Search Results

Search found 4886 results on 196 pages for 'geeks on hugs'.

Page 108/196 | < Previous Page | 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115  | Next Page >

• APress Deal of the Day - 1/June/2012 - Introducing Visual C# 2010

  - by TATWORTH

  Today's $10 Deal of the Day from APress at http://www.apress.com/9781430231714 is Introducing Visual C# 2010."If you're new to C# programming, this book is the ideal way to get started. Respected author Adam Freeman guides you through the C# language by carefully building up your knowledge from fundamental concepts to advanced features." Adam Freeman is an excellent author. This is an excellent introduction to C# programming and a manual for those with experience. Having read through book, I am very impressed by its practical approach to C#. I cannot improve on the by-line "Get started on your C# journey with an expert by your side leading by example" Adam Freeman teaches C# by precept and example. I suspect he drives a Volvo C30 as it comes up in many of the code examples! Throughout the book there are numerous links back and forth so as to avoid over complicating the current topic. I have have no hesitation in recommending this book both to programmers starting out with C# and to the seasoned professional. It is a book that should be on every C# development team's book shelf.

  Read the article

• Creating the Business Card Request InfoPath Form

  - by JKenderdine

  Business Card Request Demo Files Back in January I spoke at SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach about InfoPath forms and Web Part deployment.  Below is some of the information and details regarding the form I created for the session.  There are many blogs and Microsoft articles on how to create a basic form so I won’t repeat that information here.   This blog will just explain a few of the options I chose when creating the solutions for SPS Virginia Beach.  The above link contains the zipped package files of the two InfoPath forms(no code solution and coded solution), the list template for the Location list I used, and the PowerPoint deck.  If you plan to use these templates, you will need to update the forms to work within your own environments (change data connections, code links, etc.).  Also, you must have the SharePoint Enterprise version, with InfoPath Services configured in order to use the Web Browser enabled forms. So what are the requirements for this template? Business Card Request Form Template Design Plan: Gather user information and requirements for card Pull in as much user information as possible. Use data from the user profile web services as a data source Show and hide fields as necessary for requirements Create multiple views – one for those submitting the form and Another view for the executive assistants placing the orders. Browser based form integrated into SharePoint team site Submitted directly to form library The base form was created using the blank template.  The table and rows were added using Insert tab and selecting Custom Table.  The use of tables is a great way to make sure everything lines up.  You do have to split the tables from time to time.  If you’ve ever split cells and then tried to re-align one to find that you impacted the others, you know why.  Here is what the base form looks like in InfoPath.   Show and hide fields as necessary for requirements You will notice I also used Sections within the form.  These show or hide depending on options selected or whether or not fields are blank.  This is a great way to prevent your users from feeling overwhelmed with a large form (this one wouldn’t apply).  Although not used in this one, you can also use various views with a tab interface.  I’ll show that in another post. Gather user information and requirements for card Pull in as much user information as possible. Use data from the user profile web services as a data source Utilizing rules you can load data when the form initiates (Data tab, Form Load).  Anything you can automate is always appreciated by the user as that is data they don’t have to enter.  For example, loading their user id or other user information on load: Always keep in mind though how much data you load and the method for loading that data (through rules, code, etc.).  They have an impact on form performance.  The form will take longer to load if you bring in a ton of data from external sources.  Laura Rogers has a great blog post on using the User Information List to load user information.   If the user has logged into SharePoint, then this can be used quite effectively and without a huge performance hit.   What I have found is that using the User Profile service via code behind or the Web Service “GetUserProfileByName” (as above) can take more time to load the user data.  Just food for thought. You must add the data connection in order for the above rules to work.  You can connect to the data connection through the Data tab, Data Connections or select Manage Data Connections link which appears under the main data source.  The data connections can be SharePoint lists or libraries, SQL data tables, XML files, etc.  Create multiple views – one for those submitting the form and Another view for the executive assistants placing the orders. You can also create multiple views for the users to enhance their experience.  Once they’ve entered the information and submitted their request for business cards, they don’t really need to see the main data input screen any more.  They just need to view what they entered. From the Page Design tab, select New View and give the view a name.  To review the existing views, click the down arrow under View: The ReviewView shows just what the user needs and nothing more: Once you have everything configured, the form should be tested within a Test SharePoint environment before final deployment to production.  This validates you don’t have any rules or code that could impact the server negatively. Submitted directly to form library   You will need to know the form library that you will be submitting to when publishing the template.  Configure the Submit data connection to connect to this library.  There is already one configured in the sample,  but it will need to be updated to your environment prior to publishing. The Design template is different from the Published template.  While both have the .XSN extension, the published template contains all the “package” information for the form.  The published form is what is loaded into Central Admin, not the design template. Browser based form integrated into SharePoint team site In Central Admin, under General Settings, select Manage Form Templates.  Upload the published form template and Activate it to a site collection. Now it is available as a content type to select in the form library.  Some documentation on publishing form templates:  Technet – Manage administrator approved form templates And that’s all our base requirements.  Hope this helps to give a good start.

  Read the article

• Channel Factory Support

  - by samkea

  http://silverlight.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=5008&ProjectName=Silverlight

  Read the article

• What I saw at TechEd North America 2014

  - by Brian Schroer

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/brians/archive/2014/05/19/teched-north-america-2014.aspxI was thrilled to be able to attend TechEd North America 2014 in Houston last week. I got to go to Orlando in 2008, and since then I’ve had to settle for watching the sessions online (which ain’t bad – They’re all available on Channel 9 for streaming or downloading. Here are links to the Developer Track sessions and to the sessions from all tracks.) The sessions I attended (with my favorites bolded) were: Shiny new stuff The Microsoft Application Platform for Developers: Create Applications That Span Devices and Services INTRODUCING: The Future of .NET on the Server DEEP DIVE: The Future of .NET on the Server ASP.NET: Building Web Application Using ASP.NET and Visual Studio The Next Generation of .NET for Building Applications The Future of Visual Basic and C# Stuff you can use now Building Rich Apps with AngularJS on ASP.NET Get the Most Out of Your Code Maps SignalR: Building Real-Time Applications with ASP.NET SignalR Performance Optimize Your ASP.NET Web App Modern Web and Visual Studio Visual Studio Power User: Tips and Tricks Debugging Tips and Tricks in Visual Studio 2013 In a world where the whole company uses TFS… Using Functional, Exploratory and Acceptance Testing to Release with Confidence A Practical View of Release Management for Visual Studio 2013 From Vanity to Value, Metrics That Matter: Improving Lean and Agile, Kanban, and Scrum Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That As usual, there were some time slots with nothing of interest and others with 5 things I wanted to see at the same time. Here are the sessions I’m still planning to watch… Getting Started with TypeScript Building a Large Scale JavaScript Application in TypeScript Modern Application Lifecycle Management Why a Hacker Can Own Your Web Servers in a Day! Async Best Practices for C# and Visual Basic Building Multi-Device Apps with the New Visual Studio Tooling for Apache Cordova Applying S.O.L.I.D. Principles in .NET/C# Native Mobile Application Development for iOS, Android, and Windows in C# and Visual Studio Using Xamarin Latest Innovations in Developing ASP.NET MVC Web Applications Zero to Hero: Untested to Tested with Microsoft Fakes Using Visual Studio Cool and Elegant ASP.NET Web Forms with HTML 5 for the Modern Web The Present and Future of .NET in a World of Devices and Services

  Read the article

• The Current week dates

  - by MoezMousavi

  The Current week dates Might be a bit vierd as we normaly not writing a multicultural web site. So not very frequently using CultureInfo however, it is  actully quite good to use it to get the week days.               CultureInfo info = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;             DayOfWeek firstday = info.DateTimeFormat.FirstDayOfWeek;             DayOfWeek today = info.Calendar.GetDayOfWeek(DateTime.Now);               int diff = today - firstday;               DateTime firstDate = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-diff);             DateTime lastDate = firstDate.AddDays(6);

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream Top Posted Authors July to December, 2010

  - by Dave Campbell

  It's past the first of January, and it's now time to recognize devs that have a large number of posts in Silverlight Cream. Ground Rules I pick what posts are on the blog Only posts that go in the database are included The author has to appear in SC at least 4 of the 6 months considered I averaged the monthly posts and am only showing Authors with an average greater than 1. Here are the Top Posted Authors at Silverlight Cream for July 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010: It is my intention to post a new list sometime shortly after the 1st of every month to recognize the top posted in the previous 6 months, so next up is January 1! Some other metrics for Silverlight Cream: At the time of this posting there are 7304 articles aggregated and searchable by partial Author, partial Title, keywords (in the synopsis), or partial URL. There are also 118 tags by which the articles can be searched. This is an increase of 317 posts over last month. At the time of this posting there are 783 articles tagged wp7dev. This is an increase of 119 posts over last month, or over a third of the posts added. Stay in the 'Light!

  Read the article

• BizTalk &ndash; Routing failure on Delivery Notifications (BizTalk 2006 R2 to 2013)

  - by S.E.R.

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/SERivas/archive/2013/11/11/biztalk-routing-failure-on-delivery-notifications.aspxThis is a detailed explanation of a something I posted a few month ago on stackoverflow, concerning a weird behavior (a bug, really…) of the delivery notifications in BizTalk. Reminder: what are delivery notifications Mechanism BizTalk has the ability to automatically publish positive acknowledgments (ACK) when it has succeeded transmitting a message or negative acknowledgments (NACK) in case of a transmission failure. Orchestrations can use delivery notifications to subscribe to those ACKs and NACKs in order to know if a message sent on a one-way send port has been successfully transmitted. Delivery Notifications can be “activated” in two ways: The most common and easy way is to set the Delivery Notification property of a logical send port (in the orchestration designer) to Transmitted: Another way is to set the BTS.AckRequired context property of the message to be sent to true: NOTE: fundamentally, those methods are strictly equivalent since the fact of setting the Delivery Notification to Transmitted on the send port only tells BizTalk the BTS.AckRequired context property has to be set to true on the outgoing message. Related context properties ACKs and NACKs have a common set of propoted context properties, which are : Propriété Description AckType Equals ACK when successful or NACK otherwise AckID MessageID of the message concerned by the acknowledgment AckOwnerID InstanceID of the instance associated with the acknowledgment AckSendPortID ID of the send port AckSendPortName Name of the send port AckOutboundTransportLocation URI of the send port AckReceivePortID ID of the port the message came from AckReceivePortName Name of the port the message came from AckInboundTransportLocation URI of the port the message came from Detailed behavior The way Delivery Notifications are handled by BizTalk is peculiar compared to the standard behavior of the Message Box: if no active subscription exists for the acknowledgment, it is simply discarded. The direct consequence of this is that there can be no routing failure for an acknowledgment, and an acknowledgment cannot be suspended. Moreover, when a message is sent to a send port where Delivery Notification = Transmitted, a correlation set is initialized and a correlation token is attached to the message (Context property: CorrelationToken). This correlation token will also be attached to the acknowledgment. So when the acknowledgment is issued, it is automatically routed to the source orchestration. Finally, when a NACK is received by the source orchestration, a DeliveryFailureException is thrown, which can be caught in Catch section. Context of the problem Consider this scenario: In an orchestration, Delivery Notifications are activated on a One-Way send port In case of a transmission failure, the messaging instance is suspended and the orchestration catches an exception (DeliveryFailureException). When the exception is caught, the orchestration does some logging and then terminates (thanks to a Terminate shape). So that leaves only the suspended messaging instance, waiting to be resumed. Symptoms Once the problem that caused the transmission failure is solved, the messaging instance is resumed. Considering what was said in the reminder, we would expect the instance to complete, leaving no active or suspended instance. Nevertheless, the result is that the messaging instance is once more suspended, this time because of a routing failure: The routing failure report shows that the suspended message has the following attached properties: Explanation Those properties clearly indicate that the message being suspended is an acknowledgment (ACK in this case), which was published in the message box and was supended because no subscribers were found. This makes sense, since the source orchestration was terminated before we resumed the messaging instance. So its subscription to the acknowledgments was no longer active when the ACK was published, which explains the routing failure. But this behavior is in direct contradiction with what was said earlier: an acknowledgment must be discarded when no subscriber is found and therefore should not be suspended. Cause It is indeed an outright bug, which appeared with the SP1 of BizTalk 2006 R2 and was never corrected since then: not in the next 4 CUs, not in BizTalk 2009, not in 2010 and not event in 2013 – though I haven’t tested CU1 and CU2 for this last edition, but I bet there is nothing to be expected from those CUs (on this particular point). Side effects This bug can have pretty nasty side effects: this behavior can be propagated to other ports, due to routing mechanisms. For instance: you have configured the ESB Toolkit and have activated the “Enable routing failure for failed messages”. The result will be that the ESB Exception SQL send port will also try and publish ACKs or NACKs concerning its own messaging instances. In itself, this is already messy, but remember that those acknowledgments will also have the source correlation token attached to them… See how far it goes? Well, actually there is more: in SQL send ports, transactions will be rolled back because of the routing failure (I guess it also happens with other adapters - like Oracle, but I haven’t tested them). Again, think of what happens when the send port is the ESB Exception send port: your BizTalk box is going mad, but you have no idea since no exception can be written in the exception database! All of this can be tricky to diagnose, I can tell you that… Solution There is no real solution, only a work-around, but it won’t solve all of the problems and side effects. The idea is to create an orchestration which subscribes to all acknowledgments. That is to say: The message type of the incoming message will be XmlDocument The BTS.AckType property exists The logical receive port will use direct binding By doing so, all acknowledgments will be consumed by an instance of this orchestration, thus avoiding the routing failure. Here is an example of what this orchestration could look like: In order not to pollute the HAT and the DTA Db (after all, this orchestration is only meant to be a palliative to some faulty internal BizTalk mechanism, so there should be no trace of its execution), all tracking must be deactivated:

  Read the article

• Review&ndash;Build Android and iOS apps in Visual Studio with Nomad

  - by Bill Osuch

  Nomad is a Visual Studio extension that allows you build apps for both Android and iOS platforms in Visual Studio using HTML5. There is no need to switch between .Net, Java and Objective-C to target different platforms - write your code once in HTML5 and build for all common mobile platforms and tablets. You have access to the native hardware functions (such as camera and GPS) through the PhoneGap library, UI libraries such as jQuery mobile allow you to create an impressive UI with minimal work. Nomad is still in an early access beta stage, so the documentation is a bit sparse. In fact, the only documentation is a simple series of steps on how to install the plug-in, set up a project, build and deploy it. You're going to want to be a least a little familiar with the PhoneGap library and jQuery mobile to really tap into the power of this. The sample project included with the download shows you just how simple it is to create projects in Visual Studio. The sample solution comes with an index.html file containing the HTML5 code, the Cordova (PhoneGap) library, jQuery libraries, and a JQuery style sheet: The html file is pretty straightforward. If you haven't experimented with JQuery mobile before, some of the attributes (such as data-role) might be new to you, but some quick Googling will fill in everything you need to know. The first part of the file builds a simple (but attractive) list with some links in it: The second part of the file is where things get interesting and it taps into the PhoneGap library. For instance, it gets the geolocation position by calling position.coords.latitude and position.coords.longitude: ...and then displays it in a simple span: Building is pretty simple, at least for Android (I'm not an iOS developer so I didn't look at that feature) - just configure the display name, version number, and package ID. There's no need to specify Android version; Nomad supports 2.2 and later. Enter these bits of information, click the new "Build for Android" button (not the regular Visual Studio Build link...) and you get a dialog box saying that your code is being built by their cloud build service (so no building while away from a WiFi signal apparently). After a couple minutes you wind up with a .apk file that can be copied over to your device. Applications built with Nomad for Android currently use a temporary certificate, so you can test the app on your devices but you cannot publish them in the Google Play Store (yet). And I love the "success" dialog box: Since Nomad is still in Beta, no pricing plans have been announced yet, so I'll be curious to see if this becomes a cost-effective solution to mobile app development. If it is, I may even be tempted to spring for the $99 iOS membership fee! In the meantime, I plan to work on porting some of my apps over to it and seeing how they work. My only quibble at this time is the lack of a centralized documentation location - I'd like to at least see which (if any) features of JQuery and PhoneGap are limited or not supported. Also, some notes on targeting different Android screen sizes would be nice, but it's relatively easy to find jQuery examples out on the InterWebs. Oh well, trial and error! You can download the Nomad extension for Visual Studio by going to their web site: www.vsnomad.com. Technorati Tags: Android, Nomad

  Read the article

• .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip

  - by Blog Author

  The .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip sold out in under 3 hours.  If you read my blog, you got a one day head start over everyone else.  If you have not registered yet we are taking names for a wait list.

  Read the article

• The Linux Foundation Video

  - by EmbeddedInsider

  They say “Free is the freedom, to sell whatever you want, to whoever you want, and however you want” Linux Video on YouTube Curious this is in Flash.  Is Flash Free?

  Read the article

• Why We Need UX Designers

  - by Tim Murphy

  Ok, so maybe this is really why I need UX designers.  While I have always had an interest in photography and can appreciate a well designed user interface putting one together is an entirely different endeavor.  Being color blind doesn’t help, but coming up with ideas is probably the biggest portion of the issue.  I can spot things that just don’t look like they work right, but what will? UX designers is an area that most companies do not spend much if any resources.  As they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression and and a poorly designed site or application is a bad first impression.  Given that they you would think that companies would invest more in appearance and usability. One of two things need to be done to rectify this issue.  Either we need to start educating our developers on user experience and design or we need to start finding ways to subsidize putting full time designers on our project teams.  Maybe it should be a time share type of situation, but something needs to be done.  As architects we need to impress on our project stakeholders the importance of User Experience and why it should be part of the budget.  If they hear it often enough eventually they may present it to you as their own idea. del.icio.us Tags: User Experience,UX,Application Design

  Read the article

• Combining Shared Secret and Username Token – Azure Service Bus

  - by Michael Stephenson

  As discussed in the introduction article this walkthrough will explain how you can implement WCF security with the Windows Azure Service Bus to ensure that you can protect your endpoint in the cloud with a shared secret but also flow through a username token so that in your listening WCF service you will be able to identify who sent the message. This could either be in the form of an application or a user depending on how you want to use your token. Prerequisites Before going into the walk through I want to explain a few assumptions about the scenario we are implementing but to keep the article shorter I am not going to walk through all of the steps in how to setup some of this. In the solution we have a simple console application which will represent the client application. There is also the services WCF application which contains the WCF service we will expose via the Windows Azure Service Bus. The WCF Service application in this example was hosted in IIS 7 on Windows 2008 R2 with AppFabric Server installed and configured to auto-start the WCF listening services. I am not going to go through significant detail around the IIS setup because it should not matter in relation to this article however if you want to understand more about how to configure WCF and IIS for such a scenario please refer to the following paper which goes into a lot of detail about how to configure this. The link is: http://tinyurl.com/8s5nwrz   The Service Component To begin with let's look at the service component and how it can be configured to listen to the service bus using a shared secret but to also accept a username token from the client. In the sample the service component is called Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.UN.Services. It has a single service which is the Visual Studio template for a WCF service when you add a new WCF Service Application so we have a service called Service1 with its Echo method. Nothing special so far!.... The next step is to look at the web.config file to see how we have configured the WCF service. In the services section of the WCF configuration you can see I have created my service and I have created a local endpoint which I simply used to do a little bit of diagnostics and to check it was working, but more importantly there is the Windows Azure endpoint which is using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding (note that this should also work just the same if your using netTcpRelayBinding). The key points to note on the above picture are the service behavior called MyServiceBehaviour and the service bus endpoints behavior called MyEndpointBehaviour. We will go into these in more detail later.   The Relay Binding The relay binding for the service has been configured to use the TransportWithMessageCredential security mode. This is the important bit where the transport security really relates to the interaction between the service and listening to the Azure Service Bus and the message credential is where we will use our username token like we have specified in the message/clientCrentialType attribute. Note also that we have left the relayClientAuthenticationType set to RelayAccessToken. This means that authentication will be made against ACS for accessing the service bus and messages will not be accepted from any sender who has not been authenticated by ACS.   The Endpoint Behaviour In the below picture you can see the endpoint behavior which is configured to use the shared secret client credential for accessing the service bus and also for diagnostic purposes I have included the service registry element. Hopefully if you are familiar with using Windows Azure Service Bus relay feature the above is very familiar to you and this is a very common setup for this section. There is nothing specific to the username token implementation here. The Service Behaviour Now we come to the bit with most of the username token bits in it. When you configure the service behavior I have included the serviceCredentials element and then setup to use userNameAuthentication and you can see that I have created my own custom username token validator.   This setup means that WCF will hand off to my class for validating the username token details. I have also added the serviceSecurityAudit element to give me a simple auditing of access capability. My UsernamePassword Validator The below picture shows you the details of the username password validator class I have implemented. WCF will hand off to this class when validating the token and give me a nice way to check the token credentials against an on-premise store. You have all of the validation features with a non-service bus WCF implementation available such as validating the username password against active directory or ASP.net membership features or as in my case above something much simpler.   The Client Now let's take a look at the client side of this solution and how we can configure the client to authenticate against ACS but also send a username token over to the service component so it can implement additional security checks on-premise. I have a console application and in the program class I want to use the proxy generated with Add Service Reference to send a message via the Azure Service Bus. You can see in my WCF client configuration below I have setup my details for the azure service bus url and am using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding. Next is my configuration for the relay binding. You can see below I have configured security to use TransportWithMessageCredential so we will flow the username token with the message and also the RelayAccessToken relayClientAuthenticationType which means the component will validate against ACS before being allowed to access the relay endpoint to send a message.     After the binding we need to configure the endpoint behavior like in the below picture. This is the normal configuration to use a shared secret for accessing a Service Bus endpoint.   Finally below we have the code of the client in the console application which will call the service bus. You can see that we have created our proxy and then made a normal call to a WCF service but this time we have also set the ClientCredentials to use the appropriate username and password which will be flown through the service bus and to our service which will validate them.     Conclusion As you can see from the above walkthrough it is not too difficult to configure a service to use both a shared secret and username token at the same time. This gives you the power and protection offered by the access control service in the cloud but also the ability to flow additional tokens to the on-premise component for additional security features to be implemented. Sample The sample used in this post is available at the following location: https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCBlogSamples/Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.UN.zip

  Read the article

• Twitter Integration in Windows 8

  - by Joe Mayo

  Glenn Versweyveld, @Depechie, blogged about Twitter Integration in Windows 8. The post describes how to use WinRtAuthorizer to perform OAuth authentication with LINQ to Twitter. If you’re using LINQ to Twitter with Windows 8, the WinRtAuthorizer is definitely the way to go. It lets you perform the entire OAuth dance with a single method call, which is a huge time savings and simplification of your code. In addition to Glenn’s excellent post, I’ve posted a sample app named MetroWinRtAuthorizerDemo.zip on the LINQ to Twitter Samples Page. @JoeMayo

  Read the article

• 5 Ways Android Still Disappoints (Me)

  - by TStewartDev

  Let me make this clear: I'm annoyed with Apple. I don't like their current policies and I don't like where Steve Jobs is taking the company. In general, I don't like it when any one company gets too much control in a market. When that happens, the leading company dictates the game and as consumers, our options all but disappear. That said, I'm still going to buy a new iPhone next week. My Apple-hating friends seem to desperately want me to go Android instead, but frankly, it's not good enough for me, and here are the reasons why. The Modern WinMo One of the reasons that Microsoft has identified for Windows Mobile's rapid decline is the breadth of hardware. They exercised little control over manufacturer's implementations. In theory, that sounds great. We as consumers have lots of choice. In practice, though, it meant among other things that updates to the devices were left up to the manufacturers. As a result, that rarely happened. (I'm still bitter at Toshiba for leaving me hanging back in 2002.) And now, Google is doing the same thing with Android. Case in point: my wife has a Motorola Backflip that we bought in April. It was released in March. Motorola says it will get Android 2.1 "sometime in Q3". Great. Meanwhile, I pull down the latest version of iPhone OS (now iOS) and install it the same day it's released. You may say that I can't judge Android by one lazy manufacturer. Yup, I sure can. With Apple, my original iPhone has been supported perfectly for 3 years. With Android, I will have to wait for upgrades after Google releases them, possibly indefinitely. Not cool. AT&T We signed a new contract with AT&T in April to get my wife's phone. I've had a reasonable experience with them. I don't imagine my experience with Verizon would be any better, and I'm relatively confident that Sprint doesn't have the coverage it takes to work well for us. The fact is, AT&T, for whatever reason, doesn't have jack for Android phones. May not be Android's fault, but it's still a shortcoming that prevents me from having it just like the iPhone's exclusivity keeps some folks on other networks from having it. Innovation? What Innovation? Android has a nice dashboard and a great notification system and… nothing else original. I keep reading about how disappointing the iPhone is nowadays. "It has no innovation," people say. Who does? Android has modeled its behavior after the iPhone. That's fine, but if all you've got is a similar product and I'm invested both skill-wise and app-wise in my current platform, why should I change? Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 looks somewhat innovative, and I'm pretty excited to see what they'll bring to the table, but that's another six months away, at least. I've got a 3 year old phone that has some annoying issues now (thanks to recent encounters with water). I need a new phone now. Is This Going to Work? There's no shortage of criticism of Apple over its App Store policies, and I've vented my own anger about it. However, I will give them credit: their screening of apps has done a great job of weeding out the crap and gives an excellent indication that the app will work on my device. How about Android? Nope. It might work on your phone. Maybe. You'll have to try it to see. Get burned by it? Well, write a nasty review to try to keep others from making the mistake you did. If you don't mind doing that stuff, then Android is the platform for you. Personally, I'd rather have a receptionist screening out the telemarketing and survey calls than hang up on them myself, but that's your call. Slow, Slowing, Slower All this yapping about multitasking. This is an area I've been on Apple's side from the beginning. Sorry folks, but this is the number one reason I hated Windows Mobile: the longer you use it, the slower it gets because it doesn't kill apps. I'm with Steve Jobs on this one: if you see a task manager, we're doing it wrong. I don't want to have to manually kill apps. I hate doing that on Windows let alone on a mobile device. To me, priority one should be keeping the device speedy. Waiting for your device to respond is unacceptable. Bonus! Taken from iPhone Letdown? 8 Things Apple Didn't Announce, here are my responses: 4G Yeah, let me know if your area actually has it. I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. No carrier is going to have 4G here for at least 3 years. Meanwhile, you still get to pay for it. Yay! Cloud iTunes/OTA Sync You got me here. Of course, whether or not your Android device will be able to do it is always a good question. 3G Video Chat You got me here, too. I'm sure you spent countless hours in front of your phone with video chat. Also, I can't wait for the "No Video Chat While Driving" laws. Mobile Hotspot This is a neat feature, but as the author points out, it's left up to the carrier whether to implement it or not. Pretty sure any Android phones that come to AT&T won't have this enabled in the foreseeable future. Is Verizon even allowing this? I just figured Sprint was because they're failing so hard at keeping customers. Free MobileMe I use Google's services with my iPhone. The only people I know who use MobileMe are Apple fanboys and fangirls. If you choose to pay for a service that you can get for free, that's your decision, not Apple's. Voice Input Voice input has been available on phones (even "dumb" phones) for years now. iPhone does have the ability, though limited. Why don't I hear people telling their phones what to do? Maybe because it's still easier to use your fingers than talk to it. Get back to me when this becomes an important feature. Free Navigation Maybe this will be a bigger deal to me now that I'm getting a phone with GPS, but when using my buddy's 3gs, Google maps has worked just fine. Maybe I just don't trust turn-by-turn navigation enough to want it. Dashboard The only legitimate complaint on this list, to me. iPhone's home screen is pathetic, doubly so for the iPad. What a waste of perfectly usable space. I also want to add notifications to this list. Android's notification panel is far superior to the iPhone's. I don't want to hunt all over my screen to find little red dots. Put 'em in one place, Apple.

  Read the article

• Customizing JBar for Notifications

  - by Ryan Ohs

  Lately I've been using JBar, a very neat jQuery plugin for displaying notifications in my web applications. Unfortunately the original version of JBar only supports binding to the click event of a DOM item. In order to get around this limitation I have modified the source code and posted an updated version on my GitHub account here. The modified version allows you to display a JBar notification by calling a method. I typically use it to display succes or failure messages when doing Ajax calls. I have also included some additional CSS and JS so that you can diplay different styles of notifications. showNotification(message) shows a green "success" message. showWarning(message) shows an orange "warning" message. showMessage(message, className) allows you to specify a custom class to apply to the notification for additional styling purposes. A web page with samples is included.   Get the code here.

  Read the article

• Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension is localized and introduced to Japan

  - by Jialiang

  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/codefx/archive/2012/10/14/sample-browser-visual-studio-extension-is-localized-and-introduced-to-japan.aspx  ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????From: Japan MVP   "The Sample Browser is very easy to use thanks to the refined interface.  The categorized menu enables faster search. Highly acclaimed.  But it need localization. It may not be a problem for those who can understand English, but I think localizing Sample Browser into Japanese will promote its use in Japan further." This is a prominent feedback collected from the Japan MVP community since we released the last version of Sample Browser, which was only available in English.  Japan developers like the Sample Browser, but they want localized code samples, localized Sample Browser UI, and the localized search experience.  The Japan MVP lead, Satoru Kitabata, observed these needs and expectations.  He started to engage with all local developer MVPs to translate the UI elements in the Sample Browser.  Lots of MVPs signed up to participate in this work.  They had roundtables and newsletters to track the progress.  In short three weeks, every control, every tooltip, every font on every label, was beautifully tuned for Japanese.  The sample search experience was also optimized for Japan developers - they can directly type Japanese query to search for code samples.  Together with Microsoft Japan MVPs, the sample use experience is localized and improved to a new level!    The Japan MVP Lead, Satoru Kitabata, further worked with MSDN Japan site manager and Japan DPE to introduce the good news of localized Sample Browser to Japan Sample Browser  http://msdn.microsoft.com/ja-jp/jj730399 Sample Browser?????? http://msdn.microsoft.com/ja-jp/jj730398     Thanks to the joint effort and Japan MVPs’ feedback and contributions, the Sample Browser gets the chance to benefit the broader Japan developer audience.

  Read the article

• Team Foundation Server (TFS) Team Build Custom Activity C# Code for Assembly Stamping

  - by Bob Hardister

  For the full context and guidance on how to develop and implement a custom activity in Team Build see the Microsoft Visual Studio Rangers Team Foundation Build Customization Guide V.1 at http://vsarbuildguide.codeplex.com/ There are many ways to stamp or set the version number of your assemblies. This approach is based on the build number.   namespace CustomActivities { using System; using System.Activities; using System.IO; using System.Text.RegularExpressions; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client; [BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.Agent)] public sealed class VersionAssemblies : CodeActivity { /// <summary> /// AssemblyInfoFileMask /// </summary> [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> AssemblyInfoFileMask { get; set; } /// <summary> /// SourcesDirectory /// </summary> [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> SourcesDirectory { get; set; } /// <summary> /// BuildNumber /// </summary> [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> BuildNumber { get; set; } /// <summary> /// BuildDirectory /// </summary> [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> BuildDirectory { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Publishes field values to the build report /// </summary> public OutArgument<string> DiagnosticTextOut { get; set; } // If your activity returns a value, derive from CodeActivity<TResult> and return the value from the Execute method. protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context) { // Obtain the runtime value of the input arguments string sourcesDirectory = context.GetValue(this.SourcesDirectory); string assemblyInfoFileMask = context.GetValue(this.AssemblyInfoFileMask); string buildNumber = context.GetValue(this.BuildNumber); string buildDirectory = context.GetValue(this.BuildDirectory); // ** Determine the version number values ** // Note: the format used here is: major.secondary.maintenance.build // ----------------------------------------------------------------- // Obtain the build definition name int nameStart = buildDirectory.LastIndexOf(@"\") + 1; string buildDefinitionName = buildDirectory.Substring(nameStart); // Set the primary.secondary.maintenance values // NOTE: these are hard coded in this example, but could be sourced from a file or parsed from a build definition name that includes them string p = "1"; string s = "5"; string m = "2"; // Initialize the build number string b; string na = "0"; // used for Assembly and Product Version instead of build number (see versioning best practices: **TBD reference) // Set qualifying product version information string productInfo = "RC2"; // Obtain the build increment number from the build number // NOTE: this code assumes the default build definition name format int buildIncrementNumberDelimterIndex = buildNumber.LastIndexOf("."); b = buildNumber.Substring(buildIncrementNumberDelimterIndex + 1); // Convert version to integer values int pVer = Convert.ToInt16(p); int sVer = Convert.ToInt16(s); int mVer = Convert.ToInt16(m); int bNum = Convert.ToInt16(b); int naNum = Convert.ToInt16(na); // ** Get all AssemblyInfo files and stamp them ** // Note: the mapping of AssemblyInfo.cs attributes to assembly display properties are as follows: // - AssemblyVersion = Assembly Version - used for the assembly version (does not change unless p, s or m values are changed) // - AssemblyFileVersion = File Version - used for the file version (changes with every build) // - AssemblyInformationalVersion = Product Version - used for the product version (can include additional version information) // ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Version assemblyVersion = new Version(pVer, sVer, mVer, naNum); Version newAssemblyFileVersion = new Version(pVer, sVer, mVer, bNum); Version productVersion = new Version(pVer, sVer, mVer); // Setup diagnostic fields int numberOfReplacements = 0; string addedAssemblyInformationalAttribute = "No"; // Enumerate over the assemblyInfo version attributes foreach (string attribute in new[] { "AssemblyVersion", "AssemblyFileVersion", "AssemblyInformationalVersion" }) { // Define the regular expression to find in each and every Assemblyinfo.cs files (which is for example 'AssemblyVersion("1.0.0.0")' ) Regex regex = new Regex(attribute + @"\(""\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+""\)"); foreach (string file in Directory.EnumerateFiles(sourcesDirectory, assemblyInfoFileMask, SearchOption.AllDirectories)) { string text = File.ReadAllText(file); // Read the text from the AssemblyInfo file // If the AsemblyInformationalVersion attribute is not in the file, add it as the last line of the file // Note: by default the AssemblyInfo.cs files will not contain the AssemblyInformationalVersion attribute if (!text.Contains("[assembly: AssemblyInformationalVersion(\"")) { string lastLine = Environment.NewLine + "[assembly: AssemblyInformationalVersion(\"1.0.0.0\")]"; text = text + lastLine; addedAssemblyInformationalAttribute = "Yes"; } // Search for the expression Match match = regex.Match(text); if (match.Success) { // Get file attributes FileAttributes fileAttributes = File.GetAttributes(file); // Set file to read only File.SetAttributes(file, fileAttributes & ~FileAttributes.ReadOnly); // Insert AssemblyInformationalVersion attribute into the file text if does not already exist string newText = string.Empty; if (attribute == "AssemblyVersion") { newText = regex.Replace(text, attribute + "(\"" + assemblyVersion + "\")"); numberOfReplacements++; } if (attribute == "AssemblyFileVersion") { newText = regex.Replace(text, attribute + "(\"" + newAssemblyFileVersion + "\")"); numberOfReplacements++; } if (attribute == "AssemblyInformationalVersion") { newText = regex.Replace(text, attribute + "(\"" + productVersion + " " + productInfo + "\")"); numberOfReplacements++; } // Publish diagnostics to build report (diagnostic verbosity only) context.SetValue(this.DiagnosticTextOut, " Added AssemblyInformational Attribute: " + addedAssemblyInformationalAttribute + " Number of replacements: " + numberOfReplacements + " Build number: " + buildNumber + " Build directory: " + buildDirectory + " Build definition name: " + buildDefinitionName + " Assembly version: " + assemblyVersion + " New file version: " + newAssemblyFileVersion + " Product version: " + productVersion + " AssemblyInfo.cs Text Last Stamped: " + newText); // Write the new text in the AssemblyInfo file File.WriteAllText(file, newText); // restore the file's original attributes File.SetAttributes(file, fileAttributes); } } } } } }

  Read the article

• A Visual Studio Release Grows in Brooklyn

  - by andrewbrust

  Yesterday, Microsoft held its flagship launch event for Office 2010 in Manhattan.  Today, the Redmond software company is holding a local launch event for Visual Studio (VS) 2010, in Brooklyn.  How come information workers get the 212 treatment and developers are relegated to 718? Well, here’s the thing: the Brooklyn Marriott is actually a great place for an event, but you need some intimate knowledge of New York City to know that.  NBC’s Studio 8H, where the Office launch was held yesterday (and from where SNL is broadcast) is a pretty small venue, but you’d need some inside knowledge to recognize that.  Likewise, while Office 2010 is a product whose value is apparent.  Appreciating VS 2010’s value takes a bit more savvy.  Setting aside its year-based designation, this release of VS, counting the old Visual Basic releases, is the 10th version of the product.  How can a developer audience get excited about an integrated development environment when it reaches double-digit version numbers?  Well, it can be tough.  Luckily, Microsoft sent Jay Schmelzer, a Group Program Manager from the Visual Studio team in Redmond, to come tell the Brooklyn audience why they should be excited. Turns out there’s a lot of reasons.  Support fro SharePoint development is a big one.  In previous versions of VS, that support has been anemic, at best.  Shortage of SharePoint developers is a huge issue in the industry, and this should help.  There’s also built in support for Windows Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) and, through a download, support for the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 platform.  ASP.NET MVC, a “close-to-the-metal” Web development option that does away with the Web Forms abstraction layer, has a first-class presence in VS.  So too does jQuery, the Open Source environment that makes JavaScript development a breeze.  The jQuery support is so good that Microsoft now contributes to that Open Source project and offers IntelliSense support for it in the code editor. Speaking of the VS code editor, it now supports multi-monitor setups, zoom-in, and block selection.  If you’re not a developer, this may sound confusing and minute.  I’ll just say that for people who are developers these are little things that really contribute to productivity, and that translates into lower development costs. The really cool demo, though, was around Visual Studio 2010’s new debugging features.  This stuff is hard to showcase, but I believe it’s truly breakthrough technology: imagine being able to step backwards in time to see what might have caused a bug.  Cool?  Now imagine being able to do that, even if you weren’t the tester and weren’t present while the testing was being done.  Then imagine being able to see a video screen capture of what the tester was doing with your app when the bug occurred.  VS 2010 allows all that.  This could be the demise of the IWOMM (“it works on my machine”) syndrome. After the keynote, I asked Schmelzer if any of Microsoft’s competitors have debugging tools that come close to VS 2010’s.  His answer was an earnest “we don’t think so.”  If that’s true, that’s a big deal, and a huge advantage for developer teams who adopt it.  It will make software development much cheaper and more efficient.  Kind of like holding a launch event at the Brooklyn Marriott instead of 30 Rock in Manhattan! VS 2010 (version 10) and Office 2010 (version 14) aren’t the only new product versions Microsoft is releasing right now.  There’s also SQL Server 2008 R2 (version 10.5), Exchange 2010 (version 8, I believe), SharePoint 2010 (version 4) and, of course, Windows 7.  With so many new versions at such levels of maturity, I think it’s fair to say Microsoft has reached middle-age.  How does a company stave off a potential mid-life crisis, especially when with young Turks like Google coming along and competing so fiercely?  Hard to say.  But if focusing on core value, including value that’s hard to play into a sexy demo, is part oft the answer, then Microsoft’s doing OK.  And if some new tricks, like Windows Phone 7, can gain some traction, that might round things out nicely. Are the legacy products old tricks, or are they revised classics?  I honestly don’t know, because it’s the market’s prerogative to pass that judgement.  I can say this though: based on today’s show, I think Microsoft’s been doing its homework.

  Read the article

• Speed up loading of test results from builds in Visual Studio

  - by Jakob Ehn

  I still see people complaining about the long time it takes to load test results from a TFS build in Visual Studio. And they make a valid point, it does take a very long time to load the test results, even for a small number of tests. The reason for this is that the test results is not just the result of the test run but also all the binaries that were part of the test run. This often also means that the debug symbols (*.pdb) will be downloaded to your local machine. This reason for this behaviour is that it letsyou re-run the tests locally. However, most of the times this is not what the developer will do, they just want to know which tests failed and why. They can then fix the tests and rerun them locally. It turns out there is a way to load only the test results, which is much faster. The only tricky bit is to find the location of the .trx file that is generated during the build. Particularly in TFS 2010 where you often have multiple build agents, which of corse results in different paths to the trx file. Note: To use this you must have read permission to the build folder on the build agent where the build was executed. Open the build result for the build Click View Log Locate the part where MSTest is invoked. When using test containers, it looks like this:   Note: You can actually search in the log window, press Ctrl+F and you will get a little search box at the bottom. Nice! On the MSTest command line call, locate the /resultsfileroot parameter, which points to the folder where the test results are stored Note that this path is local for the build server, so you need to replace the drive letter with the server name: D:\Builds\Project\TestResults to \Project\TestResults">\\<BuildServer>\Project\TestResults Double-click on the .trx file and you will notice that it loads much faster compared to opening it from the build log window

  Read the article

• Some New .NET Downloads and Resources

  - by Kevin Grossnicklaus

  Last week I was fortunate enough to spend time in Redmond on Microsoft’s campus for the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit.  It was great to hang out with a number of old friends and get the opportunity to talk tech with the various product teams up at Microsoft.  The weather wasn’t exactly sunny but Microsoft always does a great job with the Summit and everyone had a blast (heck, I even got to run the bases at SafeCo field) While much of what we saw is covered under NDA, there a ton of great things in the pipeline from Microsoft and many things that are already available (or just became so) that I wasn’t necessarily aware of.  The purpose of this post is to share some of the info I learned on resources and tools available to .NET developers today.  Please let me know if you have any questions (or if you know of something else cool which might benefit others). Enjoy! Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Microsoft has issued the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010 SP1.  You can download the full SP1 on MSDN as of today (March 10th to the general public) and take advantage of such things as: Silverlight 4 is included in the box (as opposed to a separate install) Silverlight 4 Profiling WCF RIA Services SP1 Intellitrace for 64-bit and SharePoint ASP.NET now easily supports IIS Express and SQL CE Want a description of all that’s new beyond the above biased list (which arguably only contains items I think are important)?  Check out this KB article. Portable Library Tools CTP Without much fanfare Microsoft has released a CTP of a new add-in to Visual Studio 2010 which simplifies code sharing between projects targeting different runtimes (i.e. Silverlight, WPF, Win7 Phone, XBox).   With this Add-In installed you can add a new project of type “Portable Library” and specify which platforms you wish to target.  Once that is done, any code added to this library will be limited to use only features which are common to all selected frameworks.  Other projects can now reference this portable library and be provided assemblies custom built to their environment.  This greatly simplifies the current process of sharing linked files between platforms like WPF and Silverlight.  You can find out more about this CTP and how it works on this great blog post. Visual Studio Async CTP Microsoft has also released a CTP of a set of language and framework enhancements to provide a much more powerful asynchronous programming model.   Due to the focus on async programming in all types of platforms (and it being the ONLY option in Silverlight and Win7 phone) a move towards a simpler and more understandable model is always a good thing. This CTP (called Visual Studio Async CTP) can be downloaded here.  You can read more about this CTP on this blog post. MSDN Code Samples Gallery Microsoft has also launched new code samples gallery on their MSDN site: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/.   This site allows you to easily search for small samples of code related to a particular technology or platform.  If a sample of code you are looking for is not found, you can request one via the site and other developers can see your request and provide a sample to the site to suit your needs.  You can also peruse requested samples and, if you find a scenario where you can provide value, upload your own sample for the benefit of others.  Samples are packaged into the VS .vsix format and include any necessary references/dependencies.  By using .vsix as the deployment mechanism, as samples are installed from the site they are kept in your Visual Studio 2010 Samples Gallery and kept for your future reference. If you get a chance, check out the site and see how it is done.  Although a somewhat simple concept, I was very impressed with their implementation and the way they went about trying to suit a need.  I’ll definitely be looking there in the future as need something or want to share something. MSDN Search Capabilities Another item I learned recently and was not aware of (that might seem trivial to some) is the power of the MSDN site’s search capabilities.  Between the Code Samples Gallery described above and the search enhancements on MSDN, Microsoft is definitely investing in their platform to help provide developers of all skill levels the tools and resources they need to be successful. What do I mean by the MSDN search capability and why should you care? If you go to the MSDN home page (http://msdn.microsoft.com) and use the “Search MSDN with Big” box at the very top of the page you will see some very interesting results.  First, the search actually doesn’t just search the MSDN library it searches: MSDN Library All Microsoft Blogs CodePlex StackOverflow Downloads MSDN Magazine Support Knowledgebase (I’m not sure it even ends there but the above are all I know of) Beyond just searching all the above locations, the results are formatted very nicely to give some contextual information based on where the result came from.  For example, if a keyword search returned results from CodePlex, each row in the search results screen would include a large amount of information specific to CodePlex such as: Looking at the above results immediately tells you everything from the page views to the CodePlex ratings.  All in all, knowing that this much information is indexed and available from a single search location will lead me to utilize this as one of my initial searches for development information.

  Read the article

• LightSwitch Tutorial - Adding Image to a LightSwitch Screen

  - by ChrisD

  Last week, I have discussed how to control Screen Layouts in LightSwitch. Now, I will talk about how to add an image to the LightSwitch screen. In this demo, I will try to upload the image to the screen and will save the image into the database. The first step we need to do is start the VS 2010, create LightSwitch Desktop application with the name “AddingImageIntoScreenInLSBeta2” as shown in the following figure. The second steps, create a table as shown in the screen by selecting the "create a table" option in the start up screen. Then, we need to add a New Data Screen to our demo application. See the following figure which is the default screen layouts for the screen we have created. So we have to change the layout of this screen so that the uploading and using the image in the screen can be easily explained. Before adding the Model Window we have to prepare the layout. So delete the Highlighted fields as shown in the above figure. After preparing the layout to add the image, just add a new Group to the Person Property Rows Layout. To add a new group, [No: 1] – Select the Rows layout, it will shows you the Add button. [No: 2] – Click the Add button to select the new group. [No: 3] – Select the New Group. After adding the new group change the Layout type to Columns Layout. Here, -          Change the rows layout to columns layouts and give the display name as Uploading Image Example. -          Click on the add button to add the Photo field under the column layout. Add a new group under the Column layout group. Follow the [No: #] to create a new group under the columns layout group. After adding a new group of rows layout add the fields to the newly created group. [No: 1] – Select the Rows Layout group and change the display name as Details. [No: 2] – Click on Add button to select the appropriate fields to add to the group. [No: 3] – Add the fields to the group The above snippet shows the complete layout tree for our screen. Now the screen for uploading the image is ready. Just press the Play button. And see the result.

  Read the article

• SQL Azure Database Size Calculator

  - by kaleidoscope

  A neat trick on how to measure your database size in SQL Azure.  Here are the exact queries you can run to do it: Select Sum (reserved_page_count) * 8.0 / 1024 From sys.dm_db_partition_stats GO Select sys.objects.name, sum (reserved_page_count) * 8.0 / 1024 From sys.dm_db_partition_stats, sys.objects Where sys.dm_db_partition_stats.object_id = sys.objects.object_id Group by sys.objects.name The first one will give you the size of your database in MB and the second one will do the same, but break it out for each object in your database. http://www.azurejournal.com/2010/03/sql-azure-database-size-calculator/   Ritesh, D

  Read the article

• What label of tests are BizUnit tests?

  - by charlie.mott

  BizUnit is defined as a "Framework for Automated Testing of Distributed Systems.  However, I've never seen a catchy label to describe what sort of tests we create using this framework. They are not really “Unit Tests” that's for sure. "Integration Tests" might be a good definition, but I want a label that clearly separates it from the manual "System Integration Testing" phase of a project where real instances of the integrated systems are used. Among some colleagues, we brainstormed some suggestions: Automated Integration Tests Stubbed Integration Tests Sandbox Integration Tests Localised Integration Tests All give a good view of the sorts of tests that are being done. I think "Stubbed Integration Tests" is most catchy and descriptive. So I will use that until someone comes up with a better idea.

  Read the article

• Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 15 &ndash; Network Management

  - by MarkPearl

  After reading this section you should be able to Understand network management and the importance of documentation, baseline measurements, policies, and regulations to assess and maintain a network’s health. Manage a network’s performance using SNMP-based network management software, system and event logs, and traffic-shaping techniques Identify the reasons for and elements of an asset managements system Plan and follow regular hardware and software maintenance routines Fundamentals of Network Management Network management refers to the assessment, monitoring, and maintenance of all aspects of a network including checking for hardware faults, ensuring high QoS, maintaining records of network assets, etc. Scope of network management differs depending on the size and requirements of the network. All sub topics of network management share the goals of enhancing the efficiency and performance while preventing costly downtime or loss. Documentation The way documentation is stored may vary, but to adequately manage a network one should at least record the following… Physical topology (types of LAN and WAN topologies – ring, star, hybrid) Access method (does it use Ethernet 802.3, token ring, etc.) Protocols Devices (Switches, routers, etc) Operating Systems Applications Configurations (What version of operating system and config files for serve / client software) Baseline Measurements A baseline is a report of the network’s current state of operation. Baseline measurements might include the utilization rate for your network backbone, number of users logged on per day, etc. Baseline measurements allow you to compare future performance increases or decreases caused by network changes or events with past network performance. Obtaining baseline measurements is the only way to know for certain whether a pattern of usage has changed, or whether a network upgrade has made a difference. There are various tools available for measuring baseline performance on a network. Policies, Procedures, and Regulations Following rules helps limit chaos, confusion, and possibly downtime. The following policies and procedures and regulations make for sound network management. Media installations and management (includes designing physical layout of cable, etc.) Network addressing policies (includes choosing and applying a an addressing scheme) Resource sharing and naming conventions (includes rules for logon ID’s) Security related policies Troubleshooting procedures Backup and disaster recovery procedures In addition to internal policies, a network manager must consider external regulatory rules. Fault and Performance Management After documenting every aspect of your network and following policies and best practices, you are ready to asses you networks status on an on going basis. This process includes both performance management and fault management. Network Management Software To accomplish both fault and performance management, organizations often use enterprise-wide network management software. There various software packages that do this, each collect data from multiple networked devices at regular intervals, in a process called polling. Each managed device runs a network management agent. So as not to affect the performance of a device while collecting information, agents do not demand significant processing resources. The definition of a managed devices and their data are collected in a MIB (Management Information Base). Agents communicate information about managed devices via any of several application layer protocols. On modern networks most agents use SNMP which is part of the TCP/IP suite and typically runs over UDP on port 161. Because of the flexibility and sophisticated network management applications are a challenge to configure and fine-tune. One needs to be careful to only collect relevant information and not cause performance issues (i.e. pinging a device every 5 seconds can be a problem with thousands of devices). MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is a simple command line utility that uses SNMP to poll devices and collects data in a log file. MRTG can be used with Windows, UNIX and Linux. System and Event Logs Virtually every condition recognized by an operating system can be recorded. This is typically done using event logs. In Windows there is a GUI event log viewer. Similar information is recorded in UNIX and Linux in a system log. Much of the information collected in event logs and syslog files does not point to a problem, even if it is marked with a warning so it is important to filter your logs appropriately to reduce the noise. Traffic Shaping When a network must handle high volumes of network traffic, users benefit from performance management technique called traffic shaping. Traffic shaping involves manipulating certain characteristics of packets, data streams, or connections to manage the type and amount of traffic traversing a network or interface at any moment. Its goals are to assure timely delivery of the most important traffic while offering the best possible performance for all users. Several types of traffic prioritization exist including prioritizing traffic according to any of the following characteristics… Protocol IP address User group DiffServr VLAN tag in a Data Link layer frame Service or application Caching In addition to traffic shaping, a network or host might use caching to improve performance. Caching is the local storage of frequently needed files that would otherwise be obtained from an external source. By keeping files close to the requester, caching allows the user to access those files quickly. The most common type of caching is Web caching, in which Web pages are stored locally. To an ISP, caching is much more than just convenience. It prevents a significant volume of WAN traffic, thus improving performance and saving money. Asset Management Another key component in managing networks is identifying and tracking its hardware. This is called asset management. The first step to asset management is to take an inventory of each node on the network. You will also want to keep records of every piece of software purchased by your organization. Asset management simplifies maintaining and upgrading the network chiefly because you know what the system includes. In addition, asset management provides network administrators with information about the costs and benefits of certain types of hardware or software. Change Management Networks are always in a stage of flux with various aspects including… Software changes and patches Client Upgrades Shared Application Upgrades NOS Upgrades Hardware and Physical Plant Changes Cabling Upgrades Backbone Upgrades For a detailed explanation on each of these read the textbook (Page 750 – 761)

  Read the article

• Silverlight 4 Twitter Client - Part 2

  - by Max

  We will create a few classes now to help us with storing and retrieving user credentials, so that we don't ask for it every time we want to speak with Twitter for getting some information. Now the class to sorting out the credentials. We will have this class as a static so as to ensure one instance of the same. This class is mainly going to include a getter setter for username and password, a method to check if the user if logged in and another one to log out the user. You can get the code here. Now let us create another class to facilitate easy retrieval from twitter xml format results for any queries we make. This basically involves just creating a getter setter for all the values that you would like to retrieve from the xml document returned. You can get the format of the xml document from here. Here is what I've in my Status.cs data structure class. using System; using System.Net; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Documents; using System.Windows.Ink; using System.Windows.Input; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Media.Animation; using System.Windows.Shapes;  namespace MaxTwitter.Classes { public class Status { public Status() {} public string ID { get; set; } public string Text { get; set; } public string Source { get; set; } public string UserID { get; set; } public string UserName { get; set; } } }  Now let us looking into implementing the Login.xaml.cs, first thing here is if the user is already logged in, we need to redirect the user to the homepage, this we can accomplish using the event OnNavigatedTo, which is fired when the user navigates to this particular Login page. Here you utilize the navigate to method of NavigationService to goto a different page if the user is already logged in. if (GlobalVariable.isLoggedin())         this.NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/Home", UriKind.Relative));  On the submit button click event, add the new event handler, which would save the perform the WebClient request and download the results as xml string. WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("https://", System.Net.Browser.WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp);  The following line allows us to create a web client to create a web request to a url and get back the string response. Something that came as a great news with SL 4 for many SL developers.   WebClient myService = new WebClient(); myService.AllowReadStreamBuffering = true; myService.UseDefaultCredentials = false; myService.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(TwitterUsername.Text, TwitterPassword.Password);  Here in the following line, we add an event that has to be fired once the xml string has been downloaded. Here you can do all your XLINQ stuff.   myService.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(TimelineRequestCompleted);   myService.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri("https://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml"));  Now let us look at implementing the TimelineRequestCompleted event. Here we are not actually using the string response we get from twitter, I just use it to ensure the user is authenticated successfully and then save the credentials and redirect to home page. public void TimelineRequestCompleted(object sender, System.Net.DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e) { if (e.Error != null) { MessageBox.Show("This application must be installed first"); }  If there is no error, we can save the credentials to reuse it later.   else { GlobalVariable.saveCredentials(TwitterUsername.Text, TwitterPassword.Password); this.NavigationService.Navigate(new System.Uri("/Home", UriKind.Relative)); } } Ok so now login page is done. Now the main thing – running this application. This credentials stuff would only work, if the application is run out of the browser. So we need fiddle with a few Silverlioght project settings to enable this. Here is how:    Right click on Silverlight > properties then check the "Enable running application out of browser".    Then click on Out-Of-Browser settings and check "Require elevated trust…" option. That's it, all done to run. Now press F5 to run the application, fix the errors if any. Then once the application opens up in browser with the login page, right click and choose install.  Once you install, it would automatically run and you can login and can see that you are redirected to the Home page. Here are the files that are related to this posts. We will look at implementing the Home page, etc… in the next post. Please post your comments and feedbacks; it would greatly help me in improving my posts!  Thanks for your time, catch you soon.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115  | Next Page >