is checked in small pieces, 4-8 hours work max, and AT LEAST daily checkins, a manual code review comes second down the lane. I would expect review quality gates to happen before merging back to main, or before merging to release. But that would all be on checked-in code. Branching is absolutely one way to ease the pain. Another way we are using is automatic quality builds, running metrics, coverage, static code analysis. Unfortunately it takes some time, would be great to be on CI’s – but…., so it’s done scheduled every night. Based on this we get, among other stuff, top 10 lists of suspicious code, which is then subjected to reviews. If a person seems to be very popular on these top 10 lists, we subject every check in from that person to a review for a period. That normally helps. None of the clients I have can afford to have every checkin reviewed, so we need to find ways around it. I don’t disagree with the nicety of having all the code reviewed, but I find it hard to find those resources in today’s enterprises. David V. Corbin | Visual Studio ALM Ranger I tend to agree with both sides. I hate having code that is not checked in, but at the same time hate having “bad” code in the repository. I have found that branching is one approach to solving this dilemma. Code is checked into the private/feature branch before the review, but is not merged over to the “official” branch until after the review. I advocate both, depending on circumstance (especially team dynamics) - The “pre-checkin” is usually for elements that may impact the project as a whole. Think of it as another “gate” along with passing unit tests. - The “post-checkin” may very well not be at the changeset level, but correlates to a review at the “user story” level. Again, this depends on team dynamics in play…. Robert MacLean | Microsoft ALM MVP I do not think there is no right answer for the industry as a whole. In short the question is why do you do reviews? Your question implies risk mitigation, so in low risk areas you can get away with it after check in while in high risk you need to do it before check in. An example is those new to a team or juniors need it much earlier (maybe that is before checkin, maybe that is soon after) than seniors who have shipped twenty sprints on the team. Abhimanyu Singhal | Visual Studio ALM Ranger Depends on per scenario basis. We recommend post check-in reviews when: 1. We don't want to block other checks and processes on manual code reviews. Manual reviews take time, and some pieces may not require manual reviews at all. 2. We need to trace all changes and track history. 3. We have a code promotion strategy/process in place. For risk mitigation, post checkin code can be promoted to Accepted branches. Or can be rejected. Pre Checkin Reviews are used when 1. There is a high risk factor associated 2. Reviewers are generally (most of times) have immediate availability. 3. Team does not have strict tracking needs. Simply speaking, no single process fits all scenarios. You need to select what works best for your team/project. Thomas Schissler | Visual Studio ALM Ranger This is an interesting discussion, I’m right now discussing details about executing code reviews with my teams. I see and understand the aspects you brought in, but there is another side as well, I’d like to point out. 1.) If you do reviews per check in this is not very practical as a hard rule because this will disturb the flow of the team very often or it will lead to reduce the checkin frequency of the devs which I would not accept. 2.) If you do later reviews, for example if you review PBIs, it is not easy to find out which code you should review. Either you review all changesets associate with the PBI, but then you might review code which has been changed with a later checkin and the dev maybe has already fixed the issue. Or you review the diff of the latest changeset of the PBI with the first but then you might also review changes of other PBIs. Jakob Leander | Sr. Director, Avanade In my experience, manual code review: 1. Does not get done and at the very least does not get redone after changes (regardless of intentions at start of project) 2. When a project actually do it, they often do not do it right away = errors pile up 3. Requires a lot of time discussing/defining the standard and for the team to learn it However code review is very important since e.g. even small memory leaks in a high volume web solution have big consequences In the last years I have advocated following approach for code review - Architects up front do “at least one best practice example” of each type of component and tell the team. Copy from this one. This should include error handling, logging, security etc. - Dev lead on project continuously browse code to validate that the best practices are used. Especially that patterns etc. are not broken. You can do this formally after each sprint/iteration if you want. Once this is validated it is unlikely to “go bad” even during later code changes Agree with customer to rely on static code analysis from Visual Studio as the one and only coding standard. This has HUUGE benefits - You can easily tweak to reach the level you desire together with customer - It is easy to measure for both developers/management - It is 100% consistent across code base - It gets validated all the time so you never end up getting hammered by a customer review in the end - It is easy to tell the developer that you do not want code back unless it has zero errors = minimize communication You need to track this at least during nightly builds and make sure team sees total # issues. Do not allow #issues it to grow uncontrolled. On the project I run I require code analysis to have run on code before checkin (checkin rule). This means - You have to have clean compile (or CA wont run) so this is extra benefit = very few broken builds - You can change a few of the rules to compile as errors instead of warnings. I often do this for “missing dispose” issues which you REALLY do not want in your app Tip: Place your custom CA rules files as part of solution. That way it works when you do branching etc. (path to CA file is relative in VS) Some may argue that CA is not as good as manual inspection. But since manual inspection in reality suffers from the 3 issues in start it is IMO a MUCH better (and much cheaper) approach from helicopter perspective Tirthankar Dutta | Director, Avanade I think code review should be run both before and after check ins. There are some code metrics that are meant to be run on the entire codebase … Also, especially on multi-site projects, one should strive to architect in a way that lets men manage the framework while boys write the repetitive code… scales very well with the need to review less by containment and imposing architectural restrictions to emphasise the design. Bruno Capuano | Microsoft ALM MVP For code reviews (means peer reviews) in distributed team I use http://www.vsanywhere.com/default.aspx David Jobling | Global Sr. Director, Avanade Peer review is the only way to scale and its a great practice for all in the team to learn to perform and accept. In my experience you soon learn who's code to watch more than others and tune the attention. Mikkel Toudal Kristiansen | Manager, Avanade If you have several branches in your code base, you will need to merge often. This requires manual merging, when a file has been changed in both branches. It offers a good opportunity to actually review to changed code. So my advice is: Merging between branches should be done as often as possible, it should be done by a senior developer, and he/she should perform a full code review of the code being merged. As for detecting architectural smells and code smells creeping into the code base, one really good third party tools exist: Ndepend (http://www.ndepend.com/, for static code analysis of the current state of the code base). You could also consider adding StyleCop to the solution. Jesse Houwing | Visual Studio ALM Ranger I gave a presentation on this subject on the TechDays conference in NL last year. See my presentation and slides here (talk in Dutch, but English presentation): http://blog.jessehouwing.nl/2012/03/did-you-miss-my-techdaysnl-talk-on-code.html I’d like to add a few more points: - Before/After checking is mostly a trust issue. If you have a team that does diligent peer reviews and regularly talk/sit together or peer review, there’s no need to enforce a before-checkin policy. The peer peer-programming and regular feedback during development can take care of most of the review requirements as long as the team isn’t under stress. - Under stress, enforce pre-checkin reviews, it might sound strange, if you’re already under time or budgetary constraints, but it is under such conditions most real issues start to be created or pile up. - Use tools to catch most common errors, Code Analysis/FxCop was already mentioned. HP Fortify, Resharper, Coderush etc can help you there. There are also a lot of 3rd party rules you can add to Code Analysis. I’ve written a few myself (http://fccopcontrib.codeplex.com) and various teams from Microsoft have added their own rules (MSOCAF for SharePoint, WSSF for WCF). For common errors that keep cropping up, see if you can define a rule. It’s much easier. But more importantly make sure you have a good help page explaining *WHY* it's wrong. If you have small feature or developer branches/shelvesets, you might want to review pre-merge. It’s still better to do peer reviews and peer programming, but the most important thing is that bad quality code doesn’t make it into the important branch. So my philosophy: - Use tooling as much as possible. - Make sure the team understands the tooling and the importance of the things it flags. It’s too easy to just click suppress all to ignore the warnings. - Under stress, tighten process, it’s under stress that the problems of late reviews will really surface - Most importantly if you do reviews do them as early as possible, but never later than needed. In other words, pre-checkin/post checking doesn’t really matter, as long as the review is done before the code is released. It’ll just be much more expensive to fix any review outcomes the later you find them. --- I would love to hear what you think!

Read the article
CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 22, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 22, 2012Popular ReleasesTelerik CAB Enabling Kit for RadControls for WinForms: TCEK 2012.1.321.20: major update, new Workspaces and UIAdapters Workspaces: - RadDockWorkspace - RadPageViewWorkspace - RadFormWorkspace - RadFormMdiWorkspace - RadTabbedMdiWorkspace UI Adapters: - RadCommandBarUIAdapter - RadRibbonBarUIAdapter - RadTreeNodeUiAdapter - RadTreeViewUIAdapter - RadItemCollectionUIAdapter - (RadMenu, RadStatusStrip, all controls that support RadItem collections)People's Note: People's Note 0.40: Version 0.40 adds an option to compact the database from the profile screen. Compacting a database can make it smaller and faster by removing empty spaces left over by editing, moving, and deleting notes. To install: copy the appropriate CAB file onto your WM device and run it.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: C++, .NET Coding Guideline: Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Coding Guideline This document describes the coding style guideline for native C++ and .NET (C# and VB.NET) programming used by the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework project team.SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQLMon 4.2 alpha 13: 1. added logic fault checking in analysis. automatically detect dead loop or memory leakage in stored procedures, for details please refer to http://sqlmon.codeplex.com/workitem/32469WebDAV for WHS: Version 1.0.67: - Added: Check whether the Remote Web Access is turned on or not; - Added: Check for Add-In updates;Metodología General Ajustada - MGA: 02.02.01: Cambios John: Se actualizan los seis formularios de Identificaciòn para que despuès de guardar actualice las grillas, de tal manera que no se dupliquen los registros al guardar. Se genera instalador con los cambios y se actualiza la base datos con ùltimos cambios en el SP de Flujo de Caja.xyzzy+: xyzzy+ 0.2.2.235+0: SHA1: 4a0258736e7df52bb6e2304178b7fcf02414ae17 PrerequisitesMicrosoft Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86) (ja) FeaturesUnicode Visual Style Known ProblemsCharacter encodings other than Shift_JIS and UTF-X may be broken. Functions related to character encodings may not work. (ex. iso-code-char)Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0 (March 2012) for .NET 4.0: March release of Phalanger 3.0 significantly enhances performance, adds new features and fixes many issues. See following for the list of main improvements: New features: Phalanger Tools installable for Visual Studio 2011 Beta "filter" extension with several most used filters implemented DomDocument HTML parser, loadHTML() method mail() PHP compatible function PHP 5.4 T_CALLABLE token PHP 5.4 "callable" type hint PCRE: UTF32 characters in range support configuration supports <c...Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.0: Version 8.0 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing new features: Internationalization Custom authentication provider Access control list for forums and threads Webdeploy package checksum: abc62990189cf0d488ef915d4a55e4b14169bc01 Visit Roadmap for more details.BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6: This beta release is the first to support SQL Server 2012 (in addition to SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2). Since it is marked as a beta release, we are looking for bug reports in the next few months as you use BIDS Helper on real projects. In addition to getting all existing BIDS Helper functionality working appropriately in SQL Server 2012 (SSDT), the following features are new... Analysis Services Tabular Smart Diff Tabular Actions Editor Tabular HideMemberIf Tabular Pre-Build ...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 1: New feature - Windows 8 Metro build New feature - JsonTextReader automatically reads ISO strings as dates New feature - Added DateFormatHandling to control whether dates are written in the MS format or ISO format, with ISO as the default New feature - Added DateTimeZoneHandling to control reading and writing DateTime time zone details New feature - Added async serialize/deserialize methods to JsonConvert New feature - Added Path to JsonReader/JsonWriter/ErrorContext and exceptions w...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Fixed a bug when ping and cmd.exe kept running in endless loop after action progress was finished. Fixed update checking from Codeplex RSS feed. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA...WebSocket4Net: WebSocket4Net 0.5: Changes in this release fixed the wss's default port bug improved JsonWebSocket supported set client access policy protocol for silverlight fixed a handshake issue in Silverlight fixed a bug that "Host" field in handshake hadn't contained port if the port is not default supported passing in Origin parameter for handshaking supported reacting pings from server side fixed a bug in data sending fixed the bug sending a closing handshake with no message which would cause an excepti...SuperWebSocket, a .NET WebSocket Server: SuperWebSocket 0.5: Changes included in this release: supported closing handshake queue checking improved JSON subprotocol supported sending ping from server to client fixed a bug about sending a closing handshake with no message refactored the code to improve protocol compatibility fixed a bug about sub protocol configuration loading in Mono improved BasicSubProtocol added JsonWebSocketSessionSurvey™ - web survey & form engine: Survey™ 2.0: The new stable Survey™ Project 2.0.0.1 version contains many new features like: Technical changes: - Use of Jquery, ASTreeview, Tabs, Tooltips and new menuprovider Features & Bugfixes: Survey list and search function Folder structure for surveys New Menustructure Library list New Library fields User list and search functions Layout options for a survey with CSS, page header and footer New IP filter security feature Enhanced Token Management New Question fields as ID, Alias...AppBarUtils for Windows Phone SDK 7.1: AppBarUtils 1.2: This release contains IconUri dependency property for both AppBarItemCommand and AppBarItemTrigger as requested by shawnoster at http://appbarutils.codeplex.com/discussions/321745. When using this IconUri dependency property, please be sure to set the Type property to AppBarItemType.Button or just omit this property entirely, because it is only for app bar icon button. The demo has been updated to show how to use this new IconUri dependency property with a new lock button on the app bar. Wh...Offline Navigation for Windows Phone 7: 0.1 Alpha: This is the 0.1 alpha release of source code.SmartNet: V1.0.0.0: DY SmartNet ?????? V1.0Javascript .NET: Javascript .NET v0.6: Upgraded to the latest stable branch of v8 (/tags/3.9.18), and switched to using their scons build system. We no longer include v8 source code as part of this project's source code. Simultaneous multithreaded use of v8 now supported (v8 Isolates), although different contexts may not share objects or call each other. 64-bit .Net 4.0 DLL now included. (Download now includes x86 and x64 for both .Net 3.5 and .Net 4.0.)MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.0.7: This release should be more stable there were a few bug fixes including the x64 issue as well as an error popping up when MyRouter started this was caused by a NULL valueNew ProjectsActivities.WMI: WF4 ?????? WMI ??????????????? Activities library related WMI, available in WF4Append Customisation Service: A lightweight windows service for applying customisations to enterprise webapps: monitors a file and makes sure your code is always appended to the end of the file. Disable the service, and your customisations go away. c# .net 4. Useful for customising branding/design, javascript, css and so on - in applications such as Dynamics CRM 2011.ASP.NET Security Module: Modulo de seguridad para aplicaciones Web asp.netavgdx: This project is just for Directx 11 learningDaabli: A lightweight C# version of the Daabli serialization framework for C++. If your application needs to load objects and data from human readable text files, then Daabli could be useful to you. It is designed to be as easy to use as possible and works with a 'C' style human editable format. The original C++ version is available here: http://daabli.sourceforge.net/ DNN Simple Tweet: DNN Simple Tweet is a simple DotNetNuke module for display of Twitter Feeds. Using the stock Twitter Profile Widget, its settings allow you to change the Twitter User name, Tweet colors, etc. Developed in VB. DNN version 6 and higher required. *NUISANCE* When selecting between "Display All" and "Timed Interval" for Twitter Behavior, the iColorPicker for the colors will disappear. This is due to the post-back which is occurring and the use of Javascript of the color picker. Updat...Don't We-KC and Sway: Don't We-KC and SwayEksponent CropUp: CropUp is a simple geometric algorithm for "weighted auto cropping". A focus point and optional "area of interest" are defined (e.g. a face in a group pictures). These are shown instead of random stomachs when the picture needs to be sized to a specific format. Umbraco package.Enterprise Modular Application: Guidelines to create Enterprise modular applications in .NET framework, independent of any specific framework.Escape From Canyon: Escape from canyon is a little game project (for academic purpose only) developed using XNA 4.0 and F#FIX Sample code using QuickFIX to connect to TT FIX Adapter: Sample FIX client provides a starting place for developers to connect to the TT FIX Adapter. It's developed in C# using QuickFIX as the FIX engine.FSGreeNetWork: FSGreeNetWorkGac Library -- C++ Utilities for GPU Accelerated GUI and Script: C++ Utilities for GPU Accelerated GUI and ScriptJhVirtualKeyboard for WPF and Silverlight: JhVirtualKeyboard is a virtual-keyboard for software developers to use with either WPF or Silverlight projects. With it - you now have a simple way to provide your users with the ability to enter characters in different languages and alphabets, or any Unicode character. Developed in C#, using Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 More information can be found on my blog article at: http://designforge.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/jhvirtualkeyboard/ by James W. HurstKrishaWeb: Krisha webNetFrameworkExtensions: Simple plain framework to add a lot of features to .NET framework core. Most of the features are added in form of extension methods.pav2: proyecto pav 2 SharePoint (2010) Connected Server: Display which web server a user is connected to in the Personal Actions drop down menu (user name in upper right). An extremely useful aid when troubleshooting issues in a multi-server SharePoint environment. I took the exisiting version which ran on MOSS 2007 and rebuilt it to run on SharePoint 2010. <b>Acknowledgements:</b> Full credit goes to Nathan Yorke for the original project http://spconnectedserver.codeplex.com which worked on MOSS 2007. SharePoint 2010 Gauge Web Part: SharePoint 2010 Gauge Web Part can be connected to any column of the “number” type in SharePoint list includes External Lists (only the farm solution version) and show calculations on column values. It supports 2 views: 1. The Gauge View 2. The Simple Indicator View SMTP Test Suite: SMTP server/client that can be used to test other servers/clients. Purely a test tool as most SMTP verbs are accepted without any checking.StarterCSS: StarterCorev4.css is inspired from Starter.master. This CSS file give you detailed explanation on the different class files on corev4.css. StarterCorev4.css will make you understand the purpose of each class files when you do ctrl + click on your master page css class.Triangle.NET: Triangle.NET is a 2D meshing software written in C#. It generates (constrained) Delaunay triangulations and quality meshes of point sets or planar straight line graphs. It is a port of Jonathan Shewchuk's Triangle software written in C.WorkFile: workfile about codeioXNA Electric Effect: An electric effect implemented using XNA 4 fro Windows Phone 7. It provides an easy way to configure settings to create realistic electric effects, lightening effects, etc.

Read the article

Search Results

Search found 11178 results on 448 pages for 'syntax checking'.

Page 106/448 | < Previous Page | 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 | Next Page >

- by drrwebber

- by sridutt

- by Anirudha

- by Lyise

- by user221287

- by Job

- by undu

- by Rick Strahl

- by Rick Strahl

- by Bertrand Le Roy

- by Matthew Guay

- by Louis Davidson

- by Tara Kizer

- by dsollen

- by Gajoo

- by DigiMortal

- by lmestre

- by TechTwaddle

- by sm81095

- by Rick Strahl

- by ScottGu

- by Ben Rees

- by migrator

- by Tarun Arora

< Previous Page | 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 | Next Page >