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• Getting size of a webpage before parsing it

  - by user2869844

  I am trying to parse a webpage using jsoup and all is working good using this code: class DownloadSearchResultsTask extends AsyncTask<String, Integer, ArrayList> { private String link = "link"; private String title = "title"; private String vote = "vote"; private String age = "age"; private String size = "size"; private String seeders = "seeders"; private String leechers = "leachers"; @Override protected void onPreExecute() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub super.onPreExecute(); } @Override protected ArrayList doInBackground(String... params) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub ArrayList <HashMap<String, String>> searchResult = new ArrayList<HashMap<String, String>>(); HashMap<String, String> map; String link, title, vote, age, size, seeders, leechers; try { HttpURLConnection httpURLConnection=(HttpURLConnection) new URL("http://www.facebook.com").openConnection(); Log.d("VIVZ", httpURLConnection.getContentLength()+""); } catch (MalformedURLException e1) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e1.printStackTrace(); } catch (IOException e1) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e1.printStackTrace(); } Document mDocument; try { long l1=System.nanoTime(); Log.e("VIVZ",l1+""); mDocument = Jsoup .connect(params[0]) .userAgent( "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WindowsNT 5.1; en-US; rv1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6") .referrer("http://www.google.com").get(); long l2=System.nanoTime(); Log.e("VIVZ",(l2-l1)+""); Elements mResults = mDocument.select("div.results dl"); for (Element result : mResults) { map = new HashMap<String, String>(); Elements elements = result.select("dt a"); for (Element linkAndTitle : elements) { link = linkAndTitle.attr("abs:href"); title = linkAndTitle.text(); map.put(this.link, link); map.put(this.title, title); } elements = result.select("dd span.v"); for (Element v : elements) { vote = v.text(); map.put(this.vote, vote); } elements = result.select("dd span.a"); for (Element a : elements) { age = a.text(); map.put(this.age, age); } elements = result.select("dd span.s"); for (Element s : elements) { size = s.text(); map.put(this.size, size); } elements = result.select("dd span.u"); for (Element u : elements) { seeders = u.text(); map.put(this.seeders, seeders); } elements = result.select("dd span.d"); for (Element d : elements) { leechers = d.text(); map.put(this.leechers, leechers); } searchResult.add(map); } Log.e("VIVZ", searchResult.toString()); return searchResult; } catch (IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block Log.e("VIVZ",e+""); } return null; } @Override protected void onPostExecute(ArrayList result) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub super.onPostExecute(result); } } The problem is i want to get the size of page before parsing it and show a Determinate progress bar please help me ..... thanx in advance

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• Doubly linked lists

  - by user1642677

  I have an assignment that I am terribly lost on involving doubly linked lists (note, we are supposed to create it from scratch, not using built-in API's). The program is supposed to keep track of credit cards basically. My professor wants us to use doubly-linked lists to accomplish this. The problem is, the book does not go into detail on the subject (doesn't even show pseudo code involving doubly linked lists), it merely describes what a doubly linked list is and then talks with pictures and no code in a small paragraph. But anyway, I'm done complaining. I understand perfectly well how to create a node class and how it works. The problem is how do I use the nodes to create the list? Here is what I have so far. public class CardInfo { private String name; private String cardVendor; private String dateOpened; private double lastBalance; private int accountStatus; private final int MAX_NAME_LENGTH = 25; private final int MAX_VENDOR_LENGTH = 15; CardInfo() { } CardInfo(String n, String v, String d, double b, int s) { setName(n); setCardVendor(v); setDateOpened(d); setLastBalance(b); setAccountStatus(s); } public String getName() { return name; } public String getCardVendor() { return cardVendor; } public String getDateOpened() { return dateOpened; } public double getLastBalance() { return lastBalance; } public int getAccountStatus() { return accountStatus; } public void setName(String n) { if (n.length() > MAX_NAME_LENGTH) throw new IllegalArgumentException("Too Many Characters"); else name = n; } public void setCardVendor(String v) { if (v.length() > MAX_VENDOR_LENGTH) throw new IllegalArgumentException("Too Many Characters"); else cardVendor = v; } public void setDateOpened(String d) { dateOpened = d; } public void setLastBalance(double b) { lastBalance = b; } public void setAccountStatus(int s) { accountStatus = s; } public String toString() { return String.format("%-25s %-15s $%-s %-s %-s", name, cardVendor, lastBalance, dateOpened, accountStatus); } } public class CardInfoNode { CardInfo thisCard; CardInfoNode next; CardInfoNode prev; CardInfoNode() { } public void setCardInfo(CardInfo info) { thisCard.setName(info.getName()); thisCard.setCardVendor(info.getCardVendor()); thisCard.setLastBalance(info.getLastBalance()); thisCard.setDateOpened(info.getDateOpened()); thisCard.setAccountStatus(info.getAccountStatus()); } public CardInfo getInfo() { return thisCard; } public void setNext(CardInfoNode node) { next = node; } public void setPrev(CardInfoNode node) { prev = node; } public CardInfoNode getNext() { return next; } public CardInfoNode getPrev() { return prev; } } public class CardList { CardInfoNode head; CardInfoNode current; CardInfoNode tail; CardList() { head = current = tail = null; } public void insertCardInfo(CardInfo info) { if(head == null) { head = new CardInfoNode(); head.setCardInfo(info); head.setNext(tail); tail.setPrev(node) // here lies the problem. tail must be set to something // to make it doubly-linked. but tail is null since it's // and end point of the list. } } } Here is the assignment itself if it helps to clarify what is required and more importantly, the parts I'm not understanding. Thanks https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3vVwsO0eQRaQlRSZG95eXlPcVE

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• 10000's+ UI elements, bind or draw?

  - by jpiccolo

  I am drawing a header for a timeline control. It looks like this: I go to 0.01 millisecond per line, so for a 10 minute timeline I am looking at drawing 60000 lines + 6000 labels. This takes a while, ~10 seconds. I would like to offload this from the UI thread. My code is currently: private void drawHeader() { Header.Children.Clear(); switch (viewLevel) { case ViewLevel.MilliSeconds100: double hWidth = Header.Width; this.drawHeaderLines(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, 10), 100, 5, hWidth); //Was looking into background worker to off load UI //backgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker(); //backgroundWorker.DoWork += delegate(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs args) // { // this.drawHeaderLines(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, 10), 100, 5, hWidth); // }; //backgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync(); break; } } private void drawHeaderLines(TimeSpan timeStep, int majorEveryXLine, int distanceBetweenLines, double headerWidth) { var currentTime = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, 0); const int everyXLine100 = 10; double currentX = 0; var currentLine = 0; while (currentX < headerWidth) { var l = new Line { ToolTip = currentTime.ToString(@"hh\:mm\:ss\.fff"), StrokeThickness = 1, X1 = 0, X2 = 0, Y1 = 30, Y2 = 25 }; if (((currentLine % majorEveryXLine) == 0) && currentLine != 0) { l.StrokeThickness = 2; l.Y2 = 15; var textBlock = new TextBlock { Text = l.ToolTip.ToString(), FontSize = 8, FontFamily = new FontFamily("Tahoma"), Foreground = new SolidColorBrush(Color.FromRgb(255, 255, 255)) }; Canvas.SetLeft(textBlock, (currentX - 22)); Canvas.SetTop(textBlock, 0); Header.Children.Add(textBlock); } if ((((currentLine % everyXLine100) == 0) && currentLine != 0) && (currentLine % majorEveryXLine) != 0) { l.Y2 = 20; var textBlock = new TextBlock { Text = string.Format(".{0}", TimeSpan.Parse(l.ToolTip.ToString()).Milliseconds), FontSize = 8, FontFamily = new FontFamily("Tahoma"), Foreground = new SolidColorBrush(Color.FromRgb(192, 192, 192)) }; Canvas.SetLeft(textBlock, (currentX - 8)); Canvas.SetTop(textBlock, 8); Header.Children.Add(textBlock); } l.Stroke = new SolidColorBrush(Color.FromRgb(255, 255, 255)); Header.Children.Add(l); Canvas.SetLeft(l, currentX); currentX += distanceBetweenLines; currentLine++; currentTime += timeStep; } } I had looked into BackgroundWorker, except you can't create UI elements on a non-UI thread. Is it possible at all to do drawHeaderLines in a non-UI thread? Could I use data binding for drawing the lines? Would this help with UI responsiveness? I would imagine I can use databinding, but the Styling is probably beyond my current WPF ability (coming from winforms and trying to learn what all these style objects are and binding them). Would anyone be able to supply a starting point for tempting this out? Or Google a tutorial that would get me started?

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• Errors with parameter datatype in PostgreSql query

  - by John

  Im trying to execute a query to postgresql using the following code. It's written in C/C++ and I keep getting the following error when declaring a cursor: DECLARE CURSOR failed: ERROR: could not determine data type of parameter $1 Searching on here and on google, I can't find a solution. Can anyone find where I have made and error and why this is happening? thanks! void searchdb( PGconn *conn, char* name, char* offset ) { // Will hold the number of field in table int nFields; // Start a transaction block PGresult *res = PQexec(conn, "BEGIN"); if (PQresultStatus(res) != PGRES_COMMAND_OK) { printf("BEGIN command failed: %s", PQerrorMessage(conn)); PQclear(res); exit_nicely(conn); } // Clear result PQclear(res); printf("BEGIN command - OK\n"); //set the values to use const char *values[3] = {(char*)name, (char*)RESULTS_LIMIT, (char*)offset}; //calculate the lengths of each of the values int lengths[3] = {strlen((char*)name), sizeof(RESULTS_LIMIT), sizeof(offset)}; //state which parameters are binary int binary[3] = {0, 0, 1}; res = PQexecParams(conn, "DECLARE emprec CURSOR for SELECT name, id, 'Events' as source FROM events_basic WHERE name LIKE '$1::varchar%' UNION ALL " " SELECT name, fsq_id, 'Venues' as source FROM venues_cache WHERE name LIKE '$1::varchar%' UNION ALL " " SELECT name, geo_id, 'Cities' as source FROM static_cities WHERE name LIKE '$1::varchar%' OR FIND_IN_SET('$1::varchar%', alternate_names) != 0 LIMIT $2::int4 OFFSET $3::int4", 3, //number of parameters NULL, //ignore the Oid field values, //values to substitute $1 and $2 lengths, //the lengths, in bytes, of each of the parameter values binary, //whether the values are binary or not 0); //we want the result in text format // Fetch rows from table if (PQresultStatus(res) != PGRES_COMMAND_OK) { printf("DECLARE CURSOR failed: %s", PQerrorMessage(conn)); PQclear(res); exit_nicely(conn); } // Clear result PQclear(res); res = PQexec(conn, "FETCH ALL in emprec"); if (PQresultStatus(res) != PGRES_TUPLES_OK) { printf("FETCH ALL failed"); PQclear(res); exit_nicely(conn); } // Get the field name nFields = PQnfields(res); // Prepare the header with table field name printf("\nFetch record:"); printf("\n********************************************************************\n"); for (int i = 0; i < nFields; i++) printf("%-30s", PQfname(res, i)); printf("\n********************************************************************\n"); // Next, print out the record for each row for (int i = 0; i < PQntuples(res); i++) { for (int j = 0; j < nFields; j++) printf("%-30s", PQgetvalue(res, i, j)); printf("\n"); } PQclear(res); // Close the emprec res = PQexec(conn, "CLOSE emprec"); PQclear(res); // End the transaction res = PQexec(conn, "END"); // Clear result PQclear(res); }

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• about getadrrinfo() C++?

  - by Isavel

  I'm reading this book called beej's guide to network programming and there's a part in the book were it provide a sample code which illustrate the use of getaddrinfo(); the book state that the code below "will print the IP addresses for whatever host you specify on the command line" - beej's guide to network programming. now I'm curious and want to try it out and run the code, but I guess the code was develop in UNIX environment and I'm using visual studio 2012 windows 7 OS, and most of the headers was not supported so I did a bit of research and find out that I need to include the winsock.h and ws2_32.lib for windows, for it to get working, fortunately everything compiled no errors, but when I run it using the debugger and put in 'www.google.com' as command argument I was disappointed that it did not print any ipaddress, the output that I got from the console is "getaddrinfo: E" what does the letter E mean? Do I need to configure something out of the debugger? Interestingly I left the command argument blank and the output changed to "usage: showip hostname" Any help would be appreciated. #ifdef _WIN32 #endif #include <sys/types.h> #include <winsock2.h> #include <ws2tcpip.h> #include <iostream> using namespace std; #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <winsock.h> #pragma comment(lib, "ws2_32.lib") int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { struct addrinfo hints, *res, *p; int status; char ipstr[INET6_ADDRSTRLEN]; if (argc != 2) { fprintf(stderr,"usage: showip hostname\n"); system("PAUSE"); return 1; } memset(&hints, 0, sizeof hints); hints.ai_family = AF_UNSPEC; // AF_INET or AF_INET6 to force version hints.ai_socktype = SOCK_STREAM; if ((status = getaddrinfo(argv[1], NULL, &hints, &res)) != 0) { fprintf(stderr, "getaddrinfo: %s\n", gai_strerror(status)); system("PAUSE"); return 2; } printf("IP addresses for %s:\n\n", argv[1]); for(p = res;p != NULL; p = p->ai_next) { void *addr; char *ipver; // get the pointer to the address itself, // different fields in IPv4 and IPv6: if (p->ai_family == AF_INET) { // IPv4 struct sockaddr_in *ipv4 = (struct sockaddr_in *)p->ai_addr; addr = &(ipv4->sin_addr); ipver = "IPv4"; } else { // IPv6 struct sockaddr_in6 *ipv6 = (struct sockaddr_in6 *)p->ai_addr; addr = &(ipv6->sin6_addr); ipver = "IPv6"; } // convert the IP to a string and print it: inet_ntop(p->ai_family, addr, ipstr, sizeof ipstr); printf(" %s: %s\n", ipver, ipstr); } freeaddrinfo(res); // free the linked list system("PAUSE"); return 0; }

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• Using an alternate JSON Serializer in ASP.NET Web API

  - by Rick Strahl

  The new ASP.NET Web API that Microsoft released alongside MVC 4.0 Beta last week is a great framework for building REST and AJAX APIs. I've been working with it for quite a while now and I really like the way it works and the complete set of features it provides 'in the box'. It's about time that Microsoft gets a decent API for building generic HTTP endpoints into the framework. DataContractJsonSerializer sucks As nice as Web API's overall design is one thing still sucks: The built-in JSON Serialization uses the DataContractJsonSerializer which is just too limiting for many scenarios. The biggest issues I have with it are: No support for untyped values (object, dynamic, Anonymous Types) MS AJAX style Date Formatting Ugly serialization formats for types like Dictionaries To me the most serious issue is dealing with serialization of untyped objects. I have number of applications with AJAX front ends that dynamically reformat data from business objects to fit a specific message format that certain UI components require. The most common scenario I have there are IEnumerable query results from a database with fields from the result set rearranged to fit the sometimes unconventional formats required for the UI components (like jqGrid for example). Creating custom types to fit these messages seems like overkill and projections using Linq makes this much easier to code up. Alas DataContractJsonSerializer doesn't support it. Neither does DataContractSerializer for XML output for that matter. What this means is that you can't do stuff like this in Web API out of the box:public object GetAnonymousType() { return new { name = "Rick", company = "West Wind", entered= DateTime.Now }; } Basically anything that doesn't have an explicit type DataContractJsonSerializer will not let you return. FWIW, the same is true for XmlSerializer which also doesn't work with non-typed values for serialization. The example above is obviously contrived with a hardcoded object graph, but it's not uncommon to get dynamic values returned from queries that have anonymous types for their result projections. Apparently there's a good possibility that Microsoft will ship Json.NET as part of Web API RTM release.  Scott Hanselman confirmed this as a footnote in his JSON Dates post a few days ago. I've heard several other people from Microsoft confirm that Json.NET will be included and be the default JSON serializer, but no details yet in what capacity it will show up. Let's hope it ends up as the default in the box. Meanwhile this post will show you how you can use it today with the beta and get JSON that matches what you should see in the RTM version. What about JsonValue? To be fair Web API DOES include a new JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray type that allow you to address some of these scenarios. JsonValue is a new type in the System.Json assembly that can be used to build up an object graph based on a dictionary. It's actually a really cool implementation of a dynamic type that allows you to create an object graph and spit it out to JSON without having to create .NET type first. JsonValue can also receive a JSON string and parse it without having to actually load it into a .NET type (which is something that's been missing in the core framework). This is really useful if you get a JSON result from an arbitrary service and you don't want to explicitly create a mapping type for the data returned. For serialization you can create an object structure on the fly and pass it back as part of an Web API action method like this:public JsonValue GetJsonValue() { dynamic json = new JsonObject(); json.name = "Rick"; json.company = "West Wind"; json.entered = DateTime.Now; dynamic address = new JsonObject(); address.street = "32 Kaiea"; address.zip = "96779"; json.address = address; dynamic phones = new JsonArray(); json.phoneNumbers = phones; dynamic phone = new JsonObject(); phone.type = "Home"; phone.number = "808 123-1233"; phones.Add(phone); phone = new JsonObject(); phone.type = "Home"; phone.number = "808 123-1233"; phones.Add(phone); //var jsonString = json.ToString(); return json; } which produces the following output (formatted here for easier reading):{ name: "rick", company: "West Wind", entered: "2012-03-08T15:33:19.673-10:00", address: { street: "32 Kaiea", zip: "96779" }, phoneNumbers: [ { type: "Home", number: "808 123-1233" }, { type: "Mobile", number: "808 123-1234" }] } If you need to build a simple JSON type on the fly these types work great. But if you have an existing type - or worse a query result/list that's already formatted JsonValue et al. become a pain to work with. As far as I can see there's no way to just throw an object instance at JsonValue and have it convert into JsonValue dictionary. It's a manual process. Using alternate Serializers in Web API So, currently the default serializer in WebAPI is DataContractJsonSeriaizer and I don't like it. You may not either, but luckily you can swap the serializer fairly easily. If you'd rather use the JavaScriptSerializer built into System.Web.Extensions or Json.NET today, it's not too difficult to create a custom MediaTypeFormatter that uses these serializers and can replace or partially replace the native serializer. Here's a MediaTypeFormatter implementation using the ASP.NET JavaScriptSerializer:using System; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; using System.Json; using System.IO; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { public class JavaScriptSerializerFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter { public JavaScriptSerializerFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); } protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { // don't serialize JsonValue structure use default for that if (type == typeof(JsonValue) || type == typeof(JsonObject) || type== typeof(JsonArray) ) return false; return true; } protected override bool CanReadType(Type type) { if (type == typeof(IKeyValueModel)) return false; return true; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Taskobject OnReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext) { var task = Taskobject.Factory.StartNew(() = { var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); string json; using (var sr = new StreamReader(stream)) { json = sr.ReadToEnd(); sr.Close(); } object val = ser.Deserialize(json,type); return val; }); return task; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Task OnWriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext, System.Net.TransportContext transportContext) { var task = Task.Factory.StartNew( () = { var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); var json = ser.Serialize(value); byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json); stream.Write(buf,0,buf.Length); stream.Flush(); }); return task; } } } Formatter implementation is pretty simple: You override 4 methods to tell which types you can handle and then handle the input or output streams to create/parse the JSON data. Note that when creating output you want to take care to still allow JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray types to be handled by the default serializer so those objects serialize properly - if you let either JavaScriptSerializer or JSON.NET handle them they'd try to render the dictionaries which is very undesirable. If you'd rather use Json.NET here's the JSON.NET version of the formatter:// this code requires a reference to JSON.NET in your project #if true using System; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; using System.Json; using Newtonsoft.Json; using System.IO; using Newtonsoft.Json.Converters; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { public class JsonNetFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter { public JsonNetFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); } protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { // don't serialize JsonValue structure use default for that if (type == typeof(JsonValue) || type == typeof(JsonObject) || type == typeof(JsonArray)) return false; return true; } protected override bool CanReadType(Type type) { if (type == typeof(IKeyValueModel)) return false; return true; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Taskobject OnReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext) { var task = Taskobject.Factory.StartNew(() = { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore, }; var sr = new StreamReader(stream); var jreader = new JsonTextReader(sr); var ser = new JsonSerializer(); ser.Converters.Add(new IsoDateTimeConverter()); object val = ser.Deserialize(jreader, type); return val; }); return task; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Task OnWriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext, System.Net.TransportContext transportContext) { var task = Task.Factory.StartNew( () = { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore, }; string json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(value, Formatting.Indented, new JsonConverter[1] { new IsoDateTimeConverter() } ); byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json); stream.Write(buf,0,buf.Length); stream.Flush(); }); return task; } } } #endif   One advantage of the Json.NET serializer is that you can specify a few options on how things are formatted and handled. You get null value handling and you can plug in the IsoDateTimeConverter which is nice to product proper ISO dates that I would expect any Json serializer to output these days. Hooking up the Formatters Once you've created the custom formatters you need to enable them for your Web API application. To do this use the GlobalConfiguration.Configuration object and add the formatter to the Formatters collection. Here's what this looks like hooked up from Application_Start in a Web project:protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Action based routing (used for RPC calls) RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "StockApi", routeTemplate: "stocks/{action}/{symbol}", defaults: new { symbol = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "StockApi" } ); // WebApi Configuration to hook up formatters and message handlers // optional RegisterApis(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration); } public static void RegisterApis(HttpConfiguration config) { // Add JavaScriptSerializer formatter instead - add at top to make default //config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JavaScriptSerializerFormatter()); // Add Json.net formatter - add at the top so it fires first! // This leaves the old one in place so JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray still are handled config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JsonNetFormatter()); } One thing to remember here is the GlobalConfiguration object which is Web API's static configuration instance. I think this thing is seriously misnamed given that GlobalConfiguration could stand for anything and so is hard to discover if you don't know what you're looking for. How about WebApiConfiguration or something more descriptive? Anyway, once you know what it is you can use the Formatters collection to insert your custom formatter. Note that I insert my formatter at the top of the list so it takes precedence over the default formatter. I also am not removing the old formatter because I still want JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray to be handled by the default serialization mechanism. Since they process in sequence and I exclude processing for these types JsonValue et al. still get properly serialized/deserialized. Summary Currently DataContractJsonSerializer in Web API is a pain, but at least we have the ability with relatively limited effort to replace the MediaTypeFormatter and plug in our own JSON serializer. This is useful for many scenarios - if you have existing client applications that used MVC JsonResult or ASP.NET AJAX results from ASMX AJAX services you can plug in the JavaScript serializer and get exactly the same serializer you used in the past so your results will be the same and don't potentially break clients. JSON serializers do vary a bit in how they serialize some of the more complex types (like Dictionaries and dates for example) and so if you're migrating it might be helpful to ensure your client code doesn't break when you switch to ASP.NET Web API. Going forward it looks like Microsoft is planning on plugging in Json.Net into Web API and make that the default. I think that's an awesome choice since Json.net has been around forever, is fast and easy to use and provides a ton of functionality as part of this great library. I just wish Microsoft would have figured this out sooner instead of now at the last minute integrating with it especially given that Json.Net has a similar set of lower level JSON objects JsonValue/JsonObject etc. which now will end up being duplicated by the native System.Json stuff. It's not like we don't already have enough confusion regarding which JSON serializer to use (JavaScriptSerializer, DataContractJsonSerializer, JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray and now Json.net). For years I've been using my own JSON serializer because the built in choices are both limited. However, with an official encorsement of Json.Net I'm happily moving on to use that in my applications. Let's see and hope Microsoft gets this right before ASP.NET Web API goes gold.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api  AJAX  ASP.NET   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); })();

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• CSS import or multiple CSS files

  - by David H

  I originally wanted to include a .css in my HTML doc that loads multiple other .css files in order to divide up some chunks of code for development purposes. I have created a test page: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>The Recipe Site</title> <link rel='stylesheet' href='/css/main.css'> <link rel='stylesheet' href='/css/site_header.css'> <!-- Let google host jQuery for us, maybeb replace with their api --> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.1/jquery.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/main.js"></script> </head> <body> <div id="site_container"> <div id="site_header"><?php include_once($r->base_dir . "inc/site_header.inc.php"); ?><!-- Include File, Update on ajax request. --></div> <div id="site_content"> Some main content. </div> <div id="site_footer"><?php include_once($r->base_dir . "inc/site_footer.inc.php"); ?><!-- Include File, Update on ajax request. --></div> </div> </body> </html> File: /css/main.css /* Reset Default Padding & Margin */ * { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; } /* Set Our Float Classes */ .clear { clear: both; } .right { float: right; } .left { float: left; } /* Setup the main body/site container */ body { background: url(/images/wallpaper.png) repeat; color: #000000; text-align: center; font: 62.5%/1.5 "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans", Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif; } site_container { background-color: #FFFFFF; height: 100%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left; width: 100%; } /* Some style sheet includes / / @import "/css/site_header.css"; */ /* Default Font Sizes */ h1 { font-size: 2.2em; } h2 { font-size: 2.0em; } h3 { font-size: 1.8em; } h4 { font-size: 1.6em; } h5 { font-size: 1.4em; } p { font-size: 1.2em; } /* Default Form Layout */ input.text { padding: 3px; border: 1px solid #999999; } /* Default Table Reset */ table { border-spacing: 0; border-collapse: collapse; } td{ text-align: left; font-weight: normal; } /* Cause not all browsers know what HTML5 is... */ header { display:block;} footer { display:block;} and now the file: /css/site_header.css: site_header { background-color: #c0c0c0; height: 100px; position: absolute; top: 100px; width: 100%; } Problem: When I use the above code, the site_header div does not have any formatting/background. When I remove the link line from the HTML doc for site_header.css and instead use an @import url("/css/site_header.css"); in my main.css file, the same results -- nothing gets rendered for for the same div. Now when I take the CSS markup from site_header.css and add it to main.css, the div gets rendered fine... So I am wondering if having multiple css files is somehow not working... or maybe having that css markup at the end of my previous css is somehow conflicting, though I cannot find a reason why it would.

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• Configuring WCF to Handle a Signature on a SOAP Message from an Oracle Server

  - by AlEl

  I'm trying to use WCF to consume a web service provided by a third-party's Oracle Application Server. I pass a username and password and as part of the response the web service returns a standard security tag in the header which includes a digest and signature. With my current setup, I successfully send a request to the server and the web service sends the expected response data back. However, when parsing the response WCF throws a MessageSecurityException, with an InnerException.Message of "Supporting token signatures not expected." My guess is that WCF wants me to configure it to handle the signature and verify it. I have a certificate from the third party that hosts the web service that I should be able to use to verify the signature. It's in the form of -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- [certificate garble] -----END CERTIFICATE----- Here's a sample header from a response that makes WCF throw the exception: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"> <soap:Header> <wsse:Security soap:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd" xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <dsig:Signature xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#"> <dsig:SignedInfo> <dsig:CanonicalizationMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/xml-exc-c14n#"/> <dsig:SignatureMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#rsa-sha1"/> <dsig:Reference URI="#_51IUwNWRVvPOcz12pZHLNQ22"> <dsig:Transforms> <dsig:Transform Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/xml-exc-c14n#"/> </dsig:Transforms> <dsig:DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1"/> <dsig:DigestValue> [DigestValue here] </dsig:DigestValue> </dsig:Reference> <dsig:Reference URI="#_dI5j0EqxrVsj0e62J6vd6w22"> <dsig:Transforms> <dsig:Transform Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/xml-exc-c14n#"/> </dsig:Transforms> <dsig:DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1"/> <dsig:DigestValue> [DigestValue here] </dsig:DigestValue> </dsig:Reference> </dsig:SignedInfo> <dsig:SignatureValue> [Signature Value Here] </dsig:SignatureValue> <dsig:KeyInfo> <wsse:SecurityTokenReference xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <wsse:Reference URI="#BST-9nKWbrE4LRv6maqstrGuUQ22" ValueType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-x509-token-profile-1.0#X509v3"/> </wsse:SecurityTokenReference> </dsig:KeyInfo> </dsig:Signature> <wsse:BinarySecurityToken ValueType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-x509-token-profile-1.0#X509v3" EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" wsu:Id="BST-9nKWbrE4LRv6maqstrGuUQ22" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> [Security Token Here] </wsse:BinarySecurityToken> <wsu:Timestamp wsu:Id="_dI5j0EqxrVsj0e62J6vd6w22" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd" xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <wsu:Created>2010-05-26T18:46:30Z</wsu:Created> </wsu:Timestamp> </wsse:Security> </soap:Header> <soap:Body wsu:Id="_51IUwNWRVvPOcz12pZHLNQ22" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> [Body content here] </soap:Body> </soap:Envelope> My binding configuration looks like: <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="myBinding" closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00" allowCookies="false" bypassProxyOnLocal="false" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard" maxBufferSize="65536" maxBufferPoolSize="524288" maxReceivedMessageSize="65536" messageEncoding="Text" textEncoding="utf-8" transferMode="Buffered" useDefaultWebProxy="true"> <readerQuotas maxDepth="32" maxStringContentLength="8192" maxArrayLength="16384" maxBytesPerRead="4096" maxNameTableCharCount="16384" /> <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential"> <transport clientCredentialType="None" proxyCredentialType="None" realm="" /> <message clientCredentialType="UserName" algorithmSuite="Default" /> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> I'm new at WCF, so I'm sorry if this is a bit of a dumb question. I've been trying to Google solutions, but there seem to be so many different ways to configure WCF that I'm getting overwhelmed. Thanks in advance!

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• Use IIS Application Initialization for keeping ASP.NET Apps alive

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been working quite a bit with Windows Services in the recent months, and well, it turns out that Windows Services are quite a bear to debug, deploy, update and maintain. The process of getting services set up,  debugged and updated is a major chore that has to be extensively documented and or automated specifically. On most projects when a service is built, people end up scrambling for the right 'process' to use for administration. Web app deployment and maintenance on the other hand are common and well understood today, as we are constantly dealing with Web apps. There's plenty of infrastructure and tooling built into Web Tools like Visual Studio to facilitate the process. By comparison Windows Services or anything self-hosted for that matter seems convoluted.In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned that on a recent project I'd been using self-hosting for SignalR inside of a Windows service, because the application is in fact a 'service' that also needs to send out lots of messages via SignalR. But the reality is that it could just as well be an IIS application with a service component that runs in the background. Either way you look at it, it's either a Windows Service with a built in Web Server, or an IIS application running a Service application, neither of which follows the standard Service or Web App template.Personally I much prefer Web applications. Running inside of IIS I get all the benefits of the IIS platform including service lifetime management (crash and restart), controlled shutdowns, the whole security infrastructure including easy certificate support, hot-swapping of code and the the ability to publish directly to IIS from within Visual Studio with ease.Because of these benefits we set out to move from the self hosted service into an ASP.NET Web app instead.The Missing Link for ASP.NET as a Service: Auto-LoadingI've had moments in the past where I wanted to run a 'service like' application in ASP.NET because when you think about it, it's so much easier to control a Web application remotely. Services are locked into start/stop operations, but if you host inside of a Web app you can write your own ticket and control it from anywhere. In fact nearly 10 years ago I built a background scheduling application that ran inside of ASP.NET and it worked great and it's still running doing its job today.The tricky part for running an app as a service inside of IIS then and now, is how to get IIS and ASP.NET launched so your 'service' stays alive even after an Application Pool reset. 7 years ago I faked it by using a web monitor (my own West Wind Web Monitor app) I was running anyway to monitor my various web sites for uptime, and having the monitor ping my 'service' every 20 seconds to effectively keep ASP.NET alive or fire it back up after a reload. I used a simple scheduler class that also includes some logic for 'self-reloading'. Hacky for sure, but it worked reliably.Luckily today it's much easier and more integrated to get IIS to launch ASP.NET as soon as an Application Pool is started by using the Application Initialization Module. The Application Initialization Module basically allows you to turn on Preloading on the Application Pool and the Site/IIS App, which essentially fires a request through the IIS pipeline as soon as the Application Pool has been launched. This means that effectively your ASP.NET app becomes active immediately, Application_Start is fired making sure your app stays up and running at all times. All the other features like Application Pool recycling and auto-shutdown after idle time still work, but IIS will then always immediately re-launch the application.Getting started with Application InitializationAs of IIS 8 Application Initialization is part of the IIS feature set. For IIS 7 and 7.5 there's a separate download available via Web Platform Installer. Using IIS 8 Application Initialization is an optional install component in Windows or the Windows Server Role Manager: This is an optional component so make sure you explicitly select it.IIS Configuration for Application InitializationInitialization needs to be applied on the Application Pool as well as the IIS Application level. As of IIS 8 these settings can be made through the IIS Administration console.Start with the Application Pool:Here you need to set both the Start Automatically which is always set, and the StartMode which should be set to AlwaysRunning. Both have to be set - the Start Automatically flag is set true by default and controls the starting of the application pool itself while Always Running flag is required in order to launch the application. Without the latter flag set the site settings have no effect.Now on the Site/Application level you can specify whether the site should pre load: Set the Preload Enabled flag to true.At this point ASP.NET apps should auto-load. This is all that's needed to pre-load the site if all you want is to get your site launched automatically.If you want a little more control over the load process you can add a few more settings to your web.config file that allow you to show a static page while the App is starting up. This can be useful if startup is really slow, so rather than displaying blank screen while the user is fiddling their thumbs you can display a static HTML page instead: <system.webServer> <applicationInitialization remapManagedRequestsTo="Startup.htm" skipManagedModules="true"> <add initializationPage="ping.ashx" /> </applicationInitialization> </system.webServer>This allows you to specify a page to execute in a dry run. IIS basically fakes request and pushes it directly into the IIS pipeline without hitting the network. You specify a page and IIS will fake a request to that page in this case ping.ashx which just returns a simple OK string - ie. a fast pipeline request. This request is run immediately after Application Pool restart, and while this request is running and your app is warming up, IIS can display an alternate static page - Startup.htm above. So instead of showing users an empty loading page when clicking a link on your site you can optionally show some sort of static status page that says, "we'll be right back".  I'm not sure if that's such a brilliant idea since this can be pretty disruptive in some cases. Personally I think I prefer letting people wait, but at least get the response they were supposed to get back rather than a random page. But it's there if you need it.Note that the web.config stuff is optional. If you don't provide it IIS hits the default site link (/) and even if there's no matching request at the end of that request it'll still fire the request through the IIS pipeline. Ideally though you want to make sure that an ASP.NET endpoint is hit either with your default page, or by specify the initializationPage to ensure ASP.NET actually gets hit since it's possible for IIS fire unmanaged requests only for static pages (depending how your pipeline is configured).What about AppDomain Restarts?In addition to full Worker Process recycles at the IIS level, ASP.NET also has to deal with AppDomain shutdowns which can occur for a variety of reasons:Files are updated in the BIN folderWeb Deploy to your siteweb.config is changedHard application crashThese operations don't cause the worker process to restart, but they do cause ASP.NET to unload the current AppDomain and start up a new one. Because the features above only apply to Application Pool restarts, AppDomain restarts could also cause your 'ASP.NET service' to stop processing in the background.In order to keep the app running on AppDomain recycles, you can resort to a simple ping in the Application_End event:protected void Application_End() { var client = new WebClient(); var url = App.AdminConfiguration.MonitorHostUrl + "ping.aspx"; client.DownloadString(url); Trace.WriteLine("Application Shut Down Ping: " + url); }which fires any ASP.NET url to the current site at the very end of the pipeline shutdown which in turn ensures that the site immediately starts back up.Manual Configuration in ApplicationHost.configThe above UI corresponds to the following ApplicationHost.config settings. If you're using IIS 7, there's no UI for these flags so you'll have to manually edit them.When you install the Application Initialization component into IIS it should auto-configure the module into ApplicationHost.config. Unfortunately for me, with Mr. Murphy in his best form for me, the module registration did not occur and I had to manually add it.<globalModules> <add name="ApplicationInitializationModule" image="%windir%\System32\inetsrv\warmup.dll" /> </globalModules>Most likely you won't need ever need to add this, but if things are not working it's worth to check if the module is actually registered.Next you need to configure the ApplicationPool and the Web site. The following are the two relevant entries in ApplicationHost.config.<system.applicationHost> <applicationPools> <add name="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" managedPipelineMode="Integrated"> <processModel identityType="LocalSystem" setProfileEnvironment="true" /> </add> </applicationPools> <sites> <site name="Default Web Site" id="1"> <application path="/MPress.Workflow.WebQueueMessageManager" applicationPool="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" preloadEnabled="true"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\Clients\…" /> </application> </site> </sites> </system.applicationHost>On the Application Pool make sure to set the autoStart and startMode flags to true and AlwaysRunning respectively. On the site make sure to set the preloadEnabled flag to true.And that's all you should need. You can still set the web.config settings described above as well.ASP.NET as a Service?In the particular application I'm working on currently, we have a queue manager that runs as standalone service that polls a database queue and picks out jobs and processes them on several threads. The service can spin up any number of threads and keep these threads alive in the background while IIS is running doing its own thing. These threads are newly created threads, so they sit completely outside of the IIS thread pool. In order for this service to work all it needs is a long running reference that keeps it alive for the life time of the application.In this particular app there are two components that run in the background on their own threads: A scheduler that runs various scheduled tasks and handles things like picking up emails to send out outside of IIS's scope and the QueueManager. Here's what this looks like in global.asax:public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { private static ApplicationScheduler scheduler; private static ServiceLauncher launcher; protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Pings the service and ensures it stays alive scheduler = new ApplicationScheduler() { CheckFrequency = 600000 }; scheduler.Start(); launcher = new ServiceLauncher(); launcher.Start(); // register so shutdown is controlled HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(launcher); }}By keeping these objects around as static instances that are set only once on startup, they survive the lifetime of the application. The code in these classes is essentially unchanged from the Windows Service code except that I could remove the various overrides required for the Windows Service interface (OnStart,OnStop,OnResume etc.). Otherwise the behavior and operation is very similar.In this application ASP.NET serves two purposes: It acts as the host for SignalR and provides the administration interface which allows remote management of the 'service'. I can start and stop the service remotely by shutting down the ApplicationScheduler very easily. I can also very easily feed stats from the queue out directly via a couple of Web requests or (as we do now) through the SignalR service.Registering a Background Object with ASP.NETNotice also the use of the HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(). This function registers an object with ASP.NET to let it know that it's a background task that should be notified if the AppDomain shuts down. RegisterObject() requires an interface with a Stop() method that's fired and allows your code to respond to a shutdown request. Here's what the IRegisteredObject::Stop() method looks like on the launcher:public void Stop(bool immediate = false) { LogManager.Current.LogInfo("QueueManager Controller Stopped."); Controller.StopProcessing(); Controller.Dispose(); Thread.Sleep(1500); // give background threads some time HostingEnvironment.UnregisterObject(this); }Implementing IRegisterObject should help with reliability on AppDomain shutdowns. Thanks to Justin Van Patten for pointing this out to me on Twitter.RegisterObject() is not required but I would highly recommend implementing it on whatever object controls your background processing to all clean shutdowns when the AppDomain shuts down.Testing it outI'm still in the testing phase with this particular service to see if there are any side effects. But so far it doesn't look like it. With about 50 lines of code I was able to replace the Windows service startup to Web start up - everything else just worked as is. An honorable mention goes to SignalR 2.0's oWin hosting, because with the new oWin based hosting no code changes at all were required, merely a couple of configuration file settings and an assembly directive needed, to point at the SignalR startup class. Sweet!It also seems like SignalR is noticeably faster running inside of IIS compared to self-host. Startup feels faster because of the preload.Starting and Stopping the 'Service'Because the application is running as a Web Server, it's easy to have a Web interface for starting and stopping the services running inside of the service. For our queue manager the SignalR service and front monitoring app has a play and stop button for toggling the queue.If you want more administrative control and have it work more like a Windows Service you can also stop the application pool explicitly from the command line which would be equivalent to stopping and restarting a service.To start and stop from the command line you can use the IIS appCmd tool. To stop:> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd stop apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"and to start> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd start apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"Note that when you explicitly force the AppPool to stop running either in the UI (on the ApplicationPools page use Start/Stop) or via command line tools, the application pool will not auto-restart immediately. You have to manually start it back up.What's not to like?There are certainly a lot of benefits to running a background service in IIS, but… ASP.NET applications do have more overhead in terms of memory footprint and startup time is a little slower, but generally for server applications this is not a big deal. If the application is stable the service should fire up and stay running indefinitely. A lot of times this kind of service interface can simply be attached to an existing Web application, or if scalability requires be offloaded to its own Web server.Easier to work withBut the ultimate benefit here is that it's much easier to work with a Web app as opposed to a service. While developing I can simply turn off the auto-launch features and launch the service on demand through IIS simply by hitting a page on the site. If I want to shut down an IISRESET -stop will shut down the service easily enough. I can then attach a debugger anywhere I want and this works like any other ASP.NET application. Yes you end up on a background thread for debugging but Visual Studio handles that just fine and if you stay on a single thread this is no different than debugging any other code.SummaryUsing ASP.NET to run background service operations is probably not a super common scenario, but it probably should be something that is considered carefully when building services. Many applications have service like features and with the auto-start functionality of the Application Initialization module, it's easy to build this functionality into ASP.NET. Especially when combined with the notification features of SignalR it becomes very, very easy to create rich services that can also communicate their status easily to the outside world.Whether it's existing applications that need some background processing for scheduling related tasks, or whether you just create a separate site altogether just to host your service it's easy to do and you can leverage the same tool chain you're already using for other Web projects. If you have lots of service projects it's worth considering… give it some thought…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in ASP.NET  SignalR  IIS   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); })();

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• DotNetOpenAuth OpenID Provider "Sequence contains more than one element"

  - by Matthew Johnson

  Hello, all, I'm having trouble implementing my OpenID provider with DNOA 3.4.3. Everything was going absolutely peachy until I needed AX support as well. I set AXFetchAsSregTransform in the web config, as recommended by Andrew at http://groups.google.com/group/dotnetopenid/browse_thread/thread/5629a24c0a7e8d99. Doing this caused me to get the exception "Sequence Contains More Than One Element" on my decide.aspx page, however, and I haven't been able to get past it. The following line is throwing the exception: Edit: Strangely enough, this is not the line throwing the error anymore. The SendResponse() is now triggering the exception ClaimsRequest requestedFields = ProviderEndpoint.PendingRequest.GetExtension(); ProviderEndpoint.SendResponse() Any thoughts on why this may be? Any help would be greatly appreciated! The logs leading up to the error are as follows: 2010-04-28 12:38:20,247 (GMT-7) [5] INFO DotNetOpenAuth.Messaging.Channel - Scanning incoming request for messages: https://myprovider/provider.ashx?openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0&openid.claimed_id=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0%2Fidentifier_select&openid.identity=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0%2Fidentifier_select&openid.mode=checkid_setup&openid.ns.ext1=http%3A%2F%2Fopenid.net%2Fsrv%2Fax%2F1.0&openid.ext1.mode=fetch_request&openid.ext1.type.email=http%3A%2F%2Faxschema.org%2Fcontact%2Femail&openid.ext1.type.fullname=http%3A%2F%2Faxschema.org%2FnamePerson&openid.ext1.type.language=http%3A%2F%2Faxschema.org%2Fpref%2Flanguage&openid.ext1.required=email&openid.return_to=http%3A%2F%2Fmyrelyingparty%2Flogin.jsp%3Foidreturn%3D%252Fhome&openid.assoc_handle=%7B634080802953194640%7D%7BHxjFNw==%7D%7B20%7D&openid.realm=http%3A%2F%2Fmyrelyingparty 2010-04-28 12:38:20,285 (GMT-7) [5] INFO DotNetOpenAuth.Messaging.Channel - Processing incoming CheckIdRequest (2.0) message: openid.claimed_id: http://specs.openid.net/auth/2.0/identifier_select openid.identity: http://specs.openid.net/auth/2.0/identifier_select openid.assoc_handle: {634080802953194640}{HxjFNw==}{20} openid.return_to: http://myrelyingparty/login.jsp?oidreturn=%2Fhome openid.realm: http://myrelyingparty/ openid.mode: checkid_setup openid.ns: http://specs.openid.net/auth/2.0 openid.ns.ext1: http://openid.net/srv/ax/1.0 openid.ext1.mode: fetch_request openid.ext1.type.email: http://axschema.org/contact/email openid.ext1.type.fullname: http://axschema.org/namePerson openid.ext1.type.language: http://axschema.org/pref/language openid.ext1.required: email 2010-04-28 12:38:22,773 (GMT-7) [14] INFO DotNetOpenAuth.Messaging.Channel - Scanning incoming request for messages: https://myprovider/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fdecide.aspx 2010-04-28 12:38:36,167 (GMT-7) [5] INFO DotNetOpenAuth.Messaging.Channel - Scanning incoming request for messages: https://myprovider/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fdecide.aspx 2010-04-28 12:38:38,147 (GMT-7) [14] ERROR DotNetOpenAuth.Messaging - Protocol error: An HTTP request to the realm URL (http://myrelyingparty/) resulted in a redirect, which is not allowed during relying party discovery. at DotNetOpenAuth.Messaging.ErrorUtilities.VerifyProtocol(Boolean condition, String message, Object[] args) at DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Realm.Discover(IDirectWebRequestHandler requestHandler, Boolean allowRedirects) at DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Realm.DiscoverReturnToEndpoints(IDirectWebRequestHandler requestHandler, Boolean allowRedirects) at DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Provider.HostProcessedRequest.IsReturnUrlDiscoverableCore(OpenIdProvider provider) at DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Provider.HostProcessedRequest.IsReturnUrlDiscoverable(OpenIdProvider provider) at OpenIdProviderWebForms.decide.Page_Load(Object src, EventArgs e) at System.Web.Util.CalliHelper.EventArgFunctionCaller(IntPtr fp, Object o, Object t, EventArgs e) at System.Web.Util.CalliEventHandlerDelegateProxy.Callback(Object sender, EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest() at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) at ASP.decide_aspx.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) at System.Web.HttpApplication.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) at System.Web.HttpApplication.PipelineStepManager.ResumeSteps(Exception error) at System.Web.HttpApplication.BeginProcessRequestNotification(HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb) at System.Web.HttpRuntime.ProcessRequestNotificationPrivate(IIS7WorkerRequest wr, HttpContext context) at System.Web.Hosting.PipelineRuntime.ProcessRequestNotificationHelper(IntPtr managedHttpContext, IntPtr nativeRequestContext, IntPtr moduleData, Int32 flags) at System.Web.Hosting.PipelineRuntime.ProcessRequestNotification(IntPtr managedHttpContext, IntPtr nativeRequestContext, IntPtr moduleData, Int32 flags) at System.Web.Hosting.PipelineRuntime.ProcessRequestNotificationHelper(IntPtr managedHttpContext, IntPtr nativeRequestContext, IntPtr moduleData, Int32 flags) at System.Web.Hosting.PipelineRuntime.ProcessRequestNotification(IntPtr managedHttpContext, IntPtr nativeRequestContext, IntPtr moduleData, Int32 flags) 2010-04-28 12:38:38,149 (GMT-7) [14] INFO DotNetOpenAuth.Yadis - Relying party discovery at URL http://myrelyingparty/ failed. DotNetOpenAuth.Messaging.ProtocolException: An HTTP request to the realm URL (http://myrelyingparty/) resulted in a redirect, which is not allowed during relying party discovery. at DotNetOpenAuth.Messaging.ErrorUtilities.VerifyProtocol(Boolean condition, String message, Object[] args) in c:\TeamCity\buildAgent\work\bf9e2ca68b75a334\src\DotNetOpenAuth\Messaging\ErrorUtilities.cs:line 235 at DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Realm.Discover(IDirectWebRequestHandler requestHandler, Boolean allowRedirects) in c:\TeamCity\buildAgent\work\bf9e2ca68b75a334\src\DotNetOpenAuth\OpenId\Realm.cs:line 446 at DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Realm.DiscoverReturnToEndpoints(IDirectWebRequestHandler requestHandler, Boolean allowRedirects) in c:\TeamCity\buildAgent\work\bf9e2ca68b75a334\src\DotNetOpenAuth\OpenId\Realm.cs:line 424 at DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Provider.HostProcessedRequest.IsReturnUrlDiscoverableCore(OpenIdProvider provider) in c:\TeamCity\buildAgent\work\bf9e2ca68b75a334\src\DotNetOpenAuth\OpenId\Provider\HostProcessedRequest.cs:line 142 2010-04-28 12:38:42,076 (GMT-7) [8] ERROR OpenIdProviderWebForms.Global - An unhandled exception was raised. Details follow: System.Web.HttpUnhandledException: Exception of type 'System.Web.HttpUnhandledException' was thrown. --- System.InvalidOperationException: Sequence contains more than one element at System.Linq.Enumerable.SingleOrDefault[TSource](IEnumerable`1 source) at DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Provider.Request.GetExtension[T]() in c:\TeamCity\buildAgent\work\bf9e2ca68b75a334\src\DotNetOpenAuth\OpenId\Provider\Request.cs:line 176 at DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Extensions.ExtensionsInteropHelper.ConvertSregToMatchRequest(IHostProcessedRequest request) in c:\TeamCity\buildAgent\work\bf9e2ca68b75a334\src\DotNetOpenAuth\OpenId\Extensions\ExtensionsInteropHelper.cs:line 180 at DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Behaviors.AXFetchAsSregTransform.DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Provider.IProviderBehavior.OnOutgoingResponse(IAuthenticationRequest request) in c:\TeamCity\buildAgent\work\bf9e2ca68b75a334\src\DotNetOpenAuth\OpenId\Behaviors\AXFetchAsSregTransform.cs:line 139 at DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Provider.OpenIdProvider.ApplyBehaviorsToResponse(IRequest request) in c:\TeamCity\buildAgent\work\bf9e2ca68b75a334\src\DotNetOpenAuth\OpenId\Provider\OpenIdProvider.cs:line 482 at DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Provider.OpenIdProvider.SendResponse(IRequest request) in c:\TeamCity\buildAgent\work\bf9e2ca68b75a334\src\DotNetOpenAuth\OpenId\Provider\OpenIdProvider.cs:line 325 at OpenIdProviderWebForms.decide.Yes_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) in C:\Projects\OpenIdProviderWebForms\decide.aspx.cs:line 130 at System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) at System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler sourceControl, String eventArgument) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at System.Web.UI.Page.HandleError(Exception e) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest() at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) at ASP.decide_aspx.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) in c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\7f580b93\b3e4d917\App_Web_tulh9ymv.1.cs:line 0 at System.Web.HttpApplication.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously)

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• Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

  - by raul.goycoolea

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

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• Agile Development

  - by James Oloo Onyango

  Alot of literature has and is being written about agile developement and its surrounding philosophies. In my quest to find the best way to express the importance of agile methodologies, i have found Robert C. Martin's "A Satire Of Two Companies" to be both the most concise and thorough! Enjoy the read! Rufus Inc Project Kick Off Your name is Bob. The date is January 3, 2001, and your head still aches from the recent millennial revelry. You are sitting in a conference room with several managers and a group of your peers. You are a project team leader. Your boss is there, and he has brought along all of his team leaders. His boss called the meeting. "We have a new project to develop," says your boss's boss. Call him BB. The points in his hair are so long that they scrape the ceiling. Your boss's points are just starting to grow, but he eagerly awaits the day when he can leave Brylcream stains on the acoustic tiles. BB describes the essence of the new market they have identified and the product they want to develop to exploit this market. "We must have this new project up and working by fourth quarter October 1," BB demands. "Nothing is of higher priority, so we are cancelling your current project." The reaction in the room is stunned silence. Months of work are simply going to be thrown away. Slowly, a murmur of objection begins to circulate around the conference table.   His points give off an evil green glow as BB meets the eyes of everyone in the room. One by one, that insidious stare reduces each attendee to quivering lumps of protoplasm. It is clear that he will brook no discussion on this matter. Once silence has been restored, BB says, "We need to begin immediately. How long will it take you to do the analysis?" You raise your hand. Your boss tries to stop you, but his spitwad misses you and you are unaware of his efforts.   "Sir, we can't tell you how long the analysis will take until we have some requirements." "The requirements document won't be ready for 3 or 4 weeks," BB says, his points vibrating with frustration. "So, pretend that you have the requirements in front of you now. How long will you require for analysis?" No one breathes. Everyone looks around to see whether anyone has some idea. "If analysis goes beyond April 1, we have a problem. Can you finish the analysis by then?" Your boss visibly gathers his courage: "We'll find a way, sir!" His points grow 3 mm, and your headache increases by two Tylenol. "Good." BB smiles. "Now, how long will it take to do the design?" "Sir," you say. Your boss visibly pales. He is clearly worried that his 3 mms are at risk. "Without an analysis, it will not be possible to tell you how long design will take." BB's expression shifts beyond austere.   "PRETEND you have the analysis already!" he says, while fixing you with his vacant, beady little eyes. "How long will it take you to do the design?" Two Tylenol are not going to cut it. Your boss, in a desperate attempt to save his new growth, babbles: "Well, sir, with only six months left to complete the project, design had better take no longer than 3 months."   "I'm glad you agree, Smithers!" BB says, beaming. Your boss relaxes. He knows his points are secure. After a while, he starts lightly humming the Brylcream jingle. BB continues, "So, analysis will be complete by April 1, design will be complete by July 1, and that gives you 3 months to implement the project. This meeting is an example of how well our new consensus and empowerment policies are working. Now, get out there and start working. I'll expect to see TQM plans and QIT assignments on my desk by next week. Oh, and don't forget that your crossfunctional team meetings and reports will be needed for next month's quality audit." "Forget the Tylenol," you think to yourself as you return to your cubicle. "I need bourbon."   Visibly excited, your boss comes over to you and says, "Gosh, what a great meeting. I think we're really going to do some world shaking with this project." You nod in agreement, too disgusted to do anything else. "Oh," your boss continues, "I almost forgot." He hands you a 30-page document. "Remember that the SEI is coming to do an evaluation next week. This is the evaluation guide. You need to read through it, memorize it, and then shred it. It tells you how to answer any questions that the SEI auditors ask you. It also tells you what parts of the building you are allowed to take them to and what parts to avoid. We are determined to be a CMM level 3 organization by June!"   You and your peers start working on the analysis of the new project. This is difficult because you have no requirements. But from the 10-minute introduction given by BB on that fateful morning, you have some idea of what the product is supposed to do.   Corporate process demands that you begin by creating a use case document. You and your team begin enumerating use cases and drawing oval and stick diagrams. Philosophical debates break out among the team members. There is disagreement as to whether certain use cases should be connected with <<extends>> or <<includes>> relationships. Competing models are created, but nobody knows how to evaluate them. The debate continues, effectively paralyzing progress.   After a week, somebody finds the iceberg.com Web site, which recommends disposing entirely of <<extends>> and <<includes>> and replacing them with <<precedes>> and <<uses>>. The documents on this Web site, authored by Don Sengroiux, describes a method known as stalwart-analysis, which claims to be a step-by-step method for translating use cases into design diagrams. More competing use case models are created using this new scheme, but again, people can't agree on how to evaluate them. The thrashing continues. More and more, the use case meetings are driven by emotion rather than by reason. If it weren't for the fact that you don't have requirements, you'd be pretty upset by the lack of progress you are making. The requirements document arrives on February 15. And then again on February 20, 25, and every week thereafter. Each new version contradicts the previous one. Clearly, the marketing folks who are writing the requirements, empowered though they might be, are not finding consensus.   At the same time, several new competing use case templates have been proposed by the various team members. Each template presents its own particularly creative way of delaying progress. The debates rage on. On March 1, Prudence Putrigence, the process proctor, succeeds in integrating all the competing use case forms and templates into a single, all-encompassing form. Just the blank form is 15 pages long. She has managed to include every field that appeared on all the competing templates. She also presents a 159- page document describing how to fill out the use case form. All current use cases must be rewritten according to the new standard.   You marvel to yourself that it now requires 15 pages of fill-in-the-blank and essay questions to answer the question: What should the system do when the user presses Return? The corporate process (authored by L. E. Ott, famed author of "Holistic Analysis: A Progressive Dialectic for Software Engineers") insists that you discover all primary use cases, 87 percent of all secondary use cases, and 36.274 percent of all tertiary use cases before you can complete analysis and enter the design phase. You have no idea what a tertiary use case is. So in an attempt to meet this requirement, you try to get your use case document reviewed by the marketing department, which you hope will know what a tertiary use case is.   Unfortunately, the marketing folks are too busy with sales support to talk to you. Indeed, since the project started, you have not been able to get a single meeting with marketing, which has provided a never-ending stream of changing and contradictory requirements documents.   While one team has been spinning endlessly on the use case document, another team has been working out the domain model. Endless variations of UML documents are pouring out of this team. Every week, the model is reworked.   The team members can't decide whether to use <<interfaces>> or <<types>> in the model. A huge disagreement has been raging on the proper syntax and application of OCL. Others on the team just got back from a 5-day class on catabolism, and have been producing incredibly detailed and arcane diagrams that nobody else can fathom.   On March 27, with one week to go before analysis is to be complete, you have produced a sea of documents and diagrams but are no closer to a cogent analysis of the problem than you were on January 3. **** And then, a miracle happens.   **** On Saturday, April 1, you check your e-mail from home. You see a memo from your boss to BB. It states unequivocally that you are done with the analysis! You phone your boss and complain. "How could you have told BB that we were done with the analysis?" "Have you looked at a calendar lately?" he responds. "It's April 1!" The irony of that date does not escape you. "But we have so much more to think about. So much more to analyze! We haven't even decided whether to use <<extends>> or <<precedes>>!" "Where is your evidence that you are not done?" inquires your boss, impatiently. "Whaaa . . . ." But he cuts you off. "Analysis can go on forever; it has to be stopped at some point. And since this is the date it was scheduled to stop, it has been stopped. Now, on Monday, I want you to gather up all existing analysis materials and put them into a public folder. Release that folder to Prudence so that she can log it in the CM system by Monday afternoon. Then get busy and start designing."   As you hang up the phone, you begin to consider the benefits of keeping a bottle of bourbon in your bottom desk drawer. They threw a party to celebrate the on-time completion of the analysis phase. BB gave a colon-stirring speech on empowerment. And your boss, another 3 mm taller, congratulated his team on the incredible show of unity and teamwork. Finally, the CIO takes the stage to tell everyone that the SEI audit went very well and to thank everyone for studying and shredding the evaluation guides that were passed out. Level 3 now seems assured and will be awarded by June. (Scuttlebutt has it that managers at the level of BB and above are to receive significant bonuses once the SEI awards level 3.)   As the weeks flow by, you and your team work on the design of the system. Of course, you find that the analysis that the design is supposedly based on is flawedno, useless; no, worse than useless. But when you tell your boss that you need to go back and work some more on the analysis to shore up its weaker sections, he simply states, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it."   So, you and your team hack the design as best you can, unsure of whether the requirements have been properly analyzed. Of course, it really doesn't matter much, since the requirements document is still thrashing with weekly revisions, and the marketing department still refuses to meet with you.     The design is a nightmare. Your boss recently misread a book named The Finish Line in which the author, Mark DeThomaso, blithely suggested that design documents should be taken down to code-level detail. "If we are going to be working at that level of detail," you ask, "why don't we simply write the code instead?" "Because then you wouldn't be designing, of course. And the only allowable activity in the design phase is design!" "Besides," he continues, "we have just purchased a companywide license for Dandelion! This tool enables 'Round the Horn Engineering!' You are to transfer all design diagrams into this tool. It will automatically generate our code for us! It will also keep the design diagrams in sync with the code!" Your boss hands you a brightly colored shrinkwrapped box containing the Dandelion distribution. You accept it numbly and shuffle off to your cubicle. Twelve hours, eight crashes, one disk reformatting, and eight shots of 151 later, you finally have the tool installed on your server. You consider the week your team will lose while attending Dandelion training. Then you smile and think, "Any week I'm not here is a good week." Design diagram after design diagram is created by your team. Dandelion makes it very difficult to draw these diagrams. There are dozens and dozens of deeply nested dialog boxes with funny text fields and check boxes that must all be filled in correctly. And then there's the problem of moving classes between packages. At first, these diagram are driven from the use cases. But the requirements are changing so often that the use cases rapidly become meaningless. Debates rage about whether VISITOR or DECORATOR design patterns should be used. One developer refuses to use VISITOR in any form, claiming that it's not a properly object-oriented construct. Someone refuses to use multiple inheritance, since it is the spawn of the devil. Review meetings rapidly degenerate into debates about the meaning of object orientation, the definition of analysis versus design, or when to use aggregation versus association. Midway through the design cycle, the marketing folks announce that they have rethought the focus of the system. Their new requirements document is completely restructured. They have eliminated several major feature areas and replaced them with feature areas that they anticipate customer surveys will show to be more appropriate. You tell your boss that these changes mean that you need to reanalyze and redesign much of the system. But he says, "The analysis phase is system. But he says, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it."   You suggest that it might be better to create a simple prototype to show to the marketing folks and even some potential customers. But your boss says, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it." Hack, hack, hack, hack. You try to create some kind of a design document that might reflect the new requirements documents. However, the revolution of the requirements has not caused them to stop thrashing. Indeed, if anything, the wild oscillations of the requirements document have only increased in frequency and amplitude.   You slog your way through them.   On June 15, the Dandelion database gets corrupted. Apparently, the corruption has been progressive. Small errors in the DB accumulated over the months into bigger and bigger errors. Eventually, the CASE tool just stopped working. Of course, the slowly encroaching corruption is present on all the backups. Calls to the Dandelion technical support line go unanswered for several days. Finally, you receive a brief e-mail from Dandelion, informing you that this is a known problem and that the solution is to purchase the new version, which they promise will be ready some time next quarter, and then reenter all the diagrams by hand.   ****   Then, on July 1 another miracle happens! You are done with the design!   Rather than go to your boss and complain, you stock your middle desk drawer with some vodka.   **** They threw a party to celebrate the on-time completion of the design phase and their graduation to CMM level 3. This time, you find BB's speech so stirring that you have to use the restroom before it begins. New banners and plaques are all over your workplace. They show pictures of eagles and mountain climbers, and they talk about teamwork and empowerment. They read better after a few scotches. That reminds you that you need to clear out your file cabinet to make room for the brandy. You and your team begin to code. But you rapidly discover that the design is lacking in some significant areas. Actually, it's lacking any significance at all. You convene a design session in one of the conference rooms to try to work through some of the nastier problems. But your boss catches you at it and disbands the meeting, saying, "The design phase is over. The only allowable activity is coding. Now get back to it."   ****   The code generated by Dandelion is really hideous. It turns out that you and your team were using association and aggregation the wrong way, after all. All the generated code has to be edited to correct these flaws. Editing this code is extremely difficult because it has been instrumented with ugly comment blocks that have special syntax that Dandelion needs in order to keep the diagrams in sync with the code. If you accidentally alter one of these comments, the diagrams will be regenerated incorrectly. It turns out that "Round the Horn Engineering" requires an awful lot of effort. The more you try to keep the code compatible with Dandelion, the more errors Dandelion generates. In the end, you give up and decide to keep the diagrams up to date manually. A second later, you decide that there's no point in keeping the diagrams up to date at all. Besides, who has time?   Your boss hires a consultant to build tools to count the number of lines of code that are being produced. He puts a big thermometer graph on the wall with the number 1,000,000 on the top. Every day, he extends the red line to show how many lines have been added. Three days after the thermometer appears on the wall, your boss stops you in the hall. "That graph isn't growing quickly enough. We need to have a million lines done by October 1." "We aren't even sh-sh-sure that the proshect will require a m-million linezh," you blather. "We have to have a million lines done by October 1," your boss reiterates. His points have grown again, and the Grecian formula he uses on them creates an aura of authority and competence. "Are you sure your comment blocks are big enough?" Then, in a flash of managerial insight, he says, "I have it! I want you to institute a new policy among the engineers. No line of code is to be longer than 20 characters. Any such line must be split into two or more preferably more. All existing code needs to be reworked to this standard. That'll get our line count up!"   You decide not to tell him that this will require two unscheduled work months. You decide not to tell him anything at all. You decide that intravenous injections of pure ethanol are the only solution. You make the appropriate arrangements. Hack, hack, hack, and hack. You and your team madly code away. By August 1, your boss, frowning at the thermometer on the wall, institutes a mandatory 50-hour workweek.   Hack, hack, hack, and hack. By September 1st, the thermometer is at 1.2 million lines and your boss asks you to write a report describing why you exceeded the coding budget by 20 percent. He institutes mandatory Saturdays and demands that the project be brought back down to a million lines. You start a campaign of remerging lines. Hack, hack, hack, and hack. Tempers are flaring; people are quitting; QA is raining trouble reports down on you. Customers are demanding installation and user manuals; salespeople are demanding advance demonstrations for special customers; the requirements document is still thrashing, the marketing folks are complaining that the product isn't anything like they specified, and the liquor store won't accept your credit card anymore. Something has to give.    On September 15, BB calls a meeting. As he enters the room, his points are emitting clouds of steam. When he speaks, the bass overtones of his carefully manicured voice cause the pit of your stomach to roll over. "The QA manager has told me that this project has less than 50 percent of the required features implemented. He has also informed me that the system crashes all the time, yields wrong results, and is hideously slow. He has also complained that he cannot keep up with the continuous train of daily releases, each more buggy than the last!" He stops for a few seconds, visibly trying to compose himself. "The QA manager estimates that, at this rate of development, we won't be able to ship the product until December!" Actually, you think it's more like March, but you don't say anything. "December!" BB roars with such derision that people duck their heads as though he were pointing an assault rifle at them. "December is absolutely out of the question. Team leaders, I want new estimates on my desk in the morning. I am hereby mandating 65-hour work weeks until this project is complete. And it better be complete by November 1."   As he leaves the conference room, he is heard to mutter: "Empowermentbah!" * * * Your boss is bald; his points are mounted on BB's wall. The fluorescent lights reflecting off his pate momentarily dazzle you. "Do you have anything to drink?" he asks. Having just finished your last bottle of Boone's Farm, you pull a bottle of Thunderbird from your bookshelf and pour it into his coffee mug. "What's it going to take to get this project done? " he asks. "We need to freeze the requirements, analyze them, design them, and then implement them," you say callously. "By November 1?" your boss exclaims incredulously. "No way! Just get back to coding the damned thing." He storms out, scratching his vacant head.   A few days later, you find that your boss has been transferred to the corporate research division. Turnover has skyrocketed. Customers, informed at the last minute that their orders cannot be fulfilled on time, have begun to cancel their orders. Marketing is re-evaluating whether this product aligns with the overall goals of the company. Memos fly, heads roll, policies change, and things are, overall, pretty grim. Finally, by March, after far too many sixty-five hour weeks, a very shaky version of the software is ready. In the field, bug-discovery rates are high, and the technical support staff are at their wits' end, trying to cope with the complaints and demands of the irate customers. Nobody is happy.   In April, BB decides to buy his way out of the problem by licensing a product produced by Rupert Industries and redistributing it. The customers are mollified, the marketing folks are smug, and you are laid off.     Rupert Industries: Project Alpha   Your name is Robert. The date is January 3, 2001. The quiet hours spent with your family this holiday have left you refreshed and ready for work. You are sitting in a conference room with your team of professionals. The manager of the division called the meeting. "We have some ideas for a new project," says the division manager. Call him Russ. He is a high-strung British chap with more energy than a fusion reactor. He is ambitious and driven but understands the value of a team. Russ describes the essence of the new market opportunity the company has identified and introduces you to Jane, the marketing manager, who is responsible for defining the products that will address it. Addressing you, Jane says, "We'd like to start defining our first product offering as soon as possible. When can you and your team meet with me?" You reply, "We'll be done with the current iteration of our project this Friday. We can spare a few hours for you between now and then. After that, we'll take a few people from the team and dedicate them to you. We'll begin hiring their replacements and the new people for your team immediately." "Great," says Russ, "but I want you to understand that it is critical that we have something to exhibit at the trade show coming up this July. If we can't be there with something significant, we'll lose the opportunity."   "I understand," you reply. "I don't yet know what it is that you have in mind, but I'm sure we can have something by July. I just can't tell you what that something will be right now. In any case, you and Jane are going to have complete control over what we developers do, so you can rest assured that by July, you'll have the most important things that can be accomplished in that time ready to exhibit."   Russ nods in satisfaction. He knows how this works. Your team has always kept him advised and allowed him to steer their development. He has the utmost confidence that your team will work on the most important things first and will produce a high-quality product.   * * *   "So, Robert," says Jane at their first meeting, "How does your team feel about being split up?" "We'll miss working with each other," you answer, "but some of us were getting pretty tired of that last project and are looking forward to a change. So, what are you people cooking up?" Jane beams. "You know how much trouble our customers currently have . . ." And she spends a half hour or so describing the problem and possible solution. "OK, wait a second" you respond. "I need to be clear about this." And so you and Jane talk about how this system might work. Some of her ideas aren't fully formed. You suggest possible solutions. She likes some of them. You continue discussing.   During the discussion, as each new topic is addressed, Jane writes user story cards. Each card represents something that the new system has to do. The cards accumulate on the table and are spread out in front of you. Both you and Jane point at them, pick them up, and make notes on them as you discuss the stories. The cards are powerful mnemonic devices that you can use to represent complex ideas that are barely formed.   At the end of the meeting, you say, "OK, I've got a general idea of what you want. I'm going to talk to the team about it. I imagine they'll want to run some experiments with various database structures and presentation formats. Next time we meet, it'll be as a group, and we'll start identifying the most important features of the system."   A week later, your nascent team meets with Jane. They spread the existing user story cards out on the table and begin to get into some of the details of the system. The meeting is very dynamic. Jane presents the stories in the order of their importance. There is much discussion about each one. The developers are concerned about keeping the stories small enough to estimate and test. So they continually ask Jane to split one story into several smaller stories. Jane is concerned that each story have a clear business value and priority, so as she splits them, she makes sure that this stays true.   The stories accumulate on the table. Jane writes them, but the developers make notes on them as needed. Nobody tries to capture everything that is said; the cards are not meant to capture everything but are simply reminders of the conversation.   As the developers become more comfortable with the stories, they begin writing estimates on them. These estimates are crude and budgetary, but they give Jane an idea of what the story will cost.   At the end of the meeting, it is clear that many more stories could be discussed. It is also clear that the most important stories have been addressed and that they represent several months worth of work. Jane closes the meeting by taking the cards with her and promising to have a proposal for the first release in the morning.   * * *   The next morning, you reconvene the meeting. Jane chooses five cards and places them on the table. "According to your estimates, these cards represent about one perfect team-week's worth of work. The last iteration of the previous project managed to get one perfect team-week done in 3 real weeks. If we can get these five stories done in 3 weeks, we'll be able to demonstrate them to Russ. That will make him feel very comfortable about our progress." Jane is pushing it. The sheepish look on her face lets you know that she knows it too. You reply, "Jane, this is a new team, working on a new project. It's a bit presumptuous to expect that our velocity will be the same as the previous team's. However, I met with the team yesterday afternoon, and we all agreed that our initial velocity should, in fact, be set to one perfectweek for every 3 real-weeks. So you've lucked out on this one." "Just remember," you continue, "that the story estimates and the story velocity are very tentative at this point. We'll learn more when we plan the iteration and even more when we implement it."   Jane looks over her glasses at you as if to say "Who's the boss around here, anyway?" and then smiles and says, "Yeah, don't worry. I know the drill by now."Jane then puts 15 more cards on the table. She says, "If we can get all these cards done by the end of March, we can turn the system over to our beta test customers. And we'll get good feedback from them."   You reply, "OK, so we've got our first iteration defined, and we have the stories for the next three iterations after that. These four iterations will make our first release."   "So," says Jane, can you really do these five stories in the next 3 weeks?" "I don't know for sure, Jane," you reply. "Let's break them down into tasks and see what we get."   So Jane, you, and your team spend the next several hours taking each of the five stories that Jane chose for the first iteration and breaking them down into small tasks. The developers quickly realize that some of the tasks can be shared between stories and that other tasks have commonalities that can probably be taken advantage of. It is clear that potential designs are popping into the developers' heads. From time to time, they form little discussion knots and scribble UML diagrams on some cards.   Soon, the whiteboard is filled with the tasks that, once completed, will implement the five stories for this iteration. You start the sign-up process by saying, "OK, let's sign up for these tasks." "I'll take the initial database generation." Says Pete. "That's what I did on the last project, and this doesn't look very different. I estimate it at two of my perfect workdays." "OK, well, then, I'll take the login screen," says Joe. "Aw, darn," says Elaine, the junior member of the team, "I've never done a GUI, and kinda wanted to try that one."   "Ah, the impatience of youth," Joe says sagely, with a wink in your direction. "You can assist me with it, young Jedi." To Jane: "I think it'll take me about three of my perfect workdays."   One by one, the developers sign up for tasks and estimate them in terms of their own perfect workdays. Both you and Jane know that it is best to let the developers volunteer for tasks than to assign the tasks to them. You also know full well that you daren't challenge any of the developers' estimates. You know these people, and you trust them. You know that they are going to do the very best they can.   The developers know that they can't sign up for more perfect workdays than they finished in the last iteration they worked on. Once each developer has filled his or her schedule for the iteration, they stop signing up for tasks.   Eventually, all the developers have stopped signing up for tasks. But, of course, tasks are still left on the board.   "I was worried that that might happen," you say, "OK, there's only one thing to do, Jane. We've got too much to do in this iteration. What stories or tasks can we remove?" Jane sighs. She knows that this is the only option. Working overtime at the beginning of a project is insane, and projects where she's tried it have not fared well.   So Jane starts to remove the least-important functionality. "Well, we really don't need the login screen just yet. We can simply start the system in the logged-in state." "Rats!" cries Elaine. "I really wanted to do that." "Patience, grasshopper." says Joe. "Those who wait for the bees to leave the hive will not have lips too swollen to relish the honey." Elaine looks confused. Everyone looks confused. "So . . .," Jane continues, "I think we can also do away with . . ." And so, bit by bit, the list of tasks shrinks. Developers who lose a task sign up for one of the remaining ones.   The negotiation is not painless. Several times, Jane exhibits obvious frustration and impatience. Once, when tensions are especially high, Elaine volunteers, "I'll work extra hard to make up some of the missing time." You are about to correct her when, fortunately, Joe looks her in the eye and says, "When once you proceed down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny."   In the end, an iteration acceptable to Jane is reached. It's not what Jane wanted. Indeed, it is significantly less. But it's something the team feels that can be achieved in the next 3 weeks.   And, after all, it still addresses the most important things that Jane wanted in the iteration. "So, Jane," you say when things had quieted down a bit, "when can we expect acceptance tests from you?" Jane sighs. This is the other side of the coin. For every story the development team implements,   Jane must supply a suite of acceptance tests that prove that it works. And the team needs these long before the end of the iteration, since they will certainly point out differences in the way Jane and the developers imagine the system's behaviour.   "I'll get you some example test scripts today," Jane promises. "I'll add to them every day after that. You'll have the entire suite by the middle of the iteration."   * * *   The iteration begins on Monday morning with a flurry of Class, Responsibilities, Collaborators sessions. By midmorning, all the developers have assembled into pairs and are rapidly coding away. "And now, my young apprentice," Joe says to Elaine, "you shall learn the mysteries of test-first design!"   "Wow, that sounds pretty rad," Elaine replies. "How do you do it?" Joe beams. It's clear that he has been anticipating this moment. "OK, what does the code do right now?" "Huh?" replied Elaine, "It doesn't do anything at all; there is no code."   "So, consider our task; can you think of something the code should do?" "Sure," Elaine said with youthful assurance, "First, it should connect to the database." "And thereupon, what must needs be required to connecteth the database?" "You sure talk weird," laughed Elaine. "I think we'd have to get the database object from some registry and call the Connect() method. "Ah, astute young wizard. Thou perceives correctly that we requireth an object within which we can cacheth the database object." "Is 'cacheth' really a word?" "It is when I say it! So, what test can we write that we know the database registry should pass?" Elaine sighs. She knows she'll just have to play along. "We should be able to create a database object and pass it to the registry in a Store() method. And then we should be able to pull it out of the registry with a Get() method and make sure it's the same object." "Oh, well said, my prepubescent sprite!" "Hay!" "So, now, let's write a test function that proves your case." "But shouldn't we write the database object and registry object first?" "Ah, you've much to learn, my young impatient one. Just write the test first." "But it won't even compile!" "Are you sure? What if it did?" "Uh . . ." "Just write the test, Elaine. Trust me." And so Joe, Elaine, and all the other developers began to code their tasks, one test case at a time. The room in which they worked was abuzz with the conversations between the pairs. The murmur was punctuated by an occasional high five when a pair managed to finish a task or a difficult test case.   As development proceeded, the developers changed partners once or twice a day. Each developer got to see what all the others were doing, and so knowledge of the code spread generally throughout the team.   Whenever a pair finished something significant whether a whole task or simply an important part of a task they integrated what they had with the rest of the system. Thus, the code base grew daily, and integration difficulties were minimized.   The developers communicated with Jane on a daily basis. They'd go to her whenever they had a question about the functionality of the system or the interpretation of an acceptance test case.   Jane, good as her word, supplied the team with a steady stream of acceptance test scripts. The team read these carefully and thereby gained a much better understanding of what Jane expected the system to do. By the beginning of the second week, there was enough functionality to demonstrate to Jane. She watched eagerly as the demonstration passed test case after test case. "This is really cool," Jane said as the demonstration finally ended. "But this doesn't seem like one-third of the tasks. Is your velocity slower than anticipated?"   You grimace. You'd been waiting for a good time to mention this to Jane but now she was forcing the issue. "Yes, unfortunately, we are going more slowly than we had expected. The new application server we are using is turning out to be a pain to configure. Also, it takes forever to reboot, and we have to reboot it whenever we make even the slightest change to its configuration."   Jane eyes you with suspicion. The stress of last Monday's negotiations had still not entirely dissipated. She says, "And what does this mean to our schedule? We can't slip it again, we just can't. Russ will have a fit! He'll haul us all into the woodshed and ream us some new ones."   You look Jane right in the eyes. There's no pleasant way to give someone news like this. So you just blurt out, "Look, if things keep going like they're going, we're not going to be done with everything by next Friday. Now it's possible that we'll figure out a way to go faster. But, frankly, I wouldn't depend on that. You should start thinking about one or two tasks that could be removed from the iteration without ruining the demonstration for Russ. Come hell or high water, we are going to give that demonstration on Friday, and I don't think you want us to choose which tasks to omit."   "Aw forchrisakes!" Jane barely manages to stifle yelling that last word as she stalks away, shaking her head. Not for the first time, you say to yourself, "Nobody ever promised me project management would be easy." You are pretty sure it won't be the last time, either.   Actually, things went a bit better than you had hoped. The team did, in fact, have to drop one task from the iteration, but Jane had chosen wisely, and the demonstration for Russ went without a hitch. Russ was not impressed with the progress, but neither was he dismayed. He simply said, "This is pretty good. But remember, we have to be able to demonstrate this system at the trade show in July, and at this rate, it doesn't look like you'll have all that much to show." Jane, whose attitude had improved dramatically with the completion of the iteration, responded to Russ by saying, "Russ, this team is working hard, and well. When July comes around, I am confident that we'll have something significant to demonstrate. It won't be everything, and some of it may be smoke and mirrors, but we'll have something."   Painful though the last iteration was, it had calibrated your velocity numbers. The next iteration went much better. Not because your team got more done than in the last iteration but simply because the team didn't have to remove any tasks or stories in the middle of the iteration.   By the start of the fourth iteration, a natural rhythm has been established. Jane, you, and the team know exactly what to expect from one another. The team is running hard, but the pace is sustainable. You are confident that the team can keep up this pace for a year or more.   The number of surprises in the schedule diminishes to near zero; however, the number of surprises in the requirements does not. Jane and Russ frequently look over the growing system and make recommendations or changes to the existing functionality. But all parties realize that these changes take time and must be scheduled. So the changes do not cause anyone's expectations to be violated. In March, there is a major demonstration of the system to the board of directors. The system is very limited and is not yet in a form good enough to take to the trade show, but progress is steady, and the board is reasonably impressed.   The second release goes even more smoothly than the first. By now, the team has figured out a way to automate Jane's acceptance test scripts. The team has also refactored the design of the system to the point that it is really easy to add new features and change old ones. The second release was done by the end of June and was taken to the trade show. It had less in it than Jane and Russ would have liked, but it did demonstrate the most important features of the system. Although customers at the trade show noticed that certain features were missing, they were very impressed overall. You, Russ, and Jane all returned from the trade show with smiles on your faces. You all felt as though this project was a winner.   Indeed, many months later, you are contacted by Rufus Inc. That company had been working on a system like this for its internal operations. Rufus has canceled the development of that system after a death-march project and is negotiating to license your technology for its environment.   Indeed, things are looking up!

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• Windows Phone 7 development: reading RSS feeds

  - by DigiMortal

  One limitation on Windows Phone 7 is related to System.Net namespace classes. There is no convenient way to read data from web. There is no WebClient class. There is no GetResponse() method – we have to do it all asynchronously because compact framework has limited set of classes we can use in our applications to communicate with internet. In this posting I will show you how to read RSS-feeds on Windows Phone 7. NB! This is my draft code and it may contain some design flaws and some questionable solutions. This code is intended to use as test-drive for Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools and I don’t suppose you are going to use this code in production environment. Current state of my RSS-reader Currently my RSS-reader for Windows Phone 7 is very simple, primitive and uses almost all defaults that come out-of-box with Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools. My first goal before going on with nicer user interface design was making RSS-reading work because instead of convenient classes from .NET Framework we have to use very limited classes from .NET Framework CE. This is why I took the reading of RSS-feeds as my first task. There are currently more things to solve regarding user-interface. As I am pretty new to all this Silverlight stuff I am not very sure if I can modify default controls easily or should I write my own controls that have better look and that work faster. The image on right shows you how my RSS-reader looks like right now. Upper side of screen is filled with list that shows headlines from this blog. The bottom part of screen is used to show description of selected posting. You can click on the image to see it in original size. In my next posting I will show you some improvements of my RSS-reader user interface that make it look nicer. But currently it is nice enough to make sure that RSS-feeds are read correctly. FeedItem class As this is most straight-forward part of the following code I will show you RSS-feed items class first. I think we have to stop on it because it is simple one. public class FeedItem {     public string Title { get; set; }     public string Description { get; set; }     public DateTime PublishDate { get; set; }     public List<string> Categories { get; set; }     public string Link { get; set; }       public FeedItem()     {         Categories = new List<string>();     } } RssClient RssClient takes feed URL and when asked it loads all items from feed and gives them back to caller through ItemsReceived event. Why it works this way? Because we can make responses only using asynchronous methods. I will show you in next section how to use this class. Although the code here is not very good but it works like expected. I will refactor this code later because it needs some more efforts and investigating. But let’s hope I find excellent solution. :) public class RssClient {     private readonly string _rssUrl;       public delegate void ItemsReceivedDelegate(RssClient client, IList<FeedItem> items);     public event ItemsReceivedDelegate ItemsReceived;       public RssClient(string rssUrl)     {         _rssUrl = rssUrl;     }       public void LoadItems()     {         var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(_rssUrl);         var result = (IAsyncResult)request.BeginGetResponse(ResponseCallback, request);     }       void ResponseCallback(IAsyncResult result)     {         var request = (HttpWebRequest)result.AsyncState;         var response = request.EndGetResponse(result);           var stream = response.GetResponseStream();         var reader = XmlReader.Create(stream);         var items = new List<FeedItem>(50);           FeedItem item = null;         var pointerMoved = false;           while (!reader.EOF)         {             if (pointerMoved)             {                 pointerMoved = false;             }             else             {                 if (!reader.Read())                     break;             }               var nodeName = reader.Name;             var nodeType = reader.NodeType;               if (nodeName == "item")             {                 if (nodeType == XmlNodeType.Element)                     item = new FeedItem();                 else if (nodeType == XmlNodeType.EndElement)                     if (item != null)                     {                         items.Add(item);                         item = null;                     }                   continue;             }               if (nodeType != XmlNodeType.Element)                 continue;               if (item == null)                 continue;               reader.MoveToContent();             var nodeValue = reader.ReadElementContentAsString();             // we just moved internal pointer             pointerMoved = true;               if (nodeName == "title")                 item.Title = nodeValue;             else if (nodeName == "description")                 item.Description =  Regex.Replace(nodeValue,@"<(.|\n)*?>",string.Empty);             else if (nodeName == "feedburner:origLink")                 item.Link = nodeValue;             else if (nodeName == "pubDate")             {                 if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(nodeValue))                     item.PublishDate = DateTime.Parse(nodeValue);             }             else if (nodeName == "category")                 item.Categories.Add(nodeValue);         }           if (ItemsReceived != null)             ItemsReceived(this, items);     } } This method is pretty long but it works. Now let’s try to use it in Windows Phone 7 application. Using RssClient And this is the fragment of code behing the main page of my application start screen. You can see how RssClient is initialized and how items are bound to list that shows them. public MainPage() {     InitializeComponent();       SupportedOrientations = SupportedPageOrientation.Portrait | SupportedPageOrientation.Landscape;     listBox1.Width = Width;       var rssClient = new RssClient("http://feedproxy.google.com/gunnarpeipman");     rssClient.ItemsReceived += new RssClient.ItemsReceivedDelegate(rssClient_ItemsReceived);     rssClient.LoadItems(); }   void rssClient_ItemsReceived(RssClient client, IList<FeedItem> items) {     Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(delegate()     {         listBox1.ItemsSource = items;     });            } Conclusion As you can see it was not very hard task to read RSS-feed and populate list with feed entries. Although we are not able to use more powerful classes that are part of full version on .NET Framework we can still live with limited set of classes that .NET Framework CE provides.

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• SL3/SL4 - Ado.Net Data Services Error during new DataServiceCollection<T>(queryResponse)

  - by Soulhuntre

  Hey all, I have two functions in a SL project (VS2010) that do almost exactly the same thing, yet one throws an error and the other does not. It seems to be related to the projections, but I am unsure about the best way to resolve. The function that works is... public void LoadAllChunksExpandAll(DataHelperReturnHandler handler, string orderby) { DataServiceCollection<CmsChunk> data = null; DataServiceQuery<CmsChunk> theQuery = _dataservice .CmsChunks .Expand("CmsItemState") .AddQueryOption("$orderby", orderby); theQuery.BeginExecute( delegate(IAsyncResult asyncResult) { _callback_dispatcher.BeginInvoke( () => { try { DataServiceQuery<CmsChunk> query = asyncResult.AsyncState as DataServiceQuery<CmsChunk>; if (query != null) { //create a tracked DataServiceCollection from the result of the asynchronous query. QueryOperationResponse<CmsChunk> queryResponse = query.EndExecute(asyncResult) as QueryOperationResponse<CmsChunk>; data = new DataServiceCollection<CmsChunk>(queryResponse); handler(data); } } catch { handler(data); } } ); }, theQuery ); } This compiles and runs as expected. A very, very similar function (shown below) fails... public void LoadAllPagesExpandAll(DataHelperReturnHandler handler, string orderby) { DataServiceCollection<CmsPage> data = null; DataServiceQuery<CmsPage> theQuery = _dataservice .CmsPages .Expand("CmsChildPages") .Expand("CmsParentPage") .Expand("CmsItemState") .AddQueryOption("$orderby", orderby); theQuery.BeginExecute( delegate(IAsyncResult asyncResult) { _callback_dispatcher.BeginInvoke( () => { try { DataServiceQuery<CmsPage> query = asyncResult.AsyncState as DataServiceQuery<CmsPage>; if (query != null) { //create a tracked DataServiceCollection from the result of the asynchronous query. QueryOperationResponse<CmsPage> queryResponse = query.EndExecute(asyncResult) as QueryOperationResponse<CmsPage>; data = new DataServiceCollection<CmsPage>(queryResponse); handler(data); } } catch { handler(data); } } ); }, theQuery ); } Clearly the issue is the Expand projections that involve a self referencing relationship (pages can contain other pages). This is under SL4 or SL3 using ADONETDataServices SL3 Update CTP3. I am open to any work around or pointers to goo information, a Google search for the error results in two hits, neither particularly helpful that I can decipher. The short error is "An item could not be added to the collection. When items in a DataServiceCollection are tracked by the DataServiceContext, new items cannot be added before items have been loaded into the collection." The full error is... System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException was caught Message=Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. StackTrace: at System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeMethodFast(IRuntimeMethodInfo method, Object target, Object[] arguments, SignatureStruct& sig, MethodAttributes methodAttributes, RuntimeType typeOwner) at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean skipVisibilityChecks) at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture) at System.Reflection.MethodBase.Invoke(Object obj, Object[] parameters) at System.Data.Services.Client.ClientType.ClientProperty.SetValue(Object instance, Object value, String propertyName, Boolean allowAdd) at System.Data.Services.Client.AtomMaterializer.ApplyItemsToCollection(AtomEntry entry, ClientProperty property, IEnumerable items, Uri nextLink, ProjectionPlan continuationPlan) at System.Data.Services.Client.AtomMaterializer.ApplyFeedToCollection(AtomEntry entry, ClientProperty property, AtomFeed feed, Boolean includeLinks) at System.Data.Services.Client.AtomMaterializer.MaterializeResolvedEntry(AtomEntry entry, Boolean includeLinks) at System.Data.Services.Client.AtomMaterializer.Materialize(AtomEntry entry, Type expectedEntryType, Boolean includeLinks) at System.Data.Services.Client.AtomMaterializer.DirectMaterializePlan(AtomMaterializer materializer, AtomEntry entry, Type expectedEntryType) at System.Data.Services.Client.AtomMaterializerInvoker.DirectMaterializePlan(Object materializer, Object entry, Type expectedEntryType) at System.Data.Services.Client.ProjectionPlan.Run(AtomMaterializer materializer, AtomEntry entry, Type expectedType) at System.Data.Services.Client.AtomMaterializer.Read() at System.Data.Services.Client.MaterializeAtom.MoveNextInternal() at System.Data.Services.Client.MaterializeAtom.MoveNext() at System.Linq.Enumerable.d_b11.MoveNext() at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceCollection1.InternalLoadCollection(IEnumerable1 items) at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceCollection1.StartTracking(DataServiceContext context, IEnumerable1 items, String entitySet, Func2 entityChanged, Func2 collectionChanged) at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceCollection1..ctor(DataServiceContext context, IEnumerable1 items, TrackingMode trackingMode, String entitySetName, Func2 entityChangedCallback, Func2 collectionChangedCallback) at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceCollection1..ctor(IEnumerable1 items) at Phinli.Dashboard.Silverlight.Helpers.DataHelper.<>c__DisplayClass44.<>c__DisplayClass46.<LoadAllPagesExpandAll>b__43() InnerException: System.InvalidOperationException Message=An item could not be added to the collection. When items in a DataServiceCollection are tracked by the DataServiceContext, new items cannot be added before items have been loaded into the collection. StackTrace: at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceCollection1.InsertItem(Int32 index, T item) at System.Collections.ObjectModel.Collection`1.Add(T item) InnerException: Thanks for any help!

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• Java Generics, JPA 2, J2EE, JSF 2, GWT, Ajax, Oracle's Java Strategies, Flex, iPhone, Agile ALM, Gra

  - by Kim Won

  Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 – India's Biggest Polyglot Conference and Workshops for IT Software Professionals Bangalore, April 9, 2010: The GIDS.Java Conference and Workshops has announced the complete program of over 50 sessions on the present and future of the Java language and VM, how they are evolving to meet the community's ever-changing needs, and some of the cutting-edge tools, technologies & techniques used for building robust enterprise Java applications today. The GIDs.Java track at Great Indian Developer Summit takes place 22 and 23 April 2010, at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. As one of the longest running independent developer conferences in India, GIDS.Java at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 is uniquely positioned to provide a blend of practical, pragmatic and immediately applicable knowledge and a glimpse of the future of technology. During 22 and 23 April 2010, GIDS.Java offers a multi-track conference, workshops, expo show floor, and networking opportunities. The first keynote at GIDS.Java "Pointy Haired Bosses and Pragmatic Programmers" is led by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam. He speaks about how each of us has a professional responsibility to be objective and make decisions that will help us and our teams be productive and deliver results. Venkat will pick on some fallacies, lay down facts, and discuss how to stay professional and objective in our daily efforts. The second keynote of the day explains the practical features that make the Cloud so interesting, and why everyone should start using it in their everyday life. Simone Brunozzi, Amazon Web Services Technology Evangelist, will detail technical examples, business details all mixed with a lot of Italian humor to ensure audience enjoy this talk without a single line of code. The third keynote of the day gives an exciting overview of directions in the Java space for Oracle, featuring concrete signs of Oracles heavy investment, a clear concise strategy overview, and deep dives into some of the most interesting pieces of technology being developed in the Java Platform Group today; such as JavaEE, JDK7, JavaFX, and our exciting new visual tools. Featuring demos by a Java evangelism team star, Simon Ritter, this talk takes you top to bottom in Java Technology. Featured talks at GID.Web include: Good, Bad, and Ugly of Java Generics, Venkat Subramaniam Pure Java Ajax: An Overview of GWT 2.0, Marty Hall How JPA 2.0 Makes a Good Thing Even Better, Mike Keith Building Enterprise RIAs with Adobe Flex and Java, Sujit Reddy G Integrated Ajax Support in JSF 2.0, Marty Hall Design Patterns in Java and Groovy, Venkat Subramaniam A Gentle Introduction to iPhone and Obj-C for Java Developers, Matthew McCullough Cloud Computing: Azure for Java Developers, Janakiram MSV Ajax Support in the Prototype JavaScript Library, Marty Hall First steps to IT Heaven Through the Cloud. Part III: .Java, Simone Brunozi Building Web 2.0 User Interfaces for Web Service Models using JSF, Frank Nimphius and Jobinesh P Acceptance Test Driven Development, John Tobin and Mohammed Mohsinali Architecting Your Java Applications for the Cloud, Praveen Srivatsa Effective Java, Venkat Subramaniam The Amazing Groovy Weight-loss Plan, Scott Davis Enterprise Modeling - from Conceptual Planning to Technical Blueprints, J Sripad Java Collections Renaissance, Donald Raab and Vlad Zakharov Power 7 and IBM J9VM, Himanshu Goyal A Whistle-stop Tour of Maven 3.0, Matthew McCullough Mass Volume Opportunities for Java Developers, Jouko Nuottila Emerging Technology Complex Event Processing, Duvvuri Srinivas Agile ALM for Distributed Development, Karthi Swaminathan Dim Sum Grails - A Sampler of Practical Non Database-Driven Grails Applications, Scott Davis Diagnosing Performance Bottlenecks in J2EE, Deepak Kaul Business Driven Identity Management, Suneet Agera Combining Java EE with OSGi using Eclipse Gemini, Mike Keith Workshop: Essence of Functional Programming, Venkat Subramaniam Workshop: Agile Development, Tools, and Teams and Scrum Certification, Stephen Forte Workshop: Cloud Computing Boot Camp on the Google App Engine, Matthew McCullough Workshop: Building Your First Amazon App, Simone Brunozzi Workshop: The 180-min AJAX and JSON Spike Class, Scott Davis Workshop: PHP + Adobe Flex = Killer RIA, Shyamprasad P Workshop: User Expereince Evaluation Model Walkthrough, Sanna Häiväläinen Workshop: Building Data Centric Applications using Adobe Flex and Java, Prashant Singh Workshop: Monetizing your Apps with PayPal X Payments Platform, Khurram Khan, Praveen Alavilli Sponsors of Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 include: Platinum sponsors Microsoft, Oracle Forum Nokia and Adobe; Gold sponsors Intel and SAP; Silver sponsors Quest Software, PayPal, Telerik and AMT. About Great Indian Developer Summit Great Indian Developer Summit is the gold standard for India's software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software and standards. Packed with premium knowledge, action plans and advise from been-there-done-it veterans, creators, and visionaries, the 2010 edition of Great Indian Developer Summit features focused sessions, case studies, workshops and power panels that will transform you into a force to reckon with. Featuring 3 co-located conferences: GIDS.NET, GIDS.Web, GIDS.Java and an exclusive day of in-depth tutorials - GIDS.Workshops, from 20 April to 24 April at the IISc campus in Bangalore. At GIDS you'll participate in hundreds of sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, engaging networking events, and the interact with the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/ A Saltmarch Media Press Release E: [email protected] Ph: +91 80 4005 1000

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• WCF AuthenticationService in IIS7 Error

  - by germandb

  I have a WCF Server running on IIS 7 using default application pool, with SSL activate, the services is installed in a SBS Server 2008. I implement client application services with wcf and SQL 2005 for setting the access control in my application. The application run under windows vista and is make with WPF. In my developer machine the application and the WCF services run well, the IIS i'm use for the trials is the local IIS 7 and the database is the SQL Server 2005 database hosting in my server. I'm using Visual Studio Project Designer to enable and configure client application services. using https://localhost/WcfServidorFundacion. When i'm change the authentication services location to https://WcfServices:5659/WcfServidorFundacion and recompile the application, the following error show up. Message: The web service returned the error status code: InternalServerError. Details of service failure: {"Message":" Error while processing your request ","StackTrace":"","ExceptionType":""} Stack Trace: en System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse() en System.Web.ClientServices.Providers.ProxyHelper.CreateWebRequestAndGetResponse(String serverUri, CookieContainer& cookies, String username, String connectionString, String connectionStringProvider, String[] paramNames, Object[] paramValues, Type returnType) InnerException: System.Net.WebException Message="Remote Server Error: (500) Interal Server Error." I can access the WCF service from the navigator using the url mentioned above and even make a webReference in my project. I make a capture of the response but I'cant post it because i don't have 10 reputation points I activate the error log in the IIS 7 server, and the result is a Warning in the ManagedPipilineHandler. I appreciate if any one can help me Errors & Warnings No.? Severity Event Module Name 132. view trace Warning -MODULE_SET_RESPONSE_ERROR_STATUS ModuleName ManagedPipelineHandler Notification 128 HttpStatus 500 HttpReason Internal Server Error HttpSubStatus 0 ErrorCode 0 ConfigExceptionInfo Notification EXECUTE_REQUEST_HANDLER ErrorCode La operación se ha completado correctamente. (0x0) Maybe this can help, is the web.config of my service <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!-- Nota: como alternativa para editar manualmente este archivo, puede utilizar la herramienta Administración de sitios web para configurar los valores de la aplicación. Utilice la opción Sitio Web->Configuración de Asp.Net en Visual Studio. Encontrará una lista completa de valores de configuración y comentarios en machine.config.comments, que se encuentra generalmente en \Windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.x\Config --> <configuration> <configSections> <sectionGroup name="system.web.extensions" type="System.Web.Configuration.SystemWebExtensionsSectionGroup, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"> <sectionGroup name="scripting" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingSectionGroup, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"> <section name="scriptResourceHandler" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingScriptResourceHandlerSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" /> <sectionGroup name="webServices" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingWebServicesSectionGroup, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"> <section name="jsonSerialization" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingJsonSerializationSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="Everywhere" /> <section name="profileService" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingProfileServiceSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" /> <section name="authenticationService" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingAuthenticationServiceSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" /> <section name="roleService" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingRoleServiceSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" /> </sectionGroup> </sectionGroup> </sectionGroup> </configSections> <appSettings /> <connectionStrings> <remove name="LocalMySqlServer" /> <remove name="LocalSqlServer" /> <add name="fundacionSelfAut" connectionString="Data Source=FUNDACIONSERVER/PRUEBAS;Initial Catalog=fundacion;User ID=wcfBaseDatos;Password=qwerty_2009;" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> </connectionStrings> <system.web> <profile enabled="true" defaultProvider="SqlProfileProvider"> <providers> <clear /> <add name="SqlProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider" connectionStringName="fundacionSelfAut" applicationName="fundafe" /> </providers> <properties> <add name="FirstName" type="String" /> <add name="LastName" type="String" /> <add name="PhoneNumber" type="String" /> </properties> </profile> <roleManager enabled="true" defaultProvider="SqlRoleProvider"> <providers> <clear /> <add name="SqlRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider" connectionStringName="fundacionSelfAut" applicationName="fundafe" /> </providers> </roleManager> <membership defaultProvider="SqlMembershipProvider"> <providers> <clear /> <add name="SqlMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider" connectionStringName="fundacionSelfAut" applicationName="fundafe" enablePasswordRetrieval="false" enablePasswordReset="false" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="true" requiresUniqueEmail="true" passwordFormat="Hashed" /> </providers> </membership> <authentication mode="Forms" /> <compilation debug="true" strict="false" explicit="true"> <assemblies> <add assembly="System.Core, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089" /> <add assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> </assemblies> </compilation> <!-- La sección <authentication> permite la configuración del modo de autenticación de seguridad utilizado por ASP.NET para identificar a un usuario entrante. --> <!-- La sección <customErrors> permite configurar las acciones que se deben llevar a cabo/cuando un error no controlado tiene lugar durante la ejecución de una solicitud. Específicamente, permite a los desarrolladores configurar páginas de error html que se mostrarán en lugar de un seguimiento de pila de errores. <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="GenericErrorPage.htm"> <error statusCode="403" redirect="NoAccess.htm" /> <error statusCode="404" redirect="FileNotFound.htm" /> </customErrors> --> <pages> <controls> <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> </controls> </pages> <httpHandlers> <remove verb="*" path="*.asmx" /> <add verb="*" path="*.asmx" validate="false" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <add verb="*" path="*_AppService.axd" validate="false" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <add verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" validate="false" /> </httpHandlers> <httpModules> <add name="ScriptModule" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> </httpModules> <sessionState timeout="40" /> </system.web> <system.codedom> <compilers> <compiler language="c#;cs;csharp" extension=".cs" warningLevel="4" type="Microsoft.CSharp.CSharpCodeProvider, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"> <providerOption name="CompilerVersion" value="v3.5" /> <providerOption name="WarnAsError" value="false" /> </compiler> </compilers> </system.codedom> <!-- La sección webServer del sistema es necesaria para ejecutar ASP.NET AJAX en Internet Information Services 7.0. Sin embargo, no es necesaria para la versión anterior de IIS. --> <system.webServer> <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" /> <modules> <add name="ScriptModule" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> </modules> <handlers> <remove name="WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated" /> <add name="ScriptHandlerFactory" verb="*" path="*.asmx" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <add name="ScriptHandlerFactoryAppServices" verb="*" path="*_AppService.axd" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <add name="ScriptResource" preCondition="integratedMode" verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> </handlers> <tracing> <traceFailedRequests> <add path="*"> <traceAreas> <add provider="ASP" verbosity="Verbose" /> <add provider="ASPNET" areas="Infrastructure,Module,Page,AppServices" verbosity="Verbose" /> <add provider="ISAPI Extension" verbosity="Verbose" /> <add provider="WWW Server" areas="Authentication,Security,Filter,StaticFile,CGI,Compression,Cache,RequestNotifications,Module" verbosity="Verbose" /> </traceAreas> <failureDefinitions statusCodes="401.3,500,403,404,405" /> </add> </traceFailedRequests> </tracing> <security> <authorization> <add accessType="Allow" users="germanbarbosa,informatica" /> </authorization> <authentication> <windowsAuthentication enabled="false" /> </authentication> </security> </system.webServer> <system.web.extensions> <scripting> <webServices> <authenticationService enabled="true" requireSSL="true" /> <profileService enabled="true" readAccessProperties="FirstName,LastName,PhoneNumber" /> <roleService enabled="true" /> </webServices> </scripting> </system.web.extensions> <system.serviceModel> <services> <!-- this enables the WCF AuthenticationService endpoint --> <service behaviorConfiguration="AppServiceBehaviors" name="System.Web.ApplicationServices.AuthenticationService"> <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="userHttps" bindingNamespace="http://asp.net/ApplicationServices/v200" contract="System.Web.ApplicationServices.AuthenticationService" /> </service> <!-- this enables the WCF RoleService endpoint --> <service behaviorConfiguration="AppServiceBehaviors" name="System.Web.ApplicationServices.RoleService"> <endpoint binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="userHttps" bindingNamespace="http://asp.net/ApplicationServices/v200" contract="System.Web.ApplicationServices.RoleService" /> </service> <!-- this enables the WCF ProfileService endpoint --> <service behaviorConfiguration="AppServiceBehaviors" name="System.Web.ApplicationServices.ProfileService"> <endpoint binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingNamespace="http://asp.net/ApplicationServices/v200" bindingConfiguration="userHttps" contract="System.Web.ApplicationServices.ProfileService" /> </service> </services> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <!-- Set up a binding that uses Username as the client credential type --> <binding name="userHttps"> <security mode="Transport"> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="AppServiceBehaviors"> <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="false" httpsGetEnabled="true" /> <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true" /> <serviceAuthorization principalPermissionMode="UseAspNetRoles" roleProviderName="SqlRoleProvider" /> <serviceCredentials> <userNameAuthentication userNamePasswordValidationMode="MembershipProvider" membershipProviderName="SqlMembershipProvider" /> </serviceCredentials> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" /> </system.serviceModel> </configuration>

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• Passing multiple POST parameters to Web API Controller Methods

  - by Rick Strahl

  ASP.NET Web API introduces a new API for creating REST APIs and making AJAX callbacks to the server. This new API provides a host of new great functionality that unifies many of the features of many of the various AJAX/REST APIs that Microsoft created before it - ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST specifically - and combines them into a whole more consistent API. Web API addresses many of the concerns that developers had with these older APIs, namely that it was very difficult to build consistent REST style resource APIs easily. While Web API provides many new features and makes many scenarios much easier, a lot of the focus has been on making it easier to build REST compliant APIs that are focused on resource based solutions and HTTP verbs. But  RPC style calls that are common with AJAX callbacks in Web applications, have gotten a lot less focus and there are a few scenarios that are not that obvious, especially if you're expecting Web API to provide functionality similar to ASP.NET AJAX style AJAX callbacks. RPC vs. 'Proper' REST RPC style HTTP calls mimic calling a method with parameters and returning a result. Rather than mapping explicit server side resources or 'nouns' RPC calls tend simply map a server side operation, passing in parameters and receiving a typed result where parameters and result values are marshaled over HTTP. Typically RPC calls - like SOAP calls - tend to always be POST operations rather than following HTTP conventions and using the GET/POST/PUT/DELETE etc. verbs to implicitly determine what operation needs to be fired. RPC might not be considered 'cool' anymore, but for typical private AJAX backend operations of a Web site I'd wager that a large percentage of use cases of Web API will fall towards RPC style calls rather than 'proper' REST style APIs. Web applications that have needs for things like live validation against data, filling data based on user inputs, handling small UI updates often don't lend themselves very well to limited HTTP verb usage. It might not be what the cool kids do, but I don't see RPC calls getting replaced by proper REST APIs any time soon.  Proper REST has its place - for 'real' API scenarios that manage and publish/share resources, but for more transactional operations RPC seems a better choice and much easier to implement than trying to shoehorn a boatload of endpoint methods into a few HTTP verbs. In any case Web API does a good job of providing both RPC abstraction as well as the HTTP Verb/REST abstraction. RPC works well out of the box, but there are some differences especially if you're coming from ASP.NET AJAX service or WCF Rest when it comes to multiple parameters. Action Routing for RPC Style Calls If you've looked at Web API demos you've probably seen a bunch of examples of how to create HTTP Verb based routing endpoints. Verb based routing essentially maps a controller and then uses HTTP verbs to map the methods that are called in response to HTTP requests. This works great for resource APIs but doesn't work so well when you have many operational methods in a single controller. HTTP Verb routing is limited to the few HTTP verbs available (plus separate method signatures) and - worse than that - you can't easily extend the controller with custom routes or action routing beyond that. Thankfully Web API also supports Action based routing which allows you create RPC style endpoints fairly easily:RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "AlbumRpcApiAction", routeTemplate: "albums/{action}/{title}", defaults: new { title = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "AlbumApi", action = "GetAblums" } ); This uses traditional MVC style {action} method routing which is different from the HTTP verb based routing you might have read a bunch about in conjunction with Web API. Action based routing like above lets you specify an end point method in a Web API controller either via the {action} parameter in the route string or via a default value for custom routes. Using routing you can pass multiple parameters either on the route itself or pass parameters on the query string, via ModelBinding or content value binding. For most common scenarios this actually works very well. As long as you are passing either a single complex type via a POST operation, or multiple simple types via query string or POST buffer, there's no issue. But if you need to pass multiple parameters as was easily done with WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX things are not so obvious. Web API has no issue allowing for single parameter like this:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(Album album) { return String.Format("{0} {1:d}", album.AlbumName, album.Entered); } There are actually two ways to call this endpoint: albums/PostAlbum Using the Model Binder with plain POST values In this mechanism you're sending plain urlencoded POST values to the server which the ModelBinder then maps the parameter. Each property value is matched to each matching POST value. This works similar to the way that MVC's  ModelBinder works. Here's how you can POST using the ModelBinder and jQuery:$.ajax( { url: "albums/PostAlbum", type: "POST", data: { AlbumName: "Dirty Deeds", Entered: "5/1/2012" }, success: function (result) { alert(result); }, error: function (xhr, status, p3, p4) { var err = "Error " + " " + status + " " + p3; if (xhr.responseText && xhr.responseText[0] == "{") err = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText).message; alert(err); } }); Here's what the POST data looks like for this request: The model binder and it's straight form based POST mechanism is great for posting data directly from HTML pages to model objects. It avoids having to do manual conversions for many operations and is a great boon for AJAX callback requests. Using Web API JSON Formatter The other option is to post data using a JSON string. The process for this is similar except that you create a JavaScript object and serialize it to JSON first.album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: new Date(1977,0,1) } $.ajax( { url: "albums/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify(album), success: function (result) { alert(result); } }); Here the data is sent using a JSON object rather than form data and the data is JSON encoded over the wire. The trace reveals that the data is sent using plain JSON (Source above), which is a little more efficient since there's no UrlEncoding that occurs. BTW, notice that WebAPI automatically deals with the date. I provided the date as a plain string, rather than a JavaScript date value and the Formatter and ModelBinder both automatically map the date propertly to the Entered DateTime property of the Album object. Passing multiple Parameters to a Web API Controller Single parameters work fine in either of these RPC scenarios and that's to be expected. ModelBinding always works against a single object because it maps a model. But what happens when you want to pass multiple parameters? Consider an API Controller method that has a signature like the following:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(Album album, string userToken) Here I'm asking to pass two objects to an RPC method. Is that possible? This used to be fairly straight forward either with WCF REST and ASP.NET AJAX ASMX services, but as far as I can tell this is not directly possible using a POST operation with WebAPI. There a few workarounds that you can use to make this work: Use both POST *and* QueryString Parameters in Conjunction If you have both complex and simple parameters, you can pass simple parameters on the query string. The above would actually work with: /album/PostAlbum?userToken=sekkritt but that's not always possible. In this example it might not be a good idea to pass a user token on the query string though. It also won't work if you need to pass multiple complex objects, since query string values do not support complex type mapping. They only work with simple types. Use a single Object that wraps the two Parameters If you go by service based architecture guidelines every service method should always pass and return a single value only. The input should wrap potentially multiple input parameters and the output should convey status as well as provide the result value. You typically have a xxxRequest and a xxxResponse class that wraps the inputs and outputs. Here's what this method might look like:public PostAlbumResponse PostAlbum(PostAlbumRequest request) { var album = request.Album; var userToken = request.UserToken; return new PostAlbumResponse() { IsSuccess = true, Result = String.Format("{0} {1:d} {2}", album.AlbumName, album.Entered,userToken) }; } with these support types:public class PostAlbumRequest { public Album Album { get; set; } public User User { get; set; } public string UserToken { get; set; } } public class PostAlbumResponse { public string Result { get; set; } public bool IsSuccess { get; set; } public string ErrorMessage { get; set; } }   To call this method you now have to assemble these objects on the client and send it up as JSON:var album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: "1/1/1977" } var user = { Name: "Rick" } var userToken = "sekkritt"; $.ajax( { url: "samples/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ Album: album, User: user, UserToken: userToken }), success: function (result) { alert(result.Result); } }); I assemble the individual types first and then combine them in the data: property of the $.ajax() call into the actual object passed to the server, that mimics the structure of PostAlbumRequest server class that has Album, User and UserToken properties. This works well enough but it gets tedious if you have to create Request and Response types for each method signature. If you have common parameters that are always passed (like you always pass an album or usertoken) you might be able to abstract this to use a single object that gets reused for all methods, but this gets confusing too: Overload a single 'parameter' too much and it becomes a nightmare to decipher what your method actual can use. Use JObject to parse multiple Property Values out of an Object If you recall, ASP.NET AJAX and WCF REST used a 'wrapper' object to make default AJAX calls. Rather than directly calling a service you always passed an object which contained properties for each parameter: { parm1: Value, parm2: Value2 } WCF REST/ASP.NET AJAX would then parse this top level property values and map them to the parameters of the endpoint method. This automatic type wrapping functionality is no longer available directly in Web API, but since Web API now uses JSON.NET for it's JSON serializer you can actually simulate that behavior with a little extra code. You can use the JObject class to receive a dynamic JSON result and then using the dynamic cast of JObject to walk through the child objects and even parse them into strongly typed objects. Here's how to do this on the API Controller end:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(JObject jsonData) { dynamic json = jsonData; JObject jalbum = json.Album; JObject juser = json.User; string token = json.UserToken; var album = jalbum.ToObject<Album>(); var user = juser.ToObject<User>(); return String.Format("{0} {1} {2}", album.AlbumName, user.Name, token); } This is clearly not as nice as having the parameters passed directly, but it works to allow you to pass multiple parameters and access them using Web API. JObject is JSON.NET's generic object container which sports a nice dynamic interface that allows you to walk through the object's properties using standard 'dot' object syntax. All you have to do is cast the object to dynamic to get access to the property interface of the JSON type. Additionally JObject also allows you to parse JObject instances into strongly typed objects, which enables us here to retrieve the two objects passed as parameters from this jquery code:var album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: "1/1/1977" } var user = { Name: "Rick" } var userToken = "sekkritt"; $.ajax( { url: "samples/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ Album: album, User: user, UserToken: userToken }), success: function (result) { alert(result); } }); Summary ASP.NET Web API brings many new features and many advantages over the older Microsoft AJAX and REST APIs, but realize that some things like passing multiple strongly typed object parameters will work a bit differently. It's not insurmountable, but just knowing what options are available to simulate this behavior is good to know. Now let me say here that it's probably not a good practice to pass a bunch of parameters to an API call. Ideally APIs should be closely factored to accept single parameters or a single content parameter at least along with some identifier parameters that can be passed on the querystring. But saying that doesn't mean that occasionally you don't run into a situation where you have the need to pass several objects to the server and all three of the options I mentioned might have merit in different situations. For now I'm sure the question of how to pass multiple parameters will come up quite a bit from people migrating WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX code to Web API. At least there are options available to make it work.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   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); })();

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• Android never receives UDP packet

  - by Quandary

  The below code results in a timeout. It works fine on non-Android Java. What's the matter? //@Override public static void run() { //System.out.println ( "Local Machine IP : "+addrStr.toString ( ) ) ; HelloWorldActivity.tv.setText("Trace 1"); try { // Retrieve the ServerName InetAddress serverAddr; //= InetAddress.getByName(Server.SERVERIP); InetAddress ias[] = InetAddress.getAllByName(Server.SERVERNAME); serverAddr = ias[0]; Log.d("UDP", "C: Connecting..."); /* Create new UDP-Socket */ DatagramSocket socket = new DatagramSocket(); /* Prepare some data to be sent. */ String strQuery="ÿÿÿÿgetservers"+" "+Server.iProtocol+" "+"'all'"; Log.d("UDP", strQuery); //byte[] buf = ("ÿÿÿÿgetservers 68 'all'").getBytes(); byte[] buf = strQuery.getBytes(); /* Create UDP-packet with * data & destination(url+port) */ DatagramPacket packet = new DatagramPacket(buf, buf.length, serverAddr, Server.SERVERPORT); Log.d("UDP", "C: Sending: '" + new String(buf) + "'"); /* Send out the packet */ socket.setSoTimeout(5000); socket.send(packet); Log.d("UDP", "C: Sent."); Log.d("UDP", "C: Done."); // http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2917 byte[] buffer= new byte[1024*100]; DatagramPacket receivePacket = new DatagramPacket(buffer, buffer.length); //, serverAddr, Server.SERVERPORT); socket.receive(receivePacket); HelloWorldActivity.tv.setText("TTT"); String x = new String(receivePacket.getData()); Log.d("UDP", "C: Received: '" + x + "'"); HelloWorldActivity.tv.setText(x); } catch (Exception e) { HelloWorldActivity.tv.setText(e.getMessage()); Log.e("UDP", "C: Error", e); } } public class Server { /* //public static java.lang.string SERVERIP; public static String SERVERNAME = "monster.idsoftware.com"; public static String SERVERIP = "192.246.40.56"; public static int SERVERPORT = 27950; public static int PROTOCOL = 68; */ //public static String SERVERNAME="monster.idsoftware.com"; public static String SERVERNAME="dpmaster.deathmask.net"; public static String SERVERIP="192.246.40.56"; public static int SERVERPORT=27950; //public static int iProtocol= 68; // Quake3 public static int iProtocol=71; // OpenArena } Android manifest: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <use-permission id="android.permission.READ_CONTACTS" /> <use-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_SETTINGS" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_CONTACTS" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.CALL_PHONE" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_GPS" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_MOCK_LOCATION" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_LOCATION" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_ASSISTED_GPS" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_CELL_ID" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.RECEIVE_SMS" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.VIBRATE" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WAKE_LOCK" /> <application android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="AAA New Application" > <activity android:name="HelloWorldActivity"> <intent-filter> <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN"/> <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER"/> </intent-filter> </activity> </application>

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• top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – June 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/wlscommunity OTNArchBeat? Free Virtual Developer Day: Oracle ADF and Oracle Fusion Middleware Development http://bit.ly/MxuNAg AMIS, Oracle & Java? Checklist veearts nu ook op iPad. @amis_services Mobile integratie met Oracle Fusion Middleware http://dld.bz/buwsM #OSB #SOA WhitehorsesWhiteblog: Troubleshoot JVM crashes of Weblogic: CompilerThread (http://bit.ly/KcGzZK) Jon petter hjulstad E-vita is now Apps Grid Specialized! ODTUG Fusion Middleware Sessions RT @OTNArchBeat: ODTUG Kscope12 - June 24-28 - San Antonio, TX http://bit.ly/LlWkNV OTNArchBeat? Free Event: Modern #Java Development, in/outside the Enterprise - May 30 - Redwood Shores, CA http://bit.ly/LfB79a ADF Community DE? Oracle Advanced ADF 11g Partner Workshop Düsseldorf /Germany (english) June 26-29, click here to see Nicolas Lorain? Best Practices for #JavaFX 2 Enterprise Applications (Part Two) http://buff.ly/Lk1DBn by Jim Weaver shay shmeltzer? #Oracle Developers in #Israel - don't miss the free #ADF workshop July 2nd - get hands-on with Oracle ADF -here OTNArchBeat? Java at JAXconf | Tori Wieldt http://bit.ly/LdoLS2 Anand Akela? #Oracle Customers and Partners – Get your free pass to @CloudExpo in New York, June 11 to 14, http://goo.gl/RpYFT <- Stop by booth #511 OracleSupport_WLS? Did you know that since 3/15/12 #WebLogic Server 12.1.1.0 is certified for production with JDK 7? http://bit.ly/IYJE0L Sharat? Highly useful #JavaFX best practices blog by @JavaFXpert More details here ADF EMG How to set up a productive ADF Dev Env - discussion started by @baigsorcl. Click here to Read and comment. OracleSupport_WLS Upcoming #webcast: Diagnosing #weblogic performance issues through #java thread dumps http://bit.ly/M4O9qF My Oracle Support? New to Oracle Support? - Webcast on Support Basics webcast May 22 10:30 Central Europe. Register @ http://bit.ly/J8o0WG Mohamad Afshar? Cloud Expo – Oracle Customers and Partners – get your free pass to Cloud Expo in New York, June 11 to 14, http://goo.gl/RpYFT OTNArchBeat Oracle VM 3.1 is here | @Ronenkofman http://bit.ly/JriWTq Oracle Exalogic? RT @D0uglasPhillips: ExalogicTV New Video Introducing Oracle Secure Global Desktop for #Exalogic!! http://bit.ly/nwkrCu OracleBlogs? Java EE6 and WebLogic YouTube video channels http://ow.ly/1jVcYJ Oracle WebLogic RT @aleftik: Excited to spend some time today playing around with the WebSockets SDK http://bit.ly/NoTtri WebLogic Community Java EE6 and WebLogic YouTube video channels http://wp.me/p1LMIb-h0 OracleSupport_WLS New tutorial! How to use the #JMS #API to create a message producer with #GlassFish and #NetBeans http://bit.ly/Juqjn JDeveloper & ADF? Tip when installing JDeveloper 11.1.2.2.0 version http://dlvr.it/1b48s1 WebLogic Community Middleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012 – HAPPY NEW YEAR! Click here to read WebLogicCommunity #opn #oracle#Specialization #opnaward Steven Davelaar? Improve performance of your ADF app using lazy, on-demand querying of detail view objects: Click here OracleBlogs? Middleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012 & HAPPY NEW YEAR! http://ow.ly/1kahzZ OracleSupport_WLS Upgrading from #weblogic 9.2.x to 10.3.x? http://bit.ly/Kqzl9N AMIS, Oracle & Java “@JDeveloper: Logout from an ADF application http://dlvr.it/1fQBnm” WebLogic Community UK OUG call for papers–your middleware success! Click here #UKOUG #soacommunity #OPN Whitehorses Whiteblog: Enterprise Manager: Manage your Fusion Middleware logfiles (http://bit.ly/KQlZkR) WebLogic Community? @Jphjulstad HI Jon, should we send Pizza when you go in production with your WebLogic 12c project? Whish you success! #WebLogicCommunity Sabine Leitner ADF Einsteigerworkshops je 2 Tage im Juni in HAM, BLN, HANN #Oracle #WLS http://bit.ly/LcOIzB @OracleWebLogic @OracleAppGrid@soacommunity Andreas Koop new post Java Heap Monitor in JDeveloper http://bit.ly/LgSk85 Sabine Leitner? #Oracle Kundentag mit Vorträgen von Sparkasse, Schufa, LBBW, Allianz über FMW & Exa Lösungen! 21.06. FRA http://bit.ly/JtwE3v @wlscommunity NetBeans Team RT @chadlung: Installing and configuring #NetBeans 7.1.2 and the #Java JDK 1.7 on OS X: http://www.giantflyingsaucer.com/blog/p=3760 #osx WebLogic Community Happy New Year #WeblogicCommunity thanks for the business! Time for a drink http://pic.twitter.com/K34KFbvH WebLogic Community UK OUG call for papers&ndash;your middleware success! http://wp.me/p1LMIb-gU WebLogic Community? Middleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012 - HAPPY NEW YEAR! http://wp.me/p1LMIb-h6 Oracle WebLogic? RT @wlscommunity: WebLogic World Record Two Processor Result with SPECjEnterprise2010 Benchmark Click here to read #weblogic #sunfire #li Marc? Relocate wlst script for all the logfiles in your domain @wlscommunity, http://tinyurl.com/btbjcco WebLogic Community WebLogic World Record Two Processor Result with SPECjEnterprise2010 Benchmark Click here #WebLogicCommunity #weblogic #sunfire Oracle WebLogic MIss a WebLogic Devcast webinar? Catch any of the replays in the series on-demand! #WebLogic #JavaEE #coherence http://bit.ly/LNGa4p JDeveloper & ADF? Bean DataControl - Edit table records http://dlvr.it/1ZWqCx Justin Kestelyn? Contents of "Virtual Developer Day: Java SE 7 and JavaFX 2.0" are now avail on demand; no reg http://tinyurl.com/78nxnyo Frank Nimphius? Preparing 12c new features for DOAG 2012 Development - June 14th in Bonn (http://development.doag.org) WebLogic Community? Middleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012&ndash;HAPPY NEW YEAR! http://wp.me/p1LMIb-he JDeveloper & ADF Placeholder Watermarks with ADF 11.1.2 http://dlvr.it/1ZWDc9 Oracle ACE Program? May edition #ACE newsletter now available online. http://bit.ly/LKA2de chriscmuir New blog post: Which JDeveloper is right for me? http://bit.ly/J8sj9e GlassFish? Transactional Interceptors in Java EE 7 - Request for feedback: Linda described how EJB's container-managed tr http://bit.ly/KKuGNJ OracleEnterpriseMgr Oracle Application Testing Suite 12.1 Debuts at StarEast 2012 http://ow.ly/aXcv8 #em12c JAX London First set of speaker session announced for #JAXLondon see: http://bit.ly/L0HSME OTNArchBeat? Oracle Cloud Conference: dates and locations worldwide http://bit.ly/JgNeID NetBeans Team? Video: Create and debug a TestNG test class in #NetBeans IDE: http://ow.ly/b7NEW NetBeans Team #NetBeans tip: Code Template for #Kohana #PHP Framework: http://ow.ly/aWIvY Robin? Started to use the #Oracle #WebLogic Server #Maven Plugin. Really awesome to install a complete #WLS with "mvn wls:install" !@wlscommunity OTNArchBeat? Free Event: Modern #Java Development, in/outside the Enterprise - May 30 - Redwood Shores, CA http://bit.ly/JIN9tf OracleBlogs WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter May 2012 http://ow.ly/1k5TeG Java Certification? Java SE 7 Fundamentals course now available On Demand. Watch a preview now: http://ow.ly/aWYgD Whitehorses Whiteblog: Native IO in WebLogic on Solaris 11 X64 (http://bit.ly/KGM4mp) NetBeans Team? Quick video of FindBugs Integration in #NetBeans IDE 7.2: http://ow.ly/aNece NetBeans Team #JavaFX Scene Builder Docs Updated for 2.2 and #NetBeans 7.2 dev builds: http://ow.ly/b7Nie Duncan Mills? New blog posting on implementing input field watermarks with ADF Faces 11.1.2 Click here #adf WebLogic Community? WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter May 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-h4 OracleBlogs? UK OUG call for papersyour middleware success! http://ow.ly/1jNs49 Nicolas Lorain? Java tip: Deploying #JavaFX apps to multiple environments - JavaWorld http://buff.ly/KDADvu Adam Bien? Java EE and How to Specify The Unconventional With Convention Over Configuration [Free Article]: The free http://bit.ly/JEUkUf Owen Hughes and team?#Oracle #Exalogic #Performance: What? How? Why? Click here GlassFish? SecuritEE in the Cloud: Java EE 7 and the Cloud theme continue to move full steam ahead. In a PaaS environment http://bit.ly/K2RPte JDeveloper & ADF? How to Align Managed Bean Scope and Bean Data Control in Oracle ADF http://dlvr.it/1dngxQ Andrejus Baranovskis Missing New Feature in JDev (11.1.2.2.0) - ADF Methods Security http://fb.me/1jQM1enls OracleSupport_WLS? Tutorial on managing #HTTP Sessions in a #Weblogic #Cluster http://bit.ly/JshESe Oracle WebLogic? ZeroTurnaround developer report: #Spring keeps getting heavier, and #Java EE keeps getting lighter http://bit.ly/JDmKy2 JDeveloper & ADF? How to Search in Views - Part 4 || Oracle ADF http://dlvr.it/1dpDjZ WebLogic Community Java Message Service with Java and Spring Framework on Oracle WebLogic; Webcast May 15th 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-gS Andreas Koop? new post ADF Bug or Feature? Non-Breaking Space outside required icon style http://bit.ly/KDZnUo Oracle WebLogic? Don't miss this month's WebLogic DevCast: WebLogic JMS and Spring JMS http://bit.ly/J6g2ST Tuesday May 15th 10:00am PT JDeveloper & ADF How To Disable SELECT COUNT Execution for ADF Table Rendering http://dlvr.it/1dqKH6 OracleSupport_WLS? #SSL and security has its own Information Center, http://bit.ly/LP8Vil for troubleshooting, install, config and more NetBeans Team? Featured #NetBeans plugin is @Codename_One for creating native apps for major mobile platforms: http://plugins.netbeans.org/ JDeveloper & ADF? Using JDeveloper HTTP Analyser to intercept/forward requests http://dlvr.it/1Yzl4J Nicolas Lorain? Create native looks for JavaFX applications: JavaFX-CSS-Themes · http://buff.ly/M0jel0 by Gregg Setzer Devoxx? Want to make the world a better place? Then get involved in Random Hacks of Kindness on June 2 - 3 in Belgium @ http://www.rhok.be #RHoK WebLogic Community top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – May 2012 Click here #WebLogicCommunity Michel Schildmeijer Oracle Traffic Director 11g http://lnkd.in/-mm3Vy Andrejus Baranovskis? Proactively Monitoring JDeveloper 11g IDE Heap Memory http://fb.me/16YZErPrx Arun Gupta? 80+ attendees building a #javaee6 application using NetBeans/WebLogic at Java Day, Istanbul fun times! http://pic.twitter.com/odY19daW A. Chatziantoniou? Just registered for the Oracle FMW Summer Camp in Lisbon. Looking forward to learn, meet friends and try to buy ice cream on the beach OTNArchBeat Another Myth Debunked: 200 Continuous Redeployments with WebLogic|@munz http://bit.ly/JiPyM7 Oracle WebLogic? Need to learn more on #WebLogic Server #JVM performance tuning? http://bit.ly/MN UxHx GlassFish? Dukes Choice Awards 2012 Nominations Are Open: 2012 Duke's Choice Award are open for nominations. These awards http://bit.ly/Ksk4U3 Justin Kestelyn? Major cloud-related announcements from Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd on June 6 http://bit.ly/KTJiII Nicolas Lorain Transparent Windows (Stage) with #JavaFX 2 : Adam Bien's Weblog http://j.mp/INgq8K WebLogic Community Web Services with JAX and Spring on WebLogic–Webcast May 30th 2012 #WebLogicCommunity #weblogic #opn JDeveloper & ADF Oracle ADF - How to work with Dates http://dlvr.it/1Y70zw OracleBlogs Web Services with JAX and Spring on WebLogicWebcast May 30th 2012 http://ow.ly/1k2WtO Adam Bien? Summer Java EE Workshops: 23.05, Amsterdam Airport Java EE Hacking, Without Airport. The dutch version of Airport http://bit.ly/JeP6hV JDeveloper & ADF ADF 11g: BC4J or EJB3. http://bit.ly/JVVFZF ADF EMG? Great discussion with JSF guru Andy Schwartz on the forum - 38 posts! Check it out: here Devoxx? Oracle (http://www.oracle.com ) joins Devoxx 2012 as the first Premium partner, welcome aboard! Nicolas Lorain Developing a Simple Todo Application using #JavaFX, #Java and #MongoDB- Part-1JavaBeat http://j.mp/IDGxLA Nicolas Lorain Preview of JavaFX 2.2 canvas feature > Harmonic Code: Death bitmaps could be beautiful... Part I http://buff.ly/KyAXg5 #JavaFX OTNArchBeat?? New York Coherence Special Interest Group (NYCSIG) - May 24 - NYC http://bit.ly/JzJcbT WebLogic Community iAS upgrade to WebLogic watch #C2B2 online seminar http://youtu.be/5m2CNUjBIGQ #WebLogicCommunity Ruth Collett? Join Oracle in #Joburg on May 21 for OTN Developer Day - sessions on #Java #JavaEE 6/7 and much more! http://bit.ly/IENwnD WebLogic Community? Sending out invitations to our advanced Fusion Middleware Summer Camps! Want to learn more register for the community Ruth Collett? Join @ArunGupta in Istanbul this Monday to hear the latest on #JavaEE 6/7 http://bit.ly/Je63cc GlassFish? NetBeans 7.2 Beta - Built for Speed, Deploy Apps to Oracle Cloud: NetBeans 7.2 Beta is now available. The http://bit.ly/LxMMTK Lucas Jellema My latest SlideShare upload : Java ain't scary - introducing Java to PL/SQ. here via @slideshare JDeveloper & ADF? #Developer #free#ADF training in #Scotland - June 13. More information: http://bit.ly/LbPLlf AMIS, Oracle & Java? AMIS behaalt als eerste in Nedeland de Oracle ADF specialisatie - Channelworld nieuwsChannelconnect: http://bit.ly/JzAcB4 WebLogic Community Web Services with JAX and Spring on WebLogic&ndash;Webcast May 30th 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-gX Nicolas Lorain?@ JavaFX-based SimpleDateFormat Demonstrator http://j.mp/KFCVOi #JavaFX via Dustin Marx Oracle Exalogic? Are you an Oracle partner? There's news on the Oracle Partner Network about #Exalogic specializations - http://bit.ly/Mt3ANY JDeveloper & ADF Shorter URL for your ADF application http://dlvr.it/1XqNLY OTNArchBeat? Bay Area Coherence Special Interest Group (BACSIG) Meeting June 7 http://bit.ly/JAa0Lx OTNArchBeat? Java EE 6 Sample Application on WebLogic 12c: Conference Planner | @arungupta http://bit.ly/LPvof4 JDeveloper & ADF? Excellent example of Oracle ADF - Google Maps/Earth integration http://dlvr.it/1cbc80 JDeveloper & ADF Setting Up JDeveloper's Embedded WLS for MySQL http://dlvr.it/1c4b8P JDeveloper & ADF? Solution for Sharing Global User Data in ADF BC http://dlvr.it/1cc7SJ Java? Java Magazine May/June #javaee #javafx #javame #openJDK #hotspot #wicket #lotsmore http://ow.ly/aX07v Oracle WebLogic? http://bit.ly/JxQsnS if you have trouble finding the right #patchset when doing an upgrade to your #weblogic server OracleEnterpriseMgr 15 minutes to go before we start our Application Testing Suite 12.1 webcast. http://bit.ly/JHyTEe Learn from the lead PM what's new. #em12c Sten Vesterli Eating your own dog food - Oracle support site finally in ADF: http://lnkd.in/s6hg_p Adam Bien Project: "Jenever" (=poison) checked-in with GIT:here CU at http://workshops.adam-bien.com. Thanks for attending! OTNArchBeat Web Service Development with NetBeans and Testing with WebLogic Admin Console | @munz http://bit.ly/JcWk34 Please feel free to send us your news! And add your blog to our SOA blog wiki

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• The Art of Productivity

  - by dwahlin

  Getting things done has always been a challenge regardless of gender, age, race, skill, or job position. No matter how hard some people try, they end up procrastinating tasks until the last minute. Some people simply focus better when they know they’re out of time and can’t procrastinate any longer. How many times have you put off working on a term paper in school until the very last minute? With only a few hours left your mental energy and focus seem to kick in to high gear especially as you realize that you either get the paper done now or risk failing. It’s amazing how a little pressure can turn into a motivator and allow our minds to focus on a given task. Some people seem to specialize in procrastinating just about everything they do while others tend to be the “doers” who get a lot done and ultimately rise up the ladder at work. What’s the difference between these types of people? Is it pure laziness or are other factors at play? I think that some people are certainly more motivated than others, but I also think a lot of it is based on the process that “doers” tend to follow - whether knowingly or unknowingly. While I’ve certainly fought battles with procrastination, I’ve always had a knack for being able to get a lot done in a relatively short amount of time. I think a lot of my “get it done” attitude goes back to the the strong work ethic my parents instilled in me at a young age. I remember my dad saying, “You need to learn to work hard!” when I was around 5 years old. I remember that moment specifically because I was on a tractor with him the first time I heard it while he was trying to move some large rocks into a pile. The tractor was big but so were the rocks and my dad had to balance the tractor perfectly so that it didn’t tip forward too far. It was challenging work and somewhat tedious but my dad finished the task and taught me a few important lessons along the way including persistence, the importance of having a skill, and getting the job done right without skimping along the way. In this post I’m going to list a few of the techniques and processes I follow that I hope may be beneficial to others. I blogged about the general concept back in 2009 but thought I’d share some updated information and lessons learned since then. Most of the ideas that follow came from learning and refining my daily work process over the years. However, since most of the ideas are common sense (at least in my opinion), I suspect they can be found in other productivity processes that are out there. Let’s start off with one of the most important yet simple tips: Start Each Day with a List. Start Each Day with a List What are you planning to get done today? Do you keep track of everything in your head or rely on your calendar? While most of us think that we’re pretty good at managing “to do” lists strictly in our head you might be surprised at how affective writing out lists can be. By writing out tasks you’re forced to focus on the most important tasks to accomplish that day, commit yourself to those tasks, and have an easy way to track what was supposed to get done and what actually got done. Start every morning by making a list of specific tasks that you want to accomplish throughout the day. I’ll even go so far as to fill in times when I’d like to work on tasks if I have a lot of meetings or other events tying up my calendar on a given day. I’m not a big fan of using paper since I type a lot faster than I write (plus I write like a 3rd grader according to my wife), so I use the Sticky Notes feature available in Windows. Here’s an example of yesterday’s sticky note: What do you add to your list? That’s the subject of the next tip. Focus on Small Tasks It’s no secret that focusing on small, manageable tasks is more effective than trying to focus on large and more vague tasks. When you make your list each morning only add tasks that you can accomplish within a given time period. For example, if I only have 30 minutes blocked out to work on an article I don’t list “Write Article”. If I do that I’ll end up wasting 30 minutes stressing about how I’m going to get the article done in 30 minutes and ultimately get nothing done. Instead, I’ll list something like “Write Introductory Paragraphs for Article”. The next day I may add, “Write first section of article” or something that’s small and manageable – something I’m confident that I can get done. You’ll find that once you’ve knocked out several smaller tasks it’s easy to continue completing others since you want to keep the momentum going. In addition to keeping my tasks focused and small, I also make a conscious effort to limit my list to 4 or 5 tasks initially. I’ve found that if I list more than 5 tasks I feel a bit overwhelmed which hurts my productivity. It’s easy to add additional tasks as you complete others and you get the added benefit of that confidence boost of knowing that you’re being productive and getting things done as you remove tasks and add others. Getting Started is the Hardest (Yet Easiest) Part I’ve always found that getting started is the hardest part and one of the biggest contributors to procrastination. Getting started working on tasks is a lot like getting a large rock pushed to the bottom of a hill. It’s difficult to get the rock rolling at first, but once you manage to get it rocking some it’s really easy to get it rolling on its way to the bottom. As an example, I’ve written 100s of articles for technical magazines over the years and have really struggled with the initial introductory paragraphs. Keep in mind that these are the paragraphs that don’t really add that much value (in my opinion anyway). They introduce the reader to the subject matter and nothing more. What a waste of time for me to sit there stressing about how to start the article. On more than one occasion I’ve spent more than an hour trying to come up with 2-3 paragraphs of text.  Talk about a productivity killer! Whether you’re struggling with a writing task, some code for a project, an email, or other tasks, jumping in without thinking too much is the best way to get started I’ve found. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have an overall plan when jumping into a task, but on some occasions you’ll find that if you simply jump into the task and stop worrying about doing everything perfectly that things will flow more smoothly. For my introductory paragraph problem I give myself 5 minutes to write out some general concepts about what I know the article will cover and then spend another 10-15 minutes going back and refining that information. That way I actually have some ideas to work with rather than a blank sheet of paper. If I still find myself struggling I’ll write the rest of the article first and then circle back to the introductory paragraphs once I’m done. To sum this tip up: Jump into a task without thinking too hard about it. It’s better to to get the rock at the top of the hill rocking some than doing nothing at all. You can always go back and refine your work.   Learn a Productivity Technique and Stick to It There are a lot of different productivity programs and seminars out there being sold by companies. I’ve always laughed at how much money people spend on some of these motivational programs/seminars because I think that being productive isn’t that hard if you create a re-useable set of steps and processes to follow. That’s not to say that some of these programs/seminars aren’t worth the money of course because I know they’ve definitely benefited some people that have a hard time getting things done and staying focused. One of the best productivity techniques I’ve ever learned is called the “Pomodoro Technique” and it’s completely free. This technique is an extremely simple way to manage your time without having to remember a bunch of steps, color coding mechanisms, or other processes. The technique was originally developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 80s and can be implemented with a simple timer. In a nutshell here’s how the technique works: Pick a task to work on Set the timer to 25 minutes and work on the task Once the timer rings record your time Take a 5 minute break Repeat the process Here’s why the technique works well for me: It forces me to focus on a single task for 25 minutes. In the past I had no time goal in mind and just worked aimlessly on a task until I got interrupted or bored. 25 minutes is a small enough chunk of time for me to stay focused. Any distractions that may come up have to wait until after the timer goes off. If the distraction is really important then I stop the timer and record my time up to that point. When the timer is running I act as if I only have 25 minutes total for the task (like you’re down to the last 25 minutes before turning in your term paper….frantically working to get it done) which helps me stay focused and turns into a “beat the clock” type of game. It’s actually kind of fun if you treat it that way and really helps me focus on a the task at hand. I automatically know how much time I’m spending on a given task (more on this later) by using this technique. I know that I have 5 minutes after each pomodoro (the 25 minute sprint) to waste on anything I’d like including visiting a website, stepping away from the computer, etc. which also helps me stay focused when the 25 minute timer is counting down. I use this technique so much that I decided to build a program for Windows 8 called Pomodoro Focus (I plan to blog about how it was built in a later post). It’s a Windows Store application that allows people to track tasks, productive time spent on tasks, interruption time experienced while working on a given task, and the number of pomodoros completed. If a time estimate is given when the task is initially created, Pomodoro Focus will also show the task completion percentage. I like it because it allows me to track my tasks, time spent on tasks (very useful in the consulting world), and even how much time I wasted on tasks (pressing the pause button while working on a task starts the interruption timer). I recently added a new feature that charts productive and interruption time for tasks since I wanted to see how productive I was from week to week and month to month. A few screenshots from the Pomodoro Focus app are shown next, I had a lot of fun building it and use it myself to as I work on tasks.   There are certainly many other productivity techniques and processes out there (and a slew of books describing them), but the Pomodoro Technique has been the simplest and most effective technique I’ve ever come across for staying focused and getting things done.   Persistence is Key Getting things done is great but one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in life is that persistence is key especially when you’re trying to get something done that at times seems insurmountable. Small tasks ultimately lead to larger tasks getting accomplished, however, it’s not all roses along the way as some of the smaller tasks may come with their own share of bumps and bruises that lead to discouragement about the end goal and whether or not it is worth achieving at all. I’ve been on several long-term projects over my career as a software developer (I have one personal project going right now that fits well here) and found that repeating, “Persistence is the key!” over and over to myself really helps. Not every project turns out to be successful, but if you don’t show persistence through the hard times you’ll never know if you succeeded or not. Likewise, if you don’t persistently stick to the process of creating a daily list, follow a productivity process, etc. then the odds of consistently staying productive aren’t good.   Track Your Time How much time do you actually spend working on various tasks? If you don’t currently track time spent answering emails, on phone calls, and working on various tasks then you might be surprised to find out that a task that you thought was going to take you 30 minutes ultimately ended up taking 2 hours. If you don’t track the time you spend working on tasks how can you expect to learn from your mistakes, optimize your time better, and become more productive? That’s another reason why I like the Pomodoro Technique – it makes it easy to stay focused on tasks while also tracking how much time I’m working on a given task.   Eliminate Distractions I blogged about this final tip several years ago but wanted to bring it up again. If you want to be productive (and ultimately successful at whatever you’re doing) then you can’t waste a lot of time playing games or on Twitter, Facebook, or other time sucking websites. If you see an article you’re interested in that has no relation at all to the tasks you’re trying to accomplish then bookmark it and read it when you have some spare time (such as during a pomodoro break). Fighting the temptation to check your friends’ status updates on Facebook? Resist the urge and realize how much those types of activities are hurting your productivity and taking away from your focus. I’ll admit that eliminating distractions is still tough for me personally and something I have to constantly battle. But, I’ve made a conscious decision to cut back on my visits and updates to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other sites. Sure, my Klout score has suffered as a result lately, but does anyone actually care about those types of scores aside from your online “friends” (few of whom you’ve actually met in person)? :-) Ultimately it comes down to self-discipline and how badly you want to be productive and successful in your career, life goals, hobbies, or whatever you’re working on. Rather than having your homepage take you to a time wasting news site, game site, social site, picture site, or others, how about adding something like the following as your homepage? Every time your browser opens you’ll see a personal message which helps keep you on the right track. You can download my ubber-sophisticated homepage here if interested. Summary Is there a single set of steps that if followed can ultimately lead to productivity? I don’t think so since one size has never fit all. Every person is different, works in their own unique way, and has their own set of motivators, distractions, and more. While I certainly don’t consider myself to be an expert on the subject of productivity, I do think that if you learn what steps work best for you and gradually refine them over time that you can come up with a personal productivity process that can serve you well. Productivity is definitely an “art” that anyone can learn with a little practice and persistence. You’ve seen some of the steps that I personally like to follow and I hope you find some of them useful in boosting your productivity. If you have others you use please leave a comment. I’m always looking for ways to improve.

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• Configuring a WCF Client to Use UserName Credentials On the Request and Check Certificate Credential

  - by AlEl

  I'm trying to use WCF to consume a web service provided by a third-party's Oracle Application Server. I pass a username and password in a UsernameToken as part of the request and as part of the response the web service returns a standard security tag in the header which includes a digest and signature. With my current setup, I successfully send a request to the server and the web service sends the expected response data back. However, when parsing the response WCF throws a MessageSecurityException, with an InnerException.Message of "Supporting token signatures not expected." My guess is that WCF wants me to configure it to handle the signature and verify it. I have a certificate from the third party that hosts the web service that I should be able to use to verify the signature, although I'm not sure if I'll need it. Here's a sample header from a response that makes WCF throw the exception: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"> <soap:Header> <wsse:Security soap:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd" xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <dsig:Signature xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#"> <dsig:SignedInfo> <dsig:CanonicalizationMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/xml-exc-c14n#"/> <dsig:SignatureMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#rsa-sha1"/> <dsig:Reference URI="#_51IUwNWRVvPOcz12pZHLNQ22"> <dsig:Transforms> <dsig:Transform Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/xml-exc-c14n#"/> </dsig:Transforms> <dsig:DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1"/> <dsig:DigestValue> [DigestValue here] </dsig:DigestValue> </dsig:Reference> <dsig:Reference URI="#_dI5j0EqxrVsj0e62J6vd6w22"> <dsig:Transforms> <dsig:Transform Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/xml-exc-c14n#"/> </dsig:Transforms> <dsig:DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1"/> <dsig:DigestValue> [DigestValue here] </dsig:DigestValue> </dsig:Reference> </dsig:SignedInfo> <dsig:SignatureValue> [Signature Value Here] </dsig:SignatureValue> <dsig:KeyInfo> <wsse:SecurityTokenReference xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <wsse:Reference URI="#BST-9nKWbrE4LRv6maqstrGuUQ22" ValueType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-x509-token-profile-1.0#X509v3"/> </wsse:SecurityTokenReference> </dsig:KeyInfo> </dsig:Signature> <wsse:BinarySecurityToken ValueType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-x509-token-profile-1.0#X509v3" EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" wsu:Id="BST-9nKWbrE4LRv6maqstrGuUQ22" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> [Security Token Here] </wsse:BinarySecurityToken> <wsu:Timestamp wsu:Id="_dI5j0EqxrVsj0e62J6vd6w22" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd" xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <wsu:Created>2010-05-26T18:46:30Z</wsu:Created> </wsu:Timestamp> </wsse:Security> </soap:Header> <soap:Body wsu:Id="_51IUwNWRVvPOcz12pZHLNQ22" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> [Body content here] </soap:Body> </soap:Envelope> My binding configuration looks like: <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="myBinding" closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00" allowCookies="false" bypassProxyOnLocal="false" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard" maxBufferSize="65536" maxBufferPoolSize="524288" maxReceivedMessageSize="65536" messageEncoding="Text" textEncoding="utf-8" transferMode="Buffered" useDefaultWebProxy="true"> <readerQuotas maxDepth="32" maxStringContentLength="8192" maxArrayLength="16384" maxBytesPerRead="4096" maxNameTableCharCount="16384" /> <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential"> <transport clientCredentialType="None" proxyCredentialType="None" realm="" /> <message clientCredentialType="UserName" algorithmSuite="Default" /> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> I think that basically what I have to do is configure WCF to use UserName client credentials in the request and Certificate client credentials in the response. I don't know how to do this though. I'm new at WCF, so I'm sorry if this is a bit of a dumb question. I've been trying to Google solutions, but there seem to be so many different ways to configure WCF that I'm getting overwhelmed. Thanks in advance!

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• Can't get JAX-WS binding customization to work

  - by Florian

  Hi! I'm trying to resolve a name clash in a wsdl2java mapping with CXF 2.2.6 The relevant wsdl snippets are: <types>... <xs:schema... <xs:element name="GetBPK"> <xs:complexType> <xs:sequence> <xs:element name="PersonInfo" type="szr:PersonInfoType" /> <xs:element name="BereichsKennung" type="xs:string" /> <xs:element name="VKZ" type="xs:string" /> <xs:element name="Target" type="szr:FremdBPKRequestType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" /> <xs:element name="ListMultiplePersons" type="xs:boolean" minOccurs="0" /> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> </xs:element> <xs:element name="GetBPKResponse"> <xs:complexType> <xs:sequence> <xs:element name="GetBPKReturn" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" /> <xs:element name="FremdBPK" type="szr:FremdBPKType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" /> <xs:element name="PersonInfo" type="szr:PersonInfoType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="5" /> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> </xs:element> </xs:schema> </types> <message name="GetBPKRequest"> <part name="parameters" element="szr:GetBPK" /> </message> <message name="GetBPKResponse"> <part name="parameters" element="szr:GetBPKResponse" /> </message> <binding... <operation name="GetBPK"> <wsdlsoap:operation soapAction="" /> <input name="GetBPKRequest"> <wsdlsoap:header message="szr:Header" part="SecurityHeader" use="literal" /> <wsdlsoap:body use="literal" /> </input> <output name="GetBPKResponse"> <wsdlsoap:body use="literal" /> </output> <fault name="SZRException"> <wsdlsoap:fault use="literal" name="SZRException" /> </fault> </operation> As you can see, the GetBPK operation takes a GetBPK as input and returns a GetBPKResponse as an output. Each element of both the GetBPK, as well as the GetBPKResponse type would be mapped to a method parameter in Java. Unfortunately both GetBPK, as well as the GetBPKResponse have an element with the name "PersonInfo", which results in a name clash. I'm trying to resolve that using a binding customization: <jaxws:bindings wsdlLocation="SZ2-aktuell.wsdl" xmlns:jaxws="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxws" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:jxb="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb" xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" xmlns:szr="urn:SZRServices"> <jaxws:bindings node="wsdl:definitions/wsdl:portType[@name='SZR']/wsdl:operation[@name='GetBPK']"> <!-- See page 116 of the JAX-WS specification version 2.2 from 10, Dec 2009 --> <jaxws:parameter part="wsdl:definitions/wsdl:message[@name='GetBPKResponse']/wsdl:part[@name='parameters']" childElementName="szr:PersonInfoType" name="PersonInfoParam" /> </jaxws:bindings> </jaxws:bindings> and call wsdl2java with the -b parameter. Unforunately, I still get the message: WSDLToJava Error: Parameter: personInfo already exists for method getBPK but of type at.enno.egovds.szr.PersonInfoType instead of java.util.List<at.enno.egovds.szr.PersonInfoType>. Use a JAXWS/JAXB binding customization to rename the parameter. I have tried several variants of the binding customization, and searched Google for hours, but unfortunately I cannot find a solution to my problem. I suspenct that the childElementName attribute is wrong, but I can't find an example of what would have to be set to make it work. Thanks in advance!

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• Flex actionscript extending DateChooser, events in calendar

  - by Nemi

  ExtendedDateChooser class is great solution for simple event calendar used in my flex project. You can find it if google for "Adding-Calendar-Event-Entries-to-the-Flex-DateChooser-Component" with a link of updated solution in comments of the post. I posted files below. Problem in that calendar is text events are missing when month is changed. Is there updateCompleted event in Actionscript just like in dateChooser flex component? Like in: <mx:DateChooser id="dc" updateCompleted="goThroughDateChooserCalendarLayoutAndSetEventsInCalendarAgain()"</mx> When scroll event is added, which is available in Actionscript, it gets dispatched but after updateDisplayList() is fired, so didn't manage to answer, why are calendar events erased? Any suggestions, what to add in code, maybe override some function? ExtendedDateChooserClass.mxml <?xml version='1.0' encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" xmlns:mycomp="cyberslingers.controls.*" layout="absolute" creationComplete="init()"> <mx:Script> <![CDATA[ import cyberslingers.controls.ExtendedDateChooser; import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent; import mx.rpc.events.FaultEvent; import mx.controls.Alert; public var mycal:ExtendedDateChooser = new ExtendedDateChooser(); // collection to hold date, data and label [Bindable] public var dateCollection:XMLList = new XMLList(); private function init():void { eventList.send(); } private function readCollection(event:ResultEvent):void { dateCollection = event.result.calendarevent; //Position and size the calendar mycal.width = 400; mycal.height = 400; //Add the data from the XML file to the calendar mycal.dateCollection = dateCollection; //Add the calendar to the canvas this.addChild(mycal); } private function readFaultHandler(event:FaultEvent):void { Alert.show(event.fault.message, "Could not load data"); } ]]> </mx:Script> <mx:HTTPService id="eventList" url="data.xml" resultFormat="e4x" result="readCollection(event);" fault="readFaultHandler(event);"/> </mx:Application> ExtendedDateChooser.as package cyberslingers.controls { import flash.events.Event; import flash.events.TextEvent; import mx.collections.ArrayCollection; import mx.controls.Alert; import mx.controls.CalendarLayout; import mx.controls.DateChooser; import mx.core.UITextField; import mx.events.FlexEvent; public class ExtendedDateChooser extends DateChooser { public function ExtendedDateChooser() { super(); this.addEventListener(TextEvent.LINK, linkHandler); this.addEventListener(FlexEvent.CREATION_COMPLETE, addEvents); } //datasource public var dateCollection:XMLList = new XMLList(); //-------------------------------------- // Add events //-------------------------------------- /** * Loop through calendar control and add event links * @param e */ private function addEvents(e:Event):void { // loop through all the calendar children for(var i:uint = 0; i < this.numChildren; i++) { var calendarObj:Object = this.getChildAt(i); // find the CalendarLayout object if(calendarObj.hasOwnProperty("className")) { if(calendarObj.className == "CalendarLayout") { var cal:CalendarLayout = CalendarLayout(calendarObj); // loop through all the CalendarLayout children for(var j:uint = 0; j < cal.numChildren; j++) { var dateLabel:Object = cal.getChildAt(j); // find all UITextFields if(dateLabel.hasOwnProperty("text")) { var day:UITextField = UITextField(dateLabel); var dayHTML:String = day.text; day.selectable = true; day.wordWrap = true; day.multiline = true; day.styleName = "EventLabel"; //TODO: passing date as string is not ideal, tough to validate //Make sure to add one to month since it is zero based var eventArray:Array = dateHelper((this.displayedMonth+1) + "/" + dateLabel.text + "/" + this.displayedYear); if(eventArray.length > 0) { for(var k:uint = 0; k < eventArray.length; k++) { dayHTML += "<br><A HREF='event:" + eventArray[k].data + "' TARGET=''>" + eventArray[k].label + "</A>"; } day.htmlText = dayHTML; } } } } } } } //-------------------------------------- // Events //-------------------------------------- /** * Handle clicking text link * @param e */ private function linkHandler(event:TextEvent):void { // What do we want to do when user clicks an entry? Alert.show("selected: " + event.text); } //-------------------------------------- // Helpers //-------------------------------------- /** * Build array of events for current date * @param string - current date * */ private function dateHelper(renderedDate:String):Array { var result:Array = new Array(); for(var i:uint = 0; i < dateCollection.length(); i++) { if(dateCollection[i].date == renderedDate) { result.push(dateCollection[i]); } } return result; } } } data.xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <rss> <calendarevent> <date>8/22/2009</date> <data>This is a test 1</data> <label>Stephens Test 1</label> </calendarevent> <calendarevent> <date>8/23/2009</date> <data>This is a test 2</data> <label>Stephens Test 2</label> </calendarevent> </rss>

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• IIRF reverse proxy problem

  - by Sergei

  Hi everyone, We have a java application ( Atlassian Bamboo) running on port 8085 on Windows 2003. It is accessile as http: //bamboo:8085. I am trying to setup reverse proxy for IIS6 using IIRF so content is accessible via http: //bamboo. It seems that I set it ip correctly, and I can retrieve Status page. This is how my IIRF.ini looks like: RewriteLog c:\temp\iirf RewriteLogLevel 2 StatusUrl /iirfStatus RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bambooi$ [I] #This setup works #ProxyPass ^/(.*)$ http://othersite/$1 #This does not ProxyPass ^/(.*)$ http://bamboo:8085/$1 However when I type in http: //bamboo in IE, I get 'page cannot be displayed ' message. FF does not return anything at all. I made Wireshark network dump, selected 'follow TCPstream' and it seems like correct page is being retrieved.Why cannot I see it then? I also noticed that I can retrieve http: //bamboo/favicon.ico so I must be very close to the solution.. This is the Wireshark output: GET / HTTP/1.1 Accept: image/gif, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, application/x-ms-application, application/x-ms-xbap, application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument, application/xaml+xml, */* Accept-Language: en-gb User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729) Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Host: bamboo Connection: Keep-Alive Cookie: JSESSIONID=wpsse0zyo4g5 HTTP/1.1 200 200 OK Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:19:46 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 Via: 1.1 DESTINATION_IP (IIRF 2.0) Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Transfer-Encoding: chunked <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <title>Dashboard</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <meta name="robots" content="all" /> <meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" /> <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" /> <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="-1" /> <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/grids/grids.css" /> <!--<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui/build/reset-fonts-grids/reset-fonts-grids.css" />--> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/styles/main.css" type="text/css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/styles/main2.css" type="text/css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/styles/global-static.css" type="text/css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/styles/widePlanList.css" type="text/css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/styles/forms.css" type="text/css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/styles/yui-support/yui-custom.css" type="text/css" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/s/1206/1/_/images/icons/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon"/> <link rel="icon" href="/s/1206/1/_/images/icons/favicon.png" type="image/png" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/styles/bamboo-tabs.css" type="text/css" /> <!-- Core YUI--> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/tabview/assets/tabview-core.css"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/tabview/assets/skins/sam/tabview-skin.css"> <script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/yahoo/yahoo-min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/event/event-min.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/dom/dom-min.js" ></script> <!--<script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/animation/animation.js" ></script>--> <!-- Container --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/container/container-min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/connection/connection-min.js"></script> <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/container/assets/container.css" /> <!-- Menu --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/menu/menu-min.js"></script> <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/menu/assets/menu.css" /> <!-- Tab view --> <!-- JavaScript Dependencies for Tabview: --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/element/element-beta-min.js"></script> <!-- Needed for old versions of the YUI --> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/styles/yui-support/tabview.css" type="text/css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/s/1206/1/_/styles/yui-support/round_tabs.css" type="text/css" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/tabview/tabview-min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-2.6.0/build/json/json-min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/yui-ext/yui-ext-nogrid.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/s/1206/1/_/scripts/bamboo.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> YAHOO.namespace('bamboo'); YAHOO.bamboo.tooltips = new Object(); YAHOO.bamboo.contextPath = ''; YAHOO.ext.UpdateManager.defaults.loadScripts = true; YAHOO.ext.UpdateManager.defaults.indicatorText = '<div class="loading-indicator">Currently loading...</div>'; YAHOO.ext.UpdateManager.defaults.timeout = 60; addUniversalOnload(addConfirmationToLinks); </script> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Bamboo RSS feed" href="/rss/createAllBuildsRssFeed.action?feedType=rssAll" /> </head> <body> <ul id="top"> <li id="skipNav"> <a href="#menu">Skip to navigation</a> </li> <li> <a href="#content">Skip to content</a> </li> </ul> <div id="nonFooter"> <div id="hd"> <div id="header"> <div id="logo"> <a href="/start.action"><img src="/images/bamboo_header_logo.gif" alt="Atlassian Bamboo" height="36" width="118" /></a> </div> <ul id="userOptions"> <li id="loginLink"> <a id="login" href="/userlogin!default.action?os_destination=%2Fstart.action">Log in</a> </li> <li id="signupLink"> <a id="signup" href="/signupUser!default.action">Signup</a> </li> <li id="helpLink"> <a id="help" href="http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BAMBOO">Help</a> </li> </ul> </div> <!-- END #header --> <div id="menu"> <ul> <li><a id="home" href="/start.action" title="Atlassian Bamboo" accesskey="H"> <u>H</u>ome</a></li> <li><a id="authors" href="/authors/gotoAuthorReport.action" accesskey="U">A<u>u</u>thors</a></li> <li><a id="reports" href="/reports/viewReport.action" accesskey="R"> <u>R</u>eports</a></li> </ul> </div> <!-- END #menu --> </div> <!-- END #hd --> <div id="bd"> <div id="content"> <h1>Header here</h1> <div class="topMarginned"> <div id='buildSummaryTabs' class='dashboardTab'> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> function initUI(){ var jtabs = new YAHOO.ext.TabPanel('buildSummaryTabs'); YAHOO.bamboo.tabPanel = jtabs; // Use setUrl for Ajax loading var tab3 = jtabs.addTab('allTab', "All Plans"); tab3.setUrl('/ajax/displayAllBuildSummaries.action', null, true); var tab4 = jtabs.addTab("currentTab", "Current Activity"); tab4.setUrl('/ajax/displayCurrentActivity.action', null, true); var handleTabChange = function(e, activePanel) { saveCookie('atlassian.bamboo.dashboard.tab.selected', activePanel.id, 365); }; jtabs.on('tabchange', handleTabChange); var selectedCookie = getCookieValue('atlassian.bamboo.dashboard.tab.selected'); if (jtabs.getTab(selectedCookie)) { jtabs.activate(selectedCookie); } else { jtabs.activate('allTab'); } } YAHOO.util.Event.onContentReady('buildSummaryTabs', initUI); </script> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> setTimeout( "window.location.reload()", 1800*1000 ); </script> <div class="clearer" ></div> </div> <!-- END #content --> </div> <!-- END #bd --> </div> <!-- END #nonFooter --> <div id="ft"> <div id="footer"> <p> Powered by <a href="http://www.atlassian.com/software/bamboo/">Atlassian Bamboo</a> version 2.2.1 build 1206 - <span title="15:59:44 17 Mar 2009">17 Mar 09</span> </p> <ul> <li class="first"> <a href="https://support.atlassian.com/secure/CreateIssue.jspa?pid=10060&issuetype=1">Report a problem</a> </li> <li> <a href="http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/CreateIssue.jspa?pid=11011&issuetype=4">Request a feature</a> </li> <li> <a href="http://forums.atlassian.com/forum.jspa?forumID=103">Contact Atlassian</a> </li> <li> <a href="/viewAdministrators.action">Contact Administrators</a> </li> </ul> </div> <!-- END #footer --> </div> <!-- END #ft -->

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, October 24, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, October 24, 2013Popular ReleasesX-tee.NET: X-tee.NET 1.0.4: Few code generation bug fixes.VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 32 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) This release has been tested with Visual Studio 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013, using TortoiseSVN 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8. It should also still work with Visual Studio 2005, but I couldn't find anyone to test it in VS2005. Build 32 (beta) changelogNew: Added Visual Studio 2013 support New: Added Visual Studio 2012 support New: Added SVN 1.8 support New: Added 'Ch...ABCat: ABCat v.2.0.1a: ?????????? ???????? ? ?????????? ?????? ???? ??? Win7. ????????? ?????? ????????? ?? ???????. ????? ?????, ???? ????? ???????? ????????? ?????????? ????????? "?? ??????? ????? ???????????? ?????????? ??????...", ?? ?????????? ??????? ? ?????????? ?????? Microsoft SQL Ce ?? ????????? ??????: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17876. ???????? ?????? x64 ??? x86 ? ??????????? ?? ?????? ???????????? ???????. ??? ??????? ????????? ?? ?????????? ?????? Entity Framework, ? ???? ...NB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module: NB_Store v2.3.8 Rel3: vv2.3.8 Rel3 updates the version number in the ManagerMenuDefault.xml. Simply update the version setting in the Back Office to 02.03.08 if you have already installed Rel2. v2.3.8 Is now DNN6 and DNN7 compatible NOTE: NB_Store v2.3.8 is NOT compatible with DNN5. SOURCE CODE : https://github.com/leedavi/NB_Store (Source code has been moved to GitHub, due to issues with codeplex SVN and the inability to move easily to GIT on codeplex)patterns & practices: Data Access Guidance: Data Access Guidance 2013: This is the 2013 release of Data Access Guidance. The documentation for this RI is also available on MSDN: Data Access for Highly-Scalable Solutions: Using SQL, NoSQL, and Polyglot Persistence: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn271399.aspxMedia Companion: Media Companion MC3.584b: IMDB changes fixed. Fixed* mc_com.exe - Fixed to using new profile entries. * Movie - fixed rename movie and folder if use foldername selected. * Movie - Alt Edit Movie, trailer url check if changed and confirm valid. * Movie - Fixed IMDB poster scraping * Movie - Fixed outline and Plot scraping, including removal of Hyperlink's. * Movie Poster refactoring, attempts to catch gdi+ errors Revision HistoryTerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v7.2 [Terraria Inventory Editor]: Added "Check for Update" button Hopefully fixed Windows XP issue You can now backspace in Item stack fieldsDirectXTex texture processing library: October 2013: October 21, 2013 Updated for Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 SDK RTM PremultiplyAlpha updated with new 'flags' parameter and to use sRGB correct blending Fixed colorspace conversion issue with DirectCompute compressor when compressing for BC7 SRGBSimple Injector: Simple Injector v2.3.6: This patch releases fixes one bug concerning resolving open generic types that contain nested generic type arguments. Nested generic types were handled incorrectly in certain cases. This affects RegisterOpenGeneric and RegisterDecorator. (work item 20332)Virtual Wifi Hotspot for Windows 7 & 8: Virtual Router Plus 2.6.0: Virtual Router Plus 2.6.0Fast YouTube Downloader: Fast YouTube Downloader 2.3.0: Fast YouTube DownloaderMagick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.7.101: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.7.1. Breaking changes: - Renamed Matrix classes: MatrixColor = ColorMatrix and MatrixConvolve = ConvolveMatrix. - Renamed Depth method with Channels parameter to BitDepth and changed the other method into a property.VidCoder: 1.5.9 Beta: Added Rip DVD and Rip Blu-ray AutoPlay actions for Windows: now you can have VidCoder start up and scan a disc when you insert it. Go to Start -> AutoPlay to set it up. Added error message for Windows XP users rather than letting it crash. Removed "quality" preset from list for QSV as it currently doesn't offer much improvement. Changed installer to ignore version number when copying files over. Should reduce the chances of a bug from me forgetting to increment a version number. Fixed ...MSBuild Extension Pack: October 2013: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack October 2013 release provides a collection of over 480 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GUI...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.49: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImageTeam.org links NEW: Added Support for "ImgNext.com" links NEW: Added Support for "HostUrImage.com" links NEW: Added Support for "3XVintage.com" linksmyCollections: Version 2.8.7.0: New in this version : Added Public Rating Added Collection Number Added Order by Collection Number Improved XBMC integrations Play on music item will now launch default player. Settings are now saved in database. Tooltip now display sort information. Fix Issue with Stars on card view. Fix Bug with PDF Export. Fix Bug with technical information's. Fix HotMovies Provider. Improved Performance on Save. Bug FixingMoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): MoreTerra 1.11.3.1: Release 1.11.3.1 ================ = New Features = ================ Added markers for Copper Cache, Silver Cache and the Enchanted Sword. ============= = Bug Fixes = ============= Use Official Colors now no longer tries to change the Draw Wires option instead. World reading was breaking for people with a stock 1.2 Terraria version. Changed world name reading so it does not crash the program if you load MoreTerra while Terraria is saving the world. =================== = Feature Removal = =...patterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: Cloud Design Patterns: 1st drop of Cloud Design Patterns project. It contains 14 patterns with 6 related guidance.Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP (v1.3): Includes all changes in v1.3 beta 1 and v1.3 beta 2 Support for Windows 8.1 RTM and VS2013 RTM Xaml: New property: AutoLoadPluginTypes to help control which stock plugins are loaded by default (requires AutoLoadPlugins = true). Support for SystemMediaTransportControls on Windows 8.1 JS: Support for visual markers in the timeline. JS: Support for markers collection and markerreached event. JS: New ChaptersPlugin to automatically populate timeline with chapter tracks. JS: Audio an...Json.NET: Json.NET 5.0 Release 8: Fix - Fixed not writing string quotes when QuoteName is falseNew ProjectsActive shape models for .net: Library to find Facial critical points (contour, nose, eyes, mouth) based on active shape models(wrapper for code.google.com/p/asmlibrary). Not support 64bit.Benson's Project: The Task1 project in ASP.NET calculates the sum of two numbers entered in two textboxes and give the output by label when the button "calculate sum" is clicked.cassan: asp.net mvc 4.5 build boostrap3 websiteCoreRG: This project is a Free GNU, its to fast development.Fractals Explorer: A Windows Phone 7 application for exploring a simple collection of fractals.GingerFight: Some test gameGirapong: Girapong is a game for Windows Phone that consist of an original approach to handle the classical sort of games like Pong, using the accelerometer of the phone.Headlight: -KeyWielder: Simple token generatorMDIContainer: MDIContainer extends WPF to support MDI. It displays your user control as window in a container.MocuGame Library: The MocuGame Library is a set of JavaScript classes made for handling every part of making an HTML5-based game, from audio, to graphics, to input.multi: Make creating multi machine environments simple. MvvmCrystalTool: Library for easy work with MVVM pattern in WP8PeerBlock For Android: PeerBlock For Android lets you control who your phone 'talks to' on the Internet. By selecting appropriate lists of 'known bad' computers, you can block...Pescar2013-Shop-Kristo-Giselle-Grecia: Tp para presentarlo el 10/10 PHP to Dynamics CRM 2011 Online: Connect you PHP webSite to Dynamics CRM 2011 Online throw WebServices. You can: - Create Entities - Update Entities - Delete Entities - Use Fetch QueriesProductive Production: Core functionality for a system to manage the entry of production in a manufacturing environment. The intent will be to provide some base functionality and intProject Of DreamTeam: Space Invaders windows phone / windowsTVShows-EF5: Proyecto básico de integración con diferentes tecnologías.Validation Engine: Validation Engine for WinForms. Engine provides powerful, flexible and easy to use rule based validation for your application. DevExpress and Net.Spring ready.WCF Events: Vis Stud 2010 C# WCF events Demo Solution??? ?, ??? ?.: ??? ?, ??? ?.

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