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• SQL SERVER – Guest Posts – Feodor Georgiev – The Context of Our Database Environment – Going Beyond the Internal SQL Server Waits – Wait Type – Day 21 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  This guest post is submitted by Feodor. Feodor Georgiev is a SQL Server database specialist with extensive experience of thinking both within and outside the box. He has wide experience of different systems and solutions in the fields of architecture, scalability, performance, etc. Feodor has experience with SQL Server 2000 and later versions, and is certified in SQL Server 2008. In this article Feodor explains the server-client-server process, and concentrated on the mutual waits between client and SQL Server. This is essential in grasping the concept of waits in a ‘global’ application plan. Recently I was asked to write a blog post about the wait statistics in SQL Server and since I had been thinking about writing it for quite some time now, here it is. It is a wide-spread idea that the wait statistics in SQL Server will tell you everything about your performance. Well, almost. Or should I say – barely. The reason for this is that SQL Server is always a part of a bigger system – there are always other players in the game: whether it is a client application, web service, any other kind of data import/export process and so on. In short, the SQL Server surroundings look like this: This means that SQL Server, aside from its internal waits, also depends on external waits and settings. As we can see in the picture above, SQL Server needs to have an interface in order to communicate with the surrounding clients over the network. For this communication, SQL Server uses protocol interfaces. I will not go into detail about which protocols are best, but you can read this article. Also, review the information about the TDS (Tabular data stream). As we all know, our system is only as fast as its slowest component. This means that when we look at our environment as a whole, the SQL Server might be a victim of external pressure, no matter how well we have tuned our database server performance. Let’s dive into an example: let’s say that we have a web server, hosting a web application which is using data from our SQL Server, hosted on another server. The network card of the web server for some reason is malfunctioning (think of a hardware failure, driver failure, or just improper setup) and does not send/receive data faster than 10Mbs. On the other end, our SQL Server will not be able to send/receive data at a faster rate either. This means that the application users will notify the support team and will say: “My data is coming very slow.” Now, let’s move on to a bit more exciting example: imagine that there is a similar setup as the example above – one web server and one database server, and the application is not using any stored procedure calls, but instead for every user request the application is sending 80kb query over the network to the SQL Server. (I really thought this does not happen in real life until I saw it one day.) So, what happens in this case? To make things worse, let’s say that the 80kb query text is submitted from the application to the SQL Server at least 100 times per minute, and as often as 300 times per minute in peak times. Here is what happens: in order for this query to reach the SQL Server, it will have to be broken into a of number network packets (according to the packet size settings) – and will travel over the network. On the other side, our SQL Server network card will receive the packets, will pass them to our network layer, the packets will get assembled, and eventually SQL Server will start processing the query – parsing, allegorizing, generating the query execution plan and so on. So far, we have already had a serious network overhead by waiting for the packets to reach our Database Engine. There will certainly be some processing overhead – until the database engine deals with the 80kb query and its 20 subqueries. The waits you see in the DMVs are actually collected from the point the query reaches the SQL Server and the packets are assembled. Let’s say that our query is processed and it finally returns 15000 rows. These rows have a certain size as well, depending on the data types returned. This means that the data will have converted to packages (depending on the network size package settings) and will have to reach the application server. There will also be waits, however, this time you will be able to see a wait type in the DMVs called ASYNC_NETWORK_IO. What this wait type indicates is that the client is not consuming the data fast enough and the network buffers are filling up. Recently Pinal Dave posted a blog on Client Statistics. What Client Statistics does is captures the physical flow characteristics of the query between the client(Management Studio, in this case) and the server and back to the client. As you see in the image, there are three categories: Query Profile Statistics, Network Statistics and Time Statistics. Number of server roundtrips–a roundtrip consists of a request sent to the server and a reply from the server to the client. For example, if your query has three select statements, and they are separated by ‘GO’ command, then there will be three different roundtrips. TDS Packets sent from the client – TDS (tabular data stream) is the language which SQL Server speaks, and in order for applications to communicate with SQL Server, they need to pack the requests in TDS packets. TDS Packets sent from the client is the number of packets sent from the client; in case the request is large, then it may need more buffers, and eventually might even need more server roundtrips. TDS packets received from server –is the TDS packets sent by the server to the client during the query execution. Bytes sent from client – is the volume of the data set to our SQL Server, measured in bytes; i.e. how big of a query we have sent to the SQL Server. This is why it is best to use stored procedures, since the reusable code (which already exists as an object in the SQL Server) will only be called as a name of procedure + parameters, and this will minimize the network pressure. Bytes received from server – is the amount of data the SQL Server has sent to the client, measured in bytes. Depending on the number of rows and the datatypes involved, this number will vary. But still, think about the network load when you request data from SQL Server. Client processing time – is the amount of time spent in milliseconds between the first received response packet and the last received response packet by the client. Wait time on server replies – is the time in milliseconds between the last request packet which left the client and the first response packet which came back from the server to the client. Total execution time – is the sum of client processing time and wait time on server replies (the SQL Server internal processing time) Here is an illustration of the Client-server communication model which should help you understand the mutual waits in a client-server environment. Keep in mind that a query with a large ‘wait time on server replies’ means the server took a long time to produce the very first row. This is usual on queries that have operators that need the entire sub-query to evaluate before they proceed (for example, sort and top operators). However, a query with a very short ‘wait time on server replies’ means that the query was able to return the first row fast. However a long ‘client processing time’ does not necessarily imply the client spent a lot of time processing and the server was blocked waiting on the client. It can simply mean that the server continued to return rows from the result and this is how long it took until the very last row was returned. The bottom line is that developers and DBAs should work together and think carefully of the resource utilization in the client-server environment. From experience I can say that so far I have seen only cases when the application developers and the Database developers are on their own and do not ask questions about the other party’s world. I would recommend using the Client Statistics tool during new development to track the performance of the queries, and also to find a synchronous way of utilizing resources between the client – server – client. Here is another example: think about similar setup as above, but add another server to the game. Let’s say that we keep our media on a separate server, and together with the data from our SQL Server we need to display some images on the webpage requested by our user. No matter how simple or complicated the logic to get the images is, if the images are 500kb each our users will get the page slowly and they will still think that there is something wrong with our data. Anyway, I don’t mean to get carried away too far from SQL Server. Instead, what I would like to say is that DBAs should also be aware of ‘the big picture’. I wrote a blog post a while back on this topic, and if you are interested, you can read it here about the big picture. And finally, here are some guidelines for monitoring the network performance and improving it: Run a trace and outline all queries that return more than 1000 rows (in Profiler you can actually filter and sort the captured trace by number of returned rows). This is not a set number; it is more of a guideline. The general thought is that no application user can consume that many rows at once. Ask yourself and your fellow-developers: ‘why?’. Monitor your network counters in Perfmon: Network Interface:Output queue length, Redirector:Network errors/sec, TCPv4: Segments retransmitted/sec and so on. Make sure to establish a good friendship with your network administrator (buy them coffee, for example J ) and get into a conversation about the network settings. Have them explain to you how the network cards are setup – are they standalone, are they ‘teamed’, what are the settings – full duplex and so on. Find some time to read a bit about networking. In this short blog post I hope I have turned your attention to ‘the big picture’ and the fact that there are other factors affecting our SQL Server, aside from its internal workings. As a further reading I would still highly recommend the Wait Stats series on this blog, also I would recommend you have the coffee break conversation with your network admin as soon as possible. This guest post is written by Feodor Georgiev. Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL

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• Node.js Adventure - Node.js on Windows

  - by Shaun

  Two weeks ago I had had a talk with Wang Tao, a C# MVP in China who is currently running his startup company and product named worktile. He asked me to figure out a synchronization solution which helps his product in the future. And he preferred me implementing the service in Node.js, since his worktile is written in Node.js. Even though I have some experience in ASP.NET MVC, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I don’t think I’m an expert of JavaScript. In fact I’m very new to it. So it scared me a bit when he asked me to use Node.js. But after about one week investigate I have to say Node.js is very easy to learn, use and deploy, even if you have very limited JavaScript skill. And I think I became love Node.js. Hence I decided to have a series named “Node.js Adventure”, where I will demonstrate my story of learning and using Node.js in Windows and Windows Azure. And this is the first one.   (Brief) Introduction of Node.js I don’t want to have a fully detailed introduction of Node.js. There are many resource on the internet we can find. But the best one is its homepage. Node.js was created by Ryan Dahl, sponsored by Joyent. It’s consist of about 80% C/C++ for core and 20% JavaScript for API. It utilizes CommonJS as the module system which we will explain later. The official definition of Node.js is Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. First of all, Node.js utilizes JavaScript as its development language and runs on top of V8 engine, which is being used by Chrome. It brings JavaScript, a client-side language into the backend service world. So many people said, even though not that actually, “Node.js is a server side JavaScript”. Additionally, Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking IO model. This means in Node.js there’s no way to block currently working thread. Every operation in Node.js executed asynchronously. This is a huge benefit especially if our code needs IO operations such as reading disks, connect to database, consuming web service, etc.. Unlike IIS or Apache, Node.js doesn’t utilize the multi-thread model. In Node.js there’s only one working thread serves all users requests and resources response, as the ST star in the figure below. And there is a POSIX async threads pool in Node.js which contains many async threads (AT stars) for IO operations. When a user have an IO request, the ST serves it but it will not do the IO operation. Instead the ST will go to the POSIX async threads pool to pick up an AT, pass this operation to it, and then back to serve any other requests. The AT will actually do the IO operation asynchronously. Assuming before the AT complete the IO operation there is another user comes. The ST will serve this new user request, pick up another AT from the POSIX and then back. If the previous AT finished the IO operation it will take the result back and wait for the ST to serve. ST will take the response and return the AT to POSIX, and then response to the user. And if the second AT finished its job, the ST will response back to the second user in the same way. As you can see, in Node.js there’s only one thread serve clients’ requests and POSIX results. This thread looping between the users and POSIX and pass the data back and forth. The async jobs will be handled by POSIX. This is the event-driven non-blocking IO model. The performance of is model is much better than the multi-threaded blocking model. For example, Apache is built in multi-threaded blocking model while Nginx is in event-driven non-blocking mode. Below is the performance comparison between them. And below is the memory usage comparison between them. These charts are captured from the video NodeJS Basics: An Introductory Training, which presented at Cloud Foundry Developer Advocate.   Node.js on Windows To execute Node.js application on windows is very simple. First of you we need to download the latest Node.js platform from its website. After installed, it will register its folder into system path variant so that we can execute Node.js at anywhere. To confirm the Node.js installation, just open up a command windows and type “node”, then it will show the Node.js console. As you can see this is a JavaScript interactive console. We can type some simple JavaScript code and command here. To run a Node.js JavaScript application, just specify the source code file name as the argument of the “node” command. For example, let’s create a Node.js source code file named “helloworld.js”. Then copy a sample code from Node.js website. 1: var http = require("http"); 2:  3: http.createServer(function (req, res) { 4: res.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"}); 5: res.end("Hello World\n"); 6: }).listen(1337, "127.0.0.1"); 7:  8: console.log("Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/"); This code will create a web server, listening on 1337 port and return “Hello World” when any requests come. Run it in the command windows. Then open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:1337/. As you can see, when using Node.js we are not creating a web application. In fact we are likely creating a web server. We need to deal with request, response and the related headers, status code, etc.. And this is one of the benefit of using Node.js, lightweight and straightforward. But creating a website from scratch again and again is not acceptable. The good news is that, Node.js utilizes CommonJS as its module system, so that we can leverage some modules to simplify our job. And furthermore, there are about ten thousand of modules available n the internet, which covers almost all areas in server side application development.   NPM and Node.js Modules Node.js utilizes CommonJS as its module system. A module is a set of JavaScript files. In Node.js if we have an entry file named “index.js”, then all modules it needs will be located at the “node_modules” folder. And in the “index.js” we can import modules by specifying the module name. For example, in the code we’ve just created, we imported a module named “http”, which is a build-in module installed alone with Node.js. So that we can use the code in this “http” module. Besides the build-in modules there are many modules available at the NPM website. Thousands of developers are contributing and downloading modules at this website. Hence this is another benefit of using Node.js. There are many modules we can use, and the numbers of modules increased very fast, and also we can publish our modules to the community. When I wrote this post, there are totally 14,608 modules at NPN and about 10 thousand downloads per day. Install a module is very simple. Let’s back to our command windows and input the command “npm install express”. This command will install a module named “express”, which is a MVC framework on top of Node.js. And let’s create another JavaScript file named “helloweb.js” and copy the code below in it. I imported the “express” module. And then when the user browse the home page it will response a text. If the incoming URL matches “/Echo/:value” which the “value” is what the user specified, it will pass it back with the current date time in JSON format. And finally my website was listening at 12345 port. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3:  4: app.get("/", function(req, res) { 5: res.send("Hello Node.js and Express."); 6: }); 7:  8: app.get("/Echo/:value", function(req, res) { 9: var value = req.params.value; 10: res.json({ 11: "Value" : value, 12: "Time" : new Date() 13: }); 14: }); 15:  16: console.log("Web application opened."); 17: app.listen(12345); For more information and API about the “express”, please have a look here. Start our application from the command window by command “node helloweb.js”, and then navigate to the home page we can see the response in the browser. And if we go to, for example http://localhost:12345/Echo/Hello Shaun, we can see the JSON result. The “express” module is very populate in NPM. It makes the job simple when we need to build a MVC website. There are many modules very useful in NPM. - underscore: A utility module covers many common functionalities such as for each, map, reduce, select, etc.. - request: A very simple HTT request client. - async: Library for coordinate async operations. - wind: Library which enable us to control flow with plain JavaScript for asynchronous programming (and more) without additional pre-compiling steps.   Node.js and IIS I demonstrated how to run the Node.js application from console. Since we are in Windows another common requirement would be, “can I host Node.js in IIS?” The answer is “Yes”. Tomasz Janczuk created a project IISNode at his GitHub space we can find here. And Scott Hanselman had published a blog post introduced about it.   Summary In this post I provided a very brief introduction of Node.js, includes it official definition, architecture and how it implement the event-driven non-blocking model. And then I described how to install and run a Node.js application on windows console. I also described the Node.js module system and NPM command. At the end I referred some links about IISNode, an IIS extension that allows Node.js application runs on IIS. Node.js became a very popular server side application platform especially in this year. By leveraging its non-blocking IO model and async feature it’s very useful for us to build a highly scalable, asynchronously service. I think Node.js will be used widely in the cloud application development in the near future.   In the next post I will explain how to use SQL Server from Node.js.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Pluralsight Meet the Author Podcast on HTML5 Canvas Programming

  - by dwahlin

    In the latest installment of Pluralsight’s Meet the Author podcast series, Fritz Onion and I talk about my new course, HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals.  In the interview I describe different canvas technologies covered throughout the course and a sample application at the end of the course that covers how to build a custom business chart from start to finish. Meet the Author:  Dan Wahlin on HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals   Transcript [Fritz] Hi. This is Fritz Onion. I’m here today with Dan Wahlin to talk about his new course HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals. Dan founded the Wahlin Group, which you can find at thewahlingroup.com, which specializes in ASP.NET, jQuery, Silverlight, and SharePoint consulting. He’s a Microsoft Regional Director and has been awarded Microsoft’s MVP for ASP.NET, Connected Systems, and Silverlight. Dan is on the INETA Bureau’s — Speaker’s Bureau, speaks at conferences and user groups around the world, and has written several books on .NET. Thanks for talking to me today, Dan. [Dan] Always good to talk with you, Fritz. [Fritz] So this new course of yours, HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals, I have to say that most of the really snazzy demos I’ve seen with HTML5 have involved Canvas, so I thought it would be a good starting point to chat with you about why we decided to create a course dedicated just to Canvas. If you want to kind of give us that perspective. [Dan] Sure. So, you know, there’s quite a bit of material out there on HTML5 in general, and as people that have done a lot with HTML5 are probably aware, a lot of HTML5 is actually JavaScript centric. You know, a lot of people when they first learn it, think it’s tags, but most of it’s actually JavaScript, and it just so happens that the HTML5 Canvas is one of those things. And so it’s not just, you know, a tag you add and it just magically draws all these things. You mentioned there’s a lot of cool things you can do from games to there’s some really cool multimedia applications out there where they integrate video and audio and all kinds of things into the Canvas, to more business scenarios such as charting and things along those lines. So the reason we made a course specifically on it is, a lot of the material out there touches on it but the Canvas is actually a pretty deep topic. You can do some pretty advanced stuff or easy stuff depending on what your application requirements are, and the API itself, you know, there’s over 30 functions just in the Canvas API and then a whole set of properties that actually go with that as well. So it’s a pretty big topic, and that’s why we created a course specifically tailored towards just the Canvas. [Fritz] Right. And let’s — let me just review the outline briefly here for everyone. So you start off with an introduction to getting started with Canvas, drawing with the HTML5 Canvas, then you talk about manipulating pixels, and you finish up with building a custom data chart. So I really like your example flow here. I think it will appeal to even business developers, right. Even if you’re not into HTML5 for the games or the media capabilities, there’s still something here for everyone I think working with the Canvas. Which leads me to another question, which is, where do you see the Canvas fitting in to kind of your day-to-day developer, people that are working business applications and maybe vanilla websites that aren’t doing kind of cutting edge stuff with interactivity with users? Is there a still a place for the Canvas in those scenarios? [Dan] Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of us — and I include myself here — over the last few years, the focus has generally been, especially if you’re, let’s say, a PHP or ASP.NET or Java type of developer, we’re kind of accustomed to working on the server side, and, you know, we kind of relied on Flash or Silverlight or these other plug-ins for the client side stuff when it was kind of fancy, like charts and graphs and things along those lines. With the what I call massive shift of applications, you know, mainly because of mobile, to more of client side, one of the big benefits I think from a maybe corporate standard way of thinking of things, since we do a lot of work with different corporations, is that, number one, rather than having to have the plug-in, which of course isn’t going to work on iPad and some of these other devices out there that are pretty popular, you can now use a built-in technology that all the modern browsers support, and that includes things like Safari on the iPad and iPhone and the Android tablets and things like that with their browsers, and actually render some really sophisticated charts. Whether you do it by scratch or from scratch or, you know, get a third party type of library involved, it’s just JavaScript. So it downloads fast so it’s good from a performance perspective; and when it comes to what you can render, it’s extremely robust. You can do everything from, you know, your basic circles to polygons or polylines to really advanced gradients as well and even provide some interactivity and animations, and that’s some of the stuff I touch upon in the class. In fact, you mentioned the last part of the outline there is building a custom data chart and that’s kind of gears towards more of the, what I’d call enterprise or corporate type developer. [Fritz] Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s, you know, a lot of the demos I’ve seen with HTML5 focus on more the interactivity and kind of game side of things, but the Canvas is such a diverse element within HTML5 that I can see it being applicable pretty much anywhere. So why don’t we talk a little bit about some of the specifics of what you cover? You talk about drawing and then manipulating pixels. You want to kind of give us the different ways of working with the Canvas and what some of those APIs provide for you? [Dan] Sure. So going all the way back to the start of the outline, we actually started off by showing different demonstrations of the Canvas in action, and we show some fun stuff — multimedia apps and games and things like that — and then also some more business scenarios; and then once you see that, hopefully it kinds of piques your interest and you go, oh, wow, this is actually pretty phenomenal what you can do. So then we start you off with, so how to you actually draw things. Now, there are some libraries out there that will draw things like graphs, but if you want to customize those or just build something you have from scratch, you need to know the basics, such as, you know, how do you draw circles and lines and arcs and Bezier curves and all those fancy types of shapes that a given chart may have on it or that a game may have in it for that matter. So we start off by covering what I call the core API functions; how do you, for instance, fill a rectangle or convert that to a square by setting the height and the width; how do you draw arcs or different types of curves and there’s different types supported such as I mentioned Bezier curves or quadratic curves; and then we also talk about how do you integrate text into it. You might have some images already that are just regular bitmap type images that you want to integrate, you can do that with a Canvas. And you can even sync video into the Canvas, which actually opens up some pretty interesting possibilities for both business and I think just general multimedia apps. Once you kind of get those core functions down for the basic shapes that you need to be able to draw on any type of Canvas, then we go a little deeper into what are the pixels that are there to manipulate. And that’s one of the important things to understand about the HTML5 Canvas, scalable vector graphics is another thing you can use now in the modern browsers; it’s vector based. Canvas is pixel based. And so we talk about how to do gradients, how can you do transforms, you know, how do you scale things or rotate things, which is extremely useful for charts ’cause you might have text that, you know, flips up on its side for a y-axis or something like that. And you can even do direct pixel manipulation. So it’s really, really powerful. If you want to get down to the RGBA level, you can do that, and I show how to do that in the course, and then kind of wrap that section up with some animation fundamentals. [Fritz] Great. Yeah, that’s really powerful stuff for programmatically rendering data to clients and responding to user inputs. Look forward to seeing what everyone’s going to come up with building this stuff. So great. That’s — that’s HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals with Dan Wahlin. Thanks very much, Dan. [Dan] Thanks again. I appreciate it.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 27, 2010New ProjectsActive Directory User Properties Change: A complete application in VS 2005 and VB.NET, for Request Request in User Details in Active Directory, with flow to HR and then to IT for approval ...AVR Terminal: A Windows application for connecting to an AVR via RS232 serial or USB-to-COM FTDI ports. Works on Arduino, Bare Bones Board, and any custom board...Battle Droids: AVR-based Network Combat!: A Battle Droid is an AVR® microcontroller running the BattleDroid firmware. This firmware turns your AVR into a lean, mean, fighting machine, and ...Camp Foundation: Camp Foundationchakma: chakma is a question - answer based web application to make people get questions from anybody around the world and being able to answer them. c...Document.Editor: Document.Editor is a multitab text editor for Windows. It includes plain and rich text format support, multi tab interface so you can edit multiple...Dot Net Marche Music Store Demo Application: This is a demo application that the DotNetMarche user gorup (www.dotnetmarche.org) use to make experiments and prepare demos for our workshopselivators: a monitor which enables the user to view the movement of the elivators in a buildingExtended SSIS Package Execute: The SSIS package execute task is flawed as it does not support passing variables. Here we have a custom task that will pass items in a dataflow as...File tools: File toolsFileExplorer.NET: FileExplorer.NET is a .net usercontrol which tries to mimic the Windows FileExplorer treeview.Kazuku: ASP.NET MVC 2 Content Management SystemKSharp Ajax Control Toolkit Library: Built ontop of the Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit, this library offers enhanced versions of the controls found in the Ajax Control Toolkit....Nitrous - An Aspx ViewEngine for ASP.NET MVC: Near drop-in replacement ASP.NET ViewEngine for MVC.Open Data Protocol - Client Libraries: This is an Open Source release of the .NET and Silverlight Client Libraries for the Open Data Protocol (OData). For more information on odata, see ...ORAYLIS BI.SmartDiff: BI.SmartDiff is a helper to connect the functionality of BIDS Helper – SmartDiff to TortoiseSVN. BIDS Helper – SmartDiff helps you to get more read...RicciWebSiteSystem: soon websiteSynapse:Silverlight A Simple Silverlight Framework: Synapse:Silverlight is a simplified framework for Silverlight. It's purpose is to help developers and designers produce basic LOB solutions that do...TestProjectMB: Testing Team Foundation ServerThoughtWorks Cruise Notification Interceptor: Cruise notification interceptorThreadSafeControls: ThreadSafeControls is a C# project that greatly simplifies the process of transitioning Windows Forms applications to a multithreaded environment b...Unscrambler: Unscrambler is a multitouch WPF word game built with MVVM Light in order to show how to use the touch maniupation and inertia features included in ...Web Utilities: web utilitiesNew Releases7zbackup - PowerShell Script to Backup Files with 7zip: 7zBackup v. 1.7.1 Stable: Bug Solved : Presence of junction.exe is wrongly referred to 7z.exeAVR Terminal: AVR Terminal v0.2: Here is an Alpha-almost-BETA release of the AVR Terminal. That being said, I use it almost daily and it shouldn't break anything on your system, b...Bistro FSharp Extensions: 0.9.7.0: This is the VS 2010 release of BistroFS extensions. 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• Following the Thread in OSB

  - by Antony Reynolds

  Threading in OSB The Scenario I recently led an OSB POC where we needed to get high throughput from an OSB pipeline that had the following logic: 1. Receive Request 2. Send Request to External System 3. If Response has a particular value   3.1 Modify Request   3.2 Resend Request to External System 4. Send Response back to Requestor All looks very straightforward and no nasty wrinkles along the way.  The flow was implemented in OSB as follows (see diagram for more details): Proxy Service to Receive Request and Send Response Request Pipeline   Copies Original Request for use in step 3 Route Node   Sends Request to External System exposed as a Business Service Response Pipeline   Checks Response to Check If Request Needs to Be Resubmitted Modify Request Callout to External System (same Business Service as Route Node) The Proxy and the Business Service were each assigned their own Work Manager, effectively giving each of them their own thread pool. The Surprise Imagine our surprise when, on stressing the system we saw it lock up, with large numbers of blocked threads.  The reason for the lock up is due to some subtleties in the OSB thread model which is the topic of this post.   Basic Thread Model OSB goes to great lengths to avoid holding on to threads.  Lets start by looking at how how OSB deals with a simple request/response routing to a business service in a route node. Most Business Services are implemented by OSB in two parts.  The first part uses the request thread to send the request to the target.  In the diagram this is represented by the thread T1.  After sending the request to the target (the Business Service in our diagram) the request thread is released back to whatever pool it came from.  A multiplexor (muxer) is used to wait for the response.  When the response is received the muxer hands off the response to a new thread that is used to execute the response pipeline, this is represented in the diagram by T2. OSB allows you to assign different Work Managers and hence different thread pools to each Proxy Service and Business Service.  In out example we have the “Proxy Service Work Manager” assigned to the Proxy Service and the “Business Service Work Manager” assigned to the Business Service.  Note that the Business Service Work Manager is only used to assign the thread to process the response, it is never used to process the request. This architecture means that while waiting for a response from a business service there are no threads in use, which makes for better scalability in terms of thread usage. First Wrinkle Note that if the Proxy and the Business Service both use the same Work Manager then there is potential for starvation.  For example: Request Pipeline makes a blocking callout, say to perform a database read. Business Service response tries to allocate a thread from thread pool but all threads are blocked in the database read. New requests arrive and contend with responses arriving for the available threads. Similar problems can occur if the response pipeline blocks for some reason, maybe a database update for example. Solution The solution to this is to make sure that the Proxy and Business Service use different Work Managers so that they do not contend with each other for threads. Do Nothing Route Thread Model So what happens if there is no route node?  In this case OSB just echoes the Request message as a Response message, but what happens to the threads?  OSB still uses a separate thread for the response, but in this case the Work Manager used is the Default Work Manager. So this is really a special case of the Basic Thread Model discussed above, except that the response pipeline will always execute on the Default Work Manager.   Proxy Chaining Thread Model So what happens when the route node is actually calling a Proxy Service rather than a Business Service, does the second Proxy Service use its own Thread or does it re-use the thread of the original Request Pipeline? Well as you can see from the diagram when a route node calls another proxy service then the original Work Manager is used for both request pipelines.  Similarly the response pipeline uses the Work Manager associated with the ultimate Business Service invoked via a Route Node.  This actually fits in with the earlier description I gave about Business Services and by extension Route Nodes they “… uses the request thread to send the request to the target”. Call Out Threading Model So what happens when you make a Service Callout to a Business Service from within a pipeline.  The documentation says that “The pipeline processor will block the thread until the response arrives asynchronously” when using a Service Callout.  What this means is that the target Business Service is called using the pipeline thread but the response is also handled by the pipeline thread.  This implies that the pipeline thread blocks waiting for a response.  It is the handling of this response that behaves in an unexpected way. When a Business Service is called via a Service Callout, the calling thread is suspended after sending the request, but unlike the Route Node case the thread is not released, it waits for the response.  The muxer uses the Business Service Work Manager to allocate a thread to process the response, but in this case processing the response means getting the response and notifying the blocked pipeline thread that the response is available.  The original pipeline thread can then continue to process the response. Second Wrinkle This leads to an unfortunate wrinkle.  If the Business Service is using the same Work Manager as the Pipeline then it is possible for starvation or a deadlock to occur.  The scenario is as follows: Pipeline makes a Callout and the thread is suspended but still allocated Multiple Pipeline instances using the same Work Manager are in this state (common for a system under load) Response comes back but all Work Manager threads are allocated to blocked pipelines. Response cannot be processed and so pipeline threads never unblock – deadlock! Solution The solution to this is to make sure that any Business Services used by a Callout in a pipeline use a different Work Manager to the pipeline itself. The Solution to My Problem Looking back at my original workflow we see that the same Business Service is called twice, once in a Routing Node and once in a Response Pipeline Callout.  This was what was causing my problem because the response pipeline was using the Business Service Work Manager, but the Service Callout wanted to use the same Work Manager to handle the responses and so eventually my Response Pipeline hogged all the available threads so no responses could be processed. The solution was to create a second Business Service pointing to the same location as the original Business Service, the only difference was to assign a different Work Manager to this Business Service.  This ensured that when the Service Callout completed there were always threads available to process the response because the response processing from the Service Callout had its own dedicated Work Manager. Summary Request Pipeline Executes on Proxy Work Manager (WM) Thread so limited by setting of that WM.  If no WM specified then uses WLS default WM. Route Node Request sent using Proxy WM Thread Proxy WM Thread is released before getting response Muxer is used to handle response Muxer hands off response to Business Service (BS) WM Response Pipeline Executes on Routed Business Service WM Thread so limited by setting of that WM.  If no WM specified then uses WLS default WM. No Route Node (Echo functionality) Proxy WM thread released New thread from the default WM used for response pipeline Service Callout Request sent using proxy pipeline thread Proxy thread is suspended (not released) until the response comes back Notification of response handled by BS WM thread so limited by setting of that WM.  If no WM specified then uses WLS default WM. Note this is a very short lived use of the thread After notification by callout BS WM thread that thread is released and execution continues on the original pipeline thread. Route/Callout to Proxy Service Request Pipeline of callee executes on requestor thread Response Pipeline of caller executes on response thread of requested proxy Throttling Request message may be queued if limit reached. Requesting thread is released (route node) or suspended (callout) So what this means is that you may get deadlocks caused by thread starvation if you use the same thread pool for the business service in a route node and the business service in a callout from the response pipeline because the callout will need a notification thread from the same thread pool as the response pipeline.  This was the problem we were having. You get a similar problem if you use the same work manager for the proxy request pipeline and a business service callout from that request pipeline. It also means you may want to have different work managers for the proxy and business service in the route node. Basically you need to think carefully about how threading impacts your proxy services. References Thanks to Jay Kasi, Gerald Nunn and Deb Ayers for helping to explain this to me.  Any errors are my own and not theirs.  Also thanks to my colleagues Milind Pandit and Prasad Bopardikar who travelled this road with me. OSB Thread Model Great Blog Post on Thread Usage in OSB

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• Hello Operator, My Switch Is Bored

  - by Paul White

  This is a post for T-SQL Tuesday #43 hosted by my good friend Rob Farley. The topic this month is Plan Operators. I haven’t taken part in T-SQL Tuesday before, but I do like to write about execution plans, so this seemed like a good time to start. This post is in two parts. The first part is primarily an excuse to use a pretty bad play on words in the title of this blog post (if you’re too young to know what a telephone operator or a switchboard is, I hate you). The second part of the post looks at an invisible query plan operator (so to speak). 1. My Switch Is Bored Allow me to present the rare and interesting execution plan operator, Switch: Books Online has this to say about Switch: Following that description, I had a go at producing a Fast Forward Cursor plan that used the TOP operator, but had no luck. That may be due to my lack of skill with cursors, I’m not too sure. The only application of Switch in SQL Server 2012 that I am familiar with requires a local partitioned view: CREATE TABLE dbo.T1 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 00 AND 24)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T2 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 25 AND 49)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T3 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 50 AND 74)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T4 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 75 AND 99)); GO CREATE VIEW V1 AS SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T1 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T2 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T3 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T4; Not only that, but it needs an updatable local partitioned view. We’ll need some primary keys to meet that requirement: ALTER TABLE dbo.T1 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T1 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T2 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T2 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T3 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T3 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T4 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T4 PRIMARY KEY (c1); We also need an INSERT statement that references the view. Even more specifically, to see a Switch operator, we need to perform a single-row insert (multi-row inserts use a different plan shape): INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1); And now…the execution plan: The Constant Scan manufactures a single row with no columns. The Compute Scalar works out which partition of the view the new value should go in. The Assert checks that the computed partition number is not null (if it is, an error is returned). The Nested Loops Join executes exactly once, with the partition id as an outer reference (correlated parameter). The Switch operator checks the value of the parameter and executes the corresponding input only. If the partition id is 0, the uppermost Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T1. If the partition id is 1, the next lower Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T2…and so on. In case you were wondering, here’s a query and execution plan for a multi-row insert to the view: INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1), (2); Yuck! An Eager Table Spool and four Filters! I prefer the Switch plan. My guess is that almost all the old strategies that used a Switch operator have been replaced over time, using things like a regular Concatenation Union All combined with Start-Up Filters on its inputs. Other new (relative to the Switch operator) features like table partitioning have specific execution plan support that doesn’t need the Switch operator either. This feels like a bit of a shame, but perhaps it is just nostalgia on my part, it’s hard to know. Please do let me know if you encounter a query that can still use the Switch operator in 2012 – it must be very bored if this is the only possible modern usage! 2. Invisible Plan Operators The second part of this post uses an example based on a question Dave Ballantyne asked using the SQL Sentry Plan Explorer plan upload facility. If you haven’t tried that yet, make sure you’re on the latest version of the (free) Plan Explorer software, and then click the Post to SQLPerformance.com button. That will create a site question with the query plan attached (which can be anonymized if the plan contains sensitive information). Aaron Bertrand and I keep a close eye on questions there, so if you have ever wanted to ask a query plan question of either of us, that’s a good way to do it. The problem The issue I want to talk about revolves around a query issued against a calendar table. The script below creates a simplified version and adds 100 years of per-day information to it: USE tempdb; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Calendar ( dt date NOT NULL, isWeekday bit NOT NULL, theYear smallint NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT PK__dbo_Calendar_dt PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (dt) ); GO -- Monday is the first day of the week for me SET DATEFIRST 1;   -- Add 100 years of data INSERT dbo.Calendar WITH (TABLOCKX) (dt, isWeekday, theYear) SELECT CA.dt, isWeekday = CASE WHEN DATEPART(WEEKDAY, CA.dt) IN (6, 7) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END, theYear = YEAR(CA.dt) FROM Sandpit.dbo.Numbers AS N CROSS APPLY ( VALUES (DATEADD(DAY, N.n - 1, CONVERT(date, '01 Jan 2000', 113))) ) AS CA (dt) WHERE N.n BETWEEN 1 AND 36525; The following query counts the number of weekend days in 2013: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; It returns the correct result (104) using the following execution plan: The query optimizer has managed to estimate the number of rows returned from the table exactly, based purely on the default statistics created separately on the two columns referenced in the query’s WHERE clause. (Well, almost exactly, the unrounded estimate is 104.289 rows.) There is already an invisible operator in this query plan – a Filter operator used to apply the WHERE clause predicates. We can see it by re-running the query with the enormously useful (but undocumented) trace flag 9130 enabled: Now we can see the full picture. The whole table is scanned, returning all 36,525 rows, before the Filter narrows that down to just the 104 we want. Without the trace flag, the Filter is incorporated in the Clustered Index Scan as a residual predicate. It is a little bit more efficient than using a separate operator, but residual predicates are still something you will want to avoid where possible. The estimates are still spot on though: Anyway, looking to improve the performance of this query, Dave added the following filtered index to the Calendar table: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear) WHERE isWeekday = 0; The original query now produces a much more efficient plan: Unfortunately, the estimated number of rows produced by the seek is now wrong (365 instead of 104): What’s going on? The estimate was spot on before we added the index! Explanation You might want to grab a coffee for this bit. Using another trace flag or two (8606 and 8612) we can see that the cardinality estimates were exactly right initially: The highlighted information shows the initial cardinality estimates for the base table (36,525 rows), the result of applying the two relational selects in our WHERE clause (104 rows), and after performing the COUNT_BIG(*) group by aggregate (1 row). All of these are correct, but that was before cost-based optimization got involved :) Cost-based optimization When cost-based optimization starts up, the logical tree above is copied into a structure (the ‘memo’) that has one group per logical operation (roughly speaking). The logical read of the base table (LogOp_Get) ends up in group 7; the two predicates (LogOp_Select) end up in group 8 (with the details of the selections in subgroups 0-6). These two groups still have the correct cardinalities as trace flag 8608 output (initial memo contents) shows: During cost-based optimization, a rule called SelToIdxStrategy runs on group 8. It’s job is to match logical selections to indexable expressions (SARGs). It successfully matches the selections (theYear = 2013, is Weekday = 0) to the filtered index, and writes a new alternative into the memo structure. The new alternative is entered into group 8 as option 1 (option 0 was the original LogOp_Select): The new alternative is to do nothing (PhyOp_NOP = no operation), but to instead follow the new logical instructions listed below the NOP. The LogOp_GetIdx (full read of an index) goes into group 21, and the LogOp_SelectIdx (selection on an index) is placed in group 22, operating on the result of group 21. The definition of the comparison ‘the Year = 2013’ (ScaOp_Comp downwards) was already present in the memo starting at group 2, so no new memo groups are created for that. New Cardinality Estimates The new memo groups require two new cardinality estimates to be derived. First, LogOp_Idx (full read of the index) gets a predicted cardinality of 10,436. This number comes from the filtered index statistics: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH STAT_HEADER; The second new cardinality derivation is for the LogOp_SelectIdx applying the predicate (theYear = 2013). To get a number for this, the cardinality estimator uses statistics for the column ‘theYear’, producing an estimate of 365 rows (there are 365 days in 2013!): DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, theYear) WITH HISTOGRAM; This is where the mistake happens. Cardinality estimation should have used the filtered index statistics here, to get an estimate of 104 rows: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH HISTOGRAM; Unfortunately, the logic has lost sight of the link between the read of the filtered index (LogOp_GetIdx) in group 22, and the selection on that index (LogOp_SelectIdx) that it is deriving a cardinality estimate for, in group 21. The correct cardinality estimate (104 rows) is still present in the memo, attached to group 8, but that group now has a PhyOp_NOP implementation. Skipping over the rest of cost-based optimization (in a belated attempt at brevity) we can see the optimizer’s final output using trace flag 8607: This output shows the (incorrect, but understandable) 365 row estimate for the index range operation, and the correct 104 estimate still attached to its PhyOp_NOP. This tree still has to go through a few post-optimizer rewrites and ‘copy out’ from the memo structure into a tree suitable for the execution engine. One step in this process removes PhyOp_NOP, discarding its 104-row cardinality estimate as it does so. To finish this section on a more positive note, consider what happens if we add an OVER clause to the query aggregate. This isn’t intended to be a ‘fix’ of any sort, I just want to show you that the 104 estimate can survive and be used if later cardinality estimation needs it: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) OVER () FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; The estimated execution plan is: Note the 365 estimate at the Index Seek, but the 104 lives again at the Segment! We can imagine the lost predicate ‘isWeekday = 0’ as sitting between the seek and the segment in an invisible Filter operator that drops the estimate from 365 to 104. Even though the NOP group is removed after optimization (so we don’t see it in the execution plan) bear in mind that all cost-based choices were made with the 104-row memo group present, so although things look a bit odd, it shouldn’t affect the optimizer’s plan selection. I should also mention that we can work around the estimation issue by including the index’s filtering columns in the index key: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear, isWeekday) WHERE isWeekday = 0 WITH (DROP_EXISTING = ON); There are some downsides to doing this, including that changes to the isWeekday column may now require Halloween Protection, but that is unlikely to be a big problem for a static calendar table ;)  With the updated index in place, the original query produces an execution plan with the correct cardinality estimation showing at the Index Seek: That’s all for today, remember to let me know about any Switch plans you come across on a modern instance of SQL Server! Finally, here are some other posts of mine that cover other plan operators: Segment and Sequence Project Common Subexpression Spools Why Plan Operators Run Backwards Row Goals and the Top Operator Hash Match Flow Distinct Top N Sort Index Spools and Page Splits Singleton and Range Seeks Bitmaps Hash Join Performance Compute Scalar © 2013 Paul White – All Rights Reserved Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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• EM12c Release 4: Cloud Control to Major Tom...

  - by abulloch

  With the latest release of Enterprise Manager 12c, Release 4 (12.1.0.4) the EM development team has added new functionality to assist the EM Administrator to monitor the health of the EM infrastructure.   Taking feedback delivered from customers directly and through customer advisory boards some nice enhancements have been made to the “Manage Cloud Control” sections of the UI, commonly known in the EM community as “the MTM pages” (MTM stands for Monitor the Monitor).  This part of the EM Cloud Control UI is viewed by many as the mission control for EM Administrators. In this post we’ll highlight some of the new information that’s on display in these redesigned pages and explain how the information they present can help EM administrators identify potential bottlenecks or issues with the EM infrastructure. The first page we’ll take a look at is the newly designed Repository information page.  You can get to this from the main Setup menu, through Manage Cloud Control, then Repository.  Once this page loads you’ll see the new layout that includes 3 tabs containing more drill-down information. The Repository Tab The first tab, Repository, gives you a series of 6 panels or regions on screen that display key information that the EM Administrator needs to review from time to time to ensure that their infrastructure is in good health. Rather than go through every panel let’s call out a few and let you explore the others later yourself on your own EM site.  Firstly, we have the Repository Details panel. At a glance the EM Administrator can see the current version of the EM repository database and more critically, three important elements of information relating to availability and reliability :- Is the database in Archive Log mode ? Is the database using Flashback ? When was the last database backup taken ? In this test environment above the answers are not too worrying, however, Production environments should have at least Archivelog mode enabled, Flashback is a nice feature to enable prior to upgrades (for fast rollback) and all Production sites should have a backup.  In this case the backup information in the Control file indicates there’s been no recorded backups taken. The next region of interest to note on this page shows key information around the Repository configuration, specifically, the initialisation parameters (from the spfile). If you’re storing your EM Repository in a Cluster Database you can view the parameters on each individual instance using the Instance Name drop-down selector in the top right of the region. Additionally, you’ll note there is now a check performed on the active configuration to ensure that you’re using, at the very least, Oracle minimum recommended values.  Should the values in your EM Repository not meet these requirements it will be flagged in this table with a red X for non-compliance.  You can of-course change these values within EM by selecting the Database target and modifying the parameters in the spfile (and optionally, the run-time values if the parameter allows dynamic changes). The last region to call out on this page before moving on is the new look Repository Scheduler Job Status region. This region is an update of a similar region seen on previous releases of the MTM pages in Cloud Control but there’s some important new functionality that’s been added that customers have requested. First-up - Restarting Repository Jobs.  As you can see from the graphic, you can now optionally select a job (by selecting the row in the UI table element) and click on the Restart Job button to take care of any jobs which have stopped or stalled for any reason.  Previously this needed to be done at the command line using EMDIAG or through a PL/SQL package invocation.  You can now take care of this directly from within the UI. Next, you’ll see that a feature has been added to allow the EM administrator to customise the run-time for some of the background jobs that run in the Repository.  We heard from some customers that ensuring these jobs don’t clash with Production backups, etc is a key requirement.  This new functionality allows you to select the pencil icon to edit the schedule time for these more resource intensive background jobs and modify the schedule to avoid clashes like this. Moving onto the next tab, let’s select the Metrics tab. The Metrics Tab There’s some big changes here, this page contains new information regions that help the Administrator understand the direct impact the in-bound metric flows are having on the EM Repository.  Many customers have provided feedback that they are in the dark about the impact of adding new targets or large numbers of new hosts or new target types into EM and the impact this has on the Repository.  This page helps the EM Administrator get to grips with this.  Let’s take a quick look at two regions on this page. First-up there’s a bubble chart showing a comprehensive view of the top resource consumers of metric data, over the last 30 days, charted as the number of rows loaded against the number of collections for the metric.  The size of the bubble indicates a relative volume.  You can see from this example above that a quick glance shows that Host metrics are the largest inbound flow into the repository when measured by number of rows.  Closely following behind this though are a large number of collections for Oracle Weblogic Server and Application Deployment.  Taken together the Host Collections is around 0.7Mb of data.  The total information collection for Weblogic Server and Application Deployments is 0.38Mb and 0.37Mb respectively. If you want to get this information breakdown on the volume of data collected simply hover over the bubble in the chart and you’ll get a floating tooltip showing the information. Clicking on any bubble in the chart takes you one level deeper into a drill-down of the Metric collection. Doing this reveals the individual metric elements for these target types and again shows a representation of the relative cost - in terms of Number of Rows, Number of Collections and Storage cost of data for each Metric type. Looking at another panel on this page we can see a different view on this data. This view shows a view of the Top N metrics (the drop down allows you to select 10, 15 or 20) and sort them by volume of data.  In the case above we can see the largest metric collection (by volume) in this case (over the last 30 days) is the information about OS Registered Software on a Host target. Taken together, these two regions provide a powerful tool for the EM Administrator to understand the potential impact of any new targets that have been discovered and promoted into management by EM12c.  It’s a great tool for identifying the cause of a sudden increase in Repository storage consumption or Redo log and Archive log generation. Using the information on this page EM Administrators can take action to mitigate any load impact by deploying monitoring templates to the targets causing most load if appropriate.   The last tab we’ll look at on this page is the Schema tab. The Schema Tab Selecting this tab brings up a window onto the SYSMAN schema with a focus on Space usage in the EM Repository.  Understanding what tablespaces are growing, at what rate, is essential information for the EM Administrator to stay on top of managing space allocations for the EM Repository so that it works as efficiently as possible and performs well for the users.  Not least because ensuring storage is managed well ensures continued availability of EM for monitoring purposes. The first region to highlight here shows the trend of space usage for the tablespaces in the EM Repository over time.  You can see the upward trend here showing that storage in the EM Repository is being consumed on an upward trend over the last few days here. This is normal as this EM being used here is brand new with Agents being added daily to bring targets into monitoring.  If your Enterprise Manager configuration has reached a steady state over a period of time where the number of new inbound targets is relatively small, the metric collection settings are fairly uniform and standardised (using Templates and Template Collections) you’re likely to see a trend of space allocation that plateau’s. The table below the trend chart shows the Top 20 Tables/Indexes sorted descending by order of space consumed.  You can switch the trend view chart and corresponding detail table by choosing a different tablespace in the EM Repository using the drop-down picker on the top right of this region. The last region to highlight on this page is the region showing information about the Purge policies in effect in the EM Repository. This information is useful to illustrate to EM Administrators the default purge policies in effect for the different categories of information available in the EM Repository.  Of course, it’s also been a long requested feature to have the ability to modify these default retention periods.  You can also do this using this screen.  As there are interdependencies between some data elements you can’t modify retention policies on a feature by feature basis.  Instead, retention policies take categories of information and bundles them together in Groups.  Retention policies are modified at the Group Level.  Understanding the impact of this really deserves a blog post all on it’s own as modifying these can have a significant impact on both the EM Repository’s storage footprint and it’s performance.  For now, we’re just highlighting the features visibility on these new pages. As a user of EM12c we hope the new features you see here address some of the feedback that’s been given on these pages over the past few releases.  We’ll look out for any comments or feedback you have on these pages ! 

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• Click Once Deployment Process and Issue Resolution

  - by Geordie

  Introduction We are adopting Click Once as a deployment standard for Thick .Net application clients.  The latest version of this tool has matured it to a point where it can be used in an enterprise environment.  This guide will identify how to use Click Once deployment and promote code trough the dev, test and production environments. Why Use Click Once over SCCM If we already use SCCM why add Click Once to the deployment options.  The advantages of Click Once are their ability to update the code in a single location and have the update flow automatically down to the user community.  There have been challenges in the past with getting configuration updates to download but these can now be achieved.  With SCCM you can do the same thing but it then needs to be packages and pushed out to users.  Each time a new user is added to an application, time needs to be spent by an administrator, to push out any required application packages.  With Click Once the user would go to a web link and the application and pre requisites will automatically get installed. New Deployment Steps Overview The deployment in an enterprise environment includes several steps as the solution moves through the development life cycle before being released into production.  To make mitigate risk during the release phase, it is important to ensure the solution is not deployed directly into production from the development tools.  Although this is the easiest path, it can introduce untested code into production and result in unexpected results. 1. Deploy the client application to a development web server using Visual Studio 2008 Click Once deployment tools.  Once potential production versions of the solution are being generated, ensure the production install URL is specified when deploying code from Visual Studio.  (For details see ‘Deploying Click Once Code from Visual Studio’) 2. xCopy the code to the test server.  Run the MageUI tool to update the URLs, signing and version numbers to match the test server. (For details see ‘Moving Click Once Code to a new Server without using Visual Studio’) 3. xCopy the code to the production server.  Run the MageUI tool to update the URLs, signing and version numbers to match the production server. The certificate used to sign the code should be provided by a certificate authority that will be trusted by the client machines.  Finally make sure the setup.exe contains the production install URL.  If not redeploy the solution from Visual Studio to the dev environment specifying the production install URL.  Then xcopy the install.exe file from dev to production.  (For details see ‘Moving Click Once Code to a new Server without using Visual Studio’) Detailed Deployment Steps Deploying Click Once Code From Visual Studio Open Visual Studio and create a new WinForms or WPF project.   In the solution explorer right click on the project and select ‘Publish’ in the context menu.   The ‘Publish Wizard’ will start.  Enter the development deployment path.  This could be a local directory or web site.  When first publishing the solution set this to a development web site and Visual basic will create a site with an install.htm page.  Click Next.  Select weather the application will be available both online and offline. Then click Finish. Once the initial deployment is completed, republish the solution this time mapping to the directory that holds the code that was just published.  This time the Publish Wizard contains and additional option.   The setup.exe file that is created has the install URL hardcoded in it.  It is this screen that allows you to specify the URL to use.  At some point a setup.exe file must be generated for production.  Enter the production URL and deploy the solution to the dev folder.  This file can then be saved for latter use in deployment to production.  During development this URL should be pointing to development site to avoid accidently installing the production application. Visual studio will publish the application to the desired location in the process it will create an anonymous ‘pfx’ certificate to sign the deployment configuration files.  A production certificate should be acquired in preparation for deployment to production.   Directory structure created by Visual Studio     Application files created by Visual Studio   Development web site (install.htm) created by Visual Studio Migrating Click Once Code to a new Server without using Visual Studio To migrate the Click Once application code to a new server, a tool called MageUI is needed to modify the .application and .manifest files.  The MageUI tool is usually located – ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin’ folder or can be downloaded from the web. When deploying to a new environment copy all files in the project folder to the new server.  In this case the ‘ClickOnceSample’ folder and contents.  The old application versions can be deleted, in this case ‘ClickOnceSample_1_0_0_0’ and ‘ClickOnceSample_1_0_0_1’.  Open IIS Manager and create a virtual directory that points to the project folder.  Also make the publish.htm the default web page.   Run the ManeUI tool and then open the .application file in the root project folder (in this case in the ‘ClickOnceSample’ folder). Click on the Deployment Options in the left hand list and update the URL to the new server URL and save the changes.   When MageUI tries to save the file it will prompt for the file to be signed.   This step cannot be bypassed if you want the Click Once deployment to work from a web site.  The easiest solution to this for test is to use the auto generated certificate that Visual Studio created for the project.  This certificate can be found with the project source code.   To save time go to File>Preferences and configure the ‘Use default signing certificate’ fields.   Future deployments will only require application files to be transferred to the new server.  The only difference is then updating the .application file the ‘Version’ must be updated to match the new version and the ‘Application Reference’ has to be update to point to the new .manifest file.     Updating the Configuration File of a Click Once Deployment Package without using Visual Studio When an update to the configuration file is required, modifying the ClickOnceSample.exe.config.deploy file will not result in current users getting the new configurations.  We do not want to go back to Visual Studio and generate a new version as this might introduce unexpected code changes.  A new version of the application can be created by copying the folder (in this case ClickOnceSample_1_0_0_2) and pasting it into the application Files directory.  Rename the directory ‘ClickOnceSample_1_0_0_3’.  In the new folder open the configuration file in notepad and make the configuration changes. Run MageUI and open the manifest file in the newly copied directory (ClickOnceSample_1_0_0_3).   Edit the manifest version to reflect the newly copied files (in this case 1.0.0.3).  Then save the file.  Open the .application file in the root folder.  Again update the version to 1.0.0.3.  Since the file has not changed the Deployment Options/Start Location URL should still be correct.  The application Reference needs to be updated to point to the new versions .manifest file.  Save the file. Next time a user runs the application the new version of the configuration file will be down loaded.  It is worth noting that there are 2 different types of configuration parameter; application and user.  With Click Once deployment the difference is significant.  When an application is downloaded the configuration file is also brought down to the client machine.  The developer may have written code to update the user parameters in the application.  As a result each time a new version of the application is down loaded the user parameters are at risk of being overwritten.  With Click Once deployment the system knows if the user parameters are still the default values.  If they are they will be overwritten with the new default values in the configuration file.  If they have been updated by the user, they will not be overwritten. Settings configuration view in Visual Studio Production Deployment When deploying the code to production it is prudent to disable the development and test deployment sites.  This will allow errors such as incorrect URL to be quickly identified in the initial testing after deployment.  If the sites are active there is no way to know if the application was downloaded from the production deployment and not redirected to test or dev.   Troubleshooting Clicking the install button on the install.htm page fails. Error: URLDownloadToCacheFile failed with HRESULT '-2146697210' Error: An error occurred trying to download <file>   This is due to the setup.exe file pointing to the wrong location. ‘The setup.exe file that is created has the install URL hardcoded in it.  It is this screen that allows you to specify the URL to use.  At some point a setup.exe file must be generated for production.  Enter the production URL and deploy the solution to the dev folder.  This file can then be saved for latter use in deployment to production.  During development this URL should be pointing to development site to avoid accidently installing the production application.’

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• How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project

  - by constant

  While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack. After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades? On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea. Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company. Engineering Systems is Hard Work! The backbone of Exalogic is its InfiniBand network: 4 times better bandwidth than even 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and only about a tenth of its latency. What a potential for increased scalability and throughput across the middleware and database layers! But InfiniBand is a beast that needs to be tamed: It is true that Exalogic uses a standard, open-source Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) InfiniBand driver stack. Unfortunately, this software has been developed by the HPC community with fastest speed in mind (which is good) but, despite the name, not many other enterprise-class requirements are included (which is less good). Here are some of the improvements that Oracle's InfiniBand development team had to add to the OFED stack to make it enterprise-ready, simply because typical HPC users didn't have the need to implement them: More than 100 bug fixes in the pieces that were not related to the Message Passing Interface Protocol (MPI), which is the protocol that HPC users use most of the time, but which is less useful in the enterprise. Performance optimizations and tuning across the whole IB stack: From Switches, Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and drivers to low-level protocols, middleware and applications. Yes, even the standard HPC IB stack could be improved in terms of performance. Ethernet over IB (EoIB): Exalogic uses InfiniBand internally to reach high performance, but it needs to play nicely with datacenters around it. That's why Oracle added Ethernet over InfiniBand technology to it that allows for creating many virtual 10GBE adapters inside Exalogic's nodes that are aggregated and connected to Exalogic's IB gateway switches. While this is an open standard, it's up to the vendor to implement it. In this case, Oracle integrated the EoIB stack with Oracle's own IB to 10GBE gateway switches, and made it fully virtualized from the beginning. This means that Exalogic customers can completely rewire their server infrastructure inside the rack without having to physically pull or plug a single cable - a must-have for every cloud deployment. Anybody who wants to match this level of integration would need to add an InfiniBand switch development team to their project. Or just buy Oracle's gateway switches, which are conveniently shipped with a whole server infrastructure attached! IPv6 support for InfiniBand's Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), TCP/IP over IB (IPoIB) and EoIB protocols. Because no IPv6 = not very enterprise-class. HA capability for SDP. High Availability is not a big requirement for HPC, but for enterprise-class application servers it is. Every node in Exalogic's InfiniBand network is connected twice for redundancy. If any cable or port or HCA fails, there's always a replacement link ready to take over. This requires extra magic at the protocol level to work. So in addition to Weblogic's failover capabilities, Oracle implemented IB automatic path migration at the SDP level to avoid unnecessary failover operations at the middleware level. Security, for example spoof-protection. Another feature that is less important for traditional users of InfiniBand, but very important for enterprise customers. InfiniBand Partitioning and Quality-of-Service (QoS): One of the first questions we get from customers about Exalogic is: “How can we implement multi-tenancy?” The answer is to partition your IB network, which effectively creates many networks that work independently and that are protected at the lowest networking layer possible. In addition to that, QoS allows administrators to prioritize traffic flow in multi-tenancy environments so they can keep their service levels where it matters most. Resilient IB Fabric Management: InfiniBand is a self-managing network, so a lot of the magic lies in coming up with the right topology and in teaching the subnet manager how to properly discover and manage the network. Oracle's Infiniband switches come with pre-integrated, highly available fabric management with seamless integration into Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. In short: Oracle elevated the OFED InfiniBand stack into an enterprise-class networking infrastructure. Many years and multiple teams of manpower went into the above improvements - this is something you can only get from Oracle, because no other InfiniBand vendor can give you these features across the whole stack! Exabus: Because it's not About the Size of Your Network, it's How You Use it! So let's assume that you somehow were able to get your hands on an enterprise-class IB driver stack. Or maybe you don't care and are just happy with the standard OFED one? Anyway, the next step is to actually leverage that InfiniBand performance. Here are the choices: Use traditional TCP/IP on top of the InfiniBand stack, Develop your own integration between your middleware and the lower-level (but faster) InfiniBand protocols. While more bandwidth is always a good thing, it's actually the low latency that enables superior performance for your applications when running on any networking infrastructure: The lower the latency, the faster the response travels through the network and the more transactions you can close per second. The reason why InfiniBand is such a low latency technology is that it gets rid of most if not all of your traditional networking protocol stack: Data is literally beamed from one region of RAM in one server into another region of RAM in another server with no kernel/drivers/UDP/TCP or other networking stack overhead involved! Which makes option 1 a no-go: Adding TCP/IP on top of InfiniBand is like adding training wheels to your racing bike. It may be ok in the beginning and for development, but it's not quite the performance IB was meant to deliver. Which only leaves option 2: Integrating your middleware with fast, low-level InfiniBand protocols. And this is what Exalogic's "Exabus" technology is all about. Here are a few Exabus features that help applications leverage the performance of InfiniBand in Exalogic: RDMA and SDP integration at the JDBC driver level (SDP), for Oracle Weblogic (SDP), Oracle Coherence (RDMA), Oracle Tuxedo (RDMA) and the new Oracle Traffic Director (RDMA) on Exalogic. Using these protocols, middleware can communicate a lot faster with each other and the Oracle database than by using standard networking protocols, Seamless Integration of Ethernet over InfiniBand from Exalogic's Gateway switches into the OS, Oracle Weblogic optimizations for handling massive amounts of parallel transactions. Because if you have an 8-lane Autobahn, you also need to improve your ramps so you can feed it with many cars in parallel. Integration of Weblogic with Oracle Exadata for faster performance, optimized session management and failover. As you see, “Exabus” is Oracle's word for describing all the InfiniBand enhancements Oracle put into Exalogic: OFED stack enhancements, protocols for faster IB access, and InfiniBand support and optimizations at the virtualization and middleware level. All working together to deliver the full potential of InfiniBand performance. Who else has 100% control over their middleware so they can develop their own low-level protocol integration with InfiniBand? Even if you take an open source approach, you're looking at years of development work to create, test and support a whole new networking technology in your middleware! The Extras: Less Hassle, More Productivity, Faster Time to Market And then there are the other advantages of Engineered Systems that are true for Exalogic the same as they are for every other Engineered System: One simple purchasing process: No headaches due to endless RFPs and no “Will X work with Y?” uncertainties. Everything has been engineered together: All kinds of bugs and problems have been already fixed at the design level that would have only manifested themselves after you have built the system from scratch. Everything is built, tested and integrated at the factory level . Less integration pain for you, faster time to market. Every Exalogic machine world-wide is identical to Oracle's own machines in the lab: Instant replication of any problems you may encounter, faster time to resolution. Simplified patching, management and operations. One throat to choke: Imagine finger-pointing hell for systems that have been put together using several different vendors. Oracle's Engineered Systems have a single phone number that customers can call to get their problems solved. For more business-centric values, read The Business Value of Engineered Systems. Conclusion: Buy Exalogic, or get ready for a 6-12 Month Science Project And here's the reason why it's not easy to "build your own Exalogic": There's a lot of work required to make such a system fly. In fact, anybody who is starting to "just put together a bunch of servers and an InfiniBand network" is really looking at a 6-12 month science project. And the outcome is likely to not be very enterprise-class. And it won't have Exalogic's performance either. Because building an Engineered System is literally rocket science: It takes a lot of time, effort, resources and many iterations of design/test/analyze/fix to build such a system. That's why InfiniBand has been reserved for HPC scientists for such a long time. And only Oracle can bring the power of InfiniBand in an enterprise-class, ready-to use, pre-integrated version to customers, without the develop/integrate/support pain. For more details, check the new Exalogic overview white paper which was updated only recently. P.S.: Thanks to my colleagues Ola, Paul, Don and Andy for helping me put together this article! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project'; var flattr_dsc = 'While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack.After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades?On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea.Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.'; var flattr_tag = 'Engineered Systems,Engineered Systems,Infiniband,Integration,latency,Oracle,performance'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/04/how-avoid-your-next-12-month-science-project'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• How I Record Screencasts

  - by Daniel Moth

  I get this asked a lot so here is my brain dump on the topic. What A screencast is just a demo that you present to yourself while recording the screen. As such, my advice for clearing your screen for demo purposes and setting up Visual Studio still applies here (adjusting for the fact I wrote those blog posts when I was running Vista and VS2008, not Windows 8 and VS2012). To see examples of screencasts, watch any of my screencasts on channel9. Why If you are a technical presenter, think of when you get best reactions from a developer audience in your sessions: when you are doing demos, of course. Imagine if you could package those alone and share them with folks to watch over and over? If you have ever gone through a tutorial trying to recreate steps to explore a feature, think how much more helpful it would be if you could watch a video and follow along. Think of how many folks you "touch" with a conference presentation, and how many more you can reach with an online shorter recording of the demo. If you invest so much of your time for the first type of activity, isn't the second type of activity also worth an investment? Fact: If you are able to record a screencast of a demo, you will be much better prepared to deliver it in person. In fact lately I will force myself to make a screencast of any demo I need to present live at an upcoming event. It is also a great backup - if for whatever reason something fails (software, network, etc) during an attempt of a live demo, you can just play the recorded video for the live audience. There are other reasons (e.g. internal sharing of the latest implemented feature) but the context above is the one within which I create most of my screencasts. Software & Hardware I use Camtasia from Tech Smith, version 7.1.1. Microsoft has a variety of options for capturing the screen to video, but I have been using this software for so long now that I have not invested time to explore alternatives… I also use whatever cheapo headset is near me, but sometimes I get some complaints from some folks about the audio so now I try to remember to use "the good headset". I do not use a web camera as I am not a huge fan of PIP. Preparation First you have to know your technology and demo. Once you think you know it, write down the outline and major steps of the demo. Keep it short 5-20 minutes max. I break that rule sometimes but try not to. The longer the video is the more chances that people will not have the patience to sit through it and the larger the download wmv file ends up being. Run your demo a few times, timing yourself each time to ensure that you have the planned timing correct, but also to make sure that you are comfortable with what you are going to demo. Unlike with a live audience, there is no live reaction/feedback to steer you, so it can be a bit unnerving at first. It can also lead you to babble too much, so try extra hard to be succinct when demoing/screencasting on your own. TIP: Before recording, hide your desktop/taskbar clock if it is showing. Recording To record you start the Camtasia Recorder tool Configure the settings thought the menus Capture menu to choose custom size or full screen. I try to use full screen and remember to lower the resolution of your screen to as low as possible, e.g. 1024x768 or 1360x768 or something like that. From the Tools -> Options dialog you can choose to record audio and the volume level. Effects menu I typically leave untouched but you should explore and experiment to your liking, e.g. how the mouse pointer is captured, and whether there should be a delay for the recording when you start it. Once you've configured these settings, typically you just launch this tool and hit the F9 key to start recording. TIP: As you record, if you ever start to "lose your way" hit F9 again to pause recording, regroup your thoughts and flow, and then hit F9 again to resume. Finally, hit F10 to stop recording. At that point the video starts playing for you in the recorder. This is where you can preview the video to see that you are happy with it before saving. If you are happy, hit the Save As menu to choose where you want to save the video.     TIP: If you've really lost your way to the extent where you'll need to do some editing, hit F10 to stop recording, save the video and then record some more - you'll be able to stitch the videos together later and this will make it easier for you to delete the parts where you messed up. TIP: Before you commit to recording the whole demo, every time you should record 5 seconds and preview them to ensure that you are capturing the screen the way you want to and that your audio is still correctly configured and at the right level. Trust me, you do not want to be recording 15 minutes only to find out that you messed up on the configuration somewhere. Editing To edit the video you launch another Camtasia app, the Camtasia Studio. File->New Project. File->Save Project and choose location. File->Import Media and choose the video(s) you saved earlier. These adds them to the area at the top/middle but not at the timeline at the bottom. Right click on the video and choose Add to timeline. It will prompt you for the Editing dimensions and I always choose Recording Dimensions. Do whatever edits you want to do for this video, then add the next video if you have one to stitch and repeat. In terms of edits there are many options. The simplest is to do nothing, which is the option I did when I first starting doing these in 2006. Nowadays, I typically cut out pieces that I don't like and also lower/mute the audio in other areas and also speed up the video in some areas. A full tutorial on how to do this is beyond the scope of this blog post, but your starting point is to select portions on the timeline and then open the Edit menu at the very top (tip: the context menu doesn't have all options). You can spend hours editing a recording, so don’t lose track of time! When you are done editing, save again, and you are now ready to Produce. Producing Production is specific to where you will publish. I've only ever published on channel9, so for that I do the following File -> Produce and share. This opens a wizard dialog In the dropdown choose Custom production settings Hit Next and then choose WMV Hit Next and keep the default of Camtasia Studio Best Quality and File Size (recommended) Hit Next and choose Editing dimensions video size Hit Next, hit Options and you get a dialog. Enter a Title for the project tab and then on the author tab enter the Creator and Homepage. Hit OK Hit Next. Hit Next again. Enter a video file name in the Production name textbox and then hit Finish. Now do other stuff while you wait for the video to be produced and you hear it playing. After the video is produced watch it to ensure it was produced correctly (e.g. sometimes you get mouse issues) and then you are ready for publishing it. Publishing Follow the instructions of the place where you are going to publish. If you are MSFT internal and want to choose channel9 then contact those folks so they can share their instructions (if you don't know who they are ping me and I'll connect you but they are easy to find in the GAL). For me this involves using a tool to point to the video, choosing a file name (again), choosing an image from the video to display when it is not playing, choosing what output formats I want, and then later on a webpage adding tags, adding a description, and adding a title. That’s all folks, have fun! Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• My View on ASP.NET Web Forms versus MVC

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction A lot has been said on Web Forms and MVC, but since I was recently asked about my opinion on the subject, here it is. First, I have to say that I really like both technologies and I don’t think any is going away – just remember SharePoint, which is built on top of Web Forms. I see them as complementary, targeting different needs and leveraging different skills. Let’s go through some of their differences. Rapid Application Development Rapid Application Development (RAD) is the development process by which you have an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a visual design surface and a toolbox, and you drag components from the toolbox to the design surface and set their properties through a property inspector. It was introduced with some of the earliest Windows graphical IDEs such as Visual Basic and Delphi. With Web Forms you have RAD out of the box. Visual Studio offers a generally good (and extensible) designer for the layout of pages and web user controls. Designing a page may simply be about dragging controls from the toolbox, setting their properties and wiring up some events to event handlers, which are implemented in code behind .NET classes. Most people will be familiar with this kind of development and enjoy it. You can see what you are doing from the beginning. MVC also has designable pages – called views in MVC terminology – the problem is that they can be built using different technologies, some of which, at the moment (MVC 4) do not support RAD – Razor, for example. I believe it is just a matter of time for that to be implemented in Visual Studio, but it will mostly consist on HTML editing, and until that day comes, you have to live with source editing. Development Model Web Forms features the same development model that you are used to from Windows Forms and other similar technologies: events fired by controls and automatic persistence of their properties between postbacks. For that, it uses concepts such as view state, which some may love and others may hate, because it may be misused quite easily, but otherwise does its job well. Another fundamental concept is data binding, by which a collection of data can be fed to a control and have it render that data somehow – just thing of the GridView control. The focus is on the page, that’s where it all starts, and you can place everything in the same code behind class: data access, business logic, layout, etc. The controls take care of generating a great part of the HTML and JavaScript for you. With MVC there is no free lunch when it comes to data persistence between requests, you have to implement it yourself. As for event handling, that is at the core of MVC, in the form of controllers and action methods, you just don’t think of them as event handlers. In MVC you need to think more in HTTP terms, so action methods such as POST and GET are relevant to you, and may write actions to handle one or the other. Also of crucial importance is model binding: the way by which MVC converts your posted data into a .NET class. This is something that ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms has introduced as well, but it is a cornerstone in MVC. MVC also has built-in validation of these .NET classes, which out of the box uses the Data Annotations API. You have full control of the generated HTML - except for that coming from the helper methods, usually small fragments - which requires a greater familiarity with the specifications. You normally rely much more on JavaScript APIs, they are even included in the Visual Studio template, that is because much less is done for you. Reuse It is difficult to accept a professional company/project that does not employ reuse. It can save a lot of time thus cutting costs significantly. Code reused in several projects matures as time goes by and helps developers learn from past experiences. ASP.NET Web Forms was built with reuse in mind, in the form of controls. Controls encapsulate functionality and are generally portable from project to project (with the notable exception of web user controls, those with an associated .ASCX markup file). ASP.NET has dozens of controls and it is very easy to develop new ones, so I believe this is a great advantage. A control can inject JavaScript code and external references as well as generate HTML an CSS. MVC on the other hand does not use controls – it is possible to use them, with some view engines like ASPX, but it is just not advisable because it breaks the flow – where do Init, Load, PreRender, etc, fit? The most similar to controls is extension methods, or helpers. They serve the same purpose – generating HTML, CSS or JavaScript – and can be reused between different projects. What differentiates them from controls is that there is no inheritance and no context – an extension method is just a static method which doesn’t know where it is being called. You also have partial views, which you can reuse in the same project, but there is no inheritance as well. This, in my view, is a weakness of MVC. Architecture Both technologies are highly extensible. I have writtenstarted writing a series of posts on ASP.NET Web Forms extensibility and will probably write another series on MVC extensibility as well. A number of scenarios are covered in any of these models, and some extensibility points apply to both, because, of course both stand upon ASP.NET. With Web Forms, if you’re like me, you start by defining you master pages, pages and controls, with some helper classes to glue everything. You may as well throw in some JavaScript, but probably you’re main work will be with plain old .NET code. The controls you define have the chance to inject JavaScript code and references, through either the ScriptManager or the page’s ClientScript object, as well as generating HTML and CSS code. The master page and page model with code behind classes offer a number of “hooks” by which you can change the normal way of things, for example, in a page you can access any control on the master page, add script or stylesheet references to its head and even change the page’s title. Also, with Web Forms, you typically have URLs in the form “/SomePath/SomePage.aspx?SomeParameter=SomeValue”, which isn’t really SEO friendly, no to mention the HTML that some controls produce, far from standards, optimization and best practices. In MVC, you also normally start by defining the master page (or layout) and views, which are the visible parts, and then define controllers on separate files. These controllers do not know anything about the views, except the names and types of the parameters that will be passed to and from them. The controller will be responsible for the data access and business logic, eventually relying on additional classes for this purpose. On a controller you only receive parameters and return a result, which may be a request for the rendering of a view, a redirection to another URL or a JSON object, to name just a few. The controller class does not know anything about the web, so you can effectively reuse it in a non-web project. This separation and the lack of programmatic access to the UI elements, makes it very difficult to implement, for example, something like SharePoint with MVC. OK, I know about Orchard, but it isn’t really a general purpose development framework, but instead, a CMS that happens to use MVC. Not having controls render HTML for you gives you in turn much more control over it – it is your responsibility to create it, which you can either consider a blessing or a curse, in the later case, you probably shouldn’t be using MVC at all. Also MVC URLs tend to be much more SEO-oriented, if you design your controllers and actions properly. Testing In a well defined architecture, you should separate business logic, data access logic and presentation logic, because these are all different things and it might even be the need to switch one implementation for another: for example, you might design a system which includes a data access layer, a business logic layer and two presentation layers, one on top of ASP.NET and the other with WPF; and the data access layer might be implemented first using NHibernate and later on switched for Entity Framework Code First. These changes are not that rare, so care should be taken in designing the system to make them possible. Web Forms are difficult to test, because it relies on event handlers which are only fired in web contexts, when a form is submitted or a page is requested. You can call them with reflection, but you have to set up a number of mocking objects first, HttpContext.Current first coming to my mind. MVC, on the other hand, makes testing controllers a breeze, so much that it even includes a template option for generating boilerplate unit test classes up from start. A well designed – from the unit test point of view - controller will receive everything it needs to work as parameters to its action methods, so you can pass whatever values you need very easily. That doesn’t mean, of course, that everything can be tested: views, for instance, are difficult to test without actually accessing the site, but MVC offers the possibility to compile views at build time, so that, at least, you know you don’t have syntax errors beforehand. Myths Some popular but unfounded myths around MVC include: You cannot use controls in MVC: not true, actually, you can, at least with the Web Forms (ASPX) view engine; the declaration and usage is exactly the same as with Web Forms; You cannot specify a base class for a view: with the ASPX view engine you can use the Inherits Page directive, with this and all the others you can use the pageBaseType and userControlBaseType attributes of the <page> element; MVC shields you from doing “bad things” on your views: well, you can place any code on a code block, at least with the ASPX view engine (you may be starting to see a pattern here), even data access code; The model is the entity model, tied to an O/RM: the model is actually any class that you use to pass values to a view, including (but generally not recommended) an entity model; Unit tests come with no cost: unit tests generally don’t cover the UI, although there are frameworks just for that (see WatiN, for example); also, for some tests, you will have to mock or replace either the HttpContext.Current property or the HttpContextBase class yourself; Everything is testable: views aren’t, without accessing the site; MVC relies on HTML5/some_cool_new_javascript_framework: there is no relation whatsoever, MVC renders whatever you want it to render and does not require any framework to be present. The thing is, the subsequent releases of MVC happened in a time when Microsoft has become much more involved in standards, so the files and technologies included in the Visual Studio templates reflect this, and it just happens to work well with jQuery, for example. Conclusion Well, this is how I see it. Some folks may think that I am being too rude on MVC, probably because I don’t like it, but that’s not true: like I said, I do like MVC and I am starting my new projects with it. I just don’t want to go along with that those that say that MVC is much superior to Web Forms, in fact, some things you can do much more easily with Web Forms than with MVC. I will be more than happy to hear what you think on this!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 24, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 24, 2010New Projects(SocketCoder) Full Silverlight Web Video/Voice Conference: Is an open source project to develop full Silverlight Web Video/Voice Conference System in C# .NETabc123: Prueba Archetype Programming Language: See http://dvanderboom.wordpress.comBusiness Process Automation (BPA): BPA is a project initiative to develop an ERP which will integrate with work flow of an organization. It is build on the concept that all business ...Content Rendering: Content Rendering is a .NET 3.5 string template engine. The program uses reflection, an extensibility API and a template document, which has a cust...DTA Output Renamer: The DTA Output Renamer takes recommendations from the SQL Server Database Tuning Advisor (DTA) and updates the names of the indexes/statistics to b...Flexible Editing Toolkit: The Flexible Editing Toolkit aims to enable users who have coding experience in .Net to write own editors/tools using an easy-to-use framework and ...Fluent NHibernate, MVC 2: Projeto ultra simples desenvolvido em Asp.Net MVC 2 com Fluent NHibernate. Foram utilizadas camadas baseadas no DDD. Sample project to test DDD arc...GravityGame: Proyecto del capítulo del IGDA en el Tec de Monterrey Campus Sonora Norte. El objetivo es la creación de un primer juego para conocer cuales son l...Partner Relationship Management (PRM) Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM: R2 of the PRM accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.Posh-Hg: Mercurial integration for Windows PowershellSuiteMap: selfSvenska till Rövarspråket: Översätter svenska till rövarspråketTV4Home: This projects extends MediaPortal TV Server with a solution for MediaCenter clients, a Web-Interface and a WHS Add-In.User Profile WebPart: Use this webpart to display SharePoint User Profile information. VolumeMasterCmd: Command line application that will set the wave volume level. Usage: VolumeMaster | VolumeMaster [0-100] Display or set the wave volume level ...wawa cloud store service: 盖茨描述了云计算和云存储之间的区别。“人们老是会搞混。云存储是把你的文件存储到其他地方，进行备份，这和云计算是不同的。这两者都很了不起，都是很好的技术。” 他表示，“云存储的效能没有折扣，因此富于理性的存储经理将会考虑使用云存储技术。” 相反，他表示云计算则会有一些问题，延迟和带宽都可能会...XNA Collision Detection: A collision library which extracts the triangles from a given model, and tests for collision using multiple methods on all existing triangles. Thi...You Private Social Network: YourPrivateNet is for all people who are unsatisfied with how social networking giants, namely facebook, are dealing with privacy and the users dat...New ReleasesArchetype Programming Language: C Sharp 4.0 Grammar in M: This is a C# 4.0 grammar that I am using to learn about parsers and the process of generating ASTs, in preparation for doing the same for the Arche...CassiniDev - Cassini 3.5/4.0 Developers Edition: CassiniDev 3.5.1.4 and 4.0.1.4 beta3: Binary release includes: .net 3.5sp1 and 4.0 builds of Gui app, Console app, Library assembly and Visual Studio development server replacements f...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.10: The current build has the following capabilities: Can create new workbooks Add worksheets Access cells using R1C1, A1, and mixed notations. A...CRM Web Service Toolkit: MSCRM4 Web Service Toolkit for JavaScript v2.0: MSCRM Web Service Toolkit for JavaScript v2.0. The release contains: CrmServiceToolkit.js (The uncompressed code) CrmServiceToolkit.min.js (The ...DBFramework: Kenly.DBFramework4.6.5.2: Kenly.DBFramework4.6.5.2eComic: eComic 2010.0.0.1: With the release of .NET 4.0 the system was upgraded. This upgrade involved starting the project over from scratch, so the installation package wil...Exchange 2010 RBAC Editor (RBAC GUI) - updated on 5/24/2010: RBAC Editor 0.9.3.1: Some bugs fixed, support added for unscopedtoplevel roles (still in progress), added logging capabilities Please use email address in About menu o...Hammock for REST: Hammock v1.0.4: v1.0.4 ChangesAdded handling for special characters in OAuth signatures (\r\n\t\b) Corrected an inconsistency in OAuth GET vs. POST when encoding...HKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201005231730): New features: (None) Bug fix: Fixed problem of unable to start new thread. Fixed problem of unable to show user icons due to incorrect path. ...Kurumsal Ofis Paketi: Kurumsal Ofis Paketi Sürüm 1.0: Kurumsal Ofis Paketi Sürüm 1.0MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.15.59175: Fixed FileFactory implementation (FileFactory team doesn't give up); Fixed minor bugs.Munq: Tools for ASP.NET MVC: Munq IocContainer Version 2.0: The latest and greatest.NLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.05.23.001: Changes since the last build:2010-05-23 00:01:19 Jarek Kowalski Made contition on <when /> required. Added unit tests. 2010-05-22 20:06:16 Jarek K...NUnit for Team Build: Version 2.0 Alpha 1: This version has experimental TFS 2010 support. I have been using it successfully with TFS 2010 for a few weeks now with no problems. It should be ...Partner Relationship Management (PRM) Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM: PRM Accelerator (R2) for Dynamics CRM 4.0: The Partner Relationship Management (PRM) Accelerator allows businesses to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to distribute sales leads and centrally manag...Percussion Toolkit: Command line Note Detector 1.0: A command line tool for detecting note onsets in WAV files. Note: Currently only supports 32-bit float encoded Microsoft WAV files with a sample ...Percussion Toolkit: Reference Input Data Set (A): This release contains a set of input WAV files for testing note onset detection accuracy and effectiveness. The archive contains computer-generate...Percussion Toolkit: Rhythm Friend: Rhythm Friend is an interactive tool for practicing drum rudiments. It provides a simple metronome coupled with rhythm coach features.SharePoint List Field Manager: SharePoint List Field Manager: This is Version 2 of the SharePoint List Field Manager. First created for CorasWorks customers, we have decided to make it publically available to ...Silverlight 4.0 Popup Menu: Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0 v1.2 Beta: - Added delay on hover events for both parent and child menus. - Parent menus now close automatically when child menu is clicked. - Updated referen...Software Is Hardwork: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+03: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+03 UNSUPPORTED, UNTESTED ALPHA RELEASE Code may disappear. This is just a preview of code that was in progress. Code is s...The Fastcopy Helper: The Fastcopy Helper 2.0: The Fastcopy Helper 2.0 This is a new method to run for it . Fastcopy同步辅助器 方案二 这个方案二，是使用了全新的方法进行磁盘文件扫描，和比较。速度飙升到最快！同时优化了很多细节的内容，使得性能大幅度提升。User Profile WebPart: UserProfileWebPart 1.0: Inititial release.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30523.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVolumeMasterCmd: VolumeMaster 1.0: First release.XNA Collision Detection: XNA Static Collider: Provides collision detection between a Model and BoundingSphere, or a Model and Ray. An example of how to initialize a collision object: Collidee...xxfd1r4w96: 20100523: Приложението има следната функционалност: 1. Добавяне на сайта https://online.bulbank.bg в trusted sites. 2. Инсталиране на Bulbank Root Certificat...Yet another developer blog - Examples: Asynchronous Form in ASP.NET MVC: This sample application shows how to use jQuery Validation plugin for creating an asynchronous form in ASP.NET MVC 1 with client side validation. T...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibrarySqlServerExtensionsGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and Silverlightpatterns & practices: Windows Azure Security GuidanceCassiniDev - Cassini 3.5/4.0 Developers EditionNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleCodeReviewBlogEngine.NET

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• 10 Reasons Why Java is the Top Embedded Platform

  - by Roger Brinkley

  With the release of Oracle ME Embedded 3.2 and Oracle Java Embedded Suite, Java is now ready to fully move into the embedded developer space, what many have called the "Internet of Things". Here are 10 reasons why Java is the top embedded platform. 1. Decouples software development from hardware development cycle Development is typically split between both hardware and software in a traditional design flow . This leads to complicated co-design and requires prototype hardware to be built. This parallel and interdependent hardware / software design process typically leads to two or more re-development phases. With Embedded Java, all specific work is carried out in software, with the (processor) hardware implementation fully decoupled. This with eliminate or at least reduces the need for re-spins of software or hardware and the original development efforts can be carried forward directly into product development and validation. 2. Development and testing can be done (mostly) using standard desktop systems through emulation Because the software and hardware are decoupled it now becomes easier to test the software long before it reaches the hardware through hardware emulation. Emulation is the ability of a program in an electronic device to imitate another program or device. In the past Java tools like the Java ME SDK and the SunSPOTs Solarium provided developers with emulation for a complete set of mobile telelphones and SunSpots. This often included network interaction or in the case of SunSPOTs radio communication. What emulation does is speed up the development cycle by refining the software development process without the need of hardware. The software is fixed, redefined, and refactored without the timely expense of hardware testing. With tools like the Java ME 3.2 SDK, Embedded Java applications can be be quickly developed on Windows based platforms. In the end of course developers should do a full set of testing on the hardware as incompatibilities between emulators and hardware will exist, but the amount of time to do this should be significantly reduced. 3. Highly productive language, APIs, runtime, and tools mean quick time to market Charles Nutter probably said it best in twitter blog when he tweeted, "Every time I see a piece of C code I need to port, my heart dies a little. Then I port it to 1/4 as much Java, and feel better." The Java environment is a very complex combination of a Java Virtual Machine, the Java Language, and it's robust APIs. Combine that with the Java ME SDK for small devices or just Netbeans for the larger devices and you have a development environment where development time is reduced significantly meaning the product can be shipped sooner. Of course this is assuming that the engineers don't get slap happy adding new features given the extra time they'll have.  4. Create high-performance, portable, secure, robust, cross-platform applications easily The latest JIT compilers for the Oracle JVM approach the speed of C/C++ code, and in some memory allocation intensive circumstances, exceed it. And specifically for the embedded devices both ME Embedded and SE Embedded have been optimized for the smaller footprints.  In portability Java uses Bytecode to make the language platform independent. This creates a write once run anywhere environment that allows you to develop on one platform and execute on others and avoids a platform vendor lock in. For security, Java achieves protection by confining a Java program to a Java execution environment and not allowing it to access other parts of computer.  In variety of systems the program must execute reliably to be robust. Finally, Oracle Java ME Embedded is a cross-industry and cross-platform product optimized in release version 3.2 for chipsets based on the ARM architectures. Similarly Oracle Java SE Embedded works on a variety of ARM V5, V6, and V7, X86 and Power Architecture Linux. 5. Java isolates your apps from language and platform variations (e.g. C/C++, kernel, libc differences) This has been a key factor in Java from day one. Developers write to Java and don't have to worry about underlying differences in the platform variations. Those platform variations are being managed by the JVM. Gone are the C/C++ problems like memory corruptions, stack overflows, and other such bugs which are extremely difficult to isolate. Of course this doesn't imply that you won't be able to get away from native code completely. There could be some situations where you have to write native code in either assembler or C/C++. But those instances should be limited. 6. Most popular embedded processors supported allowing design flexibility Java SE Embedded is now available on ARM V5, V6, and V7 along with Linux on X86 and Power Architecture platforms. Java ME Embedded is available on system based on ARM architecture SOCs with low memory footprints and a device emulation environment for x86/Windows desktop computers, integrated with the Java ME SDK 3.2. A standard binary of Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 for ARM KEIL development boards based on ARM Cortex M-3/4 (KEIL MCBSTM32F200 using ST Micro SOC STM32F207IG) will soon be available for download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). 7. Support for key embedded features (low footprint, power mgmt., low latency, etc) All embedded devices by there very nature are constrained in some way. Economics may dictate a device with a less RAM and ROM. The CPU needs can dictate a less powerful device. Power consumption is another major resource in some embedded devices as connecting to consistent power source not always desirable or possible. For others they have to constantly on. Often many of these systems are headless (in the embedded space it's almost always Halloween).  For memory resources ,Java ME Embedded can run in environment as low as 130KB RAM/350KB ROM for a minimal, customized configuration up to 700KB RAM/1500KB ROM for the full, standard configuration. Java SE Embedded is designed for environments starting at 32MB RAM/39MB  ROM. Key functionality of embedded devices such as auto-start and recovery, flexible networking are fully supported. And while Java SE Embedded has been optimized for mid-range to high-end embedded systems, Java ME Embedded is a Java runtime stack optimized for small embedded systems. It provides a robust and flexible application platform with dedicated embedded functionality for always-on, headless (no graphics/UI), and connected devices. 8. Leverage huge Java developer ecosystem (expertise, existing code) There are over 9 million developers in world that work on Java, and while not all of them work on embedded systems, their wealth of expertise in developing applications is immense. In short, getting a java developer to work on a embedded system is pretty easy, you probably have a java developer living in your subdivsion.  Then of course there is the wealth of existing code. The Java Embedded Community on Java.net is central gathering place for embedded Java developers. Conferences like Embedded Java @ JavaOne and the a variety of hardware vendor conferences like Freescale Technlogy Forums offer an excellent opportunity for those interested in embedded systems. 9. Easily create end-to-end solutions integrated with Java back-end services In the "Internet of Things" things aren't on an island doing an single task. For instance and embedded drink dispenser doesn't just dispense a beverage, but could collect money from a credit card and also send information about current sales. Similarly, an embedded house power monitoring system doesn't just manage the power usage in a house, but can also send that data back to the power company. In both cases it isn't about the individual thing, but monitoring a collection of  things. How much power did your block, subdivsion, area of town, town, county, state, nation, world use? How many Dr Peppers were purchased from thing1, thing2, thingN? The point is that all this information can be collected and transferred securely  (and believe me that is key issue that Java fully supports) to back end services for further analysis. And what better back in service exists than a Java back in service. It's interesting to note that on larger embedded platforms that support the Java Embedded Suite some of the analysis might be done on the embedded device itself as JES has a glassfish server and Java Database as part of the installation. The result is an end to end Java solution. 10. Solutions from constrained devices to server-class systems Just take a look at some of the embedded Java systems that have already been developed and you'll see a vast range of solutions. Livescribe pen, Kindle, each and every Blu-Ray player, Cisco's Advanced VOIP phone, KronosInTouch smart time clock, EnergyICT smart metering, EDF's automated meter management, Ricoh Printers, and Stanford's automated car  are just a few of the list of embedded Java implementation that continues to grow. Conclusion Now if your a Java Developer you probably look at some of the 10 reasons and say "duh", but for the embedded developers this is should be an eye opening list. And with the release of ME Embedded 3.2 and the Java Embedded Suite the embedded developers life is now a whole lot easier. For the Java developer your employment opportunities are about to increase. For both it's a great time to start developing Java for the "Internet of Things".

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• Part 2&ndash;Load Testing In The Cloud

  - by Tarun Arora

  Welcome to Part 2, In Part 1 we discussed the advantages of creating a Test Rig in the cloud, the Azure edge and the Test Rig Topology we want to get to. In Part 2, Let’s start by understanding the components of Azure we’ll be making use of followed by manually putting them together to create the test rig, so… let’s get down dirty start setting up the Test Rig.  What Components of Azure will I be using for building the Test Rig in the Cloud? To run the Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Compute and to enable communication between Test Controller and Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect.  Azure Connect The Test Controller is on premise and the Test Agents are in the cloud (How will they talk?). To enable communication between the two, we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect. With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IPsec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. With this you can now join Windows Azure role instances to your domain, so that you can use your existing methods for domain authentication, name resolution, or other domain-wide maintenance actions. For more details refer to an overview of Windows Azure connect. A very useful video explaining everything you wanted to know about Windows Azure connect.  Azure Compute Windows Azure compute provides developers a platform to host and manage applications in Microsoft’s data centres across the globe. A Windows Azure application is built from one or more components called ‘roles.’ Roles come in three different types: Web role, Worker role, and Virtual Machine (VM) role, we’ll be using the Worker role to set up the Test Agents. A very nice blog post discussing the difference between the 3 role types. Developers are free to use the .NET framework or other software that runs on Windows with the Worker role or Web role. Developers can also create applications using languages such as PHP and Java. More on Windows Azure Compute. Each Windows Azure compute instance represents a virtual server... Virtual Machine Size CPU Cores Memory Cost Per Hour Extra Small Shared 768 MB $0.04 Small 1 1.75 GB $0.12 Medium 2 3.50 GB $0.24 Large 4 7.00 GB $0.48 Extra Large 8 14.00 GB $0.96   You might want to review the Windows Azure Pricing FAQ. Let’s Get Started building the Test Rig… Configuration Machine Role Comments VM – 1 Domain Controller for Playpit.com On Premise VM – 2 TFS, Test Controller On Premise VM – 3 Test Agent Cloud   In this blog post I would assume that you have the domain, Team Foundation Server and Test Controller Installed and set up already. If not, please refer to the TFS 2010 Installation Guide and this walkthrough on MSDN to set up your Test Controller. You can also download a preconfigured TFS 2010 VM from Brian Keller's blog, Brian also has some great hands on Labs on TFS 2010 that you may want to explore. I. Lets start building VM – 3: The Test Agent Download the Windows Azure SDK and Tools Open Visual Studio and create a new Windows Azure Project using the Cloud Template                   Choose the Worker Role for reasons explained in the earlier post         The WorkerRole.cs implements the Run() and OnStart() methods, no code changes required. You should be able to compile the project and run it in the compute emulator (The compute emulator should have been installed as part of the Windows Azure Toolkit) on your local machine.                   We will only be making changes to WindowsAzureProject, open ServiceDefinition.csdef. Ensure that the vmsize is small (remember the cost chart above). Import the “Connect” module. I am importing the Connect module because I need to join the Worker role VM to the Playpit domain. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect"/> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg and note that settings with key ‘Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.%%%%’ have been added to the configuration file. This is because you decided to import the connect module. See the config below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>             Let’s go step by step and understand all the highlighted parameters and where you can find the values for them.       osFamily – By default this is set to 1 (Windows Server 2008 SP2). Change this to 2 if you want the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. The Advantage of using osFamily = “2” is that you get Powershell 2.0 rather than Powershell 1.0. In Powershell 2.0 you could simply use “powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted ./myscript.ps1” and it will work while in Powershell 1.0 you will have to change the registry key by including the following in your command file “reg add HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell /v ExecutionPolicy /d Unrestricted /f” before you can execute any power shell. The other reason you might want to move to os2 is if you wanted IIS 7.5.       Activation Token – To enable communication between the on premise machine and the Windows Azure Worker role VM both need to have the same token. Log on to Windows Azure Management Portal, click on Connect, click on Get Activation Token, this should give you the activation token, copy the activation token to the clipboard and paste it in the configuration file. Note – Later in the blog I’ll be showing you how to install connect on the on premise machine.                       EnableDomainJoin – Set the value to true, ofcourse we want to join the on windows azure worker role VM to the domain.       DomainFQDN, DomainControllerFQDN, DomainAccountName, DomainPassword, DomainOU, Administrators – This information is specific to your domain. I have extracted this information from the ‘service manager’ and ‘Active Directory Users and Computers’. Also, i created a new Domain-OU namely ‘CloudInstances’ so all my cloud instances joined to my domain show up here, this is optional. You can encrypt the DomainPassword – refer to the instructions here. Or hold fire, I’ll be covering that when i come to certificates and encryption in the coming section.       Now once you have filled all this information up, the configuration file should look something like below, <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> Next we will be enabling the Remote Desktop module in to the ServiceDefinition.csdef, we could make changes manually or allow a beautiful wizard to help us make changes. I prefer the second option. So right click on the Windows Azure project and choose Publish       Now once you get the publish wizard, if you haven’t already you would be asked to import your Windows Azure subscription, this is simply the Msdn subscription activation key xml. Once you have done click Next to go to the Settings page and check ‘Enable Remote Desktop for all roles’.       As soon as you do that you get another pop up asking you the details for the user that you would be logging in with (make sure you enter a reasonable expiry date, you do not want the user account to expire today). Notice the more information tag at the bottom, click that to get access to the certificate section. See screen shot below.       From the drop down select the option to create a new certificate        In the pop up window enter the friendly name for your certificate. In my case I entered ‘WAC – Test Rig’ and click ok. This will create a new certificate for you. Click on the view button to see the certificate details. Do you see the Thumbprint, this is the value that will go in the config file (very important). Now click on the Copy to File button to copy the certificate, we will need to import the certificate to the windows Azure Management portal later. So, make sure you save it a safe location.                                Click Finish and enter details of the user you would like to create with permissions for remote desktop access, once you have entered the details on the ‘Remote desktop configuration’ screen click on Ok. From the Publish Windows Azure Wizard screen press Cancel. Cancel because we don’t want to publish the role just yet and Yes because we want to save all the changes in the config file.       Now if you go to the ServiceDefinition.csdef file you will see that the RemoteAccess and RemoteForwarder roles have been imported for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" /> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Now go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg file and you see a whole bunch for setting “Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.%%%” values added for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.Enabled" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountUsername" value="Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountEncryptedPassword" value="MIIBnQYJKoZIhvcNAQcDoIIBjjCCAYoCAQAxggFOMIIBSgIBADAyMB4xHDAaBgNVBAMME1dpbmRvd 3MgQXp1cmUgVG9vbHMCEGa+B46voeO5T305N7TSG9QwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQAEggEABg4ol5Xol66Ip6QKLbAPWdmD4ae ADZ7aKj6fg4D+ATr0DXBllZHG5Umwf+84Sj2nsPeCyrg3ZDQuxrfhSbdnJwuChKV6ukXdGjX0hlowJu/4dfH4jTJC7sBWS AKaEFU7CxvqYEAL1Hf9VPL5fW6HZVmq1z+qmm4ecGKSTOJ20Fptb463wcXgR8CWGa+1w9xqJ7UmmfGeGeCHQ4QGW0IDSBU6ccg vzF2ug8/FY60K1vrWaCYOhKkxD3YBs8U9X/kOB0yQm2Git0d5tFlIPCBT2AC57bgsAYncXfHvPesI0qs7VZyghk8LVa9g5IqaM Cp6cQ7rmY/dLsKBMkDcdBHuCTAzBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwFAYIKoZIhvcNAwcECDRVifSXbA43gBApNrp40L1VTVZ1iGag+3O1" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountExpiration" value="2012-11-27T23:59:59.0000000+00:00" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteForwarder.Enabled" value="true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> <Certificates> <Certificate name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.PasswordEncryption" thumbprint="AA23016CF0BDFC344400B5B82706B608B92E4217" thumbprintAlgorithm="sha1" /> </Certificates> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>          Okay let’s look at them one at a time,       Enabled - Yes, we would like to enable Remote Access.       AccountUserName – This is the user name you entered while you were on the publish windows azure role screen, as detailed above.       AccountEncrytedPassword – Try and decode that, the certificate is used to encrypt the password you specified for the user account. Remember earlier i said, either use the instructions or wait and i’ll be showing you encryption, now the user account i am using for rdp has the same password as my domain password, so i can simply copy the value of the AccountEncryptedPassword to the DomainPassword as well.       AccountExpiration – This is the expiration as you specified in the wizard earlier, make sure your account does not expire today.       Remote Forwarder – Check out the documentation, below is how I understand it, -- One role in an application that implements a remote desktop connection must import the RemoteForwarder module. The two modules work together to enable the remote desktop connections to role instances. -- If you have multiple roles defined in the service model, it does not matter which role you add the RemoteForwarder module to, but you must add it to only one of the role definitions.       Certificate – Remember the certificate thumbprint from the wizard, the on premise machine and windows azure role machine that need to speak to each other must have the same thumbprint. More on that when we install Windows Azure connect Endpoints on the on premise machine. As i said earlier, in this blog post, I’ll be showing you the manual process so i won’t be scripting any star up tasks to install the test agent or register the test agent with the TFS Server. I’ll be showing you all this cool stuff in the next blog post, that’s because it’s important to understand the manual side of it, it becomes easier for you to troubleshoot in case something fails. Having said that, the changes we have made are sufficient to spin up the Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent VM, have it connected with the play.pit.com domain and have remote access enabled on it. Before we deploy the Test Agent VM we need to set up Windows Azure Connect on the TFS Server. II. Windows Azure Connect: Setting up Connect on VM – 2 i.e. TFS & Test Controller Glad you made it so far, now to enable communication between the on premise TFS/Test Controller and Azure-ed Test Agent we need to enable communication. We have set up the Azure connect module in the Test Agent configuration, now the connect end points need to be enabled on the on premise machines, let’s have a look at how we can do this. Log on to VM – 2 running the TFS Server and Test Controller Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network Click on Virtual Network, if you already have a subscription you should see the below screen shot, if not, you would be asked to complete the subscription first        Click on Install Local Endpoints from the top left on the panel and you get a url appended with a token id in it, remember the token i showed you earlier, in theory the token you get here should match the token you added to the Test Agent config file.        Copy the url to the clip board and paste it in IE explorer (important, the installation at present only works out of IE and you need to have cookies enabled in order to complete the installation). As stated in the pop up, you can NOT download and run the software later, you need to run it as is, since it contains a token. Once the installation completes you should see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray.                         Right click the Azure Connect icon, choose Diagnostics and refer to this link for diagnostic detail terminology. NOTE – Unfortunately I could not see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray, a bit of binging with Google revealed that the azure connect icon is only shown when the ‘Windows Azure Connect Endpoint’ Service is started. So go to services.msc and make sure that the service is started, if not start it, unfortunately again, the service did not start for me on a manual start and i realised that one of the dependant services was disabled, you can look at the service dependencies and start them and then start windows azure connect. Bottom line, you need to start Windows Azure connect service before you can proceed. Please refer here on MSDN for more on Troubleshooting Windows Azure connect. (Follow the next step as well)   Now go back to the Windows Azure Management Portal and from Groups and Roles create a new group, lets call it ‘Test Rig’. Make sure you add the VM – 2 (the TFS Server VM where you just installed the endpoint).       Now if you go back to the Azure Connect icon in the system tray and click ‘Refresh Policy’ you will notice that the disconnected status of the icon should change to ready for connection. III. Importing Certificate in to Windows Azure Management Portal But before that you need to import the certificate you created in Step I in to the Windows Azure Management Portal. Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on ‘Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN’ and then ‘Management Certificates’ followed by Add Certificates as shown in the screen shot below        Browse to the location where you saved the certificate earlier, remember… Refer to Step I in case you forgot.        Now you should be able to see the imported certificate here, make sure the thumbprint of the certificate matches the one you inserted in the config files        IV. Publish Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent Having completed I, II and III, you are ready to publish the Test Agent VM – 3 to the cloud. Go to Visual Studio and right click the Windows Azure project and select Publish. Verify the infomration in the wizard, from the advanced settings tab, you can also enabled capture of intellitrace or profiling information.         Click Next and Click Publish! From the view menu bar select the Windows Azure Activity Log window.       Now you should be able to see the deployment progress in real time.             In the Windows Azure Management Portal, you should also be able to see the progress of creation of a new Worker Role.       Once the deployment is complete you should be able to RDP (go to run prompt type mstsc and in the pop up the machine name) in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM from the Playpit network using the domain admin user account. In case you are unable to log in to the Test Agent using the domain admin user account it means the process of joining the Test Agent to the domain has failed! But the good news is, because you imported the connect module, you can connect to the Test Agent machine using Windows Azure Management Portal and troubleshoot the reason for failure, you will be able to log in with the user name and password you specified in the config file for the keys ‘RemoteAccess.AccountUsername, RemoteAccess.EncryptedPassword (just that enter the password unencrypted)’, fix it or manually join the machine to the domain. Once you have managed to Join the Test Agent VM to the Domain move to the next step.      So, log in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM with the Playpit Domain Administrator and verify that you can log in, the machine is connected to the domain and the connect service is successfully running. If yes, give your self a pat on the back, you are 80% mission accomplished!         Go to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network, click on Groups and Roles and click on Test Rig, click Edit Group, the edit the Test Rig group you created earlier. In the Connect to section, click on Add to select the worker role you have just deployed. Also, check the ‘Allow connections between endpoints in the group’ with this you will enable to communication between test controller and test agents and test agents/test agents. Click Save.      Now, you are ready to deploy the Test Agent software on the Worker Role Test Agent VM and configure it to work with the Test Controller. V. Configuring VM – 3: Installing Test Agent and Associating Test Agent to Controller Log in to the Worker Role Test Agent VM that you have just successfully deployed, make sure you log in with the domain administrator account. Download the All Agents software from MSDN, ‘en_visual_studio_agents_2010_x86_x64_dvd_509679.iso’, extract the iso and navigate to where you have extracted the iso. In my case, i have extracted the iso to “C:\Resources\Temp\VsAgentSetup”. Open the Test Agent folder and double click on setup.exe. Once you have installed the Test Agent you should reach the configuration window. If you face any issues installing TFS Test Agent on the VM, refer to the walkthrough on MSDN.       Once you have successfully installed the Test Agent software you will need to configure the test agent. Right click the test agent configuration tool and run as a different user. i.e. an Administrator. This is really to run the configuration wizard with elevated privileges (you might have UAC block something's otherwise).        In the run options, you can select ‘service’ you do not need to run the agent as interactive un less you are running coded UI tests. I have specified the domain administrator to connect to the TFS Test Controller. In real life, i would never do that, i would create a separate test user service account for this purpose. But for the blog post, we are using the most powerful user so that any policies or restrictions don’t block you.        Click the Apply Settings button and you should be all green! If not, the summary usually gives helpful error messages that you can resolve and proceed. As per my experience, you may run in to either a permission or a firewall blocking communication issue.        And now the moment of truth! Go to VM –2 open up Visual Studio and from the Test Menu select Manage Test Controller       Mission Accomplished! You should be able to see the Test Agent that you have just configured here,         VI. Creating and Running Load Tests on your brand new Azure-ed Test Rig I have various blog posts on Performance Testing with Visual Studio Ultimate, you can follow the links and videos below, Blog Posts: - Part 1 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 2 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 3 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Videos: - Test Tools Configuration & Settings in Visual Studio - Why & How to Record Web Performance Tests in Visual Studio Ultimate - Goal Driven Load Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate Now that you have created your load tests, there is one last change you need to make before you can run the tests on your Azure Test Rig, create a new Test settings file, and change the Test Execution method to ‘Remote Execution’ and select the test controller you have configured the Worker Role Test Agent against in our case VM – 2 So, go on, fire off a test run and see the results of the test being executed on the Azur-ed Test Rig. Review and What’s next? A quick recap of the benefits of running the Test Rig in the cloud and what i will be covering in the next blog post AND I would love to hear your feedback! Advantages Utilizing the power of Azure compute to run a heavy virtual user load. Benefiting from the Azure flexibility, destroy Test Agents when not in use, takes < 25 minutes to spin up a new Test Agent. Most important test Network Latency, (network latency and speed of connection are two different things – usually network latency is very hard to test), by placing the Test Agents in Microsoft Data centres around the globe, one can actually test the lag in transferring the bytes not because of a slow connection but because the page has been requested from the other side of the globe. Next Steps The process of spinning up the Test Agents in windows Azure is not 100% automated. I am working on the Worker process and power shell scripts to make the role deployment, unattended install of test agent software and registration of the test agent to the test controller automated. In the next blog post I will show you how to make the complete process unattended and automated. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Hope you enjoyed this post, I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. See you in Part III.   Share this post : CodeProject

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• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

  About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

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• SATA errors reported during boot: exception Emask 0x40 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x80800 action 0x0

  - by digby280

  I have noticed some error during the Linux boot. They seem to continue to occur after the boot adding lines to the log every few seconds. Once booted this normally does not appear to be causing any problems. However, around 1 in 10 boots results in a kernel panic and the computer has on two or three occasions suddenly rebooted after being powered on for a number of hours. I presume the cause of the reboot is a kernel panic as well. I am running Ubuntu 11.10 and I have had Ubuntu installed on the computer for around a year. I have googled around and not found anything useful. I have provided the kernel log lines and the output of smartctl. Can anyone explain exactly what these errors mean, or better still how to resolve them? Apr 2 16:51:27 dell580 kernel: [ 19.831140] EXT4-fs (sdb2): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,user_xattr,commit=0 Apr 2 16:51:27 dell580 kernel: [ 19.934194] tg3 0000:03:00.0: eth0: Link is down Apr 2 16:51:28 dell580 kernel: [ 20.929468] tg3 0000:03:00.0: eth0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex Apr 2 16:51:28 dell580 kernel: [ 20.929471] tg3 0000:03:00.0: eth0: Flow control is on for TX and on for RX Apr 2 16:51:28 dell580 kernel: [ 20.929727] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready Apr 2 16:51:29 dell580 kernel: [ 21.609381] EXT4-fs (sdb2): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,user_xattr,commit=0 Apr 2 16:51:29 dell580 kernel: [ 21.616515] ata2.01: exception Emask 0x40 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x80800 action 0x0 Apr 2 16:51:29 dell580 kernel: [ 21.616519] ata2.01: SError: { HostInt 10B8B } Apr 2 16:51:29 dell580 kernel: [ 21.616525] ata2.00: hard resetting link Apr 2 16:51:29 dell580 kernel: [ 21.934036] ata2.01: hard resetting link Apr 2 16:51:29 dell580 kernel: [ 22.408890] ata2.00: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) Apr 2 16:51:29 dell580 kernel: [ 22.408907] ata2.01: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Apr 2 16:51:29 dell580 kernel: [ 22.440934] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/100 Apr 2 16:51:29 dell580 kernel: [ 22.449040] ata2.01: configured for UDMA/133 Apr 2 16:51:29 dell580 kernel: [ 22.449818] ata2: EH complete Apr 2 16:51:33 dell580 kernel: [ 26.122664] ata2.01: exception Emask 0x40 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x80800 action 0x0 Apr 2 16:51:33 dell580 kernel: [ 26.122670] ata2.01: SError: { HostInt 10B8B } Apr 2 16:51:33 dell580 kernel: [ 26.122677] ata2.00: hard resetting link Apr 2 16:51:33 dell580 kernel: [ 26.442684] ata2.01: hard resetting link Apr 2 16:51:34 dell580 kernel: [ 26.925545] ata2.00: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) Apr 2 16:51:34 dell580 kernel: [ 26.925561] ata2.01: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Apr 2 16:51:34 dell580 kernel: [ 26.961542] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/100 Apr 2 16:51:34 dell580 kernel: [ 26.969616] ata2.01: configured for UDMA/133 Apr 2 16:51:34 dell580 kernel: [ 26.970400] ata2: EH complete Apr 2 16:51:35 dell580 kernel: [ 28.111180] ata2.01: exception Emask 0x40 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x80800 action 0x0 Apr 2 16:51:35 dell580 kernel: [ 28.111184] ata2.01: SError: { HostInt 10B8B } Apr 2 16:51:35 dell580 kernel: [ 28.111191] ata2.00: hard resetting link Apr 2 16:51:35 dell580 kernel: [ 28.429674] ata2.01: hard resetting link Apr 2 16:51:36 dell580 kernel: [ 28.904557] ata2.00: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) Apr 2 16:51:36 dell580 kernel: [ 28.904572] ata2.01: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Apr 2 16:51:36 dell580 kernel: [ 28.936609] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/100 Apr 2 16:51:36 dell580 kernel: [ 28.944692] ata2.01: configured for UDMA/133 Apr 2 16:51:36 dell580 kernel: [ 28.945464] ata2: EH complete Apr 2 16:51:38 dell580 kernel: [ 31.581756] eth0: no IPv6 routers present Apr 2 16:51:38 dell580 kernel: [ 32.103066] ata2.01: exception Emask 0x40 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x80800 action 0x0 Apr 2 16:51:38 dell580 kernel: [ 32.103074] ata2.01: SError: { HostInt 10B8B } Apr 2 16:51:38 dell580 kernel: [ 32.103085] ata2.00: hard resetting link Apr 2 16:51:38 dell580 kernel: [ 32.419669] ata2.01: hard resetting link Apr 2 16:51:39 dell580 kernel: [ 32.894518] ata2.00: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) Apr 2 16:51:39 dell580 kernel: [ 32.894533] ata2.01: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Apr 2 16:51:39 dell580 kernel: [ 32.926536] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/100 Apr 2 16:51:39 dell580 kernel: [ 32.934715] ata2.01: configured for UDMA/133 Apr 2 16:51:39 dell580 kernel: [ 32.935578] ata2: EH complete Here's the output of smartctl for the drive. smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.0.0-17-generic] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: SAMSUNG SpinPoint F1 DT Device Model: SAMSUNG HD103UJ Serial Number: S13PJ90QC19706 LU WWN Device Id: 5 0000f0 00b1c7960 Firmware Version: 1AA01113 User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes [1.00 TB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: ATA-8-ACS revision 3b Local Time is: Mon Apr 2 17:13:48 2012 BST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity was never started. Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled. Self-test execution status: ( 41) The self-test routine was interrupted by the host with a hard or soft reset. Total time to complete Offline data collection: (11772) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 197) minutes. Conveyance self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 21) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x003f) SCT Status supported. SCT Error Recovery Control supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0007 076 076 011 Pre-fail Always - 7940 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 521 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 253 253 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0025 100 100 015 Pre-fail Offline - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 642 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0033 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 482 13 Read_Soft_Error_Rate 0x000e 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 183 Runtime_Bad_Block 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 759 184 End-to-End_Error 0x0033 100 100 000 Pre-fail Always - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 073 069 000 Old_age Always - 27 (Min/Max 16/27) 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 073 067 000 Old_age Always - 27 (Min/Max 16/28) 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 320028 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 1494 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x000a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 201 Soft_Read_Error_Rate 0x000a 253 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 ATA Error Count: 211 (device log contains only the most recent five errors) CR = Command Register [HEX] FR = Features Register [HEX] SC = Sector Count Register [HEX] SN = Sector Number Register [HEX] CL = Cylinder Low Register [HEX] CH = Cylinder High Register [HEX] DH = Device/Head Register [HEX] DC = Device Command Register [HEX] ER = Error register [HEX] ST = Status register [HEX] Powered_Up_Time is measured from power on, and printed as DDd+hh:mm:SS.sss where DD=days, hh=hours, mm=minutes, SS=sec, and sss=millisec. It "wraps" after 49.710 days. Error 211 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 0 hours (0 days + 0 hours) When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle. After command completion occurred, registers were: ER ST SC SN CL CH DH -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 84 51 0f 31 63 8f e1 Error: ICRC, ABRT 15 sectors at LBA = 0x018f6331 = 26174257 Commands leading to the command that caused the error were: CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- -------------------- c8 00 00 40 62 8f e1 08 00:01:00.460 READ DMA c8 00 20 00 7c 30 e0 08 00:01:00.450 READ DMA c8 00 00 10 49 8f e1 08 00:01:00.440 READ DMA c8 00 e0 20 d0 30 e0 08 00:01:00.420 READ DMA c8 00 00 c0 59 90 e1 08 00:01:00.400 READ DMA Error 210 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 0 hours (0 days + 0 hours) When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle. After command completion occurred, registers were: ER ST SC SN CL CH DH -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 84 51 cf e9 cf 66 e0 Error: ICRC, ABRT 207 sectors at LBA = 0x0066cfe9 = 6737897 Commands leading to the command that caused the error were: CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- -------------------- c8 00 00 b8 cf 66 e0 08 00:08:29.780 READ DMA c8 00 60 60 c9 18 e0 08 00:08:29.770 READ DMA c8 00 40 20 c9 18 e0 08 00:08:29.770 READ DMA c8 00 20 00 c9 18 e0 08 00:08:29.760 READ DMA c8 00 20 98 cf 66 e0 08 00:08:29.750 READ DMA Error 209 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 0 hours (0 days + 0 hours) When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle. After command completion occurred, registers were: ER ST SC SN CL CH DH -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 84 51 2f d1 74 e0 e0 Error: ICRC, ABRT 47 sectors at LBA = 0x00e074d1 = 14709969 Commands leading to the command that caused the error were: CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- -------------------- c8 00 00 00 74 e0 e0 08 00:00:30.940 READ DMA c8 00 20 18 36 de e0 08 00:00:30.930 READ DMA c8 00 08 48 f1 dd e0 08 00:00:30.930 READ DMA c8 00 08 a8 f0 dd e0 08 00:00:30.930 READ DMA c8 00 08 90 f0 dd e0 08 00:00:30.930 READ DMA Error 208 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 0 hours (0 days + 0 hours) When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle. After command completion occurred, registers were: ER ST SC SN CL CH DH -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 84 51 7f 21 88 9d e0 Error: ICRC, ABRT 127 sectors at LBA = 0x009d8821 = 10324001 Commands leading to the command that caused the error were: CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- -------------------- c8 00 a0 00 88 9d e0 08 00:00:27.610 READ DMA c8 00 58 a8 e7 9c e0 08 00:00:27.610 READ DMA c8 00 00 28 e6 9c e0 08 00:00:27.610 READ DMA c8 00 00 e0 e4 9c e0 08 00:00:27.610 READ DMA c8 00 00 90 e0 9c e0 08 00:00:27.600 READ DMA Error 207 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 0 hours (0 days + 0 hours) When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle. After command completion occurred, registers were: ER ST SC SN CL CH DH -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 04 51 26 6a 6a c3 e0 Error: ABRT at LBA = 0x00c36a6a = 12806762 Commands leading to the command that caused the error were: CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- -------------------- ca 00 00 90 69 c3 e0 08 00:29:39.350 WRITE DMA ca 00 40 90 68 c3 e0 08 00:29:39.350 WRITE DMA ca 00 40 50 65 c3 e0 08 00:29:39.350 WRITE DMA ca 00 40 d0 64 c3 e0 08 00:29:39.350 WRITE DMA ca 00 40 90 63 c3 e0 08 00:29:39.350 WRITE DMA SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Short offline Interrupted (host reset) 90% 638 - # 2 Short offline Interrupted (host reset) 90% 638 - # 3 Extended offline Interrupted (host reset) 90% 638 - # 4 Short offline Interrupted (host reset) 90% 638 - # 5 Extended offline Interrupted (host reset) 90% 638 - SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1 SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS 1 0 0 Not_testing 2 0 0 Not_testing 3 0 0 Not_testing 4 0 0 Not_testing 5 0 0 Not_testing Selective self-test flags (0x0): After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk. If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.

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• Organizations &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 7

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Name different device categories Discuss the functions and structure of I/.O modules Describe the principles of Programmed I/O Describe the principles of Interrupt-driven I/O Describe the principles of DMA Discuss the evolution characteristic of I/O channels Describe different types of I/O interface Explain the principles of point-to-point and multipoint configurations Discuss the way in which a FireWire serial bus functions Discuss the principles of InfiniBand architecture External Devices An external device attaches to the computer by a link to an I/O module. The link is used to exchange control, status, and data between the I/O module and the external device. External devices can be classified into 3 categories… Human readable – e.g. video display Machine readable – e.g. magnetic disk Communications – e.g. wifi card I/O Modules An I/O module has two major functions… Interface to the processor and memory via the system bus or central switch Interface to one or more peripheral devices by tailored data links Module Functions The major functions or requirements for an I/O module fall into the following categories… Control and timing Processor communication Device communication Data buffering Error detection I/O function includes a control and timing requirement, to coordinate the flow of traffic between internal resources and external devices. Processor communication involves the following… Command decoding Data Status reporting Address recognition The I/O device must be able to perform device communication. This communication involves commands, status information, and data. An essential task of an I/O module is data buffering due to the relative slow speeds of most external devices. An I/O module is often responsible for error detection and for subsequently reporting errors to the processor. I/O Module Structure An I/O module functions to allow the processor to view a wide range of devices in a simple minded way. The I/O module may hide the details of timing, formats, and the electro mechanics of an external device so that the processor can function in terms of simple reads and write commands. An I/O channel/processor is an I/O module that takes on most of the detailed processing burden, presenting a high-level interface to the processor. There are 3 techniques are possible for I/O operations Programmed I/O Interrupt[t I/O DMA Access Programmed I/O When a processor is executing a program and encounters an instruction relating to I/O it executes that instruction by issuing a command to the appropriate I/O module. With programmed I/O, the I/O module will perform the requested action and then set the appropriate bits in the I/O status register. The I/O module takes no further actions to alert the processor. I/O Commands To execute an I/O related instruction, the processor issues an address, specifying the particular I/O module and external device, and an I/O command. There are four types of I/O commands that an I/O module may receive when it is addressed by a processor… Control – used to activate a peripheral and tell it what to do Test – Used to test various status conditions associated with an I/O module and its peripherals Read – Causes the I/O module to obtain an item of data from the peripheral and place it in an internal buffer Write – Causes the I/O module to take an item of data form the data bus and subsequently transmit that data item to the peripheral The main disadvantage of this technique is it is a time consuming process that keeps the processor busy needlessly I/O Instructions With programmed I/O there is a close correspondence between the I/O related instructions that the processor fetches from memory and the I/O commands that the processor issues to an I/O module to execute the instructions. Typically there will be many I/O devices connected through I/O modules to the system – each device is given a unique identifier or address – when the processor issues an I/O command, the command contains the address of the address of the desired device, thus each I/O module must interpret the address lines to determine if the command is for itself. When the processor, main memory and I/O share a common bus, two modes of addressing are possible… Memory mapped I/O Isolated I/O (for a detailed explanation read page 245 of book) The advantage of memory mapped I/O over isolated I/O is that it has a large repertoire of instructions that can be used, allowing more efficient programming. The disadvantage of memory mapped I/O over isolated I/O is that valuable memory address space is sued up. Interrupts driven I/O Interrupt driven I/O works as follows… The processor issues an I/O command to a module and then goes on to do some other useful work The I/O module will then interrupts the processor to request service when is is ready to exchange data with the processor The processor then executes the data transfer and then resumes its former processing Interrupt Processing The occurrence of an interrupt triggers a number of events, both in the processor hardware and in software. When an I/O device completes an I/O operations the following sequence of hardware events occurs… The device issues an interrupt signal to the processor The processor finishes execution of the current instruction before responding to the interrupt The processor tests for an interrupt – determines that there is one – and sends an acknowledgement signal to the device that issues the interrupt. The acknowledgement allows the device to remove its interrupt signal The processor now needs to prepare to transfer control to the interrupt routine. To begin, it needs to save information needed to resume the current program at the point of interrupt. The minimum information required is the status of the processor and the location of the next instruction to be executed. The processor now loads the program counter with the entry location of the interrupt-handling program that will respond to this interrupt. It also saves the values of the process registers because the Interrupt operation may modify these The interrupt handler processes the interrupt – this includes examination of status information relating to the I/O operation or other event that caused an interrupt When interrupt processing is complete, the saved register values are retrieved from the stack and restored to the registers Finally, the PSW and program counter values from the stack are restored. Design Issues Two design issues arise in implementing interrupt I/O Because there will be multiple I/O modules, how does the processor determine which device issued the interrupt? If multiple interrupts have occurred, how does the processor decide which one to process? Addressing device recognition, 4 general categories of techniques are in common use… Multiple interrupt lines Software poll Daisy chain Bus arbitration For a detailed explanation of these approaches read page 250 of the textbook. Interrupt driven I/O while more efficient than simple programmed I/O still requires the active intervention of the processor to transfer data between memory and an I/O module, and any data transfer must traverse a path through the processor. Thus is suffers from two inherent drawbacks… The I/O transfer rate is limited by the speed with which the processor can test and service a device The processor is tied up in managing an I/O transfer; a number of instructions must be executed for each I/O transfer Direct Memory Access When large volumes of data are to be moved, an efficient technique is direct memory access (DMA) DMA Function DMA involves an additional module on the system bus. The DMA module is capable of mimicking the processor and taking over control of the system from the processor. It needs to do this to transfer data to and from memory over the system bus. DMA must the bus only when the processor does not need it, or it must force the processor to suspend operation temporarily (most common – referred to as cycle stealing). When the processor wishes to read or write a block of data, it issues a command to the DMA module by sending to the DMA module the following information… Whether a read or write is requested using the read or write control line between the processor and the DMA module The address of the I/O device involved, communicated on the data lines The starting location in memory to read from or write to, communicated on the data lines and stored by the DMA module in its address register The number of words to be read or written, communicated via the data lines and stored in the data count register The processor then continues with other work, it delegates the I/O operation to the DMA module which transfers the entire block of data, one word at a time, directly to or from memory without going through the processor. When the transfer is complete, the DMA module sends an interrupt signal to the processor, this the processor is involved only at the beginning and end of the transfer. I/O Channels and Processors Characteristics of I/O Channels As one proceeds along the evolutionary path, more and more of the I/O function is performed without CPU involvement. The I/O channel represents an extension of the DMA concept. An I/O channel ahs the ability to execute I/O instructions, which gives it complete control over I/O operations. In a computer system with such devices, the CPU does not execute I/O instructions – such instructions are stored in main memory to be executed by a special purpose processor in the I/O channel itself. Two types of I/O channels are common A selector channel controls multiple high-speed devices. A multiplexor channel can handle I/O with multiple characters as fast as possible to multiple devices. The external interface: FireWire and InfiniBand Types of Interfaces One major characteristic of the interface is whether it is serial or parallel parallel interface – there are multiple lines connecting the I/O module and the peripheral, and multiple bits are transferred simultaneously serial interface – there is only one line used to transmit data, and bits must be transmitted one at a time With new generation serial interfaces, parallel interfaces are becoming less common. In either case, the I/O module must engage in a dialogue with the peripheral. In general terms the dialog may look as follows… The I/O module sends a control signal requesting permission to send data The peripheral acknowledges the request The I/O module transfers data The peripheral acknowledges receipt of data For a detailed explanation of FireWire and InfiniBand technology read page 264 – 270 of the textbook

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 04, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 04, 2013Popular ReleasesDNN Blog: 06.00.01: 06.00.01 ReleaseThis is the first bugfix release of the new v6 blog module. These are the changes: Added some robustness in v5-v6 scripts to cater for some rare upgrade scenarios Changed the name of the module definition to avoid clash with Evoq Social Addition of sitemap providerStock Track: Version 1.2 Stable: Overhaul and re-think of the user interface in normal mode. Added stock history view in normal mode. Allows user to enter orders in normal mode. Allow advanced user to run database queries within the program. Improved sales statistics feature, able to calculate against a single category.VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.50: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImageHostHQ.com" links NEW: Added Support for "ImgMoney.net" links NEW: Added Support for "ImgSavy.com" links NEW: Added Support for "PixTreat.com" links Bug fixesVidCoder: 1.5.11 Beta: Added Encode Details window. Exposes elapsed time, ETA, current and average FPS, running file size, current pass and pass progress. Open it by going to Windows -> Encode Details while an encode is running. Subtitle dialog now disables the "Burn In" checkbox when it's either unavailable or it's the only option. It also disables the "Forced Only" when the subtitle type doesn't support the "Forced" flag. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5872. Fixed crash in the preview window when a source fil...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1311.02: Add three new Actions in Custom Updates : Work with Files (Copy, Delete, Rename), Work with Folders (Add, Delete, Rename) and Work with Registry Keys (Add, Delete, Rename). Fix a bug, where after resigning an update, the display is not refresh. Modify the way WPP sort rows in 'Updates Detail Viewer' and 'Computer List Viewer' so that dates are correctly sorted. Add a Tab in the settings form to set Proxy settings when WPP needs to go on Internet. Fix a bug where 'Manage Catalogs Subsc...uComponents: uComponents v6.0.0: This release of uComponents will compile against and support the new API in Umbraco v6.1.0. What's new in uComponents v6.0.0? New DataTypesImage Point XML DropDownList XPath Templatable List New features / Resolved issuesThe following workitems have been implemented and/or resolved: 14781 14805 14808 14818 14854 14827 14868 14859 14790 14853 14790 DataType Grid 14788 14810 14873 14833 14864 14855 / 14860 14816 14823 Drag & Drop support for rows Su...SharePoint 2013 Global Metadata Navigation: SP 2013 Metadata Navigation Sandbox Solution: SharePoint 2013 Global Metadata Navigation sandbox solution version 1.0. Upload to your site collection solution store and activate. See the Documentation tab for detailed instructions.SmartStore.NET - Free ASP.NET MVC Ecommerce Shopping Cart Solution: SmartStore.NET 1.2.1: New FeaturesAdded option Limit to current basket subtotal to HadSpentAmount discount rule Items in product lists can be labelled as NEW for a configurable period of time Product templates can optionally display a discount sign when discounts were applied Added the ability to set multiple favicons depending on stores and/or themes Plugin management: multiple plugins can now be (un)installed in one go Added a field for the HTML body id to store entity (Developer) New property 'Extra...CodeGen Code Generator: CodeGen 4.3.2: Changes in this release include: Removed old tag tokens from several example templates. Fixed a bug which was causing the default author and company names not to be picked up from the registry under .NET. Added several additional tag loop expressions: <IF FIRST_TAG>, <IF LAST_TAG>, <IF MULTIPLE_TAGS> and<IF SINGLE_TAG>. Upgraded to Synergy/DE 10.1.1b, Visual Studio 2013 and Installshield Limited Edition 2013.Dynamics CRM 2013 Easy Solution Importer: Dynamics CRM 2013 Easy Solution Importer 1.0.0.0: First Version of Easy Solution Importer contains: - Entity to handle solutions - PBL to deactivate fields in form - Business Process Flow to launch the Solution Import - Plugin to import solutions - ChartSQL Power Doc: Version 1.0.2.2 BETA 1: Fixes for issues introduced with PowerShell 4.0 with serialization/deserialization. Fixed an issue with the max length of an Excel cell being exceeded by AD groups with a large number of members.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V54 (LiveConnect): This is the first release which can be used with the new LiveConnect authentication. Fixes the problem that the authentication will not work after 1 hour. Also a logfile will now be stored in "%AppData%\Community\CommunityForumsNNTPServer". If you have any problems please feel free to sent me the file "LogFile.txt".AutoAudit: AutoAudit 3.20f: Here is a high level list of the things I have changed between AutoAudit 2.00h and 3.20f ... Note: 3.20f corrects a minor bug found in 3.20e in the _RowHistory UDF when using column names with spaces. 1. AutoAudit has been tested on SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2008R2 and 2012. 2. Added the capability for AutoAudit to handle primary keys with up to 5 columns. 3. Added the capability for AutoAudit to save changes for a subset of the columns in a table. 4. Normalized the Audit table and created...Aricie - Friendlier Url Provider: Aricie - Friendlier Url Provider Version 2.5.3: This is mainly a maintenance release to stabilize the new Url Group paradigm. As usual, don't forget to install the Aricie - Shared extension first Highlights Fixed: UI bugs Min Requirements: .Net 3.5+ DotNetNuke 4.8.1+ Aricie - Shared 1.7.7+Aricie Shared: Aricie.Shared Version 1.7.7: This is mainly a maintenance version. Fixes in Property Editor: list import/export Min Requirements: DotNetNuke 4.8.1+ .Net 3.5+WPF Extended DataGrid: WPF Extended DataGrid 2.0.0.9 binaries: Fixed issue with ICollectionView containg null values (AutoFilter issue)SuperSocket, an extensible socket server framework: SuperSocket 1.6 stable: Changes included in this release: Process level isolation SuperSocket ServerManager (include server and client) Connect to client from server side initiatively Client certificate validation New configuration attributes "textEncoding", "defaultCulture", and "storeLocation" (certificate node) Many bug fixes http://docs.supersocket.net/v1-6/en-US/New-Features-and-Breaking-ChangesBarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 8.1: Check Version History for more information about this release.NAudio: NAudio 1.7: full release notes available at http://mark-dot-net.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/naudio-17-release-notes.htmlDirectX Tool Kit: October 2013: October 28, 2013 Updated for Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 SDK RTM Added DGSLEffect, DGSLEffectFactory, VertexPositionNormalTangentColorTexture, and VertexPositionNormalTangentColorTextureSkinning Model loading and effect factories support loading skinned models MakeSpriteFont now has a smooth vs. sharp antialiasing option: /sharp Model loading from CMOs now handles UV transforms for texture coordinates A number of small fixes for EffectFactory Minor code and project cleanup ...New ProjectsActive Directory User Home Directory and Home Drive Management: The script is great for migrations and overall user management. Questions please send an email to delagardecodeplex@hotmail.com.Computational Mathematics in TSQL: Combinatorial mathematics is easily expressed with computational assistance. The SQL Server engine is the canvas.Demo3: this is a demoEraDeiFessi: Un parser per un certo sito molto pesante e scomodo da navigareFinditbyme Local Search: Multi-lingual search engine that can index entities with multiple attributes.MVC Demo Project - 6: Demo project showing how to use partial views inside an ASP.NET MVC application.OLM to PST Converters: An Ideal Approach for Mac Users: OLM to PST converter helps you to access MAC Outlook emails with Windows platformOpen Source Grow Pack Ship: The Open Source Grow Pack Ship system is for the produce industry. It will allow companies with low funds and infrastructure to operate inside their own budget.Pauli: Pauli is a small .NET based password manager for home use. The Software helps a user to organize passwords, PIN codes, login accounts and notes.Refraction: Member element sorting. Contains reusable Visual Studio Extensibility code in the 'CodeManifold' project.Sensarium Cybernetic Art: Sensarium Cybernetic Art will use Kinect and brainwave technologies to create a true cybernetic art system. SharePoint - Tetris WebPart: Tetris webpart for SharePoint 2013Software Product Licensing: Dot License is very easy for your software product licensing. Product activation based on AES encryption, Processor ID and a single GUID key.VBS Class Framework: The 'VBS Class Framework' is an experimental project whcih aims at delivering 'Visual Basic Script Classes' for some commonly used Objects / Components (COM).VisualME7Logger: Graphical tools for logging real time performance statistics from VW and Audi automobilesVM Role Authoring Tool: VM ROLE Authoring Tool is used to author consistent VM Role gallery workloads for Windows Azure Pack and Windows Azure. wallet: Wallet Windows 8 Store Application: Windows 8 Store Application with XAML and C#Windows Azure Cache Extension Library: Windows Azure Cache Extension LibraryWindows Firewall Notifier: Windows Firewall Notifier (WFN) extends the default Windows embedded firewall behavior, allowing to visualize and handle incoming or outgoing connections.

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• Spooling in SQL execution plans

  - by Rob Farley

  Sewing has never been my thing. I barely even know the terminology, and when discussing this with American friends, I even found out that half the words that Americans use are different to the words that English and Australian people use. That said – let’s talk about spools! In particular, the Spool operators that you find in some SQL execution plans. This post is for T-SQL Tuesday, hosted this month by me! I’ve chosen to write about spools because they seem to get a bad rap (even in my song I used the line “There’s spooling from a CTE, they’ve got recursion needlessly”). I figured it was worth covering some of what spools are about, and hopefully explain why they are remarkably necessary, and generally very useful. If you have a look at the Books Online page about Plan Operators, at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191158.aspx, and do a search for the word ‘spool’, you’ll notice it says there are 46 matches. 46! Yeah, that’s what I thought too... Spooling is mentioned in several operators: Eager Spool, Lazy Spool, Index Spool (sometimes called a Nonclustered Index Spool), Row Count Spool, Spool, Table Spool, and Window Spool (oh, and Cache, which is a special kind of spool for a single row, but as it isn’t used in SQL 2012, I won’t describe it any further here). Spool, Table Spool, Index Spool, Window Spool and Row Count Spool are all physical operators, whereas Eager Spool and Lazy Spool are logical operators, describing the way that the other spools work. For example, you might see a Table Spool which is either Eager or Lazy. A Window Spool can actually act as both, as I’ll mention in a moment. In sewing, cotton is put onto a spool to make it more useful. You might buy it in bulk on a cone, but if you’re going to be using a sewing machine, then you quite probably want to have it on a spool or bobbin, which allows it to be used in a more effective way. This is the picture that I want you to think about in relation to your data. I’m sure you use spools every time you use your sewing machine. I know I do. I can’t think of a time when I’ve got out my sewing machine to do some sewing and haven’t used a spool. However, I often run SQL queries that don’t use spools. You see, the data that is consumed by my query is typically in a useful state without a spool. It’s like I can just sew with my cotton despite it not being on a spool! Many of my favourite features in T-SQL do like to use spools though. This looks like a very similar query to before, but includes an OVER clause to return a column telling me the number of rows in my data set. I’ll describe what’s going on in a few paragraphs’ time. So what does a Spool operator actually do? The spool operator consumes a set of data, and stores it in a temporary structure, in the tempdb database. This structure is typically either a Table (ie, a heap), or an Index (ie, a b-tree). If no data is actually needed from it, then it could also be a Row Count spool, which only stores the number of rows that the spool operator consumes. A Window Spool is another option if the data being consumed is tightly linked to windows of data, such as when the ROWS/RANGE clause of the OVER clause is being used. You could maybe think about the type of spool being like whether the cotton is going onto a small bobbin to fit in the base of the sewing machine, or whether it’s a larger spool for the top. A Table or Index Spool is either Eager or Lazy in nature. Eager and Lazy are Logical operators, which talk more about the behaviour, rather than the physical operation. If I’m sewing, I can either be all enthusiastic and get all my cotton onto the spool before I start, or I can do it as I need it. “Lazy” might not the be the best word to describe a person – in the SQL world it describes the idea of either fetching all the rows to build up the whole spool when the operator is called (Eager), or populating the spool only as it’s needed (Lazy). Window Spools are both physical and logical. They’re eager on a per-window basis, but lazy between windows. And when is it needed? The way I see it, spools are needed for two reasons. 1 – When data is going to be needed AGAIN. 2 – When data needs to be kept away from the original source. If you’re someone that writes long stored procedures, you are probably quite aware of the second scenario. I see plenty of stored procedures being written this way – where the query writer populates a temporary table, so that they can make updates to it without risking the original table. SQL does this too. Imagine I’m updating my contact list, and some of my changes move data to later in the book. If I’m not careful, I might update the same row a second time (or even enter an infinite loop, updating it over and over). A spool can make sure that I don’t, by using a copy of the data. This problem is known as the Halloween Effect (not because it’s spooky, but because it was discovered in late October one year). As I’m sure you can imagine, the kind of spool you’d need to protect against the Halloween Effect would be eager, because if you’re only handling one row at a time, then you’re not providing the protection... An eager spool will block the flow of data, waiting until it has fetched all the data before serving it up to the operator that called it. In the query below I’m forcing the Query Optimizer to use an index which would be upset if the Name column values got changed, and we see that before any data is fetched, a spool is created to load the data into. This doesn’t stop the index being maintained, but it does mean that the index is protected from the changes that are being done. There are plenty of times, though, when you need data repeatedly. Consider the query I put above. A simple join, but then counting the number of rows that came through. The way that this has executed (be it ideal or not), is to ask that a Table Spool be populated. That’s the Table Spool operator on the top row. That spool can produce the same set of rows repeatedly. This is the behaviour that we see in the bottom half of the plan. In the bottom half of the plan, we see that the a join is being done between the rows that are being sourced from the spool – one being aggregated and one not – producing the columns that we need for the query. Table v Index When considering whether to use a Table Spool or an Index Spool, the question that the Query Optimizer needs to answer is whether there is sufficient benefit to storing the data in a b-tree. The idea of having data in indexes is great, but of course there is a cost to maintaining them. Here we’re creating a temporary structure for data, and there is a cost associated with populating each row into its correct position according to a b-tree, as opposed to simply adding it to the end of the list of rows in a heap. Using a b-tree could even result in page-splits as the b-tree is populated, so there had better be a reason to use that kind of structure. That all depends on how the data is going to be used in other parts of the plan. If you’ve ever thought that you could use a temporary index for a particular query, well this is it – and the Query Optimizer can do that if it thinks it’s worthwhile. It’s worth noting that just because a Spool is populated using an Index Spool, it can still be fetched using a Table Spool. The details about whether or not a Spool used as a source shows as a Table Spool or an Index Spool is more about whether a Seek predicate is used, rather than on the underlying structure. Recursive CTE I’ve already shown you an example of spooling when the OVER clause is used. You might see them being used whenever you have data that is needed multiple times, and CTEs are quite common here. With the definition of a set of data described in a CTE, if the query writer is leveraging this by referring to the CTE multiple times, and there’s no simplification to be leveraged, a spool could theoretically be used to avoid reapplying the CTE’s logic. Annoyingly, this doesn’t happen. Consider this query, which really looks like it’s using the same data twice. I’m creating a set of data (which is completely deterministic, by the way), and then joining it back to itself. There seems to be no reason why it shouldn’t use a spool for the set described by the CTE, but it doesn’t. On the other hand, if we don’t pull as many columns back, we might see a very different plan. You see, CTEs, like all sub-queries, are simplified out to figure out the best way of executing the whole query. My example is somewhat contrived, and although there are plenty of cases when it’s nice to give the Query Optimizer hints about how to execute queries, it usually doesn’t do a bad job, even without spooling (and you can always use a temporary table). When recursion is used, though, spooling should be expected. Consider what we’re asking for in a recursive CTE. We’re telling the system to construct a set of data using an initial query, and then use set as a source for another query, piping this back into the same set and back around. It’s very much a spool. The analogy of cotton is long gone here, as the idea of having a continual loop of cotton feeding onto a spool and off again doesn’t quite fit, but that’s what we have here. Data is being fed onto the spool, and getting pulled out a second time when the spool is used as a source. (This query is running on AdventureWorks, which has a ManagerID column in HumanResources.Employee, not AdventureWorks2012) The Index Spool operator is sucking rows into it – lazily. It has to be lazy, because at the start, there’s only one row to be had. However, as rows get populated onto the spool, the Table Spool operator on the right can return rows when asked, ending up with more rows (potentially) getting back onto the spool, ready for the next round. (The Assert operator is merely checking to see if we’ve reached the MAXRECURSION point – it vanishes if you use OPTION (MAXRECURSION 0), which you can try yourself if you like). Spools are useful. Don’t lose sight of that. Every time you use temporary tables or table variables in a stored procedure, you’re essentially doing the same – don’t get upset at the Query Optimizer for doing so, even if you think the spool looks like an expensive part of the query. I hope you’re enjoying this T-SQL Tuesday. Why not head over to my post that is hosting it this month to read about some other plan operators? At some point I’ll write a summary post – once I have you should find a comment below pointing at it. @rob_farley

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• Oracle on Oracle: Is that all?

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  On October 17th, I posted a short blog and a podcast interview with Chirag Andani, talking about how Oracle IT uses its own IDM products. Blog link here. In response, I received a comment from reader Jaime Cardoso ([email protected]) who posted: “- You could have talked about how by deploying Oracle's Open standards base technology you were able to integrate any new system in your infrastructure in days. - You could have talked about how by deploying federation you were enabling the business side to keep all their options open in terms of companies to buy and sell while maintaining perfect employee and customer's single view. - You could have talked about how you are now able to cut response times to your audit and security teams into 1/10th of your former times Instead you spent 6 minutes talking about single sign on and self provisioning? If I didn't knew your IDM offer so well I would now be wondering what its differences from Microsoft's offer was. Sorry for not giving a positive comment here but, please your IDM suite is very good and, you simply aren't promoting it well enough” So I decided to send Jaime a note asking him about his experience, and to get his perspective on what makes the Oracle products great. What I found out is that Jaime is a very experienced IDM Architect with several major projects under his belt. Darin Pendergraft: Can you tell me a bit about your experience? How long have you worked in IT, and what is your IDM experience? Jaime Cardoso: I started working in "serious" IT in 1998 when I became Netscape's technical specialist in Portugal. Netscape Portugal didn't exist so, I was working for their VAR here. Most of my work at the time was with Netscape's mail server and LDAP server. Since that time I've been bouncing between the system's side like Sun resellers, Solaris stuff and even worked with Sun's Engineering in the making of an Hierarchical Storage Product (Sun CIS if you know it) and the application's side, mostly in LDAP and IDM. Over the years I've been doing support, service delivery and pre-sales / architecture design of IDM solutions in most big customers in Portugal, to name a few projects: - The first European deployment of Sun Access Manager (SAPO – Portugal Telecom) - The identity repository of 5/5 of the Biggest Portuguese banks - The Portuguese government federation of services project DP: OK, in your blog response, you mentioned 3 topics: 1. Using Oracle's standards based architecture; (you) were able to integrate any new system in days: can you give an example? What systems, how long did it take, number of apps/users/accounts/roles etc. JC: It's relatively easy to design a user management strategy for a static environment, or if you simply assume that you're an <insert vendor here> shop and all your systems will bow to that vendor's will. We've all seen that path, the use of proprietary technologies in interoperability solutions but, then reality kicks in. As an ISP I recall that I made the technical decision to use Active Directory as a central authentication system for the entire IT infrastructure. Clients, systems, apps, everything was there. As a good part of the systems and apps were running on UNIX, then a connector became needed in order to have UNIX boxes to authenticate against AD. And, that strategy worked but, each new machine required the component to be installed, monitoring had to be made for that component and each new app had to be independently certified. A self care user portal was an ongoing project, AD access assumes the client is inside the domain, something the ISP's customers (and UNIX boxes) weren't nor had any intention of ever being. When the Windows 2008 rollout was done, Microsoft changed the Active Directory interface. The Windows administrators didn't have enough know-how about directories and the way systems outside the MS world behaved so, on the go live, things weren't properly tested and a general outage followed. Several hours and 1 roll back later, everything was back working. But, the ISP still had to change all of its applications to work with the new access methods and reset the effort spent on the self service user portal. To keep with the same strategy, they would also have to trust Microsoft not to change interfaces again. Simply by putting up an Oracle LDAP server in the middle and replicating the user info from the AD into LDAP, most of the problems went away. Even systems for which no AD connector existed had PAM in them so, integration was made at the OS level, fully supported by the OS supplier. Sun Identity Manager already had a self care portal, combined with a user workflow so, all the clearances had to be given before the account was created or updated. Adding a new system as a client for these authentication services was simply a new checkbox in the OS installer and, even True64 systems were, for the first time integrated also with a 5 minute work of a junior system admin. True, all the windows clients and MS apps still went to the AD for their authentication needs so, from the start everybody knew that they weren't 100% free of migration pains but, now they had a single point of problems to look at. If you're looking for numbers: - 500K directory entries (users) - 2-300 systems After the initial setup, I personally integrated about 20 systems / apps against LDAP in 1 day while being watched by the different IT teams. The internal IT staff did the rest. DP: 2. Using Federation allows the business to keep options open for buying and selling companies, and yet maintain a single view for both employee and customer. What do you mean by this? Can you give an example? JC: The market is dynamic. The company that's being bought today tomorrow will be sold again. Companies that spread on different markets may see the regulator forcing a sale of part of a company due to monopoly reasons and companies that are in multiple countries have to comply with different legislations. Our job, as IT architects, while addressing the customers and employees authentication services, is quite hard and, quite contrary. On one hand, we need to give access to all of our employees to the relevant systems, apps and resources and, we already have marketing talking with us trying to find out who's a customer of the bough company but not from ours to address. On the other hand, we have to do that and keep in mind we may have to break up all that effort and that different countries legislation may became a problem with a full integration plan. That's a job for user Federation. you don't want to be the one who's telling your President that he will sell that business unit without it's customer's database (making the deal worth a lot less) or that the buyer will take with him a copy of your entire customer's database. Federation enables you to start controlling permissions to users outside of your traditional authentication realm. So what if the people of that company you just bought are keeping their old logins? Do you want, because of that, to have a dedicated system for their expenses reports? And do you want to keep their sales (and pre-sales) people out of the loop in terms of your group's path? Control the information flow, establish a Federation trust circle and give access to your apps to users that haven't (yet?) been brought into your internal login systems. You can still see your users in a unified view, you obviously control if a user has access to any particular application, either that user is in your local database or stored in a directory on the other side of the world. DP: 3. Cut response times of audit and security teams to 1/10. Is this a real number? Can you give an example? JC: No, I don't have any backing for this number. One of the companies I did system Administration for has a SOX compliance policy in place (I remind you that I live in Portugal so, this definition of SOX may be somewhat different from what you're used to) and, every time the audit team says they'll do another audit, we have to negotiate with them the size of the sample and we spend about 15 man/days gathering all the required info they ask. I did some work with Sun's Identity auditor and, from what I've been seeing, Oracle's product is even better and, I've seen that most of the information they ask would have been provided in a few hours with the help of this tool. I do stand by what I said here but, to be honest, someone from Identity Auditor team would do a much better job than me explaining this time savings. Jaime is right: the Oracle IDM products have a lot of business value, and Oracle IT is using them for a lot more than I was able to cover in the short podcast that I posted. I want to thank Jaime for his comments and perspective. We want these blog posts to be informative and honest – so if you have feedback for the Oracle IDM team on any topic discussed here, please post your comments below.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 01, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 01, 2014Popular ReleasesQuickMon: Version 3.20: Added a 'Directory Services Query' collector agent. This collector allows for querying Active Directory using simple DirectorySearcher queries.Grunndatakvalitet: Initial working: Show Altinn metadata in Excel. To get a live list you need to run the sql script on a server and update the connection string in ExcelMultiple Threads TCP Server: Project: this Project is based on VS 2013, .net freamwork 4.0, you can open it by vs 2010 or laterEssence#: Philemon-2 (Alpha Build 18): The Philemon-2 release fixes bugs, most of which have to do with the binding of .Net assemblies. Configuration profiles have been added in order to help solve some of the .Net assembly binding issues. A configuration profile is persistently stored as a folder in the filesystem. It must be located in the folder %EssenceSharpPath%\Config. The folder name must use ".profile" as its file extension. A configuration profile folder may (optionally) contain one or more files--each with its own form...DataBind: DataBind 1.0: - Efficiency ImprovedConsole Progress Bar: ConsoleProgressBar-0.3: - Validate ProgressInPercentageSpace Engineers Server Manager: SESM V1.10: V1.10 - New auto update system ! You won't miss any SE Update now ^^ To learn more : https://sesm.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Activating%20the%20auto%20update%20system - Moved the serve-wide configuration options to an other file than web.config. It should solve the "my parametters are errased by each SESM update" ! Warning ! If you upgrade from any previous version, you will need to copy-pase your parameters from your old web.config into the new SESM.config (this file is generated by acc...Accesorios de sitios Torrent en Español para Synology Download Station: Pack de Torrents en Español 6.0.0: Agregado los módulos de DivXTotal, el módulo de búsqueda depende del de alojamiento para bajar las series Utiliza el rss: http://www.divxtotal.com/rss.php DbEntry.Net (Leafing Framework): DbEntry.Net 4.2: DbEntry.Net is a lightweight Object Relational Mapping (ORM) database access compnent for .Net 4.0+. It has clearly and easily programing interface for ORM and sql directly, and supoorted Access, Sql Server, MySql, SQLite, Firebird, PostgreSQL and Oracle. It also provide a Ruby On Rails style MVC framework. Asp.Net DataSource and a simple IoC. DbEntry.Net.v4.2.Setup.zip include the setup package. DbEntry.Net.v4.2.Src.zip include source files and unit tests. DbEntry.Net.v4.2.Samples.zip ...Recaptcha for .NET: Recaptcha for .NET v1.5: What's NewMinor bug fixes Support for legacy .NET framework 4.0 and ASP.NET MVC 4. Support for .NET Framework 4.5.1.Azure Storage Explorer: Azure Storage Explorer 6 Preview 1: Welcome to Azure Storage Explorer 6 Preview 1 This is the first release of the latest Azure Storage Explorer, code-named Phoenix. What's New?Here are some important things to know about version 6: Open Source Now being run as a full open source project. Full source code on CodePlex. Collaboration encouraged! Updated Code Base Brand-new code base (WPF/C#/.NET 4.5) Visual Studio 2013 solution (previously VS2010) Uses the Task Parallel Library (TPL) for asynchronous background operat...Wsus Package Publisher: release v1.3.1407.29: Updated WPP to recognize the very latest console version. Some files was missing into the latest release of WPP which lead to crash when trying to make a custom update. Add a workaround to avoid clipboard modification when double-clicking on a label when creating a custom update. Add the ability to publish detectoids. (This feature is still in a BETA phase. Packages relying on these detectoids to determine which computers need to be updated, may apply to all computers).SSIS Connector for Sharepoint Online: Sharepoint_Online_ConnectorsV2.3.5: V2.3.5 Removed validation for user name where it was accepting user name with only ".com" V2.3.1 Added support for column with string array type. (For source only) V2.3 Added support for delete operation. just map ID columns and choose operation type as "Delete" Any other Operation Type will be taken as Insert\Update MultiUser type will be taken as User field and single user will be added, still figuring out how to add multi user field (whatever available on internet not helping :( ) V2.2 ...Artezio SharePoint 2013 Workflow Activities for VS & Actions for Designer: SharePoint Designer 2013 custom workflow actions 1.0: SharePoint Designer 2013 custom workflow actions that work with permissions. Add Role Assignment Add Role Assignments Delete Role Assignments Get Role Definition Id Get Role Definition Id By Role Type Id Reset Role Inheritance Artezio SharePoint Consulting & DevelopmentVG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.32: changes NEW: Added Support for 'ImgMega.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgCandy.net' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgPit.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'Img.yt' links FIXED: 'Radikal.ru' links FIXED: 'ImageTeam.org' links FIXED: 'ImgSee.com' links FIXED: 'Img.yt' linksAsp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo with Todo List WebApplication: Asp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo: Asp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo with simple Todo List WebApplication, Overview TodoList is a simple web application to create, store and modify Todo tasks to be maintained by the users, which comprises of following fields to the user (Task Name, Task Description, Severity, Target Date, Task Status). TodoList web application is created using MVC - 4 architecture, code-first Entity Framework (ORM) and Jqgrid for displaying the data.Waterfox: Waterfox 31.0 Portable: New features in Waterfox 31.0: Added support for Unicode 7.0 Experimental support for WebCL New features in Firefox 31.0:New Add the search field to the new tab page Support of Prefer:Safe http header for parental control mozilla::pkix as default certificate verifier Block malware from downloaded files Block malware from downloaded files audio/video .ogg and .pdf files handled by Firefox if no application specified Changed Removal of the CAPS infrastructure for specifying site-sp...SuperSocket, an extensible socket server framework: SuperSocket 1.6.3: The changes below are included in this release: fixed an exception when collect a server's status but it has been stopped fixed a bug that can cause an exception in case of sending data when the connection dropped already fixed the log4net missing issue for a QuickStart project fixed a warning in a QuickStart projectYnote Classic: Ynote Classic 2.8.5 Beta: Several Changes - Multiple Carets and Multiple Selections - Improved Startup Time - Improved Syntax Highlighting - Search Improvements - Shell Command - Improved StabilityTEBookConverter: 1.2: Fixed: Could not start convertion in some cases Fixed: Progress show during convertion was truncated Fixed: Stopping convertion didn't reset program titleNew Projects.NET to C/C++ Interop Sample: Reference projects that demonstrate how to invoke C/C++ code from .NET using C#.Aircraft Guidance Systems: Software for RC model control and navigationDNN Upgrade Wizard: Provides a simple method for upgrading a DNN siteDrop and Create indexes SSIS Task: This is a simple SSIS Control Flow Task which can be used to drop and re-create all non-primary key indexes associated with specified table.Dynamics CRM 2013 Global Advanced Find: Dynamics CRM 2013 Global Advanced Find adds a button to the global navigation allowing users to launch an advanced find window from anywhere in the system.itsanewproject: sdlfjsldjfJNMSJW: hahaOmni Kits: A library tend to help in projects for any purpose while keeping small.Phase1Week1: Learning how to post, publish, and patch my commits to CodePlex with homework using bootsrap and font awesome.PL_Last1: Pll1Tabletoparmy: Tabletoparmy ist ein Tool um Tabletop Miniaturen zu Verwalten. Aktuell gibt es nur die Möglichkeit ein X-Wing Turnier zu verwalten.TalesAndTiles: Tile based game developed with Microsoft XNA Framework 4.0??????: ?????????

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• HTML5-MVC application using VS2010 SP1

  - by nmarun

  This is my first attempt at creating HTML5 pages. VS 2010 allows working with HTML5 now (you just need to make a small change after installing SP1). So my Razor view is now a HTML5 page. I call this application - 5Commerce – (an over-simplified) HTML5 ECommerce site. So here’s the flow of the application: home page renders user enters first and last name, chooses a product and the quantity can enter additional instructions for the order place the order user is then taken to another page showing the order details Off to the details. This is what my page looks in Google Chrome 10 beta (or later) soon after it renders. Here are some of the things to observe on this. Look a little closer and you’ll see a border around the first name textbox – this is ‘autofocus’ in action. I’ve set the autofocus attribute on this textbox. So as soon as the page loads, this control gets focus. 1: <input type="text" autofocus id="firstName" class="inputWidth" data_minlength="" 2: data_maxlength="" placeholder="first name" /> See a partially grayed out ‘last name’ text in the second textbox. This is set using a placeholder attribute (see above). It gets wiped out on-focus and improves the UI visuals in general. The quantity textbox is actually a numerical-only textbox. 1: <input type="number" id="quantity" data_mincount="" class="inputWidth" /> The last line is for additional instructions. This looks like a label but it’s content is editable. Just adding the ‘contenteditable’ attribute to the span allow the user to edit the text inside. 1: <span contenteditable id="additionalInstructions" data_texttype="" class="editableContent">select text and edit </span> All of the above is just plain HTML (no lurking javascript acting in here). Makes it real clean and simple. Going more into the HTML, I see that the _Layout.cshtml already is using some HTML5 content. I created my project before installing SP1, so that was the reason for my surprise. 1: <!DOCTYPE html> This is the doctype declaration in HTML5 and this is supported even by IE6 (just take my word on IE6 now, don’t go install it to test it, especially when MS is doing an IE6 countdown). That’s just amazing and extremely easy to read remember and talk about a few less bytes on every call! I modified the rest of my _Layout.cshtml to the below: 1: <!DOCTYPE html> 2: <html> 3: <head> 4: <title>5Commerce - HTML 5 Ecommerce site</title> 5: <link href="@Url.Content("~/Content/Site.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> 6: <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.4.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> 7: <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/CustomScripts.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> 8: <script type="text/javascript"> 9: $(document).ready(function () { 10: WireupEvents(); 11: }); 12:</script> 13:  14: </head> 15:  16: <body role="document" class="bodybackground"> 17: <header role="heading"> 18: <h2>5Commerce - HTML 5 Ecommerce site!</h2> 19: </header> 20: <section id="mainForm"> 21: @RenderBody() 22: </section> 23: <footer id="page_footer" role="siteBaseInfo"> 24: <p>&copy; 2011 5Commerce Inc!</p> 25: </footer> 26: </body> 27: </html> I’m sure you’re seeing some of the new tags here. To give a brief intro about them: <header>, <footer>: Marks the header/footer region of a page or section. <section>: A logical grouping of content role attribute: Identifies the responsibility of an element. This attribute can be used by screen readers and can also be filtered through jQuery. SP1 also allows for some intellisense in HTML5. You see the other types of input fields – email, date, datetime, month, url and there are others as well. So once my page loads, i.e., ‘on document ready’, I’m wiring up the events following the principles of unobtrusive javascript. In the snippet below, I’m controlling the behavior of the input controls for specific events. 1: $("#productList").bind('change blur', function () { 2: IsSelectedProductValid(); 3: }); 4:  5: $("#quantity").bind('blur', function () { 6: IsQuantityValid(); 7: }); 8:  9: $("#placeOrderButton").click( 10: function () { 11: if (IsPageValid()) { 12: LoadProducts(); 13: } 14: }); This enables some client-side validation to occur before the data is sent to the server. These validation constraints are obtained through a JSON call to the WCF service and are set to the ‘data_’ attributes of the input controls. Have a look at the ‘GetValidators()’ function below: 1: function GetValidators() { 2: // the post to your webservice or page 3: $.ajax({ 4: type: "GET", //GET or POST or PUT or DELETE verb 5: url: "http://localhost:14805/OrderService.svc/GetValidators", // Location of the service 6: data: "{}", //Data sent to server 7: contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", // content type sent to server 8: dataType: "json", //Expected data format from server 9: processdata: true, //True or False 10: success: function (result) {//On Successfull service call 11: if (result.length > 0) { 12: for (i = 0; i < result.length; i++) { 13: if (result[i].PropertyName == "FirstName") { 14: if (result[i].MinLength > 0) { 15: $("#firstName").attr("data_minLength", result[i].MinLength); 16: } 17: if (result[i].MaxLength > 0) { 18: $("#firstName").attr("data_maxLength", result[i].MaxLength); 19: } 20: } 21: else if (result[i].PropertyName == "LastName") { 22: if (result[i].MinLength > 0) { 23: $("#lastName").attr("data_minLength", result[i].MinLength); 24: } 25: if (result[i].MaxLength > 0) { 26: $("#lastName").attr("data_maxLength", result[i].MaxLength); 27: } 28: } 29: else if (result[i].PropertyName == "Quantity") { 30: if (result[i].MinCount > 0) { 31: $("#quantity").attr("data_minCount", result[i].MinCount); 32: } 33: } 34: else if (result[i].PropertyName == "AdditionalInstructions") { 35: if (result[i].TextType.length > 0) { 36: $("#additionalInstructions").attr("data_textType", result[i].TextType); 37: } 38: } 39: } 40: } 41: }, 42: error: function (result) {// When Service call fails 43: alert('Service call failed: ' + result.status + ' ' + result.statusText); 44: } 45: }); 46:  47: //.... 48: } Just before the GetValidators() function runs and sets the validation constraints, this is what the html looks like (seen through the Dev tools of Chrome): After the function executes, you see the values in the ‘data_’  attributes. As and when we enter valid data into these fields, the error messages disappear, since the validation is bound to the blur event of the control. There you see… no error messages (well, the catch here is that once you enter THAT name, all errors disappear automatically). Clicking on ‘Place Order!’ runs the SaveOrder function. You can see the JSON for the order object that is getting constructed and passed to the WCF Service. 1: function SaveOrder() { 2: var addlInstructionsDefaultText = "select text and edit"; 3: var addlInstructions = $("span:first").text(); 4: if(addlInstructions == addlInstructionsDefaultText) 5: { 6: addlInstructions = ''; 7: } 8: var orderJson = { 9: AdditionalInstructions: addlInstructions, 10: Customer: { 11: FirstName: $("#firstName").val(), 12: LastName: $("#lastName").val() 13: }, 14: OrderedProduct: { 15: Id: $("#productList").val(), 16: Quantity: $("#quantity").val() 17: } 18: }; 19:  20: // the post to your webservice or page 21: $.ajax({ 22: type: "POST", //GET or POST or PUT or DELETE verb 23: url: "http://localhost:14805/OrderService.svc/SaveOrder", // Location of the service 24: data: JSON.stringify(orderJson), //Data sent to server 25: contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", // content type sent to server 26: dataType: "json", //Expected data format from server 27: processdata: false, //True or False 28: success: function (result) {//On Successfull service call 29: window.location.href = "http://localhost:14805/home/ShowOrderDetail/" + result; 30: }, 31: error: function (request, error) {// When Service call fails 32: alert('Service call failed: ' + request.status + ' ' + request.statusText); 33: } 34: }); 35: } The service saves this order into an XML file and returns the order id (a guid). On success, I redirect to the ShowOrderDetail action method passing the guid. This page will show all the details of the order. Although the back-end weightlifting is done by WCF, I did not show any of that plumbing-work as I wanted to concentrate more on the HTML5 and its associates. However, you can see it all in the source here. I do have one issue with HTML5 and this is an existing issue with HTML4 as well. If you see the snippet above where I’ve declared a textbox for first name, you’ll see the autofocus attribute just dangling by itself. It doesn’t follow the xml syntax of ‘key="value"’ allowing users to continue writing badly-formatted html even in the new version. You’ll see the same issue with the ‘contenteditable’ attribute as well. The work-around is that you can do ‘autofocus=”true”’ and it’ll work fine plus make it well-formatted. But unless the standards enforce this, there will be people (me included) who’ll get by, by just typing the bare minimum! Hoping this will get fixed in the coming version-updates. Source code here. Verdict: I think it’s time for us to embrace the new HTML5. Thank you HTML4 and Welcome HTML5.

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• Finding the Right Solution to Source and Manage Your Contractors

  - by mark.rosenberg(at)oracle.com

  Many of our PeopleSoft Enterprise applications customers operate in service-based industries, and all of our customers have at least some internal service units, such as IT, marketing, and facilities. Employing the services of contractors, often referred to as "contingent labor," to deliver either or both internal and external services is common practice. As we've transitioned from an industrial age to a knowledge age, talent has become a primary competitive advantage for most organizations. Contingent labor offers talent on flexible terms; it offers the ability to scale up operations, close skill gaps, and manage risk in the process of delivering services. Talent comes from many sources and the rise in the contingent worker (contractor, consultant, temporary, part time) has increased significantly in the past decade and is expected to reach 40 percent in the next decade. Managing the total pool of talent in a seamless integrated fashion not only saves organizations money and increases efficiency, but creates a better place for workers of all kinds to work. Although the term "contingent labor" is frequently used to describe both contractors and employees who have flexible schedules and relationships with an organization, the remainder of this discussion focuses on contractors. The term "contingent labor" is used interchangeably with "contractor." Recognizing the importance of contingent labor, our PeopleSoft customers often ask our team, "What Oracle vendor management system (VMS) applications should I evaluate for managing contractors?" In response, I thought it would be useful to describe and compare the three most common Oracle-based options available to our customers. They are:   The enterprise licensed software model in which you implement and utilize the PeopleSoft Services Procurement (sPro) application and potentially other PeopleSoft applications;  The software-as-a-service model in which you gain access to a derivative of PeopleSoft sPro from an Oracle Business Process Outsourcing Partner; and  The managed service provider (MSP) model in which staffing industry professionals utilize either your enterprise licensed software or the software-as-a-service application to administer your contingent labor program. At this point, you may be asking yourself, "Why three options?" The answer is that since there is no "one size fits all" in terms of talent, there is also no "one size fits all" for effectively sourcing and managing contingent workers. Various factors influence how an organization thinks about and relates to its contractors, and each of the three Oracle-based options addresses an organization's needs and preferences differently. For the purposes of this discussion, I will describe the options with respect to (A) pricing and software provisioning models; (B) control and flexibility; (C) level of engagement with contractors; and (D) approach to sourcing, employment law, and financial settlement. Option 1:  Enterprise Licensed Software In this model, you purchase from Oracle the license and support for the applications you need. Typically, you license PeopleSoft sPro as your VMS tool for sourcing, monitoring, and paying your contract labor. In conjunction with sPro, you can also utilize PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) applications (if you do not already) to configure more advanced business processes for recruiting, training, and tracking your contractors. Many customers choose this enterprise license software model because of the functionality and natural integration of the PeopleSoft applications and because the cost for the PeopleSoft software is explicit. There is no fee per transaction to source each contractor under this model. Our customers that employ contractors to augment their permanent staff on billable client engagements often find this model appealing because there are no fees to affect their profit margins. With this model, you decide whether to have your own IT organization run the software or have the software hosted and managed by either Oracle or another application services provider. Your organization, perhaps with the assistance of consultants, configures, deploys, and operates the software for managing your contingent workforce. This model offers you the highest level of control and flexibility since your organization can configure the contractor process flow exactly to your business and security requirements and can extend the functionality with PeopleTools. This option has proven very valuable and applicable to our customers engaged in government contracting because their contingent labor management practices are subject to complex standards and regulations. Customers find a great deal of value in the application functionality and configurability the enterprise licensed software offers for managing contingent labor. Some examples of that functionality are... The ability to create a tiered network of preferred suppliers including competencies, pricing agreements, and elaborate candidate management capabilities. Configurable alerts and online collaboration for bid, resource requisition, timesheet, and deliverable entry, routing, and approval for both resource and deliverable-based services. The ability to manage contractors with the same PeopleSoft HCM and Projects applications that are used to manage the permanent workforce. Because it allows you to utilize much of the same PeopleSoft HCM and Projects application functionality for contractors that you use for permanent employees, the enterprise licensed software model supports the deepest level of engagement with the contingent workforce. For example, you can: fill job openings with contingent labor; guide contingent workers through essential safety and compliance training with PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning Management; and source contingent workers directly to project-based assignments in PeopleSoft Resource Management and PeopleSoft Program Management. This option enables contingent workers to collaborate closely with your permanent staff on complex, knowledge-based efforts - R&D projects, billable client contracts, architecture and engineering projects spanning multiple years, and so on. With the enterprise licensed software model, your organization maintains responsibility for the sourcing, onboarding (including adherence to employment laws), and financial settlement processes. This means your organization maintains on staff or hires the expertise in these domains to utilize the software and interact with suppliers and contractors. Option 2:  Software as a Service (SaaS) The effort involved in setting up and operating VMS software to handle a contingent workforce leads many organizations to seek a system that can be activated and configured within a few days and for which they can pay based on usage. Oracle's Business Process Outsourcing partner, Provade, Inc., provides exactly this option to our customers. Provade offers its vendor management software as a service over the Internet and usually charges your organization a fee that is a percentage of your total contingent labor spending processed through the Provade software. (Percentage of spend is the predominant fee model, although not the only one.) In addition to lower implementation costs, the effort of configuring and maintaining the software is largely upon Provade, not your organization. This can be very appealing to IT organizations that are thinly stretched supporting other important information technology initiatives. Built upon PeopleSoft sPro, the Provade solution is tailored for simple and quick deployment and administration. Provade has added capabilities to clone users rapidly and has simplified business documents, like work orders and change orders, to facilitate enterprise-wide, self-service adoption with little to no training. Provade also leverages Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) to provide integrated spend analytics and dashboards. Although pure customization is more limited than with the enterprise licensed software model, Provade offers a very effective option for organizations that are regularly on-boarding and off-boarding high volumes of contingent staff hired to perform discrete support tasks (for example, order fulfillment during the holiday season, hourly clerical work, desktop technology repairs, and so on) or project tasks. The software is very configurable and at the same time very intuitive to even the most computer-phobic users. The level of contingent worker engagement your organization can achieve with the Provade option is generally the same as with the enterprise licensed software model since Provade can automatically establish contingent labor resources in your PeopleSoft applications. Provade has pre-built integrations to Oracle's PeopleSoft and the Oracle E-Business Suite procurement, projects, payables, and HCM applications, so that you can evaluate, train, assign, and track contingent workers like your permanent employees. Similar to the enterprise licensed software model, your organization is responsible for the contingent worker sourcing, administration, and financial settlement processes. This means your organization needs to maintain the staff expertise in these domains. Option 3:  Managed Services Provider (MSP) Whether you are using the enterprise licensed model or the SaaS model, you may want to engage the services of sourcing, employment, payroll, and financial settlement professionals to administer your contingent workforce program. Firms that offer this expertise are often referred to as "MSPs," and they are typically staffing companies that also offer permanent and temporary hiring services. (In fact, many of the major MSPs are Oracle applications customers themselves, and they utilize the PeopleSoft Solution for the Staffing Industry to run their own business operations.) Usually, MSPs place their staff on-site at your facilities, and they can utilize either your enterprise licensed PeopleSoft sPro application or the Provade VMS SaaS software to administer the network of suppliers providing contingent workers. When you utilize an MSP, there is a separate fee for the MSP's service that is typically funded by the participating suppliers of the contingent labor. Also in this model, the suppliers of the contingent labor (not the MSP) usually pay the contingent labor force. With an MSP, you are intentionally turning over business process control for the advantages associated with having someone else manage the processes. The software option you choose will to a certain extent affect your process flexibility; however, the MSPs are often able to adapt their processes to the unique demands of your business. When you engage an MSP, you will want to give some thought to the level of engagement and "partnering" you need with your contingent workforce. Because the MSP acts as an intermediary, it can be very valuable in handling high volume, routine contracting for which there is a relatively low need for "partnering" with the contingent workforce. However, if your organization (or part of your organization) engages contingent workers for high-profile client projects that require diplomacy, intensive amounts of interaction, and personal trust, introducing an MSP into the process may prove less effective than handling the process with your own staff. In fact, in many organizations, it is common to enlist an MSP to handle contractors working on internal projects and to have permanent employees handle the contractor relationships that affect the portion of the services portfolio focused on customer-facing, billable projects. One of the key advantages of enlisting an MSP is that you do not have to maintain the expertise required for orchestrating the sourcing, hiring, and paying of contingent workers.  These are the domain of the MSPs. If your own staff members are not prepared to manage the essential "overhead" processes associated with contingent labor, working with an MSP can make solid business sense. Proper administration of a contingent workforce can make the difference between project success and failure, operating profit and loss, and legal compliance and fines. Concluding Thoughts There is little doubt that thoughtfully and purposefully constructing a service delivery strategy that leverages the strengths of contingent workers can lead to better projects, deliverables, and business results. What requires a bit more thinking is determining the platform (or platforms) that will enable each part of your organization to best deliver on its mission.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 29, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 29, 2012Popular ReleasesZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.4.0.0: sync with rev. 2196 of the java version important fix for RGBLuminanceSource generating barcode bitmaps Windows Phone demo client (only tested with emulator, because I don't have a Windows Phone) Barcode generation support for Windows Forms demo client Webcam support for Windows Forms demo clientOrchard Project: Orchard 1.4: Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.4: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-4-Release-NotesFluentData -Micro ORM with a fluent API that makes it simple to query a database: FluentData version 1.2: New features: - QueryValues method - Added support for automapping to enumerations (both int and string are supported). Fixed 2 reported issues.NetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.15: 3.6.0.15 28-Feb-2012 • Fix: The communication object, System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel, cannot be used for communication because it is in the Faulted state. Work Item 10435: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10435 • Fix: Made StorageCache thread safe. Thanks to tangrl. • Fix: Members property of SqlAzManApplicationGroup is not functioning. Thanks to tangrl. Work Item 10267: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10267 • Fix: Indexer are making database calls. Thanks to t...SCCM Client Actions Tool: Client Actions Tool v1.1: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.1 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Added stop button to stop the ongoing process. Added action "Query update status". Added option "saveOnlineComputers" in config.ini to enable saving list of online computers from last session. Default value for "LatestClientVersion" set to SP2 R3 (4.00.6487.2157). Wuauserv service manual startup mode is considered healthy on Windows 7. Errors are now suppressed in checkReleases...Document.Editor: 2012.1: Whats new for Document.Editor 2012.1: Improved Recent Documents list Improved Insert Shape Improved Dialogs Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsKinect PowerPoint Control: Kinect PowerPoint Control v1.1: Updated for Kinect SDK 1.0.SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.8: API Updates: SOLID Extract Method for Archives (7Zip and RAR). ExtractAllEntries method on Archive classes will extract archives as a streaming file. This can offer better 7Zip extraction performance if any of the entries are solid. The IsSolid method on 7Zip archives will return true if any are solid. Removed IExtractionListener was removed in favor of events. Unit tests show example. Bug fixes: PPMd passes tests plus other fixes (Thanks Pavel) Zip used to always write a Post Descri...Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.3): This new version includes: - Download new networks for Facebook fan pages. - New options for downloading more posts - Bug fixes To use the new graph data provider, do the following: Unzip the Zip file into the "PlugIns" folder that can be found in the NodeXL installation folder (i.e "C:\Program Files\Social Media Research Foundation\NodeXL Excel Template\PlugIns") Open NodeXL template and you can access the new importer from the "Import" menuASP.NET REST Services Framework: Release 1.1 - Standard version: Beginning from v1.1 the REST-services Framework is compatible with ASP.NET Routing model as well with CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) principle. These two are often important when building REST API functionality within your application. It also includes ability to apply Filters to a class to target all WebRest methods, as well as some performance enhancements. New version includes Metadata Explorer providing ability exploring the existing services that becomes essential as the number ...SQL Live Monitor: SQL Live Monitor 1.31: A quick fix to make it this version work with SQL 2012. Version 2 already has 2012 working, but am still developing the UI in version 2, so this is just an interim fix to allow user to monitor SQL 2012.DotNet.Highcharts: DotNet.Highcharts 1.1 with Examples: Fixed small bug in JsonSerializer about the numbers represented as string. Fixed Issue 310: decimal values don't work Fixed Issue 345: Disable Animation Refactored Highcharts class. Implemented Issue 341: More charts on one page. Added new class Container which can combine and display multiple charts. Usage: new Container(new[] { chart1, chart2, chart3, chart4 }) Implemented Feature 302: Inside an UpdatePanel - Added method (InFunction) which create the Highchart inside JavaScript f...Content Slider Module for DotNetNuke: 01.02.00: This release has the following updates and new features: Feature: One-Click Enabling of Pager Setting Feature: Cache Sliders for Performance Feature: Configurable Cache Setting Enhancement: Transitions can be Selected Bug: Secure Folder Images not Viewable Bug: Sliders Disappear on Postback Bug: Remote Images Cause Error Bug: Deleted Images Cause Error System Requirements DotNetNuke v06.00.00 or newer .Net Framework v3.5 SP1 or newer SQL Server 2005 or newerImage Resizer for Windows: Image Resizer 3 Preview 3: Here is yet another iteration toward what will eventually become Image Resizer 3. This release is stable. However, I'm calling it a preview since there are still many features I'd still like to add before calling it complete. Updated on February 28 to fix an issue with installing on multi-user machines. As usual, here is my progress report. Done Preview 3 Fix: 3206 3076 3077 5688 Fix: 7420 Fix: 7527 Fix: 7576 7612 Preview 2 6308 6309 Fix: 7339 Fix: 7357 Preview 1 UI...Finestra Virtual Desktops: 2.5.4500: This is a bug fix release for version 2.5. It fixes several things and adds a couple of minor features. See the 2.5 release notes for more information on the major new features in that version. Important - If Finestra crashes on startup for you, you must install the Visual C++ 2010 runtime from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5555. Fixes a bug with window animations not refreshing the screen on XP and with DWM off Fixes a bug with with crashing on XP due to a bug in t...AutoExpandOver - Show popup on mouseover, focus, click in Silverlight: AutoExpandOver 2.1: Many fixes. All leaks are gone. Features added.FileSquirrel: FileSquirrel Alpha 1.2.1 32bit and x64: FileSquirrel Alpha 1.2.1Publishing SCSM Work Item to a Sharepoint Calendar: PublishWI command line tool (Updated): Updated for SCSM 2012 (RC) PublishWI command line tool Usage: PublishWI.exe WIID URL CalendarName WIID: ID of the Work Item to publish (for example, CR3333) URL: URL of the SharePoint site, such as http://www.sharepoint.com CalendarName: The name of the sharepoint calendar to publish WI to.HttpRider - Tool for Web Site Performance and Stress Tests: HttpRider 1.0: Please let me know any issues you face. ThanksMedia Companion: MC 3.432b Release: General Now remembers window location. Catching a few more exceptions when an image is blank TV A couple of UI tweaks Movies Fixed the actor name displaying HTML Fixed crash when using Save files as "movie.nfo", "movie.tbn", & "fanart.jpg" New CSV template for HTML output function Added <createdate> tag for HTML output A couple of UI tweaks Known Issues Multiepisodes are not handled correctly in MC. The created nfo is valid, but they are not displayed in MC correctly & saving the...New Projects.NET Implementation of Extensions for Financial Services: NXFS is planned to be a compliant .Net implementation of CEN/XFS (currently version 3.20) to overcome some deficits of native implementation such as not supporting highly productive programming languages (like C#) and supporting only Windows XP and x86 platform.BigCoder WebMaster Tools: BigCoder WebMaster ToolsBigCoder Whois Program: BigCoder Whois ProgrambiscuitCMS: biscuitCMS makes it easier for <target user group> to <activity>. You'll no longer have to <activity>. It's developed in <programming language>. BridgeSeismic: BridgeSeismicData Normilizer: Decomposer for SQL fact tables, for BI projectsDownload Indexed Cache: "Download Indexed Cache" implements the Bing API Version 2 to retrieve content indexed within the Bing Cache to support the "Search Engine Reconnaissance" section of the OWASP Testing Guide v3. FITSExplorer: FITS Explorer is designed to allow astronomers to quickly and easily browse and preview the image and metadata stored in FITS files. The application was developed using primarily WPF and C#, with some low-level data manipulation routines written in C++ for high-performance.ICalSync: icalsyncLeague Manager: Nosso gerenciador de campeonatosLemcube SISTRI: interfacciamento ai servizi di Interoperabilità SIS.: Lemcube SISTRI: interfacciamento ai servizi di Interoperabilità SIS.LittlePluginLib: A small plugin system based on the .net framework 3.5Log reading: Reading and parsing huge log files, download from ftp server and upload to msql database.Mail Aggregator Service: To address the problem of being 'spammed' by your own alert emails this service was created to group/batch mail messages sent to the same 'to' address. It can integrate into QuickMon or even be used as a stand-alone tool to send out alert notifications. MangoTicTacToe: Demo application of a simple Silverlight game for Windows Phone 7. This tictactoe game features some of the most basics requirements for making a Silverlight game for Windows Phone 7.MonkeyButt: Web alternatives to commercial software like Facebook and Google.PizzaSoft: PizzaSoftproject: project demoSharePoint 2010 Automatically Generated Solution Demo: In this demo project I show how to generate Sandboxed Solutions by code at runtime.SoftService: Software ServiceSPAdmin: SharePoint WarmUp ToolSSASNet: SSASNetSSIS Data Masker: A SSIS Data Flow Transformation Component To Provide Basic Data Masking Capabilities.UpiGppf: This is a high shcool projectXMPP/Media Library for .NET and Windows Phone 7.5: .NET libraries for XMPP, TLS, RTP, STUN, SOCKS and more for windows and windows phone.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 29, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 29, 2010Popular ReleasesDocX: DocX v1.0.0.11: Building Examples projectTo build the Examples project, download DocX.dll and add it as a reference to the project. OverviewThis version of DocX contains many bug fixes, it is a serious step towards a stable release. Added1) Unit testing project, 2) Examples project, 3) To many bug fixes to list here, see the source code change list history.Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System): 71406: This is the second release supporting the full line of Visual Studio 2010 editions. Changes since release 71246 include: Debug info is now stored in a single .cpdb file (which is a Firebird database) Keyboard input works now (using Console.ReadLine) Console colors work (using Console.ForegroundColor and .BackgroundColor)AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.0: Added the all new Masteries Browser which replaces the Quick Open combobox AutoLoL will now attemt to create file associations for mastery (*.lolm) files Each Mastery Build can now contain keywords that the Masteries Browser will use for filtering Changed the way AutoLoL detects if another instance is already running Changed the format of the mastery files to allow more information stored in* Dialogs will now focus the Ok or Cancel button which allows the user to press Return to clo...Confree for Outlook: Confree for Outlook 1.0: Confree for OutlookFeaturesCreate a Claro/Telmex conference directly from Outlook (only works for Argentina). NotesBy now, only works with Claro/Telmex Argentina (if you are using http://simon.telmex.net.ar, we are good).Paint.NET PSD Plugin: 1.6.0: Handling of layer masks has been greatly improved. Improved reliability. Many PSD files that previously loaded in as garbage will now load in correctly. Parallelized loading. PSD files containing layer masks will load in a bit quicker thanks to the removal of the sequential bottleneck. Hidden layers are no longer made visible on save. Many thanks to the users who helped expose the layer masks problem: Rob Horowitz, M_Lyons10. Please keep sending in those bug reports and PSD repro files!Razor Templating Engine: Razor Templating Engine v1.2: Changes: ADDED: Standard namespaces imports for all templates: System, System.Collections.Generic, System.Linq (Changeset 5635) ADDED: Methods for Precompilation (Changeset 3283) CHANGED: Refactored precompilation to be exposed per-TemplateService. (Changeset 3440) CHANGED: Added more descriptive compilation exception message. (Changeset 3629) FIXED: Forced reference to Microsoft.CSharp to correct support for testing frameworks. (Changeset 3689) FIXED: Added support for nested anonymous obj...PhysicalMeasure C# library: PhysicalMeasure 1.0 Release 2010-12-28: PhysicalMeasure 1.0 Release 2010-12-28Facebook C# SDK: 4.1.1: From 4.1.1 Release: Authentication bug fix caused by facebook change (error with redirects in Safari) Authenticator fix, always returning true From 4.1.0 Release Lots of bug fixes Removed Dynamic Runtime Language dependencies from non-dynamic platforms. Samples included in release for ASP.NET, MVC, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, WPF, WinForms, and one Visual Basic Sample Changed internal serialization to use Json.net BREAKING CHANGE: Canvas Session is no longer supported. Use Signed...MonitorWang: MonitorWang v1.0.5 (Growler): What's new?Added Growl Notification Finalisers - these are interceptor components that work exclusively with the Growl Publisher. These allow you to modify the Growl Notification just prior to it being sent by the publisher. You can inject custom logic to precisely control how the Growl Notification will appear; this includes changing the Growl Priority level and message text. I've created to two Growl Notification Finalisers - one allows you to change the Growl Notification Priorty based on ...Catel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.0.0: And there it is, the final release of Catel, and it is no longer a beta version!EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.7 ALPHA: 2.2.7 ALPHAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Mongoose has bee...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.19: Mono 2.8, Silverlight, OAuth, 100% Twitter API coverage, streaming, extensibility via Raw Queries, and added documentation. Bug fixes.Rocket Framework (.Net 4.0): Rocket Framework for Windows V 1.0.0: Architecture is reviewed and adjusted in a way so that I can introduce the Web version and WPF version of this framework next. - Rocket.Core is introduced - Controller button functions revisited and updated - DB is renewed to suite the implemented features - Create New button functionality is changed - Add Question Handling featuresFlickr Wallpaper Rotator (for Windows desktop): Wallpaper Flickr 1.1: Some minor bugfixes (mostly covering when network connection is flakey, so I discovered them all while at my parents' house for Christmas).NoSimplerAccounting: NoSimplerAccounting 6.0: -Fixed a bug in expense category report.NHibernate Mapping Generator: NHibernate Mapping Generator 2.0: Added support for Postgres (Thanks to Angelo)NewLife XCode: XCode v6.5.2010.1223 ????（????v3.5??）: XCode v6.5.2010.1223 ????，??： NewLife.Core ??? NewLife.Net ??? XControl ??? XTemplate ????，??C#?????? XAgent ???? NewLife.CommonEnitty ??????（???，XCode??????） XCode?? ?????????，??????????????????，?????95% XCode v3.5.2009.0714 ??，?v3.5?v6.0???????????????，?????????。v3.5???????????，??????????????。 XCoder ??XTemplate?????????，????????XCode??? XCoder_Src ???????（????XTemplate????），??????????????????VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.0: Please see changes: http://support.vivoware.com/project/ChangeLog.aspx?PROJID=48Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.6 Beta - codename JUNO: The Umbraco 4.6 beta (codename JUNO) release contains many new features focusing on an improved installation experience, a number of robust developer features, and contains more than 89 bug fixes since the 4.5.2 release. Improved installer experience Updated Starter Kits (Simple, Blog, Personal, Business) Beautiful, free, customizable skins included Skinning engine and Skin customization (see Skinning Documentation Kit) Default dashboards on install with hide option Updated Login t...ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider: MvcSiteMapProvider 2.3.0: Using NuGet?MvcSiteMapProvider is also listed in the NuGet feed. Learn more... Like the project? Consider a donation!Donate via PayPal via PayPal. Release notesThis will be the last release targeting ASP.NET MVC 2 and .NET 3.5. MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 will be targeting ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4 Web.config setting skipAssemblyScanOn has been deprecated in favor of excludeAssembliesForScan and includeAssembliesForScan ISiteMapNodeUrlResolver is now completely responsible for generating th...New Projects42 Sight Holistic Data Warehousing on Microsoft SQL Server 2008: This project is the Holistic DW Template. Included are the 3 MS XL spreadsheet reporting models as described in the book Holistic Data Warehousing. This Template is multi-purpose and requires no modification other than you populating it according to the book examplesAndshev.OrmTools: Tools for generating SQL queries using LINQ. ORM framework is also planned to be implemented.BFG and Dice Roller: This solution will contain 2 concepts, the Dice Roller with hooks for extension into other applications, as well as a Personal Battlefleet Gothic Helper application to help manage, control, and smoothe the flow of BFG games. The BFG application will target the Phone 7 platform.BlondieODOS: its an osBluehat Community projetcts: Bluehat Community projetcts.C# - DBWrapper MySQL: Abro aqui a discussão para criarmos uma classe para manipular dados em MySQL.CardGame for Education: This project goal is to create a small Card Game and to teach the team members how to design, implement and how to use "real world" tools. Englishlearning: My test project!Faran Silver: Silverlight Controls Developed till now. Include: 1- Persian Date Input 2- Close-able Tab Item 3- Shamsi Date Convertergocodelibrary: This is my project.Id3Stuff: Project that throws together some nice id3 mass editing functionsInfoStrat.OakFx: OakFx by InfoStratinivi: iniviJJODESK: This little utility software written in Vb.net 2.0, allows you to : - switch IE proxy, - manage IP, - launch website, - launch other utilty tools , - launch and manage cmd, bat, vbs script. - and much more ..... First I wrote this tool for my personal use, because I work with several networks, and customer sites. I think many other software developpers have the same need. All parameters are customisable, and are store in an ini text file. And it can run on an USB stick. learn MVC: Just keeping all source code in one place. Thats all folksLJF.Utility: Utility?????Lucidity: Lucid WILDMixModes Synergy - The WPF Toolkit: MixModes Synergy 2010 is a complete toolset that simplifies user interface development in Windows Presentation Foundation based applications. Synergy includes rich user interface controls providing professional look and feel for your applications out of the box.Multi Targetted Rss Reader: A Multi Targetted Rss Reader demo that shows how to multi target your view model across different screens (WP7, Silverlight, WPF, Surface).Secure Batch Command Tool For Administrators: A command line tool that will help you to protect your passwords that you should provide in your batch files. This tool encrypt Dos commands and update the batch files in a way that keeps your batch file maintainable and easy to use.SharePoint 2010 Conditional Lookup Control: I created a "Conditional Lookup" control for SharePoint 2010. With this you can connect two lookup fields controls on list forms to fill the second control with values depending on the selected value in the first control. There is a demo inside.sql dot: Ease when making a connection to the sql serverwolisbetter: WOL is better!WP7PasswordsBackup: backup/sync client for windows phone 7 passwords app. ??????: ??????

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