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  • Calculating the Size (in Bytes and MB) of a Oracle Coherence Cache

    - by Ricardo Ferreira
    The concept and usage of data grids are becoming very popular in this days since this type of technology are evolving very fast with some cool lead products like Oracle Coherence. Once for a while, developers need an programmatic way to calculate the total size of a specific cache that are residing in the data grid. In this post, I will show how to accomplish this using Oracle Coherence API. This example has been tested with 3.6, 3.7 and 3.7.1 versions of Oracle Coherence. To start the development of this example, you need to create a POJO ("Plain Old Java Object") that represents a data structure that will hold user data. This data structure will also create an internal fat so I call that should increase considerably the size of each instance in the heap memory. Create a Java class named "Person" as shown in the listing below. package com.oracle.coherence.domain; import java.io.Serializable; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.List; import java.util.Random; @SuppressWarnings("serial") public class Person implements Serializable { private String firstName; private String lastName; private List<Object> fat; private String email; public Person() { generateFat(); } public Person(String firstName, String lastName, String email) { setFirstName(firstName); setLastName(lastName); setEmail(email); generateFat(); } private void generateFat() { fat = new ArrayList<Object>(); Random random = new Random(); for (int i = 0; i < random.nextInt(18000); i++) { HashMap<Long, Double> internalFat = new HashMap<Long, Double>(); for (int j = 0; j < random.nextInt(10000); j++) { internalFat.put(random.nextLong(), random.nextDouble()); } fat.add(internalFat); } } public String getFirstName() { return firstName; } public void setFirstName(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } public String getLastName() { return lastName; } public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; } public String getEmail() { return email; } public void setEmail(String email) { this.email = email; } } Now let's create a Java program that will start a data grid into Coherence and will create a cache named "People", that will hold people instances with sequential integer keys. Each person created in this program will trigger the execution of a custom constructor created in the People class that instantiates an internal fat (the random amount of data generated to increase the size of the object) for each person. Create a Java class named "CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWithData" as shown in the listing below. package com.oracle.coherence.demo; import com.oracle.coherence.domain.Person; import com.tangosol.net.CacheFactory; import com.tangosol.net.NamedCache; public class CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWithData { public static void main(String[] args) { // Asks Coherence for a new cache named "People"... NamedCache people = CacheFactory.getCache("People"); // Creates three people that will be putted into the data grid. Each person // generates an internal fat that should increase its size in terms of bytes... Person pessoa1 = new Person("Ricardo", "Ferreira", "[email protected]"); Person pessoa2 = new Person("Vitor", "Ferreira", "[email protected]"); Person pessoa3 = new Person("Vivian", "Ferreira", "[email protected]"); // Insert three people at the data grid... people.put(1, pessoa1); people.put(2, pessoa2); people.put(3, pessoa3); // Waits for 5 minutes until the user runs the Java program // that calculates the total size of the people cache... try { System.out.println("---> Waiting for 5 minutes for the cache size calculation..."); Thread.sleep(300000); } catch (InterruptedException ie) { ie.printStackTrace(); } } } Finally, let's create a Java program that, using the Coherence API and JMX, will calculate the total size of each cache that the data grid is currently managing. The approach used in this example was retrieve every cache that the data grid are currently managing, but if you are interested on an specific cache, the same approach can be used, you should only filter witch cache will be looked for. Create a Java class named "CalculateTheSizeOfPeopleCache" as shown in the listing below. package com.oracle.coherence.demo; import java.text.DecimalFormat; import java.util.Map; import java.util.Set; import java.util.TreeMap; import javax.management.MBeanServer; import javax.management.MBeanServerFactory; import javax.management.ObjectName; import com.tangosol.net.CacheFactory; public class CalculateTheSizeOfPeopleCache { @SuppressWarnings({ "unchecked", "rawtypes" }) private void run() throws Exception { // Enable JMX support in this Coherence data grid session... System.setProperty("tangosol.coherence.management", "all"); // Create a sample cache just to access the data grid... CacheFactory.getCache(MBeanServerFactory.class.getName()); // Gets the JMX server from Coherence data grid... MBeanServer jmxServer = getJMXServer(); // Creates a internal data structure that would maintain // the statistics from each cache in the data grid... Map cacheList = new TreeMap(); Set jmxObjectList = jmxServer.queryNames(new ObjectName("Coherence:type=Cache,*"), null); for (Object jmxObject : jmxObjectList) { ObjectName jmxObjectName = (ObjectName) jmxObject; String cacheName = jmxObjectName.getKeyProperty("name"); if (cacheName.equals(MBeanServerFactory.class.getName())) { continue; } else { cacheList.put(cacheName, new Statistics(cacheName)); } } // Updates the internal data structure with statistic data // retrieved from caches inside the in-memory data grid... Set<String> cacheNames = cacheList.keySet(); for (String cacheName : cacheNames) { Set resultSet = jmxServer.queryNames( new ObjectName("Coherence:type=Cache,name=" + cacheName + ",*"), null); for (Object resultSetRef : resultSet) { ObjectName objectName = (ObjectName) resultSetRef; if (objectName.getKeyProperty("tier").equals("back")) { int unit = (Integer) jmxServer.getAttribute(objectName, "Units"); int size = (Integer) jmxServer.getAttribute(objectName, "Size"); Statistics statistics = (Statistics) cacheList.get(cacheName); statistics.incrementUnit(unit); statistics.incrementSize(size); cacheList.put(cacheName, statistics); } } } // Finally... print the objects from the internal data // structure that represents the statistics from caches... cacheNames = cacheList.keySet(); for (String cacheName : cacheNames) { Statistics estatisticas = (Statistics) cacheList.get(cacheName); System.out.println(estatisticas); } } public MBeanServer getJMXServer() { MBeanServer jmxServer = null; for (Object jmxServerRef : MBeanServerFactory.findMBeanServer(null)) { jmxServer = (MBeanServer) jmxServerRef; if (jmxServer.getDefaultDomain().equals(DEFAULT_DOMAIN) || DEFAULT_DOMAIN.length() == 0) { break; } jmxServer = null; } if (jmxServer == null) { jmxServer = MBeanServerFactory.createMBeanServer(DEFAULT_DOMAIN); } return jmxServer; } private class Statistics { private long unit; private long size; private String cacheName; public Statistics(String cacheName) { this.cacheName = cacheName; } public void incrementUnit(long unit) { this.unit += unit; } public void incrementSize(long size) { this.size += size; } public long getUnit() { return unit; } public long getSize() { return size; } public double getUnitInMB() { return unit / (1024.0 * 1024.0); } public double getAverageSize() { return size == 0 ? 0 : unit / size; } public String toString() { StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(); sb.append("\nCache Statistics of '").append(cacheName).append("':\n"); sb.append(" - Total Entries of Cache -----> " + getSize()).append("\n"); sb.append(" - Used Memory (Bytes) --------> " + getUnit()).append("\n"); sb.append(" - Used Memory (MB) -----------> " + FORMAT.format(getUnitInMB())).append("\n"); sb.append(" - Object Average Size --------> " + FORMAT.format(getAverageSize())).append("\n"); return sb.toString(); } } public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { new CalculateTheSizeOfPeopleCache().run(); } public static final DecimalFormat FORMAT = new DecimalFormat("###.###"); public static final String DEFAULT_DOMAIN = ""; public static final String DOMAIN_NAME = "Coherence"; } I've commented the overall example so, I don't think that you should get into trouble to understand it. Basically we are dealing with JMX. The first thing to do is enable JMX support for the Coherence client (ie, an JVM that will only retrieve values from the data grid and will not integrate the cluster) application. This can be done very easily using the runtime "tangosol.coherence.management" system property. Consult the Coherence documentation for JMX to understand the possible values that could be applied. The program creates an in memory data structure that holds a custom class created called "Statistics". This class represents the information that we are interested to see, which in this case are the size in bytes and in MB of the caches. An instance of this class is created for each cache that are currently managed by the data grid. Using JMX specific methods, we retrieve the information that are relevant for calculate the total size of the caches. To test this example, you should execute first the CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWithData.java program and after the CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWithData.java program. The results in the console should be something like this: 2012-06-23 13:29:31.188/4.970 Oracle Coherence 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Loaded operational configuration from "jar:file:/E:/Oracle/Middleware/oepe_11gR1PS4/workspace/calcular-tamanho-cache-coherence/lib/coherence.jar!/tangosol-coherence.xml" 2012-06-23 13:29:31.219/5.001 Oracle Coherence 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Loaded operational overrides from "jar:file:/E:/Oracle/Middleware/oepe_11gR1PS4/workspace/calcular-tamanho-cache-coherence/lib/coherence.jar!/tangosol-coherence-override-dev.xml" 2012-06-23 13:29:31.219/5.001 Oracle Coherence 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Optional configuration override "/tangosol-coherence-override.xml" is not specified 2012-06-23 13:29:31.266/5.048 Oracle Coherence 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Optional configuration override "/custom-mbeans.xml" is not specified Oracle Coherence Version 3.6.0.4 Build 19111 Grid Edition: Development mode Copyright (c) 2000, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 2012-06-23 13:29:33.156/6.938 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Loaded Reporter configuration from "jar:file:/E:/Oracle/Middleware/oepe_11gR1PS4/workspace/calcular-tamanho-cache-coherence/lib/coherence.jar!/reports/report-group.xml" 2012-06-23 13:29:33.500/7.282 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Loaded cache configuration from "jar:file:/E:/Oracle/Middleware/oepe_11gR1PS4/workspace/calcular-tamanho-cache-coherence/lib/coherence.jar!/coherence-cache-config.xml" 2012-06-23 13:29:35.391/9.173 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D4> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): TCMP bound to /192.168.177.133:8090 using SystemSocketProvider 2012-06-23 13:29:37.062/10.844 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): This Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:36.899, Address=192.168.177.133:8090, MachineId=55685, Location=process:244, Role=Oracle, Edition=Grid Edition, Mode=Development, CpuCount=2, SocketCount=2) joined cluster "cluster:0xC4DB" with senior Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:14.031, Address=192.168.177.133:8088, MachineId=55685, Location=process:1128, Role=CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWith, Edition=Grid Edition, Mode=Development, CpuCount=2, SocketCount=2) 2012-06-23 13:29:37.172/10.954 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): Member 1 joined Service Cluster with senior member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:37.188/10.970 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): Member 1 joined Service Management with senior member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:37.188/10.970 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): Member 1 joined Service DistributedCache with senior member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:37.188/10.970 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Started cluster Name=cluster:0xC4DB Group{Address=224.3.6.0, Port=36000, TTL=4} MasterMemberSet ( ThisMember=Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:36.899, Address=192.168.177.133:8090, MachineId=55685, Location=process:244, Role=Oracle) OldestMember=Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:14.031, Address=192.168.177.133:8088, MachineId=55685, Location=process:1128, Role=CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWith) ActualMemberSet=MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:14.031, Address=192.168.177.133:8088, MachineId=55685, Location=process:1128, Role=CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWith) Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:36.899, Address=192.168.177.133:8090, MachineId=55685, Location=process:244, Role=Oracle) ) RecycleMillis=1200000 RecycleSet=MemberSet(Size=0, BitSetCount=0 ) ) TcpRing{Connections=[1]} IpMonitor{AddressListSize=0} 2012-06-23 13:29:37.891/11.673 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Invocation:Management, member=2): Service Management joined the cluster with senior service member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:39.203/12.985 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=DistributedCache, member=2): Service DistributedCache joined the cluster with senior service member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:39.297/13.079 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D4> (thread=DistributedCache, member=2): Asking member 1 for 128 primary partitions Cache Statistics of 'People': - Total Entries of Cache -----> 3 - Used Memory (Bytes) --------> 883920 - Used Memory (MB) -----------> 0.843 - Object Average Size --------> 294640 I hope that this post could save you some time when calculate the total size of Coherence cache became a requirement for your high scalable system using data grids. See you!

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 26, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 26, 2012Popular ReleasesRedmine Reports: Redmine Reports V 1.0.7: added new sample report added new DateRange feature for report generation (see issue Tracker ID 15372) updated to latest MySql (6.6.4.0)sb0t v.5: sb0t 5.00 alpha 4: First public alpha release. Don't be surprised if it crashes. :)datajs - JavaScript Library for data-centric web applications: datajs version 1.1.0: datajs is a cross-browser and UI agnostic JavaScript library that enables data-centric web applications with the following features: OData client that enables CRUD operations including batching and metadata support using both ATOM and JSON payloads. Single store abstraction that provides a common API on top of HTML5 local storage technologies. Data cache component that allows reading data ranges from a collection and storing them locally to reduce the number of network requests. Changes...VFPX: Code Analyst 1.0.3: Code Analyst 1.0.3 addresses a bug discovered with FoxCodePlus where the initialization code does not properly recognize the location of the folder as well as some of the open issues in the Issue Tracker.Team Foundation Server Administration Tool: 2.2: TFS Administration Tool 2.2 supports the Team Foundation Server 2012 Object Model. Visual Studio 2012 or Team Explorer 2012 must be installed before you can install this tool. You can download and install Team Explorer 2012 from http://aka.ms/TeamExplorer2012. There are no functional changes between the previous release (2.1) and this release.XrmServiceToolkit - A CRM 2011 JavaScript Library: XrmServiceToolkit 1.3.1: Version: 1.3.1 Date: November, 2012 Dependency: JSON2, jQuery (latest or 1.7.2 above) New Feature - A change of logic to increase peroformance when returning large number of records New Function - XrmServiceToolkit.Soap.QueryAll: Return all available records by query options (>5k+) New Fix - XrmServiceToolkit.Rest.RetrieveMultiple not returning records more than 50 New Fix - XrmServiceToolkit.Soap.Business error when refering number fields like (int, double, float) New ...Coding Guidelines for C# 3.0, C# 4.0 and C# 5.0: Coding Guidelines for CSharp 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0: See Change History for a detailed list of modifications.Math.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.3.0: Portable Library Build: Adds support for WP8 (.Net 4.0 and higher, SL5, WP8 and .NET for Windows Store apps) New: portable build also for F# extensions (.Net 4.5, SL5 and .NET for Windows Store apps) NuGet: portable builds are now included in the main packages, no more need for special portable packages Linear Algebra: Continued major storage rework, in this release focusing on vectors (previous release was on matrices) Thin QR decomposition (in addition to existing full QR) Static Cr...ExtJS based ASP.NET 2.0 Controls: FineUI v3.2.1: +2012-11-25 v3.2.1 +????????。 -MenuCheckBox?CheckedChanged??????,??????????。 -???????window.IDS??????????????。 -?????(??TabCollection,ControlBaseCollection)???,????????????????。 +Grid??。 -??SelectAllRows??。 -??PageItems??,?????????????,?????、??、?????。 -????grid/gridpageitems.aspx、grid/gridpageitemsrowexpander.aspx、grid/gridpageitems_pagesize.aspx。 -???????????????????。 -??ExpandAllRowExpanders??,?????????????????(grid/gridrowexpanderexpandall2.aspx)。 -??????ExpandRowExpande...VidCoder: 1.4.9 Beta: Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5079. Fixed crashes when encoding DVDs with title gaps.ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.10.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2521 of the java version windows phone 8 assemblies improvements and fixesCharmBar: Windows 8 Charm Bar for Windows 7: Windows 8 Charm Bar for Windows 7BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.3: 2012.11.24 Ver5.7.3 (1)SMTP???????、?????????、??????????????????????? (2)?????????、?????????????????????????? (3)DNS???????CNAME????CNAME????????????????? (4)DNS????????????TTL???????? (5)???????????????????????、?????????????????? (6)???????????????????????????????Liberty: v3.4.3.0 Release 23rd November 2012: Change Log -Added -H4 A dialog which gives further instructions when attempting to open a "Halo 4 Data" file -H4 Added a short note to the weapon editor stating that dropping your weapons will cap their ammo -Reach Edit the world's gravity -Reach Fine invincibility controls in the object editor -Reach Edit object velocity -Reach Change the teams of AI bipeds and vehicles -Reach Enable/disable fall damage on the biped editor screen -Reach Make AIs deaf and/or blind in the objec...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.11.0: NugetNuGet BlogRead the release blog post for 4.11.0. Whats new50 bugfixes (see the issue tracker for a complete list) Read the documentation for the MVC bits. Breaking changesGetPropertyValue now returns an object, not a string (only affects upgrades from 4.10.x to 4.11.0) NoteIf you need Courier use the release candidate (as of build 26). The code editor has been greatly improved, but is sometimes problematic in Internet Explorer 9 and lower. Previously it was just disabled for IE and...Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 5.1.0.3: Fixed supported files list on open dialog (added .pls and .m3u) Impulse Media Player splash message (can be disabled anyway)WiX Toolset: WiX v3.7 RC: WiX v3.7 RC (3.7.1119.0) provides feature complete Bundle update and reference tracking plus several bug fixes. For more information see Rob's blog post about the release: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/11/20/WiX-v3.7-Release-Candidate-availablePicturethrill: Version 2.11.20.0: Fixed up Bing image provider on Windows 8Excel AddIn to reset the last worksheet cell: XSFormatCleaner.xla: Modified the commandbar code to use CommandBar IDs instead of English names.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 11: New feature - Added ITraceWriter, MemoryTraceWriter, DiagnosticsTraceWriter New feature - Added StringEscapeHandling with options to escape HTML and non-ASCII characters New feature - Added non-generic JToken.ToObject methods New feature - Deserialize ISet<T> properties as HashSet<T> New feature - Added implicit conversions for Uri, TimeSpan, Guid New feature - Missing byte, char, Guid, TimeSpan and Uri explicit conversion operators added to JToken New feature - Special case...New ProjectsAirlocker: Airlocker is a lightweight yet effective backup software. Right-click your folder, select "Send To -> Airlocker", and that's all! Next time you do it, only new & changed files will be copied.Architecture Lab: Domain as XML: Domain as XML - Driven Development: Visual Studio Code SamplesBase de datos 2 Farmacia distribuida: This is my summaryBullfrog project 2k11: This project was our entry for the XNA challenge 2011 at Games Fleadh. This is currently being used for a college project.CedarLogic SharePoint Utilities and Extensions: Various utilities, tools, features that provide cross cutting capabilities in support of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.Concurrent Extensions Library (CEL): Concurrent Extensions Library (CEL) provides functionality and implementations commonly useful in concurrent programming. CookieChipper - Tasty treats!: Explore your IE cookie cache dispaying forensic information, lock favorite cookies, delete all unlocked, search, manage, enjoy!CqRS Event Sourcing Sample: CqRS SampleCrivo de Erastóteles: Simples programa que devolve à você todos os números primos entre 1 e 1 bilhão em um arquivo de saída chamado "primos.txt" Simply program returns all prime numbers from 1 to 1 bi into a "primos.txt" out file.DonNicky.Common: A set of helpers for everyday coding: extensions for common purpose classes like Type, IEnumerable or Assembly, reflection routines, xml parsing and validation.DotNetDevNet iPhone App: Now you can find out what meetings are being held at DotNetDevNet through your iPhone. Information on the meeting and the speakersEuro for Windows XP: A simple tool and sample to change Estonian currency from Estonian Krone (kr) to Euro (€). Applies to all versions of Windows and from .NET 2.0 which is default build. The sample creates a custom locale and updates existing users through Registry.Floridum: Project for a XML Database.FsSignals: FsSignals is a push reactive library. Fuse8.CMF: Free Content Management System based on Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 3Fuse8.DF.Practicies: Domain Framework Best practicesFuse8.GlobalisationFramework: GlobalizationHatena Netfx Library: .NET Library for Hatena Services.Ideopuzzle: A puzzle gameinohigo: a programming language that was developed by inohiro.jasBetaApplication: Beta place for the JAS-applicationJasmine - Community Management Infrastructure: "Jasmine" is a XML based Community Management Infrastructure.Jupiter Toolkit: Jupiter Toolkit was a temporary name used for WinRT XAML Toolkit. If you clicked a link to get here - replace jupitertoolkit with winrtxamltoolkit in the URL.Kiwi Repo: Il modo più semplice per creare e gestire i tuoi repository cydia su windowsKnak: .NET APIs for CLR Type Mapping and Micro-ORM. Fast and intuitive, convention based, delivered in small C# source files.Micajah Mindtouch Deki Wiki Copier: Small C# application to move data between 2 Deki Wiki installs or, more importantly, from a wik.is account to a locally installed systemmisframework: misframeworkMulyareksa Jayasakti Accounting: Sistem Informasi Akunting Penjualan Jasa PT Mulyareksa Jayasakti SemarangMutualGuaranteeOnlineServices: MutualGuaranteeOnlineServicesMySQL PowerShell Extensions: MySQL PowerShell Extensions Provides a set of PowerShell Cmdlets to manipulate remote or local MySQL Database Server.Old Book Transaction: Website trao d?i sách cu.OneFineDay: ???Paymill Wrapper .NET: Paymill Wrapper. NET is an API for easy integration for recurring billings and payments online through the product https://www.paymill.comPoliceHealth: Police Health SystemRbac_Eshoping: Rbac Std ProjectRhombus: Rhombus is a suite of applications to make it easier for small software teams to document what they and others are doing with a minimum of effort. It is developed on the .NET 4.0 framework, primarily in C# and ASP.NET.Rollout Sharepoint Solutions - ROSS: ROSS performs the following actions: - Delete sitecollection and restart services - 'Get Latest Version' from SourceSafe - Rebuild Solution - Install all wsp solutions - Create SiteCollections - Check for build en provisioning errors - Send email to developers if errors occurredRooBooks: RooBooks - Books management tool for students and such. (circa 2004)SEI_Parkour: “Project ParkOUR” is the codename for the product being developed by members of the Software Engineering Incorporated team.Simple Memory: A simple Memory. You can define the dimension x*y. Also there are two playing modes possible. - Pairs with the same cards (classical memory) - Pairs with different cards (find the same meaning)Simples: A dot-net-a-ma-bob eco-system designed to be 'simples' to use.Slatebox.js: Real-time mind-mapping and concept drawing.Sychevs: ?????????? ?????Tambourine.NUnit: Provides pivot report creating from NUnit combinatorial test result xml files. Also supports viewing of pivot data and its exporting to xlsx.TheAssassin's OpenSource Software: Open source software for everyone's use. Mostly written in Python 3 (3.2, 3.3).Titan: a lightweight object-relational mapping framework TT: Awesome TT appUkázkové projekty: Obsahuje ukázkové projekty uživatele TenCoKaciStromy.Unified Cloud API: This API aims to provide a single interface for different cloud-based services and their corresponding providers.VolgaTransTelecomClient: VolgaTransTelecomClient makes it easier for clients of "Volga TransTelecom" company to get info about account. It's developed in C#.Windows Phone Shortcuts: This a windows phone app project. Shortcuts for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Cellular, Airplane Mode from the Start Screen.WPFResumeVideo: Play video on any computer, and resume where you left offWyvern's Depot: Personal code repository.?????????: ??????????,???。

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 13, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 13, 2012Popular ReleasesCatel - WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 MVVM toolkit: 3.1 beta 1: Catel history ============= (+) Added (*) Changed (-) Removed (x) Error / bug (fix) For more information about issues or new feature requests, please visit: http://catel.codeplex.com Documentation can be found at: http://catel.catenalogic.com ********************************************************** =========== Version 3.1 =========== Release date: ============= 2012/xx/xx Added/fixed: ============ (+) Added OnDataContextChanged and OnPropertyChanged to UserControl, DataWindow, Page ...Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching and Merging Guide: v2 - For Visual Studio 11: Welcome to the BETA of the Branching and Merging Guide preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has not been through an independent technical review Documentation has been reviewed by the quality and recording te...Media Companion: MC 3.435b Release: This release should be the last beta for 3.4xx. A handful of problems have been sorted out since last weeks release. If there are no major problems this time, it will upgraded to 3.500 Stable at the end of the week! General The .NET Framework has been modified to use the Client profile, as provided by normal Windows updates; no longer is there a requirement to download and install the Full profile! mc_com.exe has been worked on to mimic proper Media Companion output (a big thanks to vbat99...THE NVL Maker: The NVL Maker Ver 3.12: SIM??????,TRA??????,ZIP????。 ????????????????,??????~(??????????????????) ??????? simpatch1440x900 trapatch1440x900 ?????1400x900??1440x900,?????????????Data.xp3。 ???? ?????3.12?EXE????????????????, ??????????????,??Tool/krkrconf.exe,??Editor.exe, ???????????????「??????」。 ?????Editor.exe??????。 ???? ???? http://etale.us/gameupload/THE_NVL_Maker_ver3.12_sim.zip ???? http://www.mediafire.com/?je51683g22bz8vo ??Infinite Creation?? http://bbs.etale.us/forum.php ?????? ???? 3.12 ??? ???、????...SQL DAC Examples: DAC SQL Azure Import Export Service Client v 1.5: Latest version for the service client. Changes Refactored the sources to make the client implemenation as simple and streamlined as possible Fixed "type initializer" configuration issues in the previous release Updated SQL Azure datacenter mappingsSnmpMessenger: 0.1.1.1: Project Description SnmpMessenger, a messenger. Using the SNMP protocol to exchange messages. It's developed in C#. SnmpMessenger For .Net 4.0, Mono 2.8. Support SNMP V1, V2, V3. Features Send get, set and other requests and get the response. Send and receive traps. Handle requests and return the response. Note This library is compliant with the Common Language Specification(CLS). The latest version is 0.1.1.1. It is only a messenger, does not involve VACM. Any problems, Please mailto: wa...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.1.1: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.1.1. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports CPython and IronPython • Python editor with advanced member and signature intellisense • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging • Profiling with multiple view...Supporting Guidance and Whitepapers: v1 - Team Foundation Service Whitepapers: Welcome to the BETA release of the Team Foundation Service Whitepapers preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issue...Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer: .NET Gadgeteer Core 2.42.550 (BETA): Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer Core RELEASE NOTES Version 2.42.550 11 April 2012 BETA VERSION WARNING: This is a beta version! Please note: - API changes may be made before the next version (2.42.600) - The designer will not show modules/mainboards for NETMF 4.2 until you get upgraded libraries from the module/mainboard vendors - Install NETMF 4.2 (see link below) to use the new features of this release That warning aside, this version should continue to sup...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.24: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, and Client Profile. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also available via NuGet.Kendo UI ASP.NET Sample Applications: Sample Applications (2012-04-11): Sample application(s) demonstrating the use of Kendo UI in ASP.NET applications.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 2: New feature - Added support for the SerializableAttribute and serializing a type's internal fields New feature - Added MaxDepth to JsonReader/JsonSerializer/JsonSerializerSettings New feature - Added support for ignoring properties with the NonSerializableAttribute Fix - Fixed deserializing a null string throwing a NullReferenceException Fix - Fixed JsonTextReader reading from a slow stream Fix - Fixed CultureInfo not being overridden on JsonSerializerProxy Fix - Fixed full trust ...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.12: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.12 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Improved WMI date conversion to be aware of timezone differences and DST. Fixed new version check. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA on Windows XP. Cmdkey.exe is natively availab...Dual Browsing: Dual Browser: Please note the following: I setup the address bar temporarily to only accepts http:// .com addresses. Just type in the name of the website excluding: http://, www., and .com; (Ex: for www.youtube.com just type: youtube then click OK). The page splitter can be grabbed by holding down your left mouse button and move left or right. By right clicking on the page background, you can choose to refresh, go back a page and so on. Demo video: http://youtu.be/L7NTFVM3JUYPhoenix Service Bus: PServiceBus 2.0.0: Note Before installing 2.0.0, please uninstall 1.0.2 to make sure that 2.0.0 is not corrupted when installed. If you download the 2.0.0 version from 4/10/2012 9am-2pm, you might want to re-download because the version was corrupted. Feature/Changes Replace WCF Gateway Service with a ZeroMQ implementation Improve performance of TCP based transports such as (Low Level TCP Itself, RabbitMQ, Redis, e.t.c) Improve performance of message publishing when dealing with single message rather...Liberty: v3.2.0.1 Release 9th April 2012: Change Log-Fixed -Reach Fixed a bug where the object editor did not work on non-English operating systemsPath Copy Copy: 10.1: This release addresses the following work items: 11357 11358 11359 This release is a recommended upgrade, especially for users who didn't install the 10.0.1 version.ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.3: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???,????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???,????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript,?? CSS,?? UpdatePanel,?? ViewState,?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????:Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??:http://extasp.net/ ??:http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??:http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??:http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????: +2012-04-08 v3.1.3 -??Language="zh_TW"?JS???BUG(??)。 +?D...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.5.5: New Controls ChatBubble ChatBubbleTextBox OpacityToggleButton New Stuff TimeSpan languages added: RU, SK, CS Expose the physics math from TimeSpanPicker Image Stretch now on buttons Bug Fixes Layout fix so RoundToggleButton and RoundButton are exactly the same Fix for ColorPicker when set via code behind ToastPrompt bug fix with OnNavigatedTo Toast now adjusts its layout if the SIP is up Fixed some issues with Expression Blend supportHarness - Internet Explorer Automation: Harness 2.0.3: support the operation fo frameset, frame and iframe Add commands SwitchFrame GetUrl GoBack GoForward Refresh SetTimeout GetTimeout Rename commands GetActiveWindow to GetActiveBrowser SetActiveWindow to SetActiveBrowser FindWindowAll to FindBrowser NewWindow to NewBrowser GetMajorVersion to GetVersionNew Projects.NET Gadgeteer Light: This is a light weight version of the Gadgeteer framework. Although it lacks quite some support (making it lighter), it can be very useful to use Gadgeteer drivers and modules on non-gadgeteer hardware.Bloog: Yet another frickin' blog appC# compiler improvements: This project is a proof of concept which demonstrate how to improve a compiler using Roslyn. CallBack: Callback is a library written in pure Lua which helps you trigger custom defined functions automatically when your code is running according to the time. Functions can be runned once after a set time, periodically after an amount time, or many times successively.CeairCarbin: One Project About A Carbin Department Manager System About News WrokFlow SaraleChinchilla: Advanced Programming using Small Basic to create a cool 2-D video game. With enough depth (no pun intended) to branch into a 3-D version. This is a project based example for teaching a home school class for 13-17 year olds.ChlodnyWebApi: Created to demostrate ASP.NET WebAPI usefulness in a multi-targeted client scenario. See Examples and documentation at: http://researchaholic.com/Delete SharePoint List Column: preliminary on-going project to provide an easy to delete columns from a SharePoint list. Upload into SharePoint makes it easier for administrators to delete stuck columns. It's developed in C#.Directories Creater: <dirCreater> create lots of directories in simple way! <c#> <vs2010>Eclipse Project: Eclipse project Team ExplorerFlot.Net: Flot.Net provides a .Net wrapper around the Flot jQuery charting library. It is developed in C# 3.5 I created this project as I found the javascript notation difficult to create, and so developed an opbject model around the flot objects so I could cerate charts in a common language. I have used this project in an MVC environment and it serves my purpose for this. I wanted to keep the API as simple as possible.GRE Word Study: MVC application using ASP.NETJHWF Admin: Back end for jhwfKKZCodeHelper: KKOMZI Code HelperKkzSSIKORHelper: KKOMZI VB CS Helper AppLiMiao jiesuanshu: limiao de jiesuanshuManagement tool for MWT: This project though focused on creating a tool for the MWT management to use is a place to exercise the latest technology trends in the .NET community. I intend to use the best design practices the technologies like WCF, regex, HTML5, Jquery, WPF(maybe).MyHydroServer: MyHydroServer (HydroServer Lite) is a lightweight version of the CUAHSI HydroServer written in PHP. It can be run on any webhosting service that supports PHP and MySQL. The goal of this project is to make it easier to set up your own HydroServer.nanoCMS: nanoCMS is free, community driven modular CMS and platform designed for delivering rich web applications. It serves two main purposes. First for developers it provides easy expandable and customizable platform for creating web applications. Second for normal user it provides a siNetSysInfo: NetSysInfo is a free software which displays information about system like Uptime, CPU, Memory, Drives devices, Network adapters, Disk Usage, Processes, Services and more.NewFifa: My fifa the best technologyOrdinapoche: An implementation of the Ordinapoche (also known as CARDIAC in English) cardboard computer.Plan 9 Software: Home of our Open Source CodePrettyFormat: PrettyFormat is a small library of string formatters for .NET. It's developed in C# and is fully localizable.pruebasandroid: pruebas con eclipseRMath and RMath for .Net: We provide pre-compiled Windows binaries for RMath library. RMath provides stable implementation for commonly used special functions, e.g. bessel family. We also provide a .Net wrapper for the native RMath DLL with documentation and usage examples in C# and F#.Security with Visual Understanding: A Kinect home security camera. Security with Visual Understanding (SVU) is a hardware/software solution which provides a more accurate security camera. SVU uses the Microsoft Kinect to provide these capabilities. SVU recognizes when a human enters the image and furthermore, is able to differentiate between known and unknown persons by maintaining a database of known persons’ skeleton dimensions. These combined capabilities allow SVU to deliver an intelligent, autonomous security system ca...SPDeveloperDashboardFilter: This project contains the javascript code to enhance the useability of the developer dashboard.SSIS Checksum Transformation: The Checksum Transformation Calculates hash values for one or more rows using a variety of methods like MD5, RIPEMD160, SHA1, SHA256, SHA384 and SHA512.test01: firsttesttom04122012hg01: testtom04122012hg01testtom04122012tfs01: testtom04122012tfs01Tinter: Tinter is a online tool about personal information management. Such as post to-do list or notes, record financial activities, etc. It's developed in C# and will involve more new technologies as a practice project.Twicko: Simple twitter client.Vaffanculo: None.web2call: Providing live chat support over website is now an old technique to facilitate customer. web2call will allow you to place a callback button on your website where user can click and connect automatically to one of your call center representative.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, January 06, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, January 06, 2011Popular ReleasesStyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14980.000: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new ObjectBasedEnvironment object does not resolve the StyleCop installation path, thus it does not return the correct path ...VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.1: New release with bug fixes and updates for performance.SSH.NET Library: 2011.1.6: Fixes CommandTimeout default value is fixed to infinite. Port Forwarding feature improvements Memory leaks fixes New Features Add ErrorOccurred event to handle errors that occurred on different thread New and improve SFTP features SftpFile now has more attributes and some operations Most standard operations now available Allow specify encoding for command execution KeyboardInteractiveConnectionInfo class added for "keyboard-interactive" authentication. Add ability to specify bo...UltimateJB: Ultimate JB 2.03 PL3 KAKAROTO: Voici une version attendu avec impatience pour beaucoup : - La version PL3 KAKAROTO intégre ses dernières modification et intégre maintenant le firmware 2.43 !!! Conclusion : - ultimateJB DEFAULT => Pas de spoof mais disponible pour les PS3 suivantes : 3.41_kiosk 3.41 3.40 3.30 3.21 3.15 3.10 3.01 2.76 2.70 2.60 2.53 2.43.NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library for C# and VB.NET: Release 2011.03: Added lot's of new extensions and new projects for MVC and Entity Framework. object.FindTypeByRecursion Int32.InRange String.RemoveAllSpecialCharacters String.IsEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IsNotEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IfEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.ToUpperFirstLetter String.GetBytes String.ToTitleCase String.ToPlural DateTime.GetDaysInYear DateTime.GetPeriodOfDay IEnumberable.RemoveAll IEnumberable.Distinct ICollection.RemoveAll IList.Join IList.Match IList.Cast Array.IsNullOrEmpty Array.W...VidCoder: 0.8.0: Added x64 version. Made the audio output preview more detailed and accurate. If the chosen encoder or mixdown is incompatible with the source, the fallback that will be used is displayed. Added "Auto" to the audio mixdown choices. Reworked non-anamorphic size calculation to work better with non-standard pixel aspect ratios and cropping. Reworked Custom anamorphic to be more intuitive and allow display width to be set automatically (Thanks, Statick). Allowing higher bitrates for 6-ch....NET Voice Recorder: Auto-Tune Release: This is the source code and binaries to accompany the article on the Coding 4 Fun website. It is the Auto Tuner release of the .NET Voice Recorder application.BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.2.0: - Simulation Log is now automatically disabled and hidden when running 10 or more iterations - Hit and Expertise are now entered by Rating, and include option for a Racial Expertise bonus - Added option for boss to use a periodic magic ability (Dragon Breath) - Added option for boss to periodically Enrage, gaining a Damage/Attack Speed buffASP.NET MVC CMS ( Using CommonLibrary.NET ): CommonLibrary.NET CMS 0.9.5 Alpha: CommonLibrary CMSA simple yet powerful CMS system in ASP.NET MVC 2 using C# 4.0. ActiveRecord based components for Blogs, Widgets, Pages, Parts, Events, Feedback, BlogRolls, Links Includes several widgets ( tag cloud, archives, recent, user cloud, links twitter, blog roll and more ) Built using the http://commonlibrarynet.codeplex.com framework. ( Uses TDD, DDD, Models/Entities, Code Generation ) Can run w/ In-Memory Repositories or Sql Server Database See Documentation tab for Ins...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.9 BETA: 2.2.9 BETAThis 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 - Added in the Gobl...xUnit.net - Unit Testing for .NET: xUnit.net 1.7 Beta: xUnit.net release 1.7 betaBuild #1533 Important notes for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. This release adds the following new features: Added support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Added Assert.Equal(double expected, double actual, int precision)...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: New feature - Added Windows Phone 7 project New feature - Added dynamic support to LINQ to JSON New feature - Added dynamic support to serializer New feature - Added INotifyCollectionChanged to JContainer in .NET 4 build New feature - Added ReadAsDateTimeOffset to JsonReader New feature - Added ReadAsDecimal to JsonReader New feature - Added covariance to IJEnumerable type parameter New feature - Added XmlSerializer style Specified property support New feature - Added ...DbDocument: DbDoc Initial Version: DbDoc Initial versionASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.2: Atomic CMS 2.1.2 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide N2 CMS: 2.1: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) All-round improvements and bugfixes File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the template packs (above) and open the proj...Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 1.0: - Norwegian translation - French translation - German translation - WBFS dump for analysis - Scalable full HQ cover - Support for log file - Load game images improved - Support for image splitting - Diff for images after transfer - Support for scrubbing modes - Search functionality for log - Recurse depth for Files/Load - Show progress while downloading game cover - Supports more databases for cover download - Game cover loading routines improvedAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.1: Fix: Fixed a bug where pressing Save As would not select the Mastery Directory by default Unexpected errors are now always reported to the user before closing AutoLoL down.* Extracted champion data to Data directory** Added disclaimer to notify users this application has nothing to do with Riot Games Inc. Updated Codeplex image * An error report will be shown to the user which can help the developers to find out what caused the error, this should improve support ** We are working on ...TortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 1.1.8: TortoiseHg 1.1.8 is a minor bug fix release, with minor improvementsBlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.0: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.0 instructions. To get started, be sure to check out our installatio...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.6 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.6 with the following new feature: * TextDecorations property is implemented in Title for Chart. * TitleTextDecorations property is implemented in Axis. * MinPointHeight property is now applicable for Column and Bar Charts. Also this release includes few bug fixes: * ToolTipText property of DataSeries was not getting applied from Style. * Chart threw exception if IndicatorEnabled property was set to true and Too...New Projects.NET Framework Extensions Packages: Lightweight NuGet packages with reusable source code extending core .NET functionality, typically in self-contained source files added to your projects as internal classes that can be easily kept up-to-date with NuGet..NET Random Mock Extensions: .NET Random Mock Extensions allow to generate by 1 line of code object implementing any interface or class and fill its properties with random values. This can be usefull for generating test data objects for View or unit testing while you have no real domain object model.ancc: anccASP.NET Social Controls: ASP.NET Social Controls is a small collection of server controls designed to make integrating social sharing utilities such as ShareThis, AddThis and AddToAny easier, more manageable, and X/HTML-compliant, with configuration files and per-instance settings.Autofac for WindowsPhone7: This project hosts the releases for Autofac built for WindowsPhone7AutoSensitivity: AutoSensitivity allows you to define different mouse sensitivities (speeds) for your tocuhpad and mouse and automatically switch between them (based on mouse connect / disconnect).BaseCode: basecodeCaliburn Micro Silverlight Navigation: Caliburn Micro Silverlight Navigation adds navigation to Caliburn Micro UI Framework by applying the ViewModel-First principle. Debian 5 Agent for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2: Debian 5 System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Agent. Debian 5 Management Pack For System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2: Debian 5 Management Pack for SCOM 2007 R2. It will be useless without the Agent (in another project).Eventbrite Helper for WebMatrix: The Eventbrite Helper for WebMatrix makes it simple to promote your Eventbrite events in your WebMatrix site. With a few lines of code you will be able to display your events on your web site with integration with Windows Live Calendar and Google Calendar.Eye Check: EyeCheck is an eye health testing project. It contains a set of tests to examine eye health. It's developed in C# using the Silverlight technology.Hooly Search: This ASP.NET project lets you browse through and search text within holy booksIssueVision.ST: A Silverlight LOB sample using Self-tracking Entities, WCF Services, WIF, MVVM Light toolkit, MEF, and T4 Templates.Lawyer Officer: Projeto desenvolvido como meu trabalho de conclusão de curso para formação em bacharelado em sistemas da informação da FATEF-São VicenteLINQtoROOT: Translates LINQ queries from the .NET world in to CERN's ROOT language (C++) and then runs them (locally or on a PROOF server).OA: ??????????Open Manuscript System: Open Manuscript Systems (OMS) is a research journal management and publishing system with manuscript tracking that has been developed in this project to expand and improve access to research.ProjectCNPM_Vinhlt_Teacher: Ðây là b?n CNPM demo c?a nhóm 6,K52a3 HUS VN. b?n demo này cung là project dâu ti?n tri?n khai phát tri?n th? nghi?m trên mô hình m?ng - Nhi?u member cùng phát tri?n cùng lúc QuanLyNhanKhau: WPF test.RazorPad: RazorPad is a quick and simple stand-alone editing environment that allows anyone (even non-developers) to author Razor templates. It is developed in WPF using C# and relies on the System.WebPages.Razor libraries (included in the project download). Rovio Tour Guide: More details to follow soon....long story short building a robotic tour guide using the Rovio roving webcam platform for proof of concept.ScrumPilot: ScrumPilot is a viewer of events coming from Team Foundation Server The main goal of this project is to help team to follow in real time the Checkins and WorkItems changing. Team can do comments to each event and they can preview some TFS artifacts.S-DMS: S-DMS?????????(Document Manage System)Sharepoint Documentation Generator: New MOSS feature to automatically generate documentation/tables for fields, content types, lists, users, etc...ShengjieGao's projects: ?????Stylish DOS Box: Since the introduction of Windows 3.11 I am trying to avoid the DOS box and use any applet provided with GUI in Windows system. Yet, I realize that there is no week passed by without me opening the DOS box! This project will give the DOS Box a new look.Table2DTO: Auto generate code to build objects (DTOs, Models, etc) from a data table.Techweb: Alon's and Simon's 236607 homework assignments.TLC5940 Driver for Netduino: An Netduino Library for the TI TLC5940 16-Channel PWM Chip. Tratando Exceptions da Send Port na Orchestration: Quando a Send Port é do tipo Request-Response manipular o exception é intuitivo, já que basta colocar um escopo e adicionar um exception do tipo System.Exception. Mas quando a porta é one-way a coisa complica um pouco.UAC Runner: UAC Runner is a small application which allows the running of applications as an administrator from the command line using Windows UAC.Ubuntu 10 Agent for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2: Ubuntu 10 System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Agent.Ubuntu 10 Management Pack For System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2: Ubuntu 10 Management Pack for SCOM 2007 R2. It will be useless without the Agent (in another project). It is based on Red Hat 5 Management Pack. See the Download section to download the MPs and the source files (XML) Whe Online Storage: Whe Online Storage, is an 3. party online storage system and tools for free source. C#, .NET 4.0, SilverlightWindows Phone MVP: An MVP implementation for Windows Phone.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 04, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 04, 2012Popular ReleasesAcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.3.2: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????,????,?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????,??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????,????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??,????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ?? v4.3.2?? ?????????????????? ??Acfun??????? ??Bilibili?????? ??Bilibili???????????? ??Bilibili????????? ??????????????? ???? ??Bilibili??????? ????32??64? Windows XP/...ExtJS based ASP.NET 2.0 Controls: FineUI v3.2.2: ??FineUI ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???。 FineUI??? ?? No JavaScript,No CSS,No UpdatePanel,No ViewState,No WebServices ???????。 ?????? IE 7.0、Firefox 3.6、Chrome 3.0、Opera 10.5、Safari 3.0+ ???? Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ???? ??:http://fineui.com/bbs/ ??:http://fineui.com/demo/ ??:http://fineui.com/doc/ ??:http://fineui.codeplex.com/ ???? +2012-12-03 v3.2.2 -?????????????,?????button/button_menu.aspx(????)。 +?Window????Plain??;?ToolbarPosition??Footer??;?????FooterBarAlign??。 -????win...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows Phone 8: This is a brand new version of the Player Framework for Windows Phone, available exclusively for Windows Phone 8, and now based upon the Player Framework for Windows 8. While this new version is not backward compatible with Windows Phone 7 (get that http://smf.codeplex.com/releases/view/88970), it does offer the same great feature set plus dozens of new features such as advertising, localization support, and improved skinning. Click here for more information about what's new in the Windows P...SSH.NET Library: 2012.12.3: New feature(s): + SynchronizeDirectoriesmenu4web: menu4web 1.1 - free javascript menu: menu4web 1.1 has been tested with all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. Minified m4w.js library is less than 9K. Includes 22 menu examples of different styles. Can be freely distributed under The MIT License (MIT).Quest: Quest 5.3 Beta: New features in Quest 5.3 include: Grid-based map (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) Changable POV (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) Game log (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) Customisable object link colour (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) More room description options (by James Gregory) More mathematical functions now available to expressions Desktop Player uses the same UI as WebPlayer - this will make it much easier to implement customisation options New sorting functions: ObjectListSort(list,...Chinook Database: Chinook Database 1.4: Chinook Database 1.4 This is a sample database available in multiple formats: SQL scripts for multiple database vendors, embeded database files, and XML format. The Chinook data model is available here. ChinookDatabase1.4_CompleteVersion.zip is a complete package for all supported databases/data sources. There are also packages for each specific data source. Supported Database ServersDB2 EffiProz MySQL Oracle PostgreSQL SQL Server SQL Server Compact SQLite Issues Resolved293...RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: RiP-Ripper 2.9.34: changes FIXED: Thanks Function when "Download each post in it's own folder" is disabled FIXED: "PixHub.eu" linksD3 Loot Tracker: 1.5.6: Updated to work with D3 version 1.0.6.13300????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 5: 2012?11?30??? ?OAuth?????????????????????SDK OAuth oauth = new OAuth("<AppKey>", "<AppSecret>", "<????>"); WebProxy proxy = new WebProxy(); proxy.Address = new Uri("http://proxy.domain.com:3128");//??????????? proxy.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("<??>", "<??>");//???????,??? oauth.Proxy = proxy; //??????,?~ DirectQ: DirectQ II 2012-11-29: A (slightly) modernized port of Quake II to D3D9. You need SM3 or better hardware to run this - if you don't have it, then don't even bother. It should work on Windows Vista, 7 or 8; it may also work on XP but I haven't tested. Known bugs include: Some mods may not work. This is unfortunately due to the nature of Quake II's game DLLs; sometimes a recompile of the game DLL is all that's needed. In any event, ensure that the game DLL is compatible with the last release of Quake II first (...Magelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 2.2: new UI for the Administration console Bugs fixes and improvement version 2.2.215.3JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.2.5: What's new in JayData 1.2.5For detailed release notes check the release notes. Handlebars template engine supportImplement data manager applications with JayData using Handlebars.js for templating. Include JayDataModules/handlebars.js and begin typing the mustaches :) Blogpost: Handlebars templates in JayData Handlebars helpers and model driven commanding in JayData Easy JayStorm cloud data managementManage cloud data using the same syntax and data management concept just like any other data ...nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.70: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • Search engine optimization. ID-less URLs for products, categories, and manufacturers. • Added ACL support (access control list) on products and categories. • Minify and bundle JavaScript files. • Allow a store owner to decide which billing/shipping address fields are enabled/disabled/required (like it's already done for the registration page). • Moved to MVC 4 (.NET 4.5 is required). • Now Visual Studio 2012 is required to work ...SQL Server Partition Management: Partition Management Release 3.0: Release 3.0 adds support for SQL Server 2012 and is backward compatible with SQL Server 2008 and 2005. The release consists of: • A Readme file • The Executable • The source code (Visual Studio project) Enhancements include: -- Support for Columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 -- Ability to create TSQL scripts for staging table and index creation operations -- Full support for global date and time formats, locale independent -- Support for binary partitioning column types -- Fixes to is...NHook - A debugger API: NHook 1.0: x86 debugger Resolve symbol from MS Public server Resolve RVA from executable's image Add breakpoints Assemble / Disassemble target process assembly More information here, you can also check unit tests that are real sample code.PDF Library: PDFLib v2.0: Release notes This new version include many bug fixes and include support for stream objects and cross-reference object streams. New FeatureExtract images from the PDFMCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.10: Critical Update to 2.3.9: Changelog for 2.3.10 (32bit and 64bit) 1. AsfBin executable missing from build 2. Removed extra references from build to avoid conflict 3. Showanalyzer installation now checked on remote engine machine Changelog for 2.3.9 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for WTV output profile 2. Added support for minimizing MCEBuddy to the system tray 3. Added support for custom archive folder 4. Added support to disable subdirectory monitoring 5. Added support for better TS fil...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 07.00.00: Major Highlights Fixed issue that caused profiles of deleted users to be available Removed the postback after checkboxes are selected in Page Settings > Taxonomy Implemented the functionality required to edit security role names and social group names Fixed JavaScript error when using a ";" semicolon as a profile property Fixed issue when using DateTime properties in profiles Fixed viewstate error when using Facebook authentication in conjunction with "require valid profile fo...CODE Framework: 4.0.21128.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new.New Projects.Net Assembly Checker: This is the tool which can help you solve the issues like "exceptions on assembly loading."Abide - Halo Map Editor: Abide is used for modification of Halo 2 maps, and other Blam engine games.AX-OData Queries: The focus of this project, is to provide a utility that will allow someone to understand all Queries within an instance of AX 2012, that can be OData Feeds.Channel 9 Apps: The Channel 9 Apps project aims to bring Channel 9 content natively to all smart devices in the form of native applications.Edutainment: Eine App für Windows mit dem Ziel, eine Schülern ein bestimmtes Thema beizubringen.Generic Windows Service Host: *Release Coming Soon* - This is a plug-in based Windows Service that will automatically execute assemblies found in a specified directory on start-up.Good Diary: Good Diary Applicationhedefgrup: Source code for hedef-grupInIReader: It's a small and simple C# based InIReader. Read, Load and write easily with InIFiles.jsGotoDefinition: jsGotoDefinition is a VS2010 plugin that, amongst other things, allows developers to right-click and navigate to a Javascript function's definition, giving them same sort of experience available with C#.JSON-RPC RT: Json-RPC implements bidirectional JSON-RPC protocol using WinRT asynchronous async / await methods.LearnByteartRetail: The reason that I host the project in codeplext is let me to work same source code at home and company~MIX++: A C++ implementation of an emulator for the MIX processor and a MIXAL assembler as defined in 'The Art of Computer Programming'Nant SVN Extension: This library extends NAnt with SVN client tasks.POM Tools: Résumé du projetQuotesDaily: A Website to Display QuotesRSS Feed Reader for Windows 8: La aplicación RSS Feed Viewer for Windows 8 implementa un lector de RSS para una única fuente de datos que se integra con los servicios de Windows 8.SharePoint 2010 App Model: This Project has the purpose of create a set of component that emulate the new functionality of SharePoint 2013 that is the new App Model for SharePoint 2010.SiLL: SiLL is a framework for rapid development of custom CMS solutions. It was designed to offer unprecedented flexibility with no overhead present in other frameworSolid Edge SDK: Solid Edge SDKTestForCodePlex: this is a personal project for the codeplex test, public user could *not* jion in the project please.verse: Verse is a simple dynamic language and runtime with a focus on parallelism and pattern matching.VivendoByte Toolkit: A toolkit useful to build Windows Store apps. It contains helpers to bind commands in MVVM, user-controls and converters. It's built using Galasoft MVVM Light.Windows 8 Store Video App Framework: Dieses Framework zeigt die Erstellung einer eigenen Video App für Windows 8. Lokale Videos, gestreamt aus dem Netz und sogar von YouTube - alles kein Problem!WJ's Windows Phone User Controls: This project contains list of commonly used Windows Phone user controls in my daily projects. Those user controls are built on Windows Phone OS 7.1.WorkingWU: Project for photo designer web layoutxGui: a Direct3D GUI, support Direct X 9/10/11.YDNoteOpenAPI4N: a .net library for ydNote open API! ????OPENAPI?.NET??! ??????: ??????!

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 20, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 20, 2012Popular ReleasesNearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.0: Version 8.0 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing new features: Internationalization Custom authentication provider Access control list for forums and threads Webdeploy package checksum: abc62990189cf0d488ef915d4a55e4b14169bc01BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6: This beta release is the first to support SQL Server 2012 (in addition to SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2). Since it is marked as a beta release, we are looking for bug reports in the next few months as you use BIDS Helper on real projects. In addition to getting all existing BIDS Helper functionality working appropriately in SQL Server 2012 (SSDT), the following features are new... Analysis Services Tabular Smart Diff Tabular Actions Editor Tabular HideMemberIf Tabular Pre-Build ...JavaScript Web Resource Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: JavaScript Web Resource Manager (1.2.1420.191): BUG FIXED : When loading scripts from disk, the import of the web resource didn't do anything When scripts were saved to disk, it wasn't possible to edit them with an editorSQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQLMon 4.2 alpha 12: 1. improved process visualizer, now shows how many dead locks, and what are the locked objects 2. fixed some other problems.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 1: New feature - Windows 8 Metro build New feature - JsonTextReader automatically reads ISO strings as dates New feature - Added DateFormatHandling to control whether dates are written in the MS format or ISO format, with ISO as the default New feature - Added DateTimeZoneHandling to control reading and writing DateTime time zone details New feature - Added async serialize/deserialize methods to JsonConvert New feature - Added Path to JsonReader/JsonWriter/ErrorContext and exceptions w...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Fixed a bug when ping and cmd.exe kept running in endless loop after action progress was finished. Fixed update checking from Codeplex RSS feed. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA...WebSocket4Net: WebSocket4Net 0.5: Changes in this release fixed the wss's default port bug improved JsonWebSocket supported set client access policy protocol for silverlight fixed a handshake issue in Silverlight fixed a bug that "Host" field in handshake hadn't contained port if the port is not default supported passing in Origin parameter for handshaking supported reacting pings from server side fixed a bug in data sending fixed the bug sending a closing handshake with no message which would cause an excepti...SuperWebSocket, a .NET WebSocket Server: SuperWebSocket 0.5: Changes included in this release: supported closing handshake queue checking improved JSON subprotocol supported sending ping from server to client fixed a bug about sending a closing handshake with no message refactored the code to improve protocol compatibility fixed a bug about sub protocol configuration loading in Mono improved BasicSubProtocol added JsonWebSocketSessionDaun Management Studio: Daun Management Studio 0.1 (Alpha Version): These are these the alpha application packages for Daun Management Studio to manage MongoDB Server. Please visit our official website http://www.daun-project.comSurvey™ - web survey & form engine: Survey™ 2.0: The new stable Survey™ Project 2.0.0.1 version contains many new features like: Technical changes: - Use of Jquery, ASTreeview, Tabs, Tooltips and new menuprovider Features & Bugfixes: Survey list and search function Folder structure for surveys New Menustructure Library list New Library fields User list and search functions Layout options for a survey with CSS, page header and footer New IP filter security feature Enhanced Token Management New Question fields as ID, Alias...RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: RiP-Ripper 2.9.28: changes NEW: Added Support for "PixHub.eu" linksSmartNet: V1.0.0.0: DY SmartNet ?????? V1.0callisto: callisto 2.0.21: Added an option to disable local host detection.Javascript .NET: Javascript .NET v0.6: Upgraded to the latest stable branch of v8 (/tags/3.9.18), and switched to using their scons build system. We no longer include v8 source code as part of this project's source code. Simultaneous multithreaded use of v8 now supported (v8 Isolates), although different contexts may not share objects or call each other. 64-bit .Net 4.0 DLL now included. (Download now includes x86 and x64 for both .Net 3.5 and .Net 4.0.)MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.0.6: This release should be more stable there were a few bug fixes including the x64 issue as well as an error popping up when MyRouter started this was caused by a NULL valueGoogle Books Downloader for Windows: Google Books Downloader-2.0.0.0.: Google Books DownloaderFinestra Virtual Desktops: 2.5.4501: This is a very minor update release. Please see the information about the 2.5 and 2.5.4500 releases for more information on recent changes. This update did not even have an automatic update triggered for it. Adds error checking and reporting to all threads, not only those with message loopsAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.9.2: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????,????1M,????,????,?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????,??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????,???,???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??,????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??:????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86),?????"?????????"??? ??????????????,??????????: ??"AcDo...ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.0 Release Candidate: Your feedback is welcome - and this is your last chance to get your fixes in for this version! Includes installer for both Feature Server extension and Desktop extension, enhanced functionality for the Desktop tools, and enhanced built-in Javascript Editor for the Feature Server component. This release candidate includes fixes to beta 4 that accommodate domain users for setting up the Server Component, and fixes for reporting/uploading references tracked in the revision table. See Code In-P...C.B.R. : Comic Book Reader: CBR 0.6: 20 Issue trackers are closed and a lot of bugs too Localize view is now MVVM and delete is working. Added the unused flag (take care that it goes to true only when displaying screen elements) Backstage - new input/output format choice control for the conversion Backstage - Add display, behaviour and register file type options in the extended options dialog Explorer list view has been transformed to a custom control. New group header, colunms order and size are saved Single insta...New Projects{3S} SQL Smart Security "Protect your T-SQL know-how!": {3S} SQL Smart Security is an add-in which can be installed in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). It enables software companies to create a secured content for database objects. The add-in brings much higher level of protection in comparison with SQL Server built in WITH ENCRYPTION feature.BETA - Content Slider for SharePoint 2010 / Office 365: SharePoint Banner / SharePoint 2010 Sliding Banner / Content Slider tools in Office 365/ Sliding Content in SharePoint is a general tool which could be used for sliding Banners or any other sliding content to be placed on any Office 365 / SharePoint 2010 / SharePoint Foundation.BF3 Development Server: The main issue of this project is to deliver a test server to all developers working on RCon (Remote-Administration-Console) Tools for Battlefield 3. Actually the only possibility to test the work made is to hire a real Game Server. BizTalk Server 2010 TCP/IP Adapter: This project is migration of existing BizTalk server 2009 TCPIP adapter to BizTalk server 2010. I have made few configuration changes which are making this adapter and installation compatible to BizTalk Server 2010. I have not modified adapter source code.BryhtCommon: It`s for easy to develope WP7 ,it contains some useful method Bug.Net Defect Tracking Components: Bug.Net server-side controls and components to add defect (bug) tracking to your current ASP.NET website.Customize Survey With Client Object Model: Customize OOB Survey/Vote/Poll in Share?Point With Client Object Model Visit http://swatipoint.blogspot.in/2011/12/sharepoint-client-object-modellist.html for more detailsDropboxToDo: A simple todo, synchronizing by Dropbox or, in future, by SkydriveFoggy: Foggy is a WPF dashboard for FogBugz information.Fort Myers High School Website: A website for Fort Myers High School in Fort Myers, Florida. This website will allow for both students and parents to better interact with the school. Developed in ASP.net (C#).Gonte.DataAccess: Data access for NET. It's developed in C#.Gonte.ObjectModel: Metadata about objects. It's developed in C#Gonte.SqlGenerator: Sql Generator It's developed in C#.kLib: This project space is for datastructures and classes, which should always be available. Any developer should use these in their projects. Liuyi.Phone.CharmScreen: Liuyi.Phone.CharmScreen Liuyi windows phone appLoU: Lord of Ultima helper suite.Managing Supplies: This WP7 project is able to manage your own suppliesNAV Fixed Assets 2012: Changes related to 'Dossier Fiscal' in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 - New Model 30 - Changes to model 31 and model 32NCAA Tourney DotNetNuke Module: The NCAA Tourney is a DotNetNuke 3.X - 6.X module that allows you to add a NCAA tournament to your portal. You can allow users to record their picks for the tournament and then manage the outcome of the tournament calculating the winner of your tourney based on customizable point system. The module has been designed to be very user friendly and efficient for the end user as well as the administrator of the tournament.nothing here anymore: nothing here anymoreOrchard Dream Store Project: A simple website using Orchard CMS. For a school projectPowerShell Management Library for TEM: A project to provide a PowerShell functionality for managing your Tivoli Endpoint Manager (built upon BigFix technology). You can locally or remotely manage endpoints and relays via these simple and easy to use PowerShell Module.PrismWebBuilder: Web Builder ProjectProjeto Northwind: Northwind - FPUQLCF: QLCFShipwire API: Shipwire makes it easier for consumers of Shipwire's international shipment fulfilment service to integrate their XML API quickly and easily. Current features are: Inventory Service Rate Service (Shipping Costs) Future features are: Order Entry Service Order Tracking ServiceSmith XNA tools: Smith's XNA tools is a set of useful that i make to improve some basics features to XNA and make the Game Design More Easy.ST Recover: ST Recover can read Atari ST floppy disks on a PC under Windows, including special formats as 800 or 900 KB and damaged or desynchronized disks, and produces standard .ST disk image files. Then the image files can be read in ST emulators as WinSTon or Steem.SyncSMS: Windows desktop client for the Android App SyncSMS. This code is not affiliated with SyncSMS in any way,tempzz: tempzzTruxtor: Truxtor modular concept for electronic gadgetsTT SA TEST1: TT SA Test 1VisualQuantCode: Neuroquants is a library in c# for quants It's developed in c#.Weeps: Generate Bass and drum line in type of midi to be guitar's backing track that was playing by userxxtest: xxtest???-????? "???????????": ?????-????????? ???????????? Digital Design 2012. ??? ????. ?????? ?: ?????????????????? ??????? ?????. ??????? ?????????? ????????? ????????. ?????????? ?????????????? ??????? ??????? ? ????? ???????????? Digital Design 2012.????? ???????????? Digital Design 2012. ??? ????. ?????? ?: ?????????????????? ??????? ?????. ??????? ?????????? ????????? ????????. ?????????? ?????????????? ??????? ??????? ? ????? ???????????? Digital Design 2012.

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  • Project Management Helps AmeriCares Deliver International Aid

    - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP
    Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Alison Weiss Handle with Care Sound project management helps AmeriCares bring international aid to those in need. The stakes are always high for AmeriCares. On a mission to restore health and save lives during times of disaster, the nonprofit international relief and humanitarian aid organization delivers donated medicines, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid to people in the U.S. and around the globe. Founded in 1982 with the express mission of responding as quickly and efficiently as possible to help people in need, the Stamford, Connecticut-based AmeriCares has delivered more than US$10.5 billion in aid to 147 countries over the past three decades. Launch the Slideshow “It’s critically important to us that we steward all the donations and that the medical supplies and medicines get to people as quickly as possible with no loss,” says Kate Sears, senior vice president for finance and technology at AmeriCares. “Whether we’re shipping IV solutions to victims of cholera in Haiti or antibiotics to Somali famine victims, we need to get the medicines there sooner because it means more people will be helped and lives improved or even saved.” Ten years ago, the tracking systems used by AmeriCares associates were paper-based. In recent years, staff started using spreadsheets, but the tracking processes were not standardized between teams. “Every team was tracking completely different information,” says Megan McDermott, senior associate, Sub-Saharan Africa partnerships, at AmeriCares. “It was just a few key things. For example, we tracked the date a shipment was supposed to arrive and the date we got reports from our partner that a hospital received aid on their end.” While the data was accurate, much detail was being lost in the process. AmeriCares management knew it could do a better job of tracking this enterprise data and in 2011 took a significant step by implementing Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management. “It’s a comprehensive solution that has helped us improve the monitoring and controlling processes. It has allowed us to do our distribution better,” says Sears. In addition, the implementation effort has been a change agent, helping AmeriCares leadership rethink project management across the entire organization. Initially, much of the focus was on standardizing processes, but staff members also learned the importance of thinking proactively to prevent possible problems and evaluating results to determine if goals and objectives are truly being met. Such data about process efficiency and overall results is critical not only to AmeriCares staff but also to the donors supporting the organization’s life-saving missions. Efficiency Saves Lives One of AmeriCares’ core operations is to gather product donations from the private sector, establish where the most-urgent needs are, and solicit monetary support to send the aid via ocean cargo or airlift to welfare- and health-oriented nongovernmental organizations, hospitals, health networks, and government ministries based in areas in need. In 2011 alone, AmeriCares sent more than 3,500 shipments to 95 countries in response to both ongoing humanitarian needs and more than two dozen emergencies, including deadly tornadoes and storms in the U.S. and the devastating tsunami in Japan. When it comes to nonprofits in general, donors want to know that the charitable organizations they support are using funds wisely. Typically, nonprofits are evaluated by donors in terms of efficiency, an area where AmeriCares has an excellent reputation: 98 percent of expenses go directly to supporting programs and less than 2 percent represent administrative and fundraising costs. Donors, however, should look at more than simple efficiency, says Peter York, senior partner and chief research and learning officer at TCC Group, a nonprofit consultancy headquartered in New York, New York. They should also look at whether organizations have the systems in place to sustain their missions and continue to thrive. An expert on nonprofit organizational management, York has spent years studying sustainable charitable organizations. He defines them as nonprofits that are able to achieve the ongoing financial support to stay relevant and continue doing core mission work. In his analysis of well over 2,500 larger nonprofits, York has found that many are not sustaining, and are actually scaling back in size. “One of the biggest challenges of nonprofit sustainability is the general public’s perception that every dollar donated has to go only to the delivery of service,” says York. “What our data shows is that there are some fundamental capacities that have to be there in order for organizations to sustain and grow.” York’s research highlights the importance of data-driven leadership at successful nonprofits. “You’ve got to have the tools, the systems, and the technologies to get objective information on what you do, the people you serve, and the results you’re achieving,” says York. “If leaders don’t have the knowledge and the data, they can’t make the strategic decisions about programs to take organizations to the next level.” Historically, AmeriCares associates have used time-tested and cost-effective strategies to ship and then track supplies from donation to delivery to their destinations in designated time frames. When disaster strikes, AmeriCares ships by air and generally pulls out all the stops to deliver the most urgently needed aid within the first few days and weeks. Then, as situations stabilize, AmeriCares turns to delivering sea containers for the postemergency and ongoing aid so often needed over the long term. According to McDermott, getting a shipment out the door is fairly complicated, requiring as many as five different AmeriCares teams collaborating together. The entire process can take months—from when products are received in the warehouse and deciding which recipients to allocate supplies to, to getting customs and governmental approvals in place, actually shipping products, and finally ensuring that the products are received in-country. Delivering that aid is no small affair. “Our volume exceeds half a billion dollars a year worth of donated medicines and medical supplies, so it’s a sizable logistical operation to bring these products in and get them out to the right place quickly to have the most impact,” says Sears. “We really pride ourselves on our controls and efficiencies.” Adding to that complexity is the fact that the longer it takes to deliver aid, the more dire the human need can be. Any time AmeriCares associates can shave off the complicated aid delivery process can translate into lives saved. “It’s really being able to track information consistently that will help us to see where are the bottlenecks and where can we work on improving our processes,” says McDermott. Setting a Standard Productivity and information management improvements were key objectives for AmeriCares when staff began the process of implementing Oracle’s Primavera solution. But before configuring the software, the staff needed to take the time to analyze the systems already in place. According to Greg Loop, manager of database systems at AmeriCares, the organization received guidance from several consultants, including Rich D’Addario, consulting project manager in the Primavera Global Business Unit at Oracle, who was instrumental in shepherding the critical requirements-gathering phase. D’Addario encouraged staff to begin documenting shipping processes by considering the order in which activities occur and which ones are dependent on others to get accomplished. This exercise helped everyone realize that to be more efficient, they needed to keep track of shipments in a more standard way. “The staff didn’t recognize formal project management methodology,” says D’Addario. “But they did understand what the most important things are and that if they go wrong, an entire project can go off course.” Before, if a boatload of supplies was being sent to Haiti and there was a problem somewhere, a lot of time was taken up finding out where the problem was—because staff was not tracking things in a standard way. As a result, even more time was needed to find possible solutions to the problem and alert recipients that the aid might be delayed. “For everyone to put on the project manager hat and standardize the way every single thing is done means that now the whole organization is on the same page as to what needs to occur from the time a hurricane hits Haiti and when a boat pulls in to unload supplies,” says D’Addario. With so much care taken to put a process foundation firmly in place, configuring the Primavera solution was actually quite simple. Specific templates were set up for different types of shipments, and dashboards were implemented to provide executives with clear overviews of every project in the system. AmeriCares’ Loop reports that system planning, refining, and testing, followed by writing up documentation and training, took approximately four months. The system went live in spring 2011 at AmeriCares’ Connecticut headquarters. While the nonprofit has an international presence, with warehouses in Europe and offices in Haiti, India, Japan, and Sri Lanka, most donated medicines come from U.S. entities and are shipped from the U.S. out to the rest of the world. In addition, all shipments are tracked from the U.S. office. AmeriCares doesn’t expect the Primavera system to take months off the shipping time, especially for sea containers. However, any time saved is still important because it will allow aid to be delivered to people more quickly at a lower overall cost. “If we can trim a day or two here or there, that can translate into lives that we’re saving, especially in emergency situations,” says Sears. A Cultural Change Beyond the measurable benefits that come with IT-driven process improvement, AmeriCares management is seeing a change in culture as a result of the Primavera project. One change has been treating every shipment of aid as a project, and everyone involved with facilitating shipments as a project manager. “This is a revolutionary concept for us,” says McDermott. “Before, we were used to thinking we were doing logistics—getting a container from point A to point B without looking at it as one project and really understanding what it meant to manage it.” AmeriCares staff is also happy to report that collaboration within the organization is much more efficient. When someone creates a shipment in the Primavera system, the same shared template is used, which means anyone can log in to the system to see the status of a shipment. Knowledgeable staff can access a shipment project to help troubleshoot a problem. Management can easily check the status of projects across the organization. “Dashboards are really useful,” says McDermott. “Instead of going into the details of each project, you can just see the high-level real-time information at a glance.” The new system is helping team members focus on proactively managing shipments rather than simply reacting when problems occur. For example, when a container is shipped, documents must be included for customs clearance. Now, the shipping template has built-in reminders to prompt team members to ask for copies of these documents from freight forwarders and to follow up with partners to discover if a shipment is on time. In the past, staff may not have worked on securing these documents until they’d been notified a shipment had arrived in-country. Another benefit of capturing and adopting best practices within the Primavera system is that staff training is easier. “Capturing the processes in documented steps and milestones allows us to teach new staff members how to do their jobs faster,” says Sears. “It provides them with the knowledge of their predecessors so they don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.” With the Primavera system already generating positive results, management is eager to take advantage of advanced capabilities. Loop is working on integrating the company’s proprietary inventory management system with the Primavera system so that when logistics or warehousing operators input data, the information will automatically go into the Primavera system. In the past, this information had to be manually keyed into spreadsheets, often leading to errors. Mining Historical Data Another feature on the horizon for AmeriCares is utilizing Primavera P6 Professional Project Management reporting capabilities. As the system begins to include more historical data, management soon will be able to draw on this information to conduct analysis that has not been possible before and create customized reports. For example, at the beginning of the shipment process, staff will be able to use historical data to more accurately estimate how long the approval process should take for a particular country. This could help ensure that food and medicine with limited shelf lives do not get stuck in customs or used beyond their expiration dates. The historical data in the Primavera system will also help AmeriCares with better planning year to year. The nonprofit’s staff has always put together a plan at the beginning of the year, but this has been very challenging simply because it is impossible to predict disasters. Now, management will be able to look at historical data and see trends and statistics as they set current objectives and prepare for future need. In addition, this historical data will provide AmeriCares management with the ability to review year-end data and compare actual project results with goals set at the beginning of the year—to see if desired outcomes were achieved and if there are areas that need improvement. It’s this type of information that is so valuable to donors. And, according to York, project management software can play a critical role in generating the data to help nonprofits sustain and grow. “It is important to invest in systems to help replicate, expand, and deliver services,” says York. “Project management software can help because it encourages nonprofits to examine program or service changes and how to manage moving forward.” Sears believes that AmeriCares donors will support the return on investment the organization will achieve with the Primavera solution. “It won’t be financial returns, but rather how many more people we can help for a given dollar or how much more quickly we can respond to a need,” says Sears. “I think donors are receptive to such arguments.” And for AmeriCares, it is all about the future and increasing results. The project management environment currently may be quite simple, but IT staff plans to expand the complexity and functionality as the organization grows in its knowledge of project management and the goals it wants to achieve. “As we use the system over time, we’ll continue to refine our best practices and accumulate more data,” says Sears. “It will advance our ability to make better data-driven decisions.”

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, January 16, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, January 16, 2011Popular ReleasesVidCoder: 0.8.1: Adds ability to choose an arbitrary range (in seconds or frames) to encode. Adds ability to override the title number in the output file name when enqueing multiple titles. Updated presets: Added iPhone 4, Apple TV 2, fixed some existing presets that should have had weightp=0 or trellis=0 on them. Added {parent} option to auto-name format. Use {parent:2} to refer to a folder 2 levels above the input file. Added {title:2} option to auto-name format. Adds leading zeroes to reach the sp...Network Asset Manager: Release 1.0.9: Release notes for version 1.0.9New FeaturesAdded new report subsystem for better report handling and report history management. Added support for Network adapter discovery Added reports for low disk space, disk utilization, hardware, OS installation Some application fixes. Bug fixesArtifact ID 2979655 : Fixed issue with installed software collection on windows 64 bit. (Thanks to nielsvdc for this patch) NotesPrevious versions of NAM installations need to be manually uninstalled bef...mytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.0 beta 2: New MVC3 RTM WEB.mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.0 Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) SRC.mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.0 System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.5, MVC3 RTM WARNING For run and debug SRC.mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.0 download and...BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.3.0: NOTE: If you have a previous version of BloodSim, you must update WControls.dll from the Required DLLs download. - Removed average stats from main window as this is no longer necessary - Added ability to name a set of runs that will show up in the title bar of the graph window - Added ability to run progressive simulation sets, increasing up to 2 chosen stats by a value each time - Added option to set the amount that Death Strike heals for on the Last 5s Damage - Added option for Blood Shiel...NuGet: NuGet 1.0 RTM: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog.MVC Music Store: MVC Music Store v2.0: This is the 2.0 release of the MVC Music Store Tutorial. This tutorial is updated for ASP.NET MVC 3 and Entity Framework Code-First, and contains fixes and improvements based on feedback and common questions from previous releases. The main download, MvcMusicStore-v2.0.zip, contains everything you need to build the sample application, including A detailed tutorial document in PDF format Assets you will need to build the project, including images, a stylesheet, and a pre-populated databas...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.7 GA Released: Hi, Today we are releasing Visifire 3.6.7 GA with the following feature: * Inlines property has been implemented in Title. Also, this release contains fix for the following bugs: * In Column and Bar chart DataPoint’s label properties were not working as expected at real-time if marker enabled was set to true. * 3D Column and Bar chart were not rendered properly if AxisMinimum property was set in x-axis. You can download Visifire v3.6.7 here. Cheers, Team VisifireFluent Validation for .NET: 2.0: Changes since 2.0 RC Fix typo in the name of FallbackAwareResourceAccessorBuilder Fix issue #7062 - allow validator selectors to work against nullable properties with overriden names. Fix error in German localization. Better support for client-side validation messages in MVC integration. All changes since 1.3 Allow custom MVC ModelValidators to be added to the FVModelValidatorProvider Support resource provider for custom property validators through the new IResourceAccessorBuilder ...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.2 ALPHA: 2.3.2 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 - Quick update to ...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.6: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: paging for the lookup lookup with multiselect changes: the css classes used by the framework where renamed to be more standard the lookup controller requries an item.ascx (no more ViewData["structure"]), and LookupList action renamed to Search all the...pwTools: pwTools: pwTools SVN Downloaderthe downloader contains three *.bat files pwtools-changelog.bat creates a changelog.txt file containing the change notes pwtools-binaries.bat is downloading the latest stable binary files pwtools-source.bat is downloading the latest project files (including source code and binaries)??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-01-12: 2011???????All-In-One Code Framework(??) 2011?1??????!!http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????release?,???????ASP.NET, AJAX, WinForm, Windows Shell????13?Sample Code。???,??????????sample code。 ?????:http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2011/01/13/6135037.aspx ??,??????MSDN????????????。 http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/zh-CN/codezhchs/threads ?????????????????,??Email ????patterns & practices – Enterprise Library: Enterprise Library 5.0 - Extensibility Labs: This is a preview release of the Hands-on Labs to help you learn and practice different ways the Enterprise Library can be extended. Learning MapCustom exception handler (estimated time to complete: 1 hr 15 mins) Custom logging trace listener (1 hr) Custom configuration source (registry-based) (30 mins) System requirementsEnterprise Library 5.0 / Unity 2.0 installed SQL Express 2008 installed Visual Studio 2010 Pro (or better) installed AuthorsChris Tavares, Microsoft Corporation ...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.0: Orchard Release Notes Build: 1.0.20 Published: 1/12/2010 How to Install OrchardTo install Orchard using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard.ashx Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. --OR-- Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.1.0.20.zip file. http://orchardproject.net/docs/Manually-installing-Orchard-zip-file.ashx The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.6.1: The Umbraco 4.6.1 (codename JUNO) release contains many new features focusing on an improved installation experience, a number of robust developer features, and contains nearly 200 bug fixes since the 4.5.2 release. Getting Started A great place to start is with our Getting Started Guide: Getting Started Guide: http://umbraco.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=197051 Make sure to check the free foundation videos on how to get started building Umbraco sites. They're ...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14986.000: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Features: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new ObjectBasedEnvironment object does not resolve the StyleCop installation path, thus it does not return the ...Facebook C# SDK: 4.2.1: - Authentication bug fixes - Updated Json.Net to version 4.0.0 - BREAKING CHANGE: Removed cookieSupport config setting, now automatic. This download is also availible on NuGet: Facebook FacebookWeb FacebookWebMvcHawkeye - The .Net Runtime Object Editor: Hawkeye 1.2.5: In the case you are running an x86 Windows and you installed Release 1.2.4, you should consider upgrading to this release (1.2.5) as it appears Hawkeye is broken on x86 OS. I apologize for the inconvenience, but it appears Hawkeye 1.2.4 (and probably previous versions) doesn't run on x86 Windows (See issue http://hawkeye.codeplex.com/workitem/7791). This maintenance release fixes this broken behavior. This release comes in two flavors: Hawkeye.125.N2 is the standard .NET 2 build, was compile...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (January 2011): Another release build for daily use; it contains many new features, enhanced compatibility with latest PHP opensource applications and several issue fixes. To improve the performance of your application using MySQL, please use Managed MySQL Extension for Phalanger. Changes made within this release include following: New features available only in Phalanger. Full support of Multi-Script-Assemblies was implemented; you can build your application into several DLLs now. Deploy them separately t...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.3: A message will be displayed when there's an update available Shows a list of recent mastery files in the Editor Tab (requested by quite a few people) Updater: Update information is now scrollable Added a buton to launch AutoLoL after updating is finished Updated the UI to match that of AutoLoL Fix: Detects and resolves 'Read Only' state on Version.xmlNew ProjectsA simple grammar based intellisense for Html / JavaScript: A JavaScript library to enable intellisense based on a grammar. Example: Sentence -> Greeting | Command Greeting -> "hello" Name Name -> string Command -> "execute " commandName commandName -> "test" | "build" | "verify" Then users will be guided with suggestions as they typeAif message header editor (AMHE): The Aif message header editor allows the developer to change the Aif message-header information in the Xml-document.Arabic Controls For WP7: This project provides a few right-to-left controls and an engine to render Arabic characters for WP7 due to the partial Arabic support.ASIVeste: No description availableAzureFiddlerCore: AzureFiddlerCore allows an instance of Fiddler to be hosted in an Azure application. It will export any requests sent through its special proxies to a SAZ file stored in Azure Blob storage, for you to download. It is written in C# using FiddlerCore.Ermek CMS: CS Tournament CMS (Claims Management System).Erqilu: Erqilu WebSite.HHChat: A client-server chat program allowing users to have a list of contacts with whom they can chat either individually or in groups. Will support sending files and emoticons. Developed in C# using WPF, MVVM and WCF.MFC GraphViewer: mfc graph algorithm toolMovieStorePDT: MovieStore-PruebaDeTecnología es un proyecto donde probaremos las tecnologías de desarrollo de software (ASP.NET MVC, C#, jQuery y EF) que utilizaremos en proyectos actuales y siguientes.NLib: NLib it's a Helper Library. It's developed in C#. Documentation will coming soonOrchard Tokens Module: Tokens module for orchard.Phatnotes to Evernote Converter: Convert your Phatnotes (Version 5) to Evernote. Phatnotes is a tool that syncs notes from PC to a windows-mobile phone or IPhone. I personally switched to an Android phone, and needed to convert my Phatnotes, so I chose Evernote. Sapit - Small And Powerful Integration Toolkit: Sapit is an implementation of integration patterns and techniques. Included are Cache, Circuit Breaker, Response Time Throttle and Timeout. Apply these to your code using Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) via Castle Windsor, PostSharp or Unity Application Block. More to come ...SimpleMVC: SimpleMVC is a lightweight .NET framework for creating applications based upon the classic Model, View and Controller concept.SMSRules: The most comprehensive SMS management tool which gives you an option to do what you always wanted to do. Some of the things which it enables you to do!! 1. Filter all the incoming messages and Move/Copy them to a folder 2. Create/Delete user folders. 3. Hide private messages. speakyourmind: A simple desktop client written in .NET that posts updates to Social Networking Sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The objective of creating this project is to learn the various social networking APIs available. (Currently only twitter support is added)String Toolkit.NET: Projeto para gerar string a partir de valores numericosTraceView Log Visualizer: TraceViewWallyMap & FindWally: Silverlight 4 and WP7 simple georeference applicationswp7 destiny: wp7 destinywp7 minesweeper: wp7 minesweeper

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  • Selling Federal Enterprise Architecture (EA)

    - by TedMcLaughlan
    Selling Federal Enterprise Architecture A taxonomy of subject areas, from which to develop a prioritized marketing and communications plan to evangelize EA activities within and among US Federal Government organizations and constituents. Any and all feedback is appreciated, particularly in developing and extending this discussion as a tool for use – more information and details are also available. "Selling" the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA) in the Federal Government (particularly in non-DoD agencies) is difficult, notwithstanding the general availability and use of the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) for some time now, and the relatively mature use of the reference models in the OMB Capital Planning and Investment (CPIC) cycles. EA in the Federal Government also tends to be a very esoteric and hard to decipher conversation – early apologies to those who agree to continue reading this somewhat lengthy article. Alignment to the FEAF and OMB compliance mandates is long underway across the Federal Departments and Agencies (and visible via tools like PortfolioStat and ITDashboard.gov – but there is still a gap between the top-down compliance directives and enablement programs, and the bottom-up awareness and effective use of EA for either IT investment management or actual mission effectiveness. "EA isn't getting deep enough penetration into programs, components, sub-agencies, etc.", verified a panelist at the most recent EA Government Conference in DC. Newer guidance from OMB may be especially difficult to handle, where bottom-up input can't be accurately aligned, analyzed and reported via standardized EA discipline at the Agency level – for example in addressing the new (for FY13) Exhibit 53D "Agency IT Reductions and Reinvestments" and the information required for "Cloud Computing Alternatives Evaluation" (supporting the new Exhibit 53C, "Agency Cloud Computing Portfolio"). Therefore, EA must be "sold" directly to the communities that matter, from a coordinated, proactive messaging perspective that takes BOTH the Program-level value drivers AND the broader Agency mission and IT maturity context into consideration. Selling EA means persuading others to take additional time and possibly assign additional resources, for a mix of direct and indirect benefits – many of which aren't likely to be realized in the short-term. This means there's probably little current, allocated budget to work with; ergo the challenge of trying to sell an "unfunded mandate". Also, the concept of "Enterprise" in large Departments like Homeland Security tends to cross all kinds of organizational boundaries – as Richard Spires recently indicated by commenting that "...organizational boundaries still trump functional similarities. Most people understand what we're trying to do internally, and at a high level they get it. The problem, of course, is when you get down to them and their system and the fact that you're going to be touching them...there's always that fear factor," Spires said. It is quite clear to the Federal IT Investment community that for EA to meet its objective, understandable, relevant value must be measured and reported using a repeatable method – as described by GAO's recent report "Enterprise Architecture Value Needs To Be Measured and Reported". What's not clear is the method or guidance to sell this value. In fact, the current GAO "Framework for Assessing and Improving Enterprise Architecture Management (Version 2.0)", a.k.a. the "EAMMF", does not include words like "sell", "persuade", "market", etc., except in reference ("within Core Element 19: Organization business owner and CXO representatives are actively engaged in architecture development") to a brief section in the CIO Council's 2001 "Practical Guide to Federal Enterprise Architecture", entitled "3.3.1. Develop an EA Marketing Strategy and Communications Plan." Furthermore, Core Element 19 of the EAMMF is advised to be applied in "Stage 3: Developing Initial EA Versions". This kind of EA sales campaign truly should start much earlier in the maturity progress, i.e. in Stages 0 or 1. So, what are the understandable, relevant benefits (or value) to sell, that can find an agreeable, participatory audience, and can pave the way towards success of a longer-term, funded set of EA mechanisms that can be methodically measured and reported? Pragmatic benefits from a useful EA that can help overcome the fear of change? And how should they be sold? Following is a brief taxonomy (it's a taxonomy, to help organize SME support) of benefit-related subjects that might make the most sense, in creating the messages and organizing an initial "engagement plan" for evangelizing EA "from within". An EA "Sales Taxonomy" of sorts. We're not boiling the ocean here; the subjects that are included are ones that currently appear to be urgently relevant to the current Federal IT Investment landscape. Note that successful dialogue in these topics is directly usable as input or guidance for actually developing early-stage, "Fit-for-Purpose" (a DoDAF term) Enterprise Architecture artifacts, as prescribed by common methods found in most EA methodologies, including FEAF, TOGAF, DoDAF and our own Oracle Enterprise Architecture Framework (OEAF). The taxonomy below is organized by (1) Target Community, (2) Benefit or Value, and (3) EA Program Facet - as in: "Let's talk to (1: Community Member) about how and why (3: EA Facet) the EA program can help with (2: Benefit/Value)". Once the initial discussion targets and subjects are approved (that can be measured and reported), a "marketing and communications plan" can be created. A working example follows the Taxonomy. Enterprise Architecture Sales Taxonomy Draft, Summary Version 1. Community 1.1. Budgeted Programs or Portfolios Communities of Purpose (CoPR) 1.1.1. Program/System Owners (Senior Execs) Creating or Executing Acquisition Plans 1.1.2. Program/System Owners Facing Strategic Change 1.1.2.1. Mandated 1.1.2.2. Expected/Anticipated 1.1.3. Program Managers - Creating Employee Performance Plans 1.1.4. CO/COTRs – Creating Contractor Performance Plans, or evaluating Value Engineering Change Proposals (VECP) 1.2. Governance & Communications Communities of Practice (CoP) 1.2.1. Policy Owners 1.2.1.1. OCFO 1.2.1.1.1. Budget/Procurement Office 1.2.1.1.2. Strategic Planning 1.2.1.2. OCIO 1.2.1.2.1. IT Management 1.2.1.2.2. IT Operations 1.2.1.2.3. Information Assurance (Cyber Security) 1.2.1.2.4. IT Innovation 1.2.1.3. Information-Sharing/ Process Collaboration (i.e. policies and procedures regarding Partners, Agreements) 1.2.2. Governing IT Council/SME Peers (i.e. an "Architects Council") 1.2.2.1. Enterprise Architects (assumes others exist; also assumes EA participants aren't buried solely within the CIO shop) 1.2.2.2. Domain, Enclave, Segment Architects – i.e. the right affinity group for a "shared services" EA structure (per the EAMMF), which may be classified as Federated, Segmented, Service-Oriented, or Extended 1.2.2.3. External Oversight/Constraints 1.2.2.3.1. GAO/OIG & Legal 1.2.2.3.2. Industry Standards 1.2.2.3.3. Official public notification, response 1.2.3. Mission Constituents Participant & Analyst Community of Interest (CoI) 1.2.3.1. Mission Operators/Users 1.2.3.2. Public Constituents 1.2.3.3. Industry Advisory Groups, Stakeholders 1.2.3.4. Media 2. Benefit/Value (Note the actual benefits may not be discretely attributable to EA alone; EA is a very collaborative, cross-cutting discipline.) 2.1. Program Costs – EA enables sound decisions regarding... 2.1.1. Cost Avoidance – a TCO theme 2.1.2. Sequencing – alignment of capability delivery 2.1.3. Budget Instability – a Federal reality 2.2. Investment Capital – EA illuminates new investment resources via... 2.2.1. Value Engineering – contractor-driven cost savings on existing budgets, direct or collateral 2.2.2. Reuse – reuse of investments between programs can result in savings, chargeback models; avoiding duplication 2.2.3. License Refactoring – IT license & support models may not reflect actual or intended usage 2.3. Contextual Knowledge – EA enables informed decisions by revealing... 2.3.1. Common Operating Picture (COP) – i.e. cross-program impacts and synergy, relative to context 2.3.2. Expertise & Skill – who truly should be involved in architectural decisions, both business and IT 2.3.3. Influence – the impact of politics and relationships can be examined 2.3.4. Disruptive Technologies – new technologies may reduce costs or mitigate risk in unanticipated ways 2.3.5. What-If Scenarios – can become much more refined, current, verifiable; basis for Target Architectures 2.4. Mission Performance – EA enables beneficial decision results regarding... 2.4.1. IT Performance and Optimization – towards 100% effective, available resource utilization 2.4.2. IT Stability – towards 100%, real-time uptime 2.4.3. Agility – responding to rapid changes in mission 2.4.4. Outcomes –measures of mission success, KPIs – vs. only "Outputs" 2.4.5. Constraints – appropriate response to constraints 2.4.6. Personnel Performance – better line-of-sight through performance plans to mission outcome 2.5. Mission Risk Mitigation – EA mitigates decision risks in terms of... 2.5.1. Compliance – all the right boxes are checked 2.5.2. Dependencies –cross-agency, segment, government 2.5.3. Transparency – risks, impact and resource utilization are illuminated quickly, comprehensively 2.5.4. Threats and Vulnerabilities – current, realistic awareness and profiles 2.5.5. Consequences – realization of risk can be mapped as a series of consequences, from earlier decisions or new decisions required for current issues 2.5.5.1. Unanticipated – illuminating signals of future or non-symmetric risk; helping to "future-proof" 2.5.5.2. Anticipated – discovering the level of impact that matters 3. EA Program Facet (What parts of the EA can and should be communicated, using business or mission terms?) 3.1. Architecture Models – the visual tools to be created and used 3.1.1. Operating Architecture – the Business Operating Model/Architecture elements of the EA truly drive all other elements, plus expose communication channels 3.1.2. Use Of – how can the EA models be used, and how are they populated, from a reasonable, pragmatic yet compliant perspective? What are the core/minimal models required? What's the relationship of these models, with existing system models? 3.1.3. Scope – what level of granularity within the models, and what level of abstraction across the models, is likely to be most effective and useful? 3.2. Traceability – the maturity, status, completeness of the tools 3.2.1. Status – what in fact is the degree of maturity across the integrated EA model and other relevant governance models, and who may already be benefiting from it? 3.2.2. Visibility – how does the EA visibly and effectively prove IT investment performance goals are being reached, with positive mission outcome? 3.3. Governance – what's the interaction, participation method; how are the tools used? 3.3.1. Contributions – how is the EA program informed, accept submissions, collect data? Who are the experts? 3.3.2. Review – how is the EA validated, against what criteria?  Taxonomy Usage Example:   1. To speak with: a. ...a particular set of System Owners Facing Strategic Change, via mandate (like the "Cloud First" mandate); about... b. ...how the EA program's visible and easily accessible Infrastructure Reference Model (i.e. "IRM" or "TRM"), if updated more completely with current system data, can... c. ...help shed light on ways to mitigate risks and avoid future costs associated with NOT leveraging potentially-available shared services across the enterprise... 2. ....the following Marketing & Communications (Sales) Plan can be constructed: a. Create an easy-to-read "Consequence Model" that illustrates how adoption of a cloud capability (like elastic operational storage) can enable rapid and durable compliance with the mandate – using EA traceability. Traceability might be from the IRM to the ARM (that identifies reusable services invoking the elastic storage), and then to the PRM with performance measures (such as % utilization of purchased storage allocation) included in the OMB Exhibits; and b. Schedule a meeting with the Program Owners, timed during their Acquisition Strategy meetings in response to the mandate, to use the "Consequence Model" for advising them to organize a rapid and relevant RFI solicitation for this cloud capability (regarding alternatives for sourcing elastic operational storage); and c. Schedule a series of short "Discovery" meetings with the system architecture leads (as agreed by the Program Owners), to further populate/validate the "As-Is" models and frame the "To Be" models (via scenarios), to better inform the RFI, obtain the best feedback from the vendor community, and provide potential value for and avoid impact to all other programs and systems. --end example -- Note that communications with the intended audience should take a page out of the standard "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) playbook, using keywords and phrases relating to "value" and "outcome" vs. "compliance" and "output". Searches in email boxes, internal and external search engines for phrases like "cost avoidance strategies", "mission performance metrics" and "innovation funding" should yield messages and content from the EA team. This targeted, informed, practical sales approach should result in additional buy-in and participation, additional EA information contribution and model validation, development of more SMEs and quick "proof points" (with real-life testing) to bolster the case for EA. The proof point here is a successful, timely procurement that satisfies not only the external mandate and external oversight review, but also meets internal EA compliance/conformance goals and therefore is more transparently useful across the community. In short, if sold effectively, the EA will perform and be recognized. EA won’t therefore be used only for compliance, but also (according to a validated, stated purpose) to directly influence decisions and outcomes. The opinions, views and analysis expressed in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.

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  • Windows Azure: Backup Services Release, Hyper-V Recovery Manager, VM Enhancements, Enhanced Enterprise Management Support

    - by ScottGu
    This morning we released a huge set of updates to Windows Azure.  These new capabilities include: Backup Services: General Availability of Windows Azure Backup Services Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Public preview of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Configuration Active Directory: Securely manage hundreds of SaaS applications Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure Windows Azure SDK 2.2: A massive update of our SDK + Visual Studio tooling support All of these improvements are now available to use immediately.  Below are more details about them. Backup Service: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Backup Today we are releasing Windows Azure Backup Service as a general availability service.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. Windows Azure Backup is a cloud based backup solution for Windows Server which allows files and folders to be backed up and recovered from the cloud, and provides off-site protection against data loss. The service provides IT administrators and developers with the option to back up and protect critical data in an easily recoverable way from any location with no upfront hardware cost. Windows Azure Backup is built on the Windows Azure platform and uses Windows Azure blob storage for storing customer data. Windows Server uses the downloadable Windows Azure Backup Agent to transfer file and folder data securely and efficiently to the Windows Azure Backup Service. Along with providing cloud backup for Windows Server, Windows Azure Backup Service also provides capability to backup data from System Center Data Protection Manager and Windows Server Essentials, to the cloud. All data is encrypted onsite before it is sent to the cloud, and customers retain and manage the encryption key (meaning the data is stored entirely secured and can’t be decrypted by anyone but yourself). Getting Started To get started with the Windows Azure Backup Service, create a new Backup Vault within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Click New->Data Services->Recovery Services->Backup Vault to do this: Once the backup vault is created you’ll be presented with a simple tutorial that will help guide you on how to register your Windows Servers with it: Once the servers you want to backup are registered, you can use the appropriate local management interface (such as the Microsoft Management Console snap-in, System Center Data Protection Manager Console, or Windows Server Essentials Dashboard) to configure the scheduled backups and to optionally initiate recoveries. You can follow these tutorials to learn more about how to do this: Tutorial: Schedule Backups Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent This tutorial helps you with setting up a backup schedule for your registered Windows Servers. Additionally, it also explains how to use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to set up a custom backup schedule. Tutorial: Recover Files and Folders Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent This tutorial helps you with recovering data from a backup. Additionally, it also explains how to use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to do the same tasks. Below are some of the key benefits the Windows Azure Backup Service provides: Simple configuration and management. Windows Azure Backup Service integrates with the familiar Windows Server Backup utility in Windows Server, the Data Protection Manager component in System Center and Windows Server Essentials, in order to provide a seamless backup and recovery experience to a local disk, or to the cloud. Block level incremental backups. The Windows Azure Backup Agent performs incremental backups by tracking file and block level changes and only transferring the changed blocks, hence reducing the storage and bandwidth utilization. Different point-in-time versions of the backups use storage efficiently by only storing the changes blocks between these versions. Data compression, encryption and throttling. The Windows Azure Backup Agent ensures that data is compressed and encrypted on the server before being sent to the Windows Azure Backup Service over the network. As a result, the Windows Azure Backup Service only stores encrypted data in the cloud storage. The encryption key is not available to the Windows Azure Backup Service, and as a result the data is never decrypted in the service. Also, users can setup throttling and configure how the Windows Azure Backup service utilizes the network bandwidth when backing up or restoring information. Data integrity is verified in the cloud. In addition to the secure backups, the backed up data is also automatically checked for integrity once the backup is done. As a result, any corruptions which may arise due to data transfer can be easily identified and are fixed automatically. Configurable retention policies for storing data in the cloud. The Windows Azure Backup Service accepts and implements retention policies to recycle backups that exceed the desired retention range, thereby meeting business policies and managing backup costs. Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Now Available in Public Preview I’m excited to also announce the public preview of a new Windows Azure Service – the Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM). Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager helps protect your business critical services by coordinating the replication and recovery of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 private clouds at a secondary location. With automated protection, asynchronous ongoing replication, and orderly recovery, the Hyper-V Recovery Manager service can help you implement Disaster Recovery and restore important services accurately, consistently, and with minimal downtime. Application data in an Hyper-V Recovery Manager scenarios always travels on your on-premise replication channel. Only metadata (such as names of logical clouds, virtual machines, networks etc.) that is needed for orchestration is sent to Azure. All traffic sent to/from Azure is encrypted. You can begin using Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery today by clicking New->Data Services->Recovery Services->Hyper-V Recovery Manager within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can read more about Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager in Brad Anderson’s 9-part series, Transform the datacenter. To learn more about setting up Hyper-V Recovery Manager follow our detailed step-by-step guide. Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Today’s Windows Azure release includes a number of nice updates to Windows Azure Virtual Machines.  These improvements include: Ability to Delete both VM Instances + Attached Disks in One Operation Prior to today’s release, when you deleted VMs within Windows Azure we would delete the VM instance – but not delete the drives attached to the VM.  You had to manually delete these yourself from the storage account.  With today’s update we’ve added a convenience option that now allows you to either retain or delete the attached disks when you delete the VM:   We’ve also added the ability to delete a cloud service, its deployments, and its role instances with a single action. This can either be a cloud service that has production and staging deployments with web and worker roles, or a cloud service that contains virtual machines.  To do this, simply select the Cloud Service within the Windows Azure Management Portal and click the “Delete” button: Warnings on Availability Sets with Only One Virtual Machine In Them One of the nice features that Windows Azure Virtual Machines supports is the concept of “Availability Sets”.  An “availability set” allows you to define a tier/role (e.g. webfrontends, databaseservers, etc) that you can map Virtual Machines into – and when you do this Windows Azure separates them across fault domains and ensures that at least one of them is always available during servicing operations.  This enables you to deploy applications in a high availability way. One issue we’ve seen some customers run into is where they define an availability set, but then forget to map more than one VM into it (which defeats the purpose of having an availability set).  With today’s release we now display a warning in the Windows Azure Management Portal if you have only one virtual machine deployed in an availability set to help highlight this: You can learn more about configuring the availability of your virtual machines here. Configuring SQL Server Always On SQL Server Always On is a great feature that you can use with Windows Azure to enable high availability and DR scenarios with SQL Server. Today’s Windows Azure release makes it even easier to configure SQL Server Always On by enabling “Direct Server Return” endpoints to be configured and managed within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Previously, setting this up required using PowerShell to complete the endpoint configuration.  Starting today you can enable this simply by checking the “Direct Server Return” checkbox: You can learn more about how to use direct server return for SQL Server AlwaysOn availability groups here. Active Directory: Application Access Enhancements This summer we released our initial preview of our Application Access Enhancements for Windows Azure Active Directory.  This service enables you to securely implement single-sign-on (SSO) support against SaaS applications (including Office 365, SalesForce, Workday, Box, Google Apps, GitHub, etc) as well as LOB based applications (including ones built with the new Windows Azure AD support we shipped last week with ASP.NET and VS 2013). Since the initial preview we’ve enhanced our SAML federation capabilities, integrated our new password vaulting system, and shipped multi-factor authentication support. We've also turned on our outbound identity provisioning system and have it working with hundreds of additional SaaS Applications: Earlier this month we published an update on dates and pricing for when the service will be released in general availability form.  In this blog post we announced our intention to release the service in general availability form by the end of the year.  We also announced that the below features would be available in a free tier with it: SSO to every SaaS app we integrate with – Users can Single Sign On to any app we are integrated with at no charge. This includes all the top SAAS Apps and every app in our application gallery whether they use federation or password vaulting. Application access assignment and removal – IT Admins can assign access privileges to web applications to the users in their active directory assuring that every employee has access to the SAAS Apps they need. And when a user leaves the company or changes jobs, the admin can just as easily remove their access privileges assuring data security and minimizing IP loss User provisioning (and de-provisioning) – IT admins will be able to automatically provision users in 3rd party SaaS applications like Box, Salesforce.com, GoToMeeting, DropBox and others. We are working with key partners in the ecosystem to establish these connections, meaning you no longer have to continually update user records in multiple systems. Security and auditing reports – Security is a key priority for us. With the free version of these enhancements you'll get access to our standard set of access reports giving you visibility into which users are using which applications, when they were using them and where they are using them from. In addition, we'll alert you to un-usual usage patterns for instance when a user logs in from multiple locations at the same time. Our Application Access Panel – Users are logging in from every type of devices including Windows, iOS, & Android. Not all of these devices handle authentication in the same manner but the user doesn't care. They need to access their apps from the devices they love. Our Application Access Panel will support the ability for users to access access and launch their apps from any device and anywhere. You can learn more about our plans for application management with Windows Azure Active Directory here.  Try out the preview and start using it today. Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure Windows Azure Active Directory provides the ability to manage your organization in a directory which is hosted entirely in the cloud, or alternatively kept in sync with an on-premises Windows Server Active Directory solution (allowing you to seamlessly integrate with the directory you already have).  With today’s Windows Azure release we are integrating Windows Azure Active Directory even more within the core Windows Azure management experience, and enabling an even richer enterprise security offering.  Specifically: 1) All Windows Azure accounts now have a default Windows Azure Active Directory created for them.  You can create and map any users you want into this directory, and grant administrative rights to manage resources in Windows Azure to these users. 2) You can keep this directory entirely hosted in the cloud – or optionally sync it with your on-premises Windows Server Active Directory.  Both options are free.  The later approach is ideal for companies that wish to use their corporate user identities to sign-in and manage Windows Azure resources.  It also ensures that if an employee leaves an organization, his or her access control rights to the company’s Windows Azure resources are immediately revoked. 3) The Windows Azure Service Management APIs have been updated to support using Windows Azure Active Directory credentials to sign-in and perform management operations.  Prior to today’s release customers had to download and use management certificates (which were not scoped to individual users) to perform management operations.  We still support this management certificate approach (don’t worry – nothing will stop working).  But we think the new Windows Azure Active Directory authentication support enables an even easier and more secure way for customers to manage resources going forward.  4) The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release (which is also shipping today) includes built-in support for the new Service Management APIs that authenticate with Windows Azure Active Directory, and now allow you to create and manage Windows Azure applications and resources directly within Visual Studio using your Active Directory credentials.  This, combined with updated PowerShell scripts that also support Active Directory, enables an end-to-end enterprise authentication story with Windows Azure. Below are some details on how all of this works: Subscriptions within a Directory As part of today’s update, we have associated all existing Window Azure accounts with a Windows Azure Active Directory (and created one for you if you don’t already have one). When you login to the Windows Azure Management Portal you’ll now see the directory name in the URI of the browser.  For example, in the screen-shot below you can see that I have a “scottgu” directory that my subscriptions are hosted within: Note that you can continue to use Microsoft Accounts (formerly known as Microsoft Live IDs) to sign-into Windows Azure.  These map just fine to a Windows Azure Active Directory – so there is no need to create new usernames that are specific to a directory if you don’t want to.  In the scenario above I’m actually logged in using my @hotmail.com based Microsoft ID which is now mapped to a “scottgu” active directory that was created for me.  By default everything will continue to work just like you used to before. Manage your Directory You can manage an Active Directory (including the one we now create for you by default) by clicking the “Active Directory” tab in the left-hand side of the portal.  This will list all of the directories in your account.  Clicking one the first time will display a getting started page that provides documentation and links to perform common tasks with it: You can use the built-in directory management support within the Windows Azure Management Portal to add/remove/manage users within the directory, enable multi-factor authentication, associate a custom domain (e.g. mycompanyname.com) with the directory, and/or rename the directory to whatever friendly name you want (just click the configure tab to do this).  You can also setup the directory to automatically sync with an on-premises Active Directory using the “Directory Integration” tab. Note that users within a directory by default do not have admin rights to login or manage Windows Azure based resources.  You still need to explicitly grant them co-admin permissions on a subscription for them to login or manage resources in Windows Azure.  You can do this by clicking the Settings tab on the left-hand side of the portal and then by clicking the administrators tab within it. Sign-In Integration within Visual Studio If you install the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release, you can now connect to Windows Azure from directly inside Visual Studio without having to download any management certificates.  You can now just right-click on the “Windows Azure” icon within the Server Explorer and choose the “Connect to Windows Azure” context menu option to do so: Doing this will prompt you to enter the email address of the username you wish to sign-in with (make sure this account is a user in your directory with co-admin rights on a subscription): You can use either a Microsoft Account (e.g. Windows Live ID) or an Active Directory based Organizational account as the email.  The dialog will update with an appropriate login prompt depending on which type of email address you enter: Once you sign-in you’ll see the Windows Azure resources that you have permissions to manage show up automatically within the Visual Studio server explorer and be available to start using: No downloading of management certificates required.  All of the authentication was handled using your Windows Azure Active Directory! Manage Subscriptions across Multiple Directories If you have already have multiple directories and multiple subscriptions within your Windows Azure account, we have done our best to create a good default mapping of your subscriptions->directories as part of today’s update.  If you don’t like the default subscription-to-directory mapping we have done you can click the Settings tab in the left-hand navigation of the Windows Azure Management Portal and browse to the Subscriptions tab within it: If you want to map a subscription under a different directory in your account, simply select the subscription from the list, and then click the “Edit Directory” button to choose which directory to map it to.  Mapping a subscription to a different directory takes only seconds and will not cause any of the resources within the subscription to recycle or stop working.  We’ve made the directory->subscription mapping process self-service so that you always have complete control and can map things however you want. Filtering By Directory and Subscription Within the Windows Azure Management Portal you can filter resources in the portal by subscription (allowing you to show/hide different subscriptions).  If you have subscriptions mapped to multiple directory tenants, we also now have a filter drop-down that allows you to filter the subscription list by directory tenant.  This filter is only available if you have multiple subscriptions mapped to multiple directories within your Windows Azure Account:   Windows Azure SDK 2.2 Today we are also releasing a major update of our Windows Azure SDK.  The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release adds some great new features including: Visual Studio 2013 Support Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio Remote Debugging Cloud Services with Visual Studio Firewall Management support within Visual Studio for SQL Databases Visual Studio 2013 RTM VM Images for MSDN Subscribers Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET Updated Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets and ScriptCenter I’ll post a follow-up blog shortly with more details about all of the above. Additional Updates In addition to the above enhancements, today’s release also includes a number of additional improvements: AutoScale: Richer time and date based scheduling support (set different rules on different dates) AutoScale: Ability to Scale to Zero Virtual Machines (very useful for Dev/Test scenarios) AutoScale: Support for time-based scheduling of Mobile Service AutoScale rules Operation Logs: Auditing support for Service Bus management operations Today we also shipped a major update to the Windows Azure SDK – Windows Azure SDK 2.2.  It has so much goodness in it that I have a whole second blog post coming shortly on it! :-) Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a bunch of great new scenarios, and enables a much richer enterprise authentication offering. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • Toorcon 15 (2013)

    - by danx
    The Toorcon gang (senior staff): h1kari (founder), nfiltr8, and Geo Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Making Attacks Go Backwards Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) Toorcon 15 is the 15th annual security conference held in San Diego. I've attended about a third of them and blogged about previous conferences I attended here starting in 2003. As always, I've only summarized the talks I attended and interested me enough to write about them. Be aware that I may have misrepresented the speaker's remarks and that they are not my remarks or opinion, or those of my employer, so don't quote me or them. Those seeking further details may contact the speakers directly or use The Google. For some talks, I have a URL for further information. A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Andrew Furtak and Oleksandr Bazhaniuk Yuri Bulygin, Oleksandr ("Alex") Bazhaniuk, and (not present) Andrew Furtak Yuri and Alex talked about UEFI and Bootkits and bypassing MS Windows 8 Secure Boot, with vendor recommendations. They previously gave this talk at the BlackHat 2013 conference. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Overview UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is interface between hardware and OS. UEFI is processor and architecture independent. Malware can replace bootloader (bootx64.efi, bootmgfw.efi). Once replaced can modify kernel. Trivial to replace bootloader. Today many legacy bootkits—UEFI replaces them most of them. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot verifies everything you load, either through signatures or hashes. UEFI firmware relies on secure update (with signed update). You would think Secure Boot would rely on ROM (such as used for phones0, but you can't do that for PCs—PCs use writable memory with signatures DXE core verifies the UEFI boat loader(s) OS Loader (winload.efi, winresume.efi) verifies the OS kernel A chain of trust is established with a root key (Platform Key, PK), which is a cert belonging to the platform vendor. Key Exchange Keys (KEKs) verify an "authorized" database (db), and "forbidden" database (dbx). X.509 certs with SHA-1/SHA-256 hashes. Keys are stored in non-volatile (NV) flash-based NVRAM. Boot Services (BS) allow adding/deleting keys (can't be accessed once OS starts—which uses Run-Time (RT)). Root cert uses RSA-2048 public keys and PKCS#7 format signatures. SecureBoot — enable disable image signature checks SetupMode — update keys, self-signed keys, and secure boot variables CustomMode — allows updating keys Secure Boot policy settings are: always execute, never execute, allow execute on security violation, defer execute on security violation, deny execute on security violation, query user on security violation Attacking MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Secure Boot does NOT protect from physical access. Can disable from console. Each BIOS vendor implements Secure Boot differently. There are several platform and BIOS vendors. It becomes a "zoo" of implementations—which can be taken advantage of. Secure Boot is secure only when all vendors implement it correctly. Allow only UEFI firmware signed updates protect UEFI firmware from direct modification in flash memory protect FW update components program SPI controller securely protect secure boot policy settings in nvram protect runtime api disable compatibility support module which allows unsigned legacy Can corrupt the Platform Key (PK) EFI root certificate variable in SPI flash. If PK is not found, FW enters setup mode wich secure boot turned off. Can also exploit TPM in a similar manner. One is not supposed to be able to directly modify the PK in SPI flash from the OS though. But they found a bug that they can exploit from User Mode (undisclosed) and demoed the exploit. It loaded and ran their own bootkit. The exploit requires a reboot. Multiple vendors are vulnerable. They will disclose this exploit to vendors in the future. Recommendations: allow only signed updates protect UEFI fw in ROM protect EFI variable store in ROM Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Yoel Gluck and Angelo Prado Angelo Prado and Yoel Gluck, Salesforce.com CRIME is software that performs a "compression oracle attack." This is possible because the SSL protocol doesn't hide length, and because SSL compresses the header. CRIME requests with every possible character and measures the ciphertext length. Look for the plaintext which compresses the most and looks for the cookie one byte-at-a-time. SSL Compression uses LZ77 to reduce redundancy. Huffman coding replaces common byte sequences with shorter codes. US CERT thinks the SSL compression problem is fixed, but it isn't. They convinced CERT that it wasn't fixed and they issued a CVE. BREACH, breachattrack.com BREACH exploits the SSL response body (Accept-Encoding response, Content-Encoding). It takes advantage of the fact that the response is not compressed. BREACH uses gzip and needs fairly "stable" pages that are static for ~30 seconds. It needs attacker-supplied content (say from a web form or added to a URL parameter). BREACH listens to a session's requests and responses, then inserts extra requests and responses. Eventually, BREACH guesses a session's secret key. Can use compression to guess contents one byte at-a-time. For example, "Supersecret SupersecreX" (a wrong guess) compresses 10 bytes, and "Supersecret Supersecret" (a correct guess) compresses 11 bytes, so it can find each character by guessing every character. To start the guess, BREACH needs at least three known initial characters in the response sequence. Compression length then "leaks" information. Some roadblocks include no winners (all guesses wrong) or too many winners (multiple possibilities that compress the same). The solutions include: lookahead (guess 2 or 3 characters at-a-time instead of 1 character). Expensive rollback to last known conflict check compression ratio can brute-force first 3 "bootstrap" characters, if needed (expensive) block ciphers hide exact plain text length. Solution is to align response in advance to block size Mitigations length: use variable padding secrets: dynamic CSRF tokens per request secret: change over time separate secret to input-less servlets Future work eiter understand DEFLATE/GZIP HTTPS extensions Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Ryan Huber Ryan Huber, Risk I/O Ryan first discussed various ways to do a denial of service (DoS) attack against web services. One usual method is to find a slow web page and do several wgets. Or download large files. Apache is not well suited at handling a large number of connections, but one can put something in front of it Can use Apache alternatives, such as nginx How to identify malicious hosts short, sudden web requests user-agent is obvious (curl, python) same url requested repeatedly no web page referer (not normal) hidden links. hide a link and see if a bot gets it restricted access if not your geo IP (unless the website is global) missing common headers in request regular timing first seen IP at beginning of attack count requests per hosts (usually a very large number) Use of captcha can mitigate attacks, but you'll lose a lot of genuine users. Bouncer, goo.gl/c2vyEc and www.github.com/rawdigits/Bouncer Bouncer is software written by Ryan in netflow. Bouncer has a small, unobtrusive footprint and detects DoS attempts. It closes blacklisted sockets immediately (not nice about it, no proper close connection). Aggregator collects requests and controls your web proxies. Need NTP on the front end web servers for clean data for use by bouncer. Bouncer is also useful for a popularity storm ("Slashdotting") and scraper storms. Future features: gzip collection data, documentation, consumer library, multitask, logging destroyed connections. Takeaways: DoS mitigation is easier with a complete picture Bouncer designed to make it easier to detect and defend DoS—not a complete cure Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman, Adobe ASSET, blogs.adobe.com/asset/ Peleus and Karthik talked about response to mass-customized exploits. Attackers behave much like a business. "Mass customization" refers to concept discussed in the book Future Perfect by Stan Davis of Harvard Business School. Mass customization is differentiating a product for an individual customer, but at a mass production price. For example, the same individual with a debit card receives basically the same customized ATM experience around the world. Or designing your own PC from commodity parts. Exploit kits are another example of mass customization. The kits support multiple browsers and plugins, allows new modules. Exploit kits are cheap and customizable. Organized gangs use exploit kits. A group at Berkeley looked at 77,000 malicious websites (Grier et al., "Manufacturing Compromise: The Emergence of Exploit-as-a-Service", 2012). They found 10,000 distinct binaries among them, but derived from only a dozen or so exploit kits. Characteristics of Mass Malware: potent, resilient, relatively low cost Technical characteristics: multiple OS, multipe payloads, multiple scenarios, multiple languages, obfuscation Response time for 0-day exploits has gone down from ~40 days 5 years ago to about ~10 days now. So the drive with malware is towards mass customized exploits, to avoid detection There's plenty of evicence that exploit development has Project Manager bureaucracy. They infer from the malware edicts to: support all versions of reader support all versions of windows support all versions of flash support all browsers write large complex, difficult to main code (8750 lines of JavaScript for example Exploits have "loose coupling" of multipe versions of software (adobe), OS, and browser. This allows specific attacks against specific versions of multiple pieces of software. Also allows exploits of more obscure software/OS/browsers and obscure versions. Gave examples of exploits that exploited 2, 3, 6, or 14 separate bugs. However, these complete exploits are more likely to be buggy or fragile in themselves and easier to defeat. Future research includes normalizing malware and Javascript. Conclusion: The coming trend is that mass-malware with mass zero-day attacks will result in mass customization of attacks. x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Richard Wartell Richard Wartell The attack vector we are addressing here is: First some malware causes a buffer overflow. The malware has no program access, but input access and buffer overflow code onto stack Later the stack became non-executable. The workaround malware used was to write a bogus return address to the stack jumping to malware Later came ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to randomize memory layout and make addresses non-deterministic. The workaround malware used was to jump t existing code segments in the program that can be used in bad ways "RoP" is Return-oriented Programming attacks. RoP attacks use your own code and write return address on stack to (existing) expoitable code found in program ("gadgets"). Pinkie Pie was paid $60K last year for a RoP attack. One solution is using anti-RoP compilers that compile source code with NO return instructions. ASLR does not randomize address space, just "gadgets". IPR/ILR ("Instruction Location Randomization") randomizes each instruction with a virtual machine. Richard's goal was to randomize a binary with no source code access. He created "STIR" (Self-Transofrming Instruction Relocation). STIR disassembles binary and operates on "basic blocks" of code. The STIR disassembler is conservative in what to disassemble. Each basic block is moved to a random location in memory. Next, STIR writes new code sections with copies of "basic blocks" of code in randomized locations. The old code is copied and rewritten with jumps to new code. the original code sections in the file is marked non-executible. STIR has better entropy than ASLR in location of code. Makes brute force attacks much harder. STIR runs on MS Windows (PEM) and Linux (ELF). It eliminated 99.96% or more "gadgets" (i.e., moved the address). Overhead usually 5-10% on MS Windows, about 1.5-4% on Linux (but some code actually runs faster!). The unique thing about STIR is it requires no source access and the modified binary fully works! Current work is to rewrite code to enforce security policies. For example, don't create a *.{exe,msi,bat} file. Or don't connect to the network after reading from the disk. Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Collin Greene Collin Greene, Facebook Collin talked about Facebook's bug bounty program. Background at FB: FB has good security frameworks, such as security teams, external audits, and cc'ing on diffs. But there's lots of "deep, dark, forgotten" parts of legacy FB code. Collin gave several examples of bountied bugs. Some bounty submissions were on software purchased from a third-party (but bounty claimers don't know and don't care). We use security questions, as does everyone else, but they are basically insecure (often easily discoverable). Collin didn't expect many bugs from the bounty program, but they ended getting 20+ good bugs in first 24 hours and good submissions continue to come in. Bug bounties bring people in with different perspectives, and are paid only for success. Bug bounty is a better use of a fixed amount of time and money versus just code review or static code analysis. The Bounty program started July 2011 and paid out $1.5 million to date. 14% of the submissions have been high priority problems that needed to be fixed immediately. The best bugs come from a small % of submitters (as with everything else)—the top paid submitters are paid 6 figures a year. Spammers like to backstab competitors. The youngest sumitter was 13. Some submitters have been hired. Bug bounties also allows to see bugs that were missed by tools or reviews, allowing improvement in the process. Bug bounties might not work for traditional software companies where the product has release cycle or is not on Internet. Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Anna Shubina Anna Shubina, Dartmouth Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (I missed the start of her talk because another track went overtime. But I have the DVD of the talk, so I'll expand later) IPsec leaves fingerprints. Using netcat, one can easily visually distinguish various crypto chaining modes just from packet timing on a chart (example, DES-CBC versus AES-CBC) One can tell a lot about VPNs just from ping roundtrips (such as what router is used) Delayed packets are not informative about a network, especially if far away from the network More needed to explore about how TCP works in real life with respect to timing Making Attacks Go Backwards Fuzzynop FuzzyNop, Mandiant This talk is not about threat attribution (finding who), product solutions, politics, or sales pitches. But who are making these malware threats? It's not a single person or group—they have diverse skill levels. There's a lot of fat-fingered fumblers out there. Always look for low-hanging fruit first: "hiding" malware in the temp, recycle, or root directories creation of unnamed scheduled tasks obvious names of files and syscalls ("ClearEventLog") uncleared event logs. Clearing event log in itself, and time of clearing, is a red flag and good first clue to look for on a suspect system Reverse engineering is hard. Disassembler use takes practice and skill. A popular tool is IDA Pro, but it takes multiple interactive iterations to get a clean disassembly. Key loggers are used a lot in targeted attacks. They are typically custom code or built in a backdoor. A big tip-off is that non-printable characters need to be printed out (such as "[Ctrl]" "[RightShift]") or time stamp printf strings. Look for these in files. Presence is not proof they are used. Absence is not proof they are not used. Java exploits. Can parse jar file with idxparser.py and decomile Java file. Java typially used to target tech companies. Backdoors are the main persistence mechanism (provided externally) for malware. Also malware typically needs command and control. Application of Artificial Intelligence in Ad-Hoc Static Code Analysis John Ashaman John Ashaman, Security Innovation Initially John tried to analyze open source files with open source static analysis tools, but these showed thousands of false positives. Also tried using grep, but tis fails to find anything even mildly complex. So next John decided to write his own tool. His approach was to first generate a call graph then analyze the graph. However, the problem is that making a call graph is really hard. For example, one problem is "evil" coding techniques, such as passing function pointer. First the tool generated an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) with the nodes created from method declarations and edges created from method use. Then the tool generated a control flow graph with the goal to find a path through the AST (a maze) from source to sink. The algorithm is to look at adjacent nodes to see if any are "scary" (a vulnerability), using heuristics for search order. The tool, called "Scat" (Static Code Analysis Tool), currently looks for C# vulnerabilities and some simple PHP. Later, he plans to add more PHP, then JSP and Java. For more information see his posts in Security Innovation blog and NRefactory on GitHub. Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Sometimes in emailing or posting TCP/IP packets to analyze problems, you may want to mask the IP address. But to do this correctly, you need to mask the checksum too, or you'll leak information about the IP. Problem reports found in stackoverflow.com, sans.org, and pastebin.org are usually not masked, but a few companies do care. If only the IP is masked, the IP may be guessed from checksum (that is, it leaks data). Other parts of packet may leak more data about the IP. TCP and IP checksums both refer to the same data, so can get more bits of information out of using both checksums than just using one checksum. Also, one can usually determine the OS from the TTL field and ports in a packet header. If we get hundreds of possible results (16x each masked nibble that is unknown), one can do other things to narrow the results, such as look at packet contents for domain or geo information. With hundreds of results, can import as CSV format into a spreadsheet. Can corelate with geo data and see where each possibility is located. Eric then demoed a real email report with a masked IP packet attached. Was able to find the exact IP address, given the geo and university of the sender. Point is if you're going to mask a packet, do it right. Eric wouldn't usually bother, but do it correctly if at all, to not create a false impression of security. Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Sergey Bratus Sergey Bratus, Dartmouth College (and Julian Bangert and Rebecca Shapiro, not present) "Reflections on Trusting Trust" refers to Ken Thompson's classic 1984 paper. "You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself." There's invisible links in the chain-of-trust, such as "well-installed microcode bugs" or in the compiler, and other planted bugs. Thompson showed how a compiler can introduce and propagate bugs in unmodified source. But suppose if there's no bugs and you trust the author, can you trust the code? Hell No! There's too many factors—it's Babylonian in nature. Why not? Well, Input is not well-defined/recognized (code's assumptions about "checked" input will be violated (bug/vunerabiliy). For example, HTML is recursive, but Regex checking is not recursive. Input well-formed but so complex there's no telling what it does For example, ELF file parsing is complex and has multiple ways of parsing. Input is seen differently by different pieces of program or toolchain Any Input is a program input executes on input handlers (drives state changes & transitions) only a well-defined execution model can be trusted (regex/DFA, PDA, CFG) Input handler either is a "recognizer" for the inputs as a well-defined language (see langsec.org) or it's a "virtual machine" for inputs to drive into pwn-age ELF ABI (UNIX/Linux executible file format) case study. Problems can arise from these steps (without planting bugs): compiler linker loader ld.so/rtld relocator DWARF (debugger info) exceptions The problem is you can't really automatically analyze code (it's the "halting problem" and undecidable). Only solution is to freeze code and sign it. But you can't freeze everything! Can't freeze ASLR or loading—must have tables and metadata. Any sufficiently complex input data is the same as VM byte code Example, ELF relocation entries + dynamic symbols == a Turing Complete Machine (TM). @bxsays created a Turing machine in Linux from relocation data (not code) in an ELF file. For more information, see Rebecca "bx" Shapiro's presentation from last year's Toorcon, "Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata" @bxsays did same thing with Mach-O bytecode Or a DWARF exception handling data .eh_frame + glibc == Turning Machine X86 MMU (IDT, GDT, TSS): used address translation to create a Turning Machine. Page handler reads and writes (on page fault) memory. Uses a page table, which can be used as Turning Machine byte code. Example on Github using this TM that will fly a glider across the screen Next Sergey talked about "Parser Differentials". That having one input format, but two parsers, will create confusion and opportunity for exploitation. For example, CSRs are parsed during creation by cert requestor and again by another parser at the CA. Another example is ELF—several parsers in OS tool chain, which are all different. Can have two different Program Headers (PHDRs) because ld.so parses multiple PHDRs. The second PHDR can completely transform the executable. This is described in paper in the first issue of International Journal of PoC. Conclusions trusting computers not only about bugs! Bugs are part of a problem, but no by far all of it complex data formats means bugs no "chain of trust" in Babylon! (that is, with parser differentials) we need to squeeze complexity out of data until data stops being "code equivalent" Further information See and langsec.org. USENIX WOOT 2013 (Workshop on Offensive Technologies) for "weird machines" papers and videos.

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  • Scrum in 5 Minutes

    - by Stephen.Walther
    The goal of this blog entry is to explain the basic concepts of Scrum in less than five minutes. You learn how Scrum can help a team of developers to successfully complete a complex software project. Product Backlog and the Product Owner Imagine that you are part of a team which needs to create a new website – for example, an e-commerce website. You have an overwhelming amount of work to do. You need to build (or possibly buy) a shopping cart, install an SSL certificate, create a product catalog, create a Facebook page, and at least a hundred other things that you have not thought of yet. According to Scrum, the first thing you should do is create a list. Place the highest priority items at the top of the list and the lower priority items lower in the list. For example, creating the shopping cart and buying the domain name might be high priority items and creating a Facebook page might be a lower priority item. In Scrum, this list is called the Product Backlog. How do you prioritize the items in the Product Backlog? Different stakeholders in the project might have different priorities. Gary, your division VP, thinks that it is crucial that the e-commerce site has a mobile app. Sally, your direct manager, thinks taking advantage of new HTML5 features is much more important. Multiple people are pulling you in different directions. According to Scrum, it is important that you always designate one person, and only one person, as the Product Owner. The Product Owner is the person who decides what items should be added to the Product Backlog and the priority of the items in the Product Backlog. The Product Owner could be the customer who is paying the bills, the project manager who is responsible for delivering the project, or a customer representative. The critical point is that the Product Owner must always be a single person and that single person has absolute authority over the Product Backlog. Sprints and the Sprint Backlog So now the developer team has a prioritized list of items and they can start work. The team starts implementing the first item in the Backlog — the shopping cart — and the team is making good progress. Unfortunately, however, half-way through the work of implementing the shopping cart, the Product Owner changes his mind. The Product Owner decides that it is much more important to create the product catalog before the shopping cart. With some frustration, the team switches their developmental efforts to focus on implementing the product catalog. However, part way through completing this work, once again the Product Owner changes his mind about the highest priority item. Getting work done when priorities are constantly shifting is frustrating for the developer team and it results in lower productivity. At the same time, however, the Product Owner needs to have absolute authority over the priority of the items which need to get done. Scrum solves this conflict with the concept of Sprints. In Scrum, a developer team works in Sprints. At the beginning of a Sprint the developers and the Product Owner agree on the items from the backlog which they will complete during the Sprint. This subset of items from the Product Backlog becomes the Sprint Backlog. During the Sprint, the Product Owner is not allowed to change the items in the Sprint Backlog. In other words, the Product Owner cannot shift priorities on the developer team during the Sprint. Different teams use Sprints of different lengths such as one month Sprints, two-week Sprints, and one week Sprints. For high-stress, time critical projects, teams typically choose shorter sprints such as one week sprints. For more mature projects, longer one month sprints might be more appropriate. A team can pick whatever Sprint length makes sense for them just as long as the team is consistent. You should pick a Sprint length and stick with it. Daily Scrum During a Sprint, the developer team needs to have meetings to coordinate their work on completing the items in the Sprint Backlog. For example, the team needs to discuss who is working on what and whether any blocking issues have been discovered. Developers hate meetings (well, sane developers hate meetings). Meetings take developers away from their work of actually implementing stuff as opposed to talking about implementing stuff. However, a developer team which never has meetings and never coordinates their work also has problems. For example, Fred might get stuck on a programming problem for days and never reach out for help even though Tom (who sits in the cubicle next to him) has already solved the very same problem. Or, both Ted and Fred might have started working on the same item from the Sprint Backlog at the same time. In Scrum, these conflicting needs – limiting meetings but enabling team coordination – are resolved with the idea of the Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum is a meeting for coordinating the work of the developer team which happens once a day. To keep the meeting short, each developer answers only the following three questions: 1. What have you done since yesterday? 2. What do you plan to do today? 3. Any impediments in your way? During the Daily Scrum, developers are not allowed to talk about issues with their cat, do demos of their latest work, or tell heroic stories of programming problems overcome. The meeting must be kept short — typically about 15 minutes. Issues which come up during the Daily Scrum should be discussed in separate meetings which do not involve the whole developer team. Stories and Tasks Items in the Product or Sprint Backlog – such as building a shopping cart or creating a Facebook page – are often referred to as User Stories or Stories. The Stories are created by the Product Owner and should represent some business need. Unlike the Product Owner, the developer team needs to think about how a Story should be implemented. At the beginning of a Sprint, the developer team takes the Stories from the Sprint Backlog and breaks the stories into tasks. For example, the developer team might take the Create a Shopping Cart story and break it into the following tasks: · Enable users to add and remote items from shopping cart · Persist the shopping cart to database between visits · Redirect user to checkout page when Checkout button is clicked During the Daily Scrum, members of the developer team volunteer to complete the tasks required to implement the next Story in the Sprint Backlog. When a developer talks about what he did yesterday or plans to do tomorrow then the developer should be referring to a task. Stories are owned by the Product Owner and a story is all about business value. In contrast, the tasks are owned by the developer team and a task is all about implementation details. A story might take several days or weeks to complete. A task is something which a developer can complete in less than a day. Some teams get lazy about breaking stories into tasks. Neglecting to break stories into tasks can lead to “Never Ending Stories” If you don’t break a story into tasks, then you can’t know how much of a story has actually been completed because you don’t have a clear idea about the implementation steps required to complete the story. Scrumboard During the Daily Scrum, the developer team uses a Scrumboard to coordinate their work. A Scrumboard contains a list of the stories for the current Sprint, the tasks associated with each Story, and the state of each task. The developer team uses the Scrumboard so everyone on the team can see, at a glance, what everyone is working on. As a developer works on a task, the task moves from state to state and the state of the task is updated on the Scrumboard. Common task states are ToDo, In Progress, and Done. Some teams include additional task states such as Needs Review or Needs Testing. Some teams use a physical Scrumboard. In that case, you use index cards to represent the stories and the tasks and you tack the index cards onto a physical board. Using a physical Scrumboard has several disadvantages. A physical Scrumboard does not work well with a distributed team – for example, it is hard to share the same physical Scrumboard between Boston and Seattle. Also, generating reports from a physical Scrumboard is more difficult than generating reports from an online Scrumboard. Estimating Stories and Tasks Stakeholders in a project, the people investing in a project, need to have an idea of how a project is progressing and when the project will be completed. For example, if you are investing in creating an e-commerce site, you need to know when the site can be launched. It is not enough to just say that “the project will be done when it is done” because the stakeholders almost certainly have a limited budget to devote to the project. The people investing in the project cannot determine the business value of the project unless they can have an estimate of how long it will take to complete the project. Developers hate to give estimates. The reason that developers hate to give estimates is that the estimates are almost always completely made up. For example, you really don’t know how long it takes to build a shopping cart until you finish building a shopping cart, and at that point, the estimate is no longer useful. The problem is that writing code is much more like Finding a Cure for Cancer than Building a Brick Wall. Building a brick wall is very straightforward. After you learn how to add one brick to a wall, you understand everything that is involved in adding a brick to a wall. There is no additional research required and no surprises. If, on the other hand, I assembled a team of scientists and asked them to find a cure for cancer, and estimate exactly how long it will take, they would have no idea. The problem is that there are too many unknowns. I don’t know how to cure cancer, I need to do a lot of research here, so I cannot even begin to estimate how long it will take. So developers hate to provide estimates, but the Product Owner and other product stakeholders, have a legitimate need for estimates. Scrum resolves this conflict by using the idea of Story Points. Different teams use different units to represent Story Points. For example, some teams use shirt sizes such as Small, Medium, Large, and X-Large. Some teams prefer to use Coffee Cup sizes such as Tall, Short, and Grande. Finally, some teams like to use numbers from the Fibonacci series. These alternative units are converted into a Story Point value. Regardless of the type of unit which you use to represent Story Points, the goal is the same. Instead of attempting to estimate a Story in hours (which is doomed to failure), you use a much less fine-grained measure of work. A developer team is much more likely to be able to estimate that a Story is Small or X-Large than the exact number of hours required to complete the story. So you can think of Story Points as a compromise between the needs of the Product Owner and the developer team. When a Sprint starts, the developer team devotes more time to thinking about the Stories in a Sprint and the developer team breaks the Stories into Tasks. In Scrum, you estimate the work required to complete a Story by using Story Points and you estimate the work required to complete a task by using hours. The difference between Stories and Tasks is that you don’t create a task until you are just about ready to start working on a task. A task is something that you should be able to create within a day, so you have a much better chance of providing an accurate estimate of the work required to complete a task than a story. Burndown Charts In Scrum, you use Burndown charts to represent the remaining work on a project. You use Release Burndown charts to represent the overall remaining work for a project and you use Sprint Burndown charts to represent the overall remaining work for a particular Sprint. You create a Release Burndown chart by calculating the remaining number of uncompleted Story Points for the entire Product Backlog every day. The vertical axis represents Story Points and the horizontal axis represents time. A Sprint Burndown chart is similar to a Release Burndown chart, but it focuses on the remaining work for a particular Sprint. There are two different types of Sprint Burndown charts. You can either represent the remaining work in a Sprint with Story Points or with task hours (the following image, taken from Wikipedia, uses hours). When each Product Backlog Story is completed, the Release Burndown chart slopes down. When each Story or task is completed, the Sprint Burndown chart slopes down. Burndown charts typically do not always slope down over time. As new work is added to the Product Backlog, the Release Burndown chart slopes up. If new tasks are discovered during a Sprint, the Sprint Burndown chart will also slope up. The purpose of a Burndown chart is to give you a way to track team progress over time. If, halfway through a Sprint, the Sprint Burndown chart is still climbing a hill then you know that you are in trouble. Team Velocity Stakeholders in a project always want more work done faster. For example, the Product Owner for the e-commerce site wants the website to launch before tomorrow. Developers tend to be overly optimistic. Rarely do developers acknowledge the physical limitations of reality. So Project stakeholders and the developer team often collude to delude themselves about how much work can be done and how quickly. Too many software projects begin in a state of optimism and end in frustration as deadlines zoom by. In Scrum, this problem is overcome by calculating a number called the Team Velocity. The Team Velocity is a measure of the average number of Story Points which a team has completed in previous Sprints. Knowing the Team Velocity is important during the Sprint Planning meeting when the Product Owner and the developer team work together to determine the number of stories which can be completed in the next Sprint. If you know the Team Velocity then you can avoid committing to do more work than the team has been able to accomplish in the past, and your team is much more likely to complete all of the work required for the next Sprint. Scrum Master There are three roles in Scrum: the Product Owner, the developer team, and the Scrum Master. I’v e already discussed the Product Owner. The Product Owner is the one and only person who maintains the Product Backlog and prioritizes the stories. I’ve also described the role of the developer team. The members of the developer team do the work of implementing the stories by breaking the stories into tasks. The final role, which I have not discussed, is the role of the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that the team is following the Scrum process. For example, the Scrum Master is responsible for making sure that there is a Daily Scrum meeting and that everyone answers the standard three questions. The Scrum Master is also responsible for removing (non-technical) impediments which the team might encounter. For example, if the team cannot start work until everyone installs the latest version of Microsoft Visual Studio then the Scrum Master has the responsibility of working with management to get the latest version of Visual Studio as quickly as possible. The Scrum Master can be a member of the developer team. Furthermore, different people can take on the role of the Scrum Master over time. The Scrum Master, however, cannot be the same person as the Product Owner. Using SonicAgile SonicAgile (SonicAgile.com) is an online tool which you can use to manage your projects using Scrum. You can use the SonicAgile Product Backlog to create a prioritized list of stories. You can estimate the size of the Stories using different Story Point units such as Shirt Sizes and Coffee Cup sizes. You can use SonicAgile during the Sprint Planning meeting to select the Stories that you want to complete during a particular Sprint. You can configure Sprints to be any length of time. SonicAgile calculates Team Velocity automatically and displays a warning when you add too many stories to a Sprint. In other words, it warns you when it thinks you are overcommitting in a Sprint. SonicAgile also includes a Scrumboard which displays the list of Stories selected for a Sprint and the tasks associated with each story. You can drag tasks from one task state to another. Finally, SonicAgile enables you to generate Release Burndown and Sprint Burndown charts. You can use these charts to view the progress of your team. To learn more about SonicAgile, visit SonicAgile.com. Summary In this post, I described many of the basic concepts of Scrum. You learned how a Product Owner uses a Product Backlog to create a prioritized list of tasks. I explained why work is completed in Sprints so the developer team can be more productive. I also explained how a developer team uses the daily scrum to coordinate their work. You learned how the developer team uses a Scrumboard to see, at a glance, who is working on what and the state of each task. I also discussed Burndown charts. You learned how you can use both Release and Sprint Burndown charts to track team progress in completing a project. Finally, I described the crucial role of the Scrum Master – the person who is responsible for ensuring that the rules of Scrum are being followed. My goal was not to describe all of the concepts of Scrum. This post was intended to be an introductory overview. For a comprehensive explanation of Scrum, I recommend reading Ken Schwaber’s book Agile Project Management with Scrum: http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Project-Management-Microsoft-Professional/dp/073561993X/ref=la_B001H6ODMC_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345224000&sr=1-1

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  • What Every Developer Should Know About MSI Components

    - by Alois Kraus
    Hopefully nothing. But if you have to do more than simple XCopy deployment and you need to support updates, upgrades and perhaps side by side scenarios there is no way around MSI. You can create Msi files with a Visual Studio Setup project which is severely limited or you can use the Windows Installer Toolset. I cannot talk about WIX with my German colleagues because WIX has a very special meaning. It is funny to always use the long name when I talk about deployment possibilities. Alternatively you can buy commercial tools which help you to author Msi files but I am not sure how good they are. Given enough pain with existing solutions you can also learn the MSI Apis and create your own packaging solution. If I were you I would use either a commercial visual tool when you do easy deployments or use the free Windows Installer Toolset. Once you know the WIX schema you can create well formed wix xml files easily with any editor. Then you can “compile” from the wxs files your Msi package. Recently I had the “pleasure” to get my hands dirty with C++ (again) and the MSI technology. Installation is a complex topic but after several month of digging into arcane MSI issues I can safely say that there should exist an easier way to install and update files as today. I am not alone with this statement as John Robbins (creator of the cool tool Paraffin) states: “.. It's a brittle and scary API in Windows …”. To help other people struggling with installation issues I present you the advice I (and others) found useful and what will happen if you ignore this advice. What is a MSI file? A MSI file is basically a database with tables which reference each other to control how your un/installation should work. The basic idea is that you declare via these tables what you want to install and MSI controls the how to get your stuff onto or off your machine. Your “stuff” consists usually of files, registry keys, shortcuts and environment variables. Therefore the most important tables are File, Registry, Environment and Shortcut table which define what will be un/installed. The key to master MSI is that every resource (file, registry key ,…) is associated with a MSI component. The actual payload consists of compressed files in the CAB format which can either be embedded into the MSI file or reside beside the MSI file or in a subdirectory below it. To examine MSI files you need Orca a free MSI editor provided by MS. There is also another free editor called Super Orca which does support diffs between MSI and it does not lock the MSI files. But since Orca comes with a shell extension I tend to use only Orca because it is so easy to right click on a MSI file and open it with this tool. How Do I Install It? Double click it. This does work for fresh installations as well as major upgrades. Updates need to be installed via the command line via msiexec /i <msi> REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=vomus   This tells the installer to reinstall all already installed features (new features will NOT be installed). The reinstallmode letters do force an overwrite of the old cached package in the %WINDIR%\Installer folder. All files, shortcuts and registry keys are redeployed if they are missing or need to be replaced with a newer version. When things did go really wrong and you want to overwrite everything unconditionally use REINSTALLMODE=vamus. How To Enable MSI Logs? You can download a MSI from Microsoft which installs some registry keys to enable full MSI logging. The log files can be found in your %TEMP% folder and are called MSIxxxx.log. Alternatively you can add to your msiexec command line the option msiexec …. /l*vx <LogFileName> Personally I find it rather strange that * does not mean full logging. To really get all logs I need to add v and x which is documented in the msiexec help but I still find this behavior unintuitive. What are MSI components? The whole MSI logic is bound to the concept of MSI components. Nearly every msi table has a Component column which binds an installable resource to a component. Below are the screenshots of the FeatureComponents and Component table of an example MSI. The Feature table defines basically the feature hierarchy.  To find out what belongs to a feature you need to look at the FeatureComponents table where for each feature the components are listed which will be installed when a feature is installed. The MSI components are defined in the  Component table. This table has as first column the component name and as second column the component id which is a GUID. All resources you want to install belong to a MSI component. Therefore nearly all MSI tables have a Component_ column which contains the component name. If you look e.g. a the File table you see that every file belongs to a component which is true for all other tables which install resources. The component table is the glue between all other tables which contain the resources you want to install. So far so easy. Why is MSI then so complex? Most MSI problems arise from the fact that you did violate a MSI component rule in one or the other way. When you install a feature the reference count for all components belonging to this feature will increase by one. If your component is installed by more than one feature it will get a higher refcount. When you uninstall a feature its refcount will drop by one. Interesting things happen if the component reference count reaches zero: Then all associated resources will be deleted. That looks like a reasonable thing and it is. What it makes complex are the strange component rules you have to follow. Below are some important component rules from the Tao of the Windows Installer … Rule 16: Follow Component Rules Components are a very important part of the Installer technology. They are the means whereby the Installer manages the resources that make up your application. The SDK provides the following guidelines for creating components in your package: Never create two components that install a resource under the same name and target location. If a resource must be duplicated in multiple components, change its name or target location in each component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Two components must not have the same key path file. This is a consequence of the previous rule. The key path value points to a particular file or folder belonging to the component that the installer uses to detect the component. If two components had the same key path file, the installer would be unable to distinguish which component is installed. Two components however may share a key path folder. Do not create a version of a component that is incompatible with all previous versions of the component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Do not create components containing resources that will need to be installed into more than one directory on the user’s system. The installer installs all of the resources in a component into the same directory. It is not possible to install some resources into subdirectories. Do not include more than one COM server per component. If a component contains a COM server, this must be the key path for the component. Do not specify more than one file per component as a target for the Start menu or a Desktop shortcut. … And these rules do not even talk about component ids, update packages and upgrades which you need to understand as well. Lets suppose you install two MSIs (MSI1 and MSI2) which have the same ComponentId but different component names. Both do install the same file. What will happen when you uninstall MSI2?   Hm the file should stay there. But the component names are different. Yes and yes. But MSI uses not use the component name as key for the refcount. Instead the ComponentId column of the Component table which contains a GUID is used as identifier under which the refcount is stored. The components Comp1 and Comp2 are identical from the MSI perspective. After the installation of both MSIs the Component with the Id {100000….} has a refcount of two. After uninstallation of one MSI there is still a refcount of one which drops to zero just as expected when we uninstall the last msi. Then the file which was the same for both MSIs is deleted. You should remember that MSI keeps a refcount across MSIs for components with the same component id. MSI does manage components not the resources you did install. The resources associated with a component are then and only then deleted when the refcount of the component reaches zero.   The dependencies between features, components and resources can be described as relations. m,k are numbers >= 1, n can be 0. Inside a MSI the following relations are valid Feature    1  –> n Components Component    1 –> m Features Component      1  –>  k Resources These relations express that one feature can install several components and features can share components between them. Every (meaningful) component will install at least one resource which means that its name (primary key to stay in database speak) does occur in some other table in the Component column as value which installs some resource. Lets make it clear with an example. We want to install with the feature MainFeature some files a registry key and a shortcut. We can then create components Comp1..3 which are referenced by the resources defined in the corresponding tables.   Feature Component Registry File Shortcuts MainFeature Comp1 RegistryKey1     MainFeature Comp2   File.txt   MainFeature Comp3   File2.txt Shortcut to File2.txt   It is illegal that the same resource is part of more than one component since this would break the refcount mechanism. Lets illustrate this:            Feature ComponentId Resource Reference Count Feature1 {1000-…} File1.txt 1 Feature2 {2000-….} File1.txt 1 The installation part works well but what happens when you uninstall Feature2? Component {20000…} gets a refcount of zero where MSI deletes all resources belonging to this component. In this case File1.txt will be deleted. But Feature1 still has another component {10000…} with a refcount of one which means that the file was deleted too early. You just have ruined your installation. To fix it you then need to click on the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs to let MSI reinstall any missing registry keys, files or shortcuts. The vigilant reader might has noticed that there is more in the Component table. Beside its name and GUID it has also an installation directory, attributes and a KeyPath. The KeyPath is a reference to a file or registry key which is used to detect if the component is already installed. This becomes important when you repair or uninstall a component. To find out if the component is already installed MSI checks if the registry key or file referenced by the KeyPath property does exist. When it does not exist it assumes that it was either already uninstalled (can lead to problems during uninstall) or that it is already installed and all is fine. Why is this detail so important? Lets put all files into one component. The KeyPath should be then one of the files of your component to check if it was installed or not. When your installation becomes corrupt because a file was deleted you cannot repair it with the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs because MSI checks the component integrity via the Resource referenced by its KeyPath. As long as you did not delete the KeyPath file MSI thinks all resources with your component are installed and never executes any repair action. You get even more trouble when you try to remove files during an upgrade (you cannot remove files during an update) from your super component which contains all files. The only way out and therefore best practice is to assign for every resource you want to install an extra component. This ensures painless updatability and repairs and you have much less effort to remove specific files during an upgrade. In effect you get this best practice relation Feature 1  –> n Components Component   1  –>  1 Resources MSI Component Rules Rule 1 – One component per resource Every resource you want to install (file, registry key, value, environment value, shortcut, directory, …) must get its own component which does never change between versions as long as the install location is the same. Penalty If you add more than one resources to a component you will break the repair capability of MSI because the KeyPath is used to check if the component needs repair. MSI ComponentId Files MSI 1.0 {1000} File1-5 MSI 2.0 {2000} File2-5 You want to remove File1 in version 2.0 of your MSI. Since you want to keep the other files you create a new component and add them there. MSI will delete all files if the component refcount of {1000} drops to zero. The files you want to keep are added to the new component {2000}. Ok that does work if your upgrade does uninstall the old MSI first. This will cause the refcount of all previously installed components to reach zero which means that all files present in version 1.0 are deleted. But there is a faster way to perform your upgrade by first installing your new MSI and then remove the old one.  If you choose this upgrade path then you will loose File1-5 after your upgrade and not only File1 as intended by your new component design.   Rule 2 – Only add, never remove resources from a component If you did follow rule 1 you will not need Rule 2. You can add in a patch more resources to one component. That is ok. But you can never remove anything from it. There are tricky ways around that but I do not want to encourage bad component design. Penalty Lets assume you have 2 MSI files which install under the same component one file   MSI1 MSI2 {1000} - ComponentId {1000} – ComponentId File1.txt File2.txt   When you install and uninstall both MSIs you will end up with an installation where either File1 or File2 will be left. Why? It seems that MSI does not store the resources associated with each component in its internal database. Instead Windows will simply query the MSI that is currently uninstalled for all resources belonging to this component. Since it will find only one file and not two it will only uninstall one file. That is the main reason why you never can remove resources from a component!   Rule 3 Never Remove A Component From an Update MSI. This is the same as if you change the GUID of a component by accident for your new update package. The resulting update package will not contain all components from the previously installed package. Penalty When you remove a component from a feature MSI will set the feature state during update to Advertised and log a warning message into its log file when you did enable MSI logging. SELMGR: ComponentId '{2DCEA1BA-3E27-E222-484C-D0D66AEA4F62}' is registered to feature 'xxxxxxx, but is not present in the Component table.  Removal of components from a feature is not supported! MSI (c) (24:44) [07:53:13:436]: SELMGR: Removal of a component from a feature is not supported Advertised means that MSI treats all components of this feature as not installed. As a consequence during uninstall nothing will be removed since it is not installed! This is not only bad because uninstall does no longer work but this feature will also not get the required patches. All other features which have followed component versioning rules for update packages will be updated but the one faulty feature will not. This results in very hard to find bugs why an update was only partially successful. Things got better with Windows Installer 4.5 but you cannot rely on that nobody will use an older installer. It is a good idea to add to your update msiexec call MSIENFORCEUPGRADECOMPONENTRULES=1 which will abort the installation if you did violate this rule.

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  • Ancillary Objects: Separate Debug ELF Files For Solaris

    - by Ali Bahrami
    We introduced a new object ELF object type in Solaris 11 Update 1 called the Ancillary Object. This posting describes them, using material originally written during their development, the PSARC arc case, and the Solaris Linker and Libraries Manual. ELF objects contain allocable sections, which are mapped into memory at runtime, and non-allocable sections, which are present in the file for use by debuggers and observability tools, but which are not mapped or used at runtime. Typically, all of these sections exist within a single object file. Ancillary objects allow them to instead go into a separate file. There are different reasons given for wanting such a feature. One can debate whether the added complexity is worth the benefit, and in most cases it is not. However, one important case stands out — customers with very large 32-bit objects who are not ready or able to make the transition to 64-bits. We have customers who build extremely large 32-bit objects. Historically, the debug sections in these objects have used the stabs format, which is limited, but relatively compact. In recent years, the industry has transitioned to the powerful but verbose DWARF standard. In some cases, the size of these debug sections is large enough to push the total object file size past the fundamental 4GB limit for 32-bit ELF object files. The best, and ultimately only, solution to overly large objects is to transition to 64-bits. However, consider environments where: Hundreds of users may be executing the code on large shared systems. (32-bits use less memory and bus bandwidth, and on sparc runs just as fast as 64-bit code otherwise). Complex finely tuned code, where the original authors may no longer be available. Critical production code, that was expensive to qualify and bring online, and which is otherwise serving its intended purpose without issue. Users in these risk adverse and/or high scale categories have good reasons to push 32-bits objects to the limit before moving on. Ancillary objects offer these users a longer runway. Design The design of ancillary objects is intended to be simple, both to help human understanding when examining elfdump output, and to lower the bar for debuggers such as dbx to support them. The primary and ancillary objects have the same set of section headers, with the same names, in the same order (i.e. each section has the same index in both files). A single added section of type SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY is added to both objects, containing information that allows a debugger to identify and validate both files relative to each other. Given one of these files, the ancillary section allows you to identify the other. Allocable sections go in the primary object, and non-allocable ones go into the ancillary object. A small set of non-allocable objects, notably the symbol table, are copied into both objects. As noted above, most sections are only written to one of the two objects, but both objects have the same section header array. The section header in the file that does not contain the section data is tagged with the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section header flag to indicate its placeholder status. Compiler writers and others who produce objects can set the SUNW_SHF_PRIMARY section header flag to mark non-allocable sections that should go to the primary object rather than the ancillary. If you don't request an ancillary object, the Solaris ELF format is unchanged. Users who don't use ancillary objects do not pay for the feature. This is important, because they exist to serve a small subset of our users, and must not complicate the common case. If you do request an ancillary object, the runtime behavior of the primary object will be the same as that of a normal object. There is no added runtime cost. The primary and ancillary object together represent a logical single object. This is facilitated by the use of a single set of section headers. One can easily imagine a tool that can merge a primary and ancillary object into a single file, or the reverse. (Note that although this is an interesting intellectual exercise, we don't actually supply such a tool because there's little practical benefit above and beyond using ld to create the files). Among the benefits of this approach are: There is no need for per-file symbol tables to reflect the contents of each file. The same symbol table that would be produced for a standard object can be used. The section contents are identical in either case — there is no need to alter data to accommodate multiple files. It is very easy for a debugger to adapt to these new files, and the processing involved can be encapsulated in input/output routines. Most of the existing debugger implementation applies without modification. The limit of a 4GB 32-bit output object is now raised to 4GB of code, and 4GB of debug data. There is also the future possibility (not currently supported) to support multiple ancillary objects, each of which could contain up to 4GB of additional debug data. It must be noted however that the 32-bit DWARF debug format is itself inherently 32-bit limited, as it uses 32-bit offsets between debug sections, so the ability to employ multiple ancillary object files may not turn out to be useful. Using Ancillary Objects (From the Solaris Linker and Libraries Guide) By default, objects contain both allocable and non-allocable sections. Allocable sections are the sections that contain executable code and the data needed by that code at runtime. Non-allocable sections contain supplemental information that is not required to execute an object at runtime. These sections support the operation of debuggers and other observability tools. The non-allocable sections in an object are not loaded into memory at runtime by the operating system, and so, they have no impact on memory use or other aspects of runtime performance no matter their size. For convenience, both allocable and non-allocable sections are normally maintained in the same file. However, there are situations in which it can be useful to separate these sections. To reduce the size of objects in order to improve the speed at which they can be copied across wide area networks. To support fine grained debugging of highly optimized code requires considerable debug data. In modern systems, the debugging data can easily be larger than the code it describes. The size of a 32-bit object is limited to 4 Gbytes. In very large 32-bit objects, the debug data can cause this limit to be exceeded and prevent the creation of the object. To limit the exposure of internal implementation details. Traditionally, objects have been stripped of non-allocable sections in order to address these issues. Stripping is effective, but destroys data that might be needed later. The Solaris link-editor can instead write non-allocable sections to an ancillary object. This feature is enabled with the -z ancillary command line option. $ ld ... -z ancillary[=outfile] ...By default, the ancillary file is given the same name as the primary output object, with a .anc file extension. However, a different name can be provided by providing an outfile value to the -z ancillary option. When -z ancillary is specified, the link-editor performs the following actions. All allocable sections are written to the primary object. In addition, all non-allocable sections containing one or more input sections that have the SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY section header flag set are written to the primary object. All remaining non-allocable sections are written to the ancillary object. The following non-allocable sections are written to both the primary object and ancillary object. .shstrtab The section name string table. .symtab The full non-dynamic symbol table. .symtab_shndx The symbol table extended index section associated with .symtab. .strtab The non-dynamic string table associated with .symtab. .SUNW_ancillary Contains the information required to identify the primary and ancillary objects, and to identify the object being examined. The primary object and all ancillary objects contain the same array of sections headers. Each section has the same section index in every file. Although the primary and ancillary objects all define the same section headers, the data for most sections will be written to a single file as described above. If the data for a section is not present in a given file, the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section header flag is set, and the sh_size field is 0. This organization makes it possible to acquire a full list of section headers, a complete symbol table, and a complete list of the primary and ancillary objects from either of the primary or ancillary objects. The following example illustrates the underlying implementation of ancillary objects. An ancillary object is created by adding the -z ancillary command line option to an otherwise normal compilation. The file utility shows that the result is an executable named a.out, and an associated ancillary object named a.out.anc. $ cat hello.c #include <stdio.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { (void) printf("hello, world\n"); return (0); } $ cc -g -zancillary hello.c $ file a.out a.out.anc a.out: ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386 Version 1 [FPU], dynamically linked, not stripped, ancillary object a.out.anc a.out.anc: ELF 32-bit LSB ancillary 80386 Version 1, primary object a.out $ ./a.out hello worldThe resulting primary object is an ordinary executable that can be executed in the usual manner. It is no different at runtime than an executable built without the use of ancillary objects, and then stripped of non-allocable content using the strip or mcs commands. As previously described, the primary object and ancillary objects contain the same section headers. To see how this works, it is helpful to use the elfdump utility to display these section headers and compare them. The following table shows the section header information for a selection of headers from the previous link-edit example. Index Section Name Type Primary Flags Ancillary Flags Primary Size Ancillary Size 13 .text PROGBITS ALLOC EXECINSTR ALLOC EXECINSTR SUNW_ABSENT 0x131 0 20 .data PROGBITS WRITE ALLOC WRITE ALLOC SUNW_ABSENT 0x4c 0 21 .symtab SYMTAB 0 0 0x450 0x450 22 .strtab STRTAB STRINGS STRINGS 0x1ad 0x1ad 24 .debug_info PROGBITS SUNW_ABSENT 0 0 0x1a7 28 .shstrtab STRTAB STRINGS STRINGS 0x118 0x118 29 .SUNW_ancillary SUNW_ancillary 0 0 0x30 0x30 The data for most sections is only present in one of the two files, and absent from the other file. The SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section header flag is set when the data is absent. The data for allocable sections needed at runtime are found in the primary object. The data for non-allocable sections used for debugging but not needed at runtime are placed in the ancillary file. A small set of non-allocable sections are fully present in both files. These are the .SUNW_ancillary section used to relate the primary and ancillary objects together, the section name string table .shstrtab, as well as the symbol table.symtab, and its associated string table .strtab. It is possible to strip the symbol table from the primary object. A debugger that encounters an object without a symbol table can use the .SUNW_ancillary section to locate the ancillary object, and access the symbol contained within. The primary object, and all associated ancillary objects, contain a .SUNW_ancillary section that allows all the objects to be identified and related together. $ elfdump -T SUNW_ancillary a.out a.out.anc a.out: Ancillary Section: .SUNW_ancillary index tag value [0] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0x8724 [1] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1 a.out [2] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0x8724 [3] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1a3 a.out.anc [4] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0xfbe2 [5] ANC_SUNW_NULL 0 a.out.anc: Ancillary Section: .SUNW_ancillary index tag value [0] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0xfbe2 [1] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1 a.out [2] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0x8724 [3] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1a3 a.out.anc [4] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0xfbe2 [5] ANC_SUNW_NULL 0 The ancillary sections for both objects contain the same number of elements, and are identical except for the first element. Each object, starting with the primary object, is introduced with a MEMBER element that gives the file name, followed by a CHECKSUM that identifies the object. In this example, the primary object is a.out, and has a checksum of 0x8724. The ancillary object is a.out.anc, and has a checksum of 0xfbe2. The first element in a .SUNW_ancillary section, preceding the MEMBER element for the primary object, is always a CHECKSUM element, containing the checksum for the file being examined. The presence of a .SUNW_ancillary section in an object indicates that the object has associated ancillary objects. The names of the primary and all associated ancillary objects can be obtained from the ancillary section from any one of the files. It is possible to determine which file is being examined from the larger set of files by comparing the first checksum value to the checksum of each member that follows. Debugger Access and Use of Ancillary Objects Debuggers and other observability tools must merge the information found in the primary and ancillary object files in order to build a complete view of the object. This is equivalent to processing the information from a single file. This merging is simplified by the primary object and ancillary objects containing the same section headers, and a single symbol table. The following steps can be used by a debugger to assemble the information contained in these files. Starting with the primary object, or any of the ancillary objects, locate the .SUNW_ancillary section. The presence of this section identifies the object as part of an ancillary group, contains information that can be used to obtain a complete list of the files and determine which of those files is the one currently being examined. Create a section header array in memory, using the section header array from the object being examined as an initial template. Open and read each file identified by the .SUNW_ancillary section in turn. For each file, fill in the in-memory section header array with the information for each section that does not have the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT flag set. The result will be a complete in-memory copy of the section headers with pointers to the data for all sections. Once this information has been acquired, the debugger can proceed as it would in the single file case, to access and control the running program. Note - The ELF definition of ancillary objects provides for a single primary object, and an arbitrary number of ancillary objects. At this time, the Oracle Solaris link-editor only produces a single ancillary object containing all non-allocable sections. This may change in the future. Debuggers and other observability tools should be written to handle the general case of multiple ancillary objects. ELF Implementation Details (From the Solaris Linker and Libraries Guide) To implement ancillary objects, it was necessary to extend the ELF format to add a new object type (ET_SUNW_ANCILLARY), a new section type (SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY), and 2 new section header flags (SHF_SUNW_ABSENT, SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY). In this section, I will detail these changes, in the form of diffs to the Solaris Linker and Libraries manual. Part IV ELF Application Binary Interface Chapter 13: Object File Format Object File Format Edit Note: This existing section at the beginning of the chapter describes the ELF header. There's a table of object file types, which now includes the new ET_SUNW_ANCILLARY type. e_type Identifies the object file type, as listed in the following table. NameValueMeaning ET_NONE0No file type ET_REL1Relocatable file ET_EXEC2Executable file ET_DYN3Shared object file ET_CORE4Core file ET_LOSUNW0xfefeStart operating system specific range ET_SUNW_ANCILLARY0xfefeAncillary object file ET_HISUNW0xfefdEnd operating system specific range ET_LOPROC0xff00Start processor-specific range ET_HIPROC0xffffEnd processor-specific range Sections Edit Note: This overview section defines the section header structure, and provides a high level description of known sections. It was updated to define the new SHF_SUNW_ABSENT and SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY flags and the new SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY section. ... sh_type Categorizes the section's contents and semantics. Section types and their descriptions are listed in Table 13-5. sh_flags Sections support 1-bit flags that describe miscellaneous attributes. Flag definitions are listed in Table 13-8. ... Table 13-5 ELF Section Types, sh_type NameValue . . . SHT_LOSUNW0x6fffffee SHT_SUNW_ancillary0x6fffffee . . . ... SHT_LOSUNW - SHT_HISUNW Values in this inclusive range are reserved for Oracle Solaris OS semantics. SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY Present when a given object is part of a group of ancillary objects. Contains information required to identify all the files that make up the group. See Ancillary Section. ... Table 13-8 ELF Section Attribute Flags NameValue . . . SHF_MASKOS0x0ff00000 SHF_SUNW_NODISCARD0x00100000 SHF_SUNW_ABSENT0x00200000 SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY0x00400000 SHF_MASKPROC0xf0000000 . . . ... SHF_SUNW_ABSENT Indicates that the data for this section is not present in this file. When ancillary objects are created, the primary object and any ancillary objects, will all have the same section header array, to facilitate merging them to form a complete view of the object, and to allow them to use the same symbol tables. Each file contains a subset of the section data. The data for allocable sections is written to the primary object while the data for non-allocable sections is written to an ancillary file. The SHF_SUNW_ABSENT flag is used to indicate that the data for the section is not present in the object being examined. When the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT flag is set, the sh_size field of the section header must be 0. An application encountering an SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section can choose to ignore the section, or to search for the section data within one of the related ancillary files. SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY The default behavior when ancillary objects are created is to write all allocable sections to the primary object and all non-allocable sections to the ancillary objects. The SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY flag overrides this behavior. Any output section containing one more input section with the SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY flag set is written to the primary object without regard for its allocable status. ... Two members in the section header, sh_link, and sh_info, hold special information, depending on section type. Table 13-9 ELF sh_link and sh_info Interpretation sh_typesh_linksh_info . . . SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY The section header index of the associated string table. 0 . . . Special Sections Edit Note: This section describes the sections used in Solaris ELF objects, using the types defined in the previous description of section types. It was updated to define the new .SUNW_ancillary (SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY) section. Various sections hold program and control information. Sections in the following table are used by the system and have the indicated types and attributes. Table 13-10 ELF Special Sections NameTypeAttribute . . . .SUNW_ancillarySHT_SUNW_ancillaryNone . . . ... .SUNW_ancillary Present when a given object is part of a group of ancillary objects. Contains information required to identify all the files that make up the group. See Ancillary Section for details. ... Ancillary Section Edit Note: This new section provides the format reference describing the layout of a .SUNW_ancillary section and the meaning of the various tags. Note that these sections use the same tag/value concept used for dynamic and capabilities sections, and will be familiar to anyone used to working with ELF. In addition to the primary output object, the Solaris link-editor can produce one or more ancillary objects. Ancillary objects contain non-allocable sections that would normally be written to the primary object. When ancillary objects are produced, the primary object and all of the associated ancillary objects contain a SHT_SUNW_ancillary section, containing information that identifies these related objects. Given any one object from such a group, the ancillary section provides the information needed to identify and interpret the others. This section contains an array of the following structures. See sys/elf.h. typedef struct { Elf32_Word a_tag; union { Elf32_Word a_val; Elf32_Addr a_ptr; } a_un; } Elf32_Ancillary; typedef struct { Elf64_Xword a_tag; union { Elf64_Xword a_val; Elf64_Addr a_ptr; } a_un; } Elf64_Ancillary; For each object with this type, a_tag controls the interpretation of a_un. a_val These objects represent integer values with various interpretations. a_ptr These objects represent file offsets or addresses. The following ancillary tags exist. Table 13-NEW1 ELF Ancillary Array Tags NameValuea_un ANC_SUNW_NULL0Ignored ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM1a_val ANC_SUNW_MEMBER2a_ptr ANC_SUNW_NULL Marks the end of the ancillary section. ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM Provides the checksum for a file in the c_val element. When ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM precedes the first instance of ANC_SUNW_MEMBER, it provides the checksum for the object from which the ancillary section is being read. When it follows an ANC_SUNW_MEMBER tag, it provides the checksum for that member. ANC_SUNW_MEMBER Specifies an object name. The a_ptr element contains the string table offset of a null-terminated string, that provides the file name. An ancillary section must always contain an ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM before the first instance of ANC_SUNW_MEMBER, identifying the current object. Following that, there should be an ANC_SUNW_MEMBER for each object that makes up the complete set of objects. Each ANC_SUNW_MEMBER should be followed by an ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM for that object. A typical ancillary section will therefore be structured as: TagMeaning ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUMChecksum of this object ANC_SUNW_MEMBERName of object #1 ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUMChecksum for object #1 . . . ANC_SUNW_MEMBERName of object N ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUMChecksum for object N ANC_SUNW_NULL An object can therefore identify itself by comparing the initial ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM to each of the ones that follow, until it finds a match. Related Other Work The GNU developers have also encountered the need/desire to support separate debug information files, and use the solution detailed at http://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Separate-Debug-Files.html. At the current time, the separate debug file is constructed by building the standard object first, and then copying the debug data out of it in a separate post processing step, Hence, it is limited to a total of 4GB of code and debug data, just as a single object file would be. They are aware of this, and I have seen online comments indicating that they may add direct support for generating these separate files to their link-editor. It is worth noting that the GNU objcopy utility is available on Solaris, and that the Studio dbx debugger is able to use these GNU style separate debug files even on Solaris. Although this is interesting in terms giving Linux users a familiar environment on Solaris, the 4GB limit means it is not an answer to the problem of very large 32-bit objects. We have also encountered issues with objcopy not understanding Solaris-specific ELF sections, when using this approach. The GNU community also has a current effort to adapt their DWARF debug sections in order to move them to separate files before passing the relocatable objects to the linker. The details of Project Fission can be found at http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/DebugFission. The goal of this project appears to be to reduce the amount of data seen by the link-editor. The primary effort revolves around moving DWARF data to separate .dwo files so that the link-editor never encounters them. The details of modifying the DWARF data to be usable in this form are involved — please see the above URL for details.

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  • The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin &ndash; #3 &ndash; Make Evolvability inevitable

    - by Ralf Westphal
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/04/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin-ndash-3-ndash-make-evolvability-inevitable.aspxThe easier something to measure the more likely it will be produced. Deviations between what is and what should be can be readily detected. That´s what automated acceptance tests are for. That´s what sprint reviews in Scrum are for. It´s no small wonder our software looks like it looks. It has all the traits whose conformance with requirements can easily be measured. And it´s lacking traits which cannot easily be measured. Evolvability (or Changeability) is such a trait. If an operation is correct, if an operation if fast enough, that can be checked very easily. But whether Evolvability is high or low, that cannot be checked by taking a measure or two. Evolvability might correlate with certain traits, e.g. number of lines of code (LOC) per function or Cyclomatic Complexity or test coverage. But there is no threshold value signalling “evolvability too low”; also Evolvability is hardly tangible for the customer. Nevertheless Evolvability is of great importance - at least in the long run. You can get away without much of it for a short time. Eventually, though, it´s needed like any other requirement. Or even more. Because without Evolvability no other requirement can be implemented. Evolvability is the foundation on which all else is build. Such fundamental importance is in stark contrast with its immeasurability. To compensate this, Evolvability must be put at the very center of software development. It must become the hub around everything else revolves. Since we cannot measure Evolvability, though, we cannot start watching it more. Instead we need to establish practices to keep it high (enough) at all times. Chefs have known that for long. That´s why everybody in a restaurant kitchen is constantly seeing after cleanliness. Hygiene is important as is to have clean tools at standardized locations. Only then the health of the patrons can be guaranteed and production efficiency is constantly high. Still a kitchen´s level of cleanliness is easier to measure than software Evolvability. That´s why important practices like reviews, pair programming, or TDD are not enough, I guess. What we need to keep Evolvability in focus and high is… to continually evolve. Change must not be something to avoid but too embrace. To me that means the whole change cycle from requirement analysis to delivery needs to be gone through more often. Scrum´s sprints of 4, 2 even 1 week are too long. Kanban´s flow of user stories across is too unreliable; it takes as long as it takes. Instead we should fix the cycle time at 2 days max. I call that Spinning. No increment must take longer than from this morning until tomorrow evening to finish. Then it should be acceptance checked by the customer (or his/her representative, e.g. a Product Owner). For me there are several resasons for such a fixed and short cycle time for each increment: Clear expectations Absolute estimates (“This will take X days to complete.”) are near impossible in software development as explained previously. Too much unplanned research and engineering work lurk in every feature. And then pervasive interruptions of work by peers and management. However, the smaller the scope the better our absolute estimates become. That´s because we understand better what really are the requirements and what the solution should look like. But maybe more importantly the shorter the timespan the more we can control how we use our time. So much can happen over the course of a week and longer timespans. But if push comes to shove I can block out all distractions and interruptions for a day or possibly two. That´s why I believe we can give rough absolute estimates on 3 levels: Noon Tonight Tomorrow Think of a meeting with a Product Owner at 8:30 in the morning. If she asks you, how long it will take you to implement a user story or bug fix, you can say, “It´ll be fixed by noon.”, or you can say, “I can manage to implement it until tonight before I leave.”, or you can say, “You´ll get it by tomorrow night at latest.” Yes, I believe all else would be naive. If you´re not confident to get something done by tomorrow night (some 34h from now) you just cannot reliably commit to any timeframe. That means you should not promise anything, you should not even start working on the issue. So when estimating use these four categories: Noon, Tonight, Tomorrow, NoClue - with NoClue meaning the requirement needs to be broken down further so each aspect can be assigned to one of the first three categories. If you like absolute estimates, here you go. But don´t do deep estimates. Don´t estimate dozens of issues; don´t think ahead (“Issue A is a Tonight, then B will be a Tomorrow, after that it´s C as a Noon, finally D is a Tonight - that´s what I´ll do this week.”). Just estimate so Work-in-Progress (WIP) is 1 for everybody - plus a small number of buffer issues. To be blunt: Yes, this makes promises impossible as to what a team will deliver in terms of scope at a certain date in the future. But it will give a Product Owner a clear picture of what to pull for acceptance feedback tonight and tomorrow. Trust through reliability Our trade is lacking trust. Customers don´t trust software companies/departments much. Managers don´t trust developers much. I find that perfectly understandable in the light of what we´re trying to accomplish: delivering software in the face of uncertainty by means of material good production. Customers as well as managers still expect software development to be close to production of houses or cars. But that´s a fundamental misunderstanding. Software development ist development. It´s basically research. As software developers we´re constantly executing experiments to find out what really provides value to users. We don´t know what they need, we just have mediated hypothesises. That´s why we cannot reliably deliver on preposterous demands. So trust is out of the window in no time. If we switch to delivering in short cycles, though, we can regain trust. Because estimates - explicit or implicit - up to 32 hours at most can be satisfied. I´d say: reliability over scope. It´s more important to reliably deliver what was promised then to cover a lot of requirement area. So when in doubt promise less - but deliver without delay. Deliver on scope (Functionality and Quality); but also deliver on Evolvability, i.e. on inner quality according to accepted principles. Always. Trust will be the reward. Less complexity of communication will follow. More goodwill buffer will follow. So don´t wait for some Kanban board to show you, that flow can be improved by scheduling smaller stories. You don´t need to learn that the hard way. Just start with small batch sizes of three different sizes. Fast feedback What has been finished can be checked for acceptance. Why wait for a sprint of several weeks to end? Why let the mental model of the issue and its solution dissipate? If you get final feedback after one or two weeks, you hardly remember what you did and why you did it. Resoning becomes hard. But more importantly youo probably are not in the mood anymore to go back to something you deemed done a long time ago. It´s boring, it´s frustrating to open up that mental box again. Learning is harder the longer it takes from event to feedback. Effort can be wasted between event (finishing an issue) and feedback, because other work might go in the wrong direction based on false premises. Checking finished issues for acceptance is the most important task of a Product Owner. It´s even more important than planning new issues. Because as long as work started is not released (accepted) it´s potential waste. So before starting new work better make sure work already done has value. By putting the emphasis on acceptance rather than planning true pull is established. As long as planning and starting work is more important, it´s a push process. Accept a Noon issue on the same day before leaving. Accept a Tonight issue before leaving today or first thing tomorrow morning. Accept a Tomorrow issue tomorrow night before leaving or early the day after tomorrow. After acceptance the developer(s) can start working on the next issue. Flexibility As if reliability/trust and fast feedback for less waste weren´t enough economic incentive, there is flexibility. After each issue the Product Owner can change course. If on Monday morning feature slices A, B, C, D, E were important and A, B, C were scheduled for acceptance by Monday evening and Tuesday evening, the Product Owner can change her mind at any time. Maybe after A got accepted she asks for continuation with D. But maybe, just maybe, she has gotten a completely different idea by then. Maybe she wants work to continue on F. And after B it´s neither D nor E, but G. And after G it´s D. With Spinning every 32 hours at latest priorities can be changed. And nothing is lost. Because what got accepted is of value. It provides an incremental value to the customer/user. Or it provides internal value to the Product Owner as increased knowledge/decreased uncertainty. I find such reactivity over commitment economically very benefical. Why commit a team to some workload for several weeks? It´s unnecessary at beast, and inflexible and wasteful at worst. If we cannot promise delivery of a certain scope on a certain date - which is what customers/management usually want -, we can at least provide them with unpredecented flexibility in the face of high uncertainty. Where the path is not clear, cannot be clear, make small steps so you´re able to change your course at any time. Premature completion Customers/management are used to premeditating budgets. They want to know exactly how much to pay for a certain amount of requirements. That´s understandable. But it does not match with the nature of software development. We should know that by now. Maybe there´s somewhere in the world some team who can consistently deliver on scope, quality, and time, and budget. Great! Congratulations! I, however, haven´t seen such a team yet. Which does not mean it´s impossible, but I think it´s nothing I can recommend to strive for. Rather I´d say: Don´t try this at home. It might hurt you one way or the other. However, what we can do, is allow customers/management stop work on features at any moment. With spinning every 32 hours a feature can be declared as finished - even though it might not be completed according to initial definition. I think, progress over completion is an important offer software development can make. Why think in terms of completion beyond a promise for the next 32 hours? Isn´t it more important to constantly move forward? Step by step. We´re not running sprints, we´re not running marathons, not even ultra-marathons. We´re in the sport of running forever. That makes it futile to stare at the finishing line. The very concept of a burn-down chart is misleading (in most cases). Whoever can only think in terms of completed requirements shuts out the chance for saving money. The requirements for a features mostly are uncertain. So how does a Product Owner know in the first place, how much is needed. Maybe more than specified is needed - which gets uncovered step by step with each finished increment. Maybe less than specified is needed. After each 4–32 hour increment the Product Owner can do an experient (or invite users to an experiment) if a particular trait of the software system is already good enough. And if so, she can switch the attention to a different aspect. In the end, requirements A, B, C then could be finished just 70%, 80%, and 50%. What the heck? It´s good enough - for now. 33% money saved. Wouldn´t that be splendid? Isn´t that a stunning argument for any budget-sensitive customer? You can save money and still get what you need? Pull on practices So far, in addition to more trust, more flexibility, less money spent, Spinning led to “doing less” which also means less code which of course means higher Evolvability per se. Last but not least, though, I think Spinning´s short acceptance cycles have one more effect. They excert pull-power on all sorts of practices known for increasing Evolvability. If, for example, you believe high automated test coverage helps Evolvability by lowering the fear of inadverted damage to a code base, why isn´t 90% of the developer community practicing automated tests consistently? I think, the answer is simple: Because they can do without. Somehow they manage to do enough manual checks before their rare releases/acceptance checks to ensure good enough correctness - at least in the short term. The same goes for other practices like component orientation, continuous build/integration, code reviews etc. None of that is compelling, urgent, imperative. Something else always seems more important. So Evolvability principles and practices fall through the cracks most of the time - until a project hits a wall. Then everybody becomes desperate; but by then (re)gaining Evolvability has become as very, very difficult and tedious undertaking. Sometimes up to the point where the existence of a project/company is in danger. With Spinning that´s different. If you´re practicing Spinning you cannot avoid all those practices. With Spinning you very quickly realize you cannot deliver reliably even on your 32 hour promises. Spinning thus is pulling on developers to adopt principles and practices for Evolvability. They will start actively looking for ways to keep their delivery rate high. And if not, management will soon tell them to do that. Because first the Product Owner then management will notice an increasing difficulty to deliver value within 32 hours. There, finally there emerges a way to measure Evolvability: The more frequent developers tell the Product Owner there is no way to deliver anything worth of feedback until tomorrow night, the poorer Evolvability is. Don´t count the “WTF!”, count the “No way!” utterances. In closing For sustainable software development we need to put Evolvability first. Functionality and Quality must not rule software development but be implemented within a framework ensuring (enough) Evolvability. Since Evolvability cannot be measured easily, I think we need to put software development “under pressure”. Software needs to be changed more often, in smaller increments. Each increment being relevant to the customer/user in some way. That does not mean each increment is worthy of shipment. It´s sufficient to gain further insight from it. Increments primarily serve the reduction of uncertainty, not sales. Sales even needs to be decoupled from this incremental progress. No more promises to sales. No more delivery au point. Rather sales should look at a stream of accepted increments (or incremental releases) and scoup from that whatever they find valuable. Sales and marketing need to realize they should work on what´s there, not what might be possible in the future. But I digress… In my view a Spinning cycle - which is not easy to reach, which requires practice - is the core practice to compensate the immeasurability of Evolvability. From start to finish of each issue in 32 hours max - that´s the challenge we need to accept if we´re serious increasing Evolvability. Fortunately higher Evolvability is not the only outcome of Spinning. Customer/management will like the increased flexibility and “getting more bang for the buck”.

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  • Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix

    - by Rick Strahl
    originally published in CoDe Magazine Editorial Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix, which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers. Let’s face it: ASP.NET development isn’t exactly trivial unless you already have a fair bit of familiarity with sophisticated development practices. Stick a non-developer in front of Visual Studio .NET or even the Visual Web Developer Express edition and it’s not likely that the person in front of the screen will be very productive or feel inspired. Yet other technologies like PHP and even classic ASP did provide the ability for non-developers and hobbyists to become reasonably proficient in creating basic web content quickly and efficiently. WebMatrix appears to be Microsoft’s attempt to bring back some of that simplicity with a number of technologies and tools. The key is to provide a friendly and fully self-contained development environment that provides all the tools needed to build an application in one place, as well as tools that allow publishing of content and databases easily to the web server. WebMatrix is made up of several components and technologies: IIS Developer Express IIS Developer Express is a new, self-contained development web server that is fully compatible with IIS 7.5 and based on the same codebase that IIS 7.5 uses. This new development server replaces the much less compatible Cassini web server that’s been used in Visual Studio and the Express editions. IIS Express addresses a few shortcomings of the Cassini server such as the inability to serve custom ISAPI extensions (i.e., things like PHP or ASP classic for example), as well as not supporting advanced authentication. IIS Developer Express provides most of the IIS 7.5 feature set providing much better compatibility between development and live deployment scenarios. SQL Server Compact 4.0 Database access is a key component for most web-driven applications, but on the Microsoft stack this has mostly meant you have to use SQL Server or SQL Server Express. SQL Server Compact is not new-it’s been around for a few years, but it’s been severely hobbled in the past by terrible tool support and the inability to support more than a single connection in Microsoft’s attempt to avoid losing SQL Server licensing. The new release of SQL Server Compact 4.0 supports multiple connections and you can run it in ASP.NET web applications simply by installing an assembly into the bin folder of the web application. In effect, you don’t have to install a special system configuration to run SQL Compact as it is a drop-in database engine: Copy the small assembly into your BIN folder (or from the GAC if installed fully), create a connection string against a local file-based database file, and then start firing SQL requests. Additionally WebMatrix includes nice tools to edit the database tables and files, along with tools to easily upsize (and hopefully downsize in the future) to full SQL Server. This is a big win, pending compatibility and performance limits. In my simple testing the data engine performed well enough for small data sets. This is not only useful for web applications, but also for desktop applications for which a fully installed SQL engine like SQL Server would be overkill. Having a local data store in those applications that can potentially be accessed by multiple users is a welcome feature. ASP.NET Razor View Engine What? Yet another native ASP.NET view engine? We already have Web Forms and various different flavors of using that view engine with Web Forms and MVC. Do we really need another? Microsoft thinks so, and Razor is an implementation of a lightweight, script-only view engine. Unlike the Web Forms view engine, Razor works only with inline code, snippets, and markup; therefore, it is more in line with current thinking of what a view engine should represent. There’s no support for a “page model” or any of the other Web Forms features of the full-page framework, but just a lightweight scripting engine that works with plain markup plus embedded expressions and code. The markup syntax for Razor is geared for minimal typing, plus some progressive detection of where a script block/expression starts and ends. This results in a much leaner syntax than the typical ASP.NET Web Forms alligator (<% %>) tags. Razor uses the @ sign plus standard C# (or Visual Basic) block syntax to delineate code snippets and expressions. Here’s a very simple example of what Razor markup looks like along with some comment annotations: <!DOCTYPE html> <html>     <head>         <title></title>     </head>     <body>     <h1>Razor Test</h1>          <!-- simple expressions -->     @DateTime.Now     <hr />     <!-- method expressions -->     @DateTime.Now.ToString("T")          <!-- code blocks -->     @{         List<string> names = new List<string>();         names.Add("Rick");         names.Add("Markus");         names.Add("Claudio");         names.Add("Kevin");     }          <!-- structured block statements -->     <ul>     @foreach(string name in names){             <li>@name</li>     }     </ul>           <!-- Conditional code -->        @if(true) {                        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->        <text>         true        </text>;    }    else    {        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->       <text>       false       </text>;    }    </body> </html> Like the Web Forms view engine, Razor parses pages into code, and then executes that run-time compiled code. Effectively a “page” becomes a code file with markup becoming literal text written into the Response stream, code snippets becoming raw code, and expressions being written out with Response.Write(). The code generated from Razor doesn’t look much different from similar Web Forms code that only uses script tags; so although the syntax may look different, the operational model is fairly similar to the Web Forms engine minus the overhead of the large Page object model. However, there are differences: -Razor pages are based on a new base class, Microsoft.WebPages.WebPage, which is hosted in the Microsoft.WebPages assembly that houses all the Razor engine parsing and processing logic. Browsing through the assembly (in the generated ASP.NET Temporary Files folder or GAC) will give you a good idea of the functionality that Razor provides. If you look closely, a lot of the feature set matches ASP.NET MVC’s view implementation as well as many of the helper classes found in MVC. It’s not hard to guess the motivation for this sort of view engine: For beginning developers the simple markup syntax is easier to work with, although you obviously still need to have some understanding of the .NET Framework in order to create dynamic content. The syntax is easier to read and grok and much shorter to type than ASP.NET alligator tags (<% %>) and also easier to understand aesthetically what’s happening in the markup code. Razor also is a better fit for Microsoft’s vision of ASP.NET MVC: It’s a new view engine without the baggage of Web Forms attached to it. The engine is more lightweight since it doesn’t carry all the features and object model of Web Forms with it and it can be instantiated directly outside of the HTTP environment, which has been rather tricky to do for the Web Forms view engine. Having a standalone script parser is a huge win for other applications as well – it makes it much easier to create script or meta driven output generators for many types of applications from code/screen generators, to simple form letters to data merging applications with user customizability. For me personally this is very useful side effect and who knows maybe Microsoft will actually standardize they’re scripting engines (die T4 die!) on this engine. Razor also better fits the “view-based” approach where the view is supposed to be mostly a visual representation that doesn’t hold much, if any, code. While you can still use code, the code you do write has to be self-contained. Overall I wouldn’t be surprised if Razor will become the new standard view engine for MVC in the future – and in fact there have been announcements recently that Razor will become the default script engine in ASP.NET MVC 3.0. Razor can also be used in existing Web Forms and MVC applications, although that’s not working currently unless you manually configure the script mappings and add the appropriate assemblies. It’s possible to do it, but it’s probably better to wait until Microsoft releases official support for Razor scripts in Visual Studio. Once that happens, you can simply drop .cshtml and .vbhtml pages into an existing ASP.NET project and they will work side by side with classic ASP.NET pages. WebMatrix Development Environment To tie all of these three technologies together, Microsoft is shipping WebMatrix with an integrated development environment. An integrated gallery manager makes it easy to download and load existing projects, and then extend them with custom functionality. It seems to be a prominent goal to provide community-oriented content that can act as a starting point, be it via a custom templates or a complete standard application. The IDE includes a project manager that works with a single project and provides an integrated IDE/editor for editing the .cshtml and .vbhtml pages. A run button allows you to quickly run pages in the project manager in a variety of browsers. There’s no debugging support for code at this time. Note that Razor pages don’t require explicit compilation, so making a change, saving, and then refreshing your page in the browser is all that’s needed to see changes while testing an application locally. It’s essentially using the auto-compiling Web Project that was introduced with .NET 2.0. All code is compiled during run time into dynamically created assemblies in the ASP.NET temp folder. WebMatrix also has PHP Editing support with syntax highlighting. You can load various PHP-based applications from the WebMatrix Web Gallery directly into the IDE. Most of the Web Gallery applications are ready to install and run without further configuration, with Wizards taking you through installation of tools, dependencies, and configuration of the database as needed. WebMatrix leverages the Web Platform installer to pull the pieces down from websites in a tight integration of tools that worked nicely for the four or five applications I tried this out on. Click a couple of check boxes and fill in a few simple configuration options and you end up with a running application that’s ready to be customized. Nice! You can easily deploy completed applications via WebDeploy (to an IIS server) or FTP directly from within the development environment. The deploy tool also can handle automatically uploading and installing the database and all related assemblies required, making deployment a simple one-click install step. Simplified Database Access The IDE contains a database editor that can edit SQL Compact and SQL Server databases. There is also a Database helper class that facilitates database access by providing easy-to-use, high-level query execution and iteration methods: @{       var db = Database.OpenFile("FirstApp.sdf");     string sql = "select * from customers where Id > @0"; } <ul> @foreach(var row in db.Query(sql,1)){         <li>@row.FirstName @row.LastName</li> } </ul> The query function takes a SQL statement plus any number of positional (@0,@1 etc.) SQL parameters by simple values. The result is returned as a collection of rows which in turn have a row object with dynamic properties for each of the columns giving easy (though untyped) access to each of the fields. Likewise Execute and ExecuteNonQuery allow execution of more complex queries using similar parameter passing schemes. Note these queries use string-based queries rather than LINQ or Entity Framework’s strongly typed LINQ queries. While this may seem like a step back, it’s also in line with the expectations of non .NET script developers who are quite used to writing and using SQL strings in code rather than using OR/M frameworks. The only question is why was something not included from the beginning in .NET and Microsoft made developers build custom implementations of these basic building blocks. The implementation looks a lot like a DataTable-style data access mechanism, but to be fair, this is a common approach in scripting languages. This type of syntax that uses simple, static, data object methods to perform simple data tasks with one line of code are common in scripting languages and are a good match for folks working in PHP/Python, etc. Seems like Microsoft has taken great advantage of .NET 4.0’s dynamic typing to provide this sort of interface for row iteration where each row has properties for each field. FWIW, all the examples demonstrate using local SQL Compact files - I was unable to get a SQL Server connection string to work with the Database class (the connection string wasn’t accepted). However, since the code in the page is still plain old .NET, you can easily use standard ADO.NET code or even LINQ or Entity Framework models that are created outside of WebMatrix in separate assemblies as required. The good the bad the obnoxious - It’s still .NET The beauty (or curse depending on how you look at it :)) of Razor and the compilation model is that, behind it all, it’s still .NET. Although the syntax may look foreign, it’s still all .NET behind the scenes. You can easily access existing tools, helpers, and utilities simply by adding them to the project as references or to the bin folder. Razor automatically recognizes any assembly reference from assemblies in the bin folder. In the default configuration, Microsoft provides a host of helper functions in a Microsoft.WebPages assembly (check it out in the ASP.NET temp folder for your application), which includes a host of HTML Helpers. If you’ve used ASP.NET MVC before, a lot of the helpers should look familiar. Documentation at the moment is sketchy-there’s a very rough API reference you can check out here: http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/asp-net-web-pages-api-reference Who needs WebMatrix? Uhm… good Question Clearly Microsoft is trying hard to create an environment with WebMatrix that is easy to use for newbie developers. The goal seems to be simplicity in providing a minimal development environment and an easy-to-use script engine/language that makes it easy to get started with. There’s also some focus on community features that can be used as starting points, such as Web Gallery applications and templates. The community features in particular are very nice and something that would be nice to eventually see in Visual Studio as well. The question is whether this is too little too late. Developers who have been clamoring for a simpler development environment on the .NET stack have mostly left for other simpler platforms like PHP or Python which are catering to the down and dirty developer. Microsoft will be hard pressed to win those folks-and other hardcore PHP developers-back. Regardless of how much you dress up a script engine fronted by the .NET Framework, it’s still the .NET Framework and all the complexity that drives it. While .NET is a fine solution in its breadth and features once you get a basic handle on the core features, the bar of entry to being productive with the .NET Framework is still pretty high. The MVC style helpers Microsoft provides are a good step in the right direction, but I suspect it’s not enough to shield new developers from having to delve much deeper into the Framework to get even basic applications built. Razor and its helpers is trying to make .NET more accessible but the reality is that in order to do useful stuff that goes beyond the handful of simple helpers you still are going to have to write some C# or VB or other .NET code. If the target is a hobby/amateur/non-programmer the learning curve isn’t made any easier by WebMatrix it’s just been shifted a tad bit further along in your development endeavor when you run out of canned components that are supplied either by Microsoft or the community. The database helpers are interesting and actually I’ve heard a lot of discussion from various developers who’ve been resisting .NET for a really long time perking up at the prospect of easier data access in .NET than the ridiculous amount of code it takes to do even simple data access with raw ADO.NET. It seems sad that such a simple concept and implementation should trigger this sort of response (especially since it’s practically trivial to create helpers like these or pick them up from countless libraries available), but there it is. It also shows that there are plenty of developers out there who are more interested in ‘getting stuff done’ easily than necessarily following the latest and greatest practices which are overkill for many development scenarios. Sometimes it seems that all of .NET is focused on the big life changing issues of development, rather than the bread and butter scenarios that many developers are interested in to get their work accomplished. And that in the end may be WebMatrix’s main raison d'être: To bring some focus back at Microsoft that simpler and more high level solutions are actually needed to appeal to the non-high end developers as well as providing the necessary tools for the high end developers who want to follow the latest and greatest trends. The current version of WebMatrix hits many sweet spots, but it also feels like it has a long way to go before it really can be a tool that a beginning developer or an accomplished developer can feel comfortable with. Although there are some really good ideas in the environment (like the gallery for downloading apps and components) which would be a great addition for Visual Studio as well, the rest of the development environment just feels like crippleware with required functionality missing especially debugging and Intellisense, but also general editor support. It’s not clear whether these are because the product is still in an early alpha release or whether it’s simply designed that way to be a really limited development environment. While simple can be good, nobody wants to feel left out when it comes to necessary tool support and WebMatrix just has that left out feeling to it. If anything WebMatrix’s technology pieces (which are really independent of the WebMatrix product) are what are interesting to developers in general. The compact IIS implementation is a nice improvement for development scenarios and SQL Compact 4.0 seems to address a lot of concerns that people have had and have complained about for some time with previous SQL Compact implementations. By far the most interesting and useful technology though seems to be the Razor view engine for its light weight implementation and it’s decoupling from the ASP.NET/HTTP pipeline to provide a standalone scripting/view engine that is pluggable. The first winner of this is going to be ASP.NET MVC which can now have a cleaner view model that isn’t inconsistent due to the baggage of non-implemented WebForms features that don’t work in MVC. But I expect that Razor will end up in many other applications as a scripting and code generation engine eventually. Visual Studio integration for Razor is currently missing, but is promised for a later release. The ASP.NET MVC team has already mentioned that Razor will eventually become the default MVC view engine, which will guarantee continued growth and development of this tool along those lines. And the Razor engine and support tools actually inherit many of the features that MVC pioneered, so there’s some synergy flowing both ways between Razor and MVC. As an existing ASP.NET developer who’s already familiar with Visual Studio and ASP.NET development, the WebMatrix IDE doesn’t give you anything that you want. The tools provided are minimal and provide nothing that you can’t get in Visual Studio today, except the minimal Razor syntax highlighting, so there’s little need to take a step back. With Visual Studio integration coming later there’s little reason to look at WebMatrix for tooling. It’s good to see that Microsoft is giving some thought about the ease of use of .NET as a platform For so many years, we’ve been piling on more and more new features without trying to take a step back and see how complicated the development/configuration/deployment process has become. Sometimes it’s good to take a step - or several steps - back and take another look and realize just how far we’ve come. WebMatrix is one of those reminders and one that likely will result in some positive changes on the platform as a whole. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

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  • Issue 15: Oracle Exadata Marketing Campaigns

    - by rituchhibber
         PARTNER FOCUS Oracle ExadataMarketing Campaign Steve McNickleVP Europe, cVidya Steve McNickle is VP Europe for cVidya, an innovative provider of revenue intelligence solutions for telecom, media and entertainment service providers including AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telecom and Vodafone. The company's product portfolio helps operators and service providers maximise margins, improve customer experience and optimise ecosystem relationships through revenue assurance, fraud and security management, sales performance management, pricing analytics, and inter-carrier services. cVidya has partnered with Oracle for more than a decade. RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Exastack Labs and Enablement Resources Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle Communications cVidya SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES Are you ready for Oracle OpenWorld this October? -- -- Please could you tell us a little about cVidya's partnering history with Oracle, and expand on your Oracle Exastack accreditations? "cVidya was established just over ten years ago and we've had a strong relationship with Oracle almost since the very beginning. Through our Revenue Intelligence work with some of the world's largest service providers we collect tremendous amounts of information, amounting to billions of records per day. We help our clients to collect, store and analyse that data to ensure that their end customers are getting the best levels of service, are billed correctly, and are happy that they are on the correct price plan. We have been an Oracle Gold level partner for seven years, and crucially just two months ago we were also accredited as Oracle Exastack Optimized for MoneyMap, our core Revenue Assurance solution. Very soon we also expect to be Oracle Exastack Optimized DRMap, our Data Retention solution." What unique capabilities and customer benefits does Oracle Exastack add to your applications? "Oracle Exastack enables us to deliver radical benefits to our customers. A typical mobile operator in the UK might handle between 500 million and two billion call data record details daily. Each transaction needs to be validated, billed correctly and fraud checked. Because of the enormous volumes involved, our clients demand scalable infrastructure that allows them to efficiently acquire, store and process all that data within controlled cost, space and environmental constraints. We have proved that the Oracle Exadata system can process data up to seven times faster and load it as much as 20 times faster than other standard best-of-breed server approaches. With the Oracle Exadata Database Machine they can reduce their datacentre equipment from say, the six or seven cabinets that they needed in the past, down to just one. This dramatic simplification delivers incredible value to the customer by cutting down enormously on all of their significant cost, space, energy, cooling and maintenance overheads." "The Oracle Exastack Program has given our clients the ability to switch their focus from reactive to proactive. Traditionally they may have spent 80 percent of their day processing, and just 20 percent enabling end customers to see advanced analytics, and avoiding issues before they occur. With our solutions and Oracle Exadata they can now switch that balance around entirely, resulting not only in reduced revenue leakage, but a far higher focus on proactive leakage prevention. How has the Oracle Exastack Program transformed your customer business? "We can already see the impact. Oracle solutions allow our delivery teams to achieve successful deployments, happy customers and self-satisfaction, and the power of Oracle's Exa solutions is easy to measure in terms of their transformational ability. We gained our first sale into a major European telco by demonstrating the major performance gains that would transform their business. Clients can measure the ease of organisational change, the early prevention of business issues, the reduction in manpower required to provide protection and coverage across all their products and services, plus of course end customer satisfaction. If customers know that that service is provided accurately and that their bills are calculated correctly, then over time this satisfaction can be attributed to revenue intelligence and the underlying systems which provide it. Combine this with the further integration we have with the other layers of the Oracle stack, including the telecommunications offerings such as NCC, OCDM and BRM, and the result is even greater customer value—not to mention the increased speed to market and the reduced project risk." What does the Oracle Exastack community bring to cVidya, both in terms of general benefits, and also tangible new opportunities and partnerships? "A great deal. We have participated in the Oracle Exastack community heavily over the past year, and have had lots of meetings with Oracle and our peers around the globe. It brings us into contact with like-minded, innovative partners, who like us are not happy to just stand still and want to take fresh technology to their customer base in order to gain enhanced value. We identified three new partnerships in each of two recent meetings, and hope these will open up new opportunities, not only in areas that exactly match where we operate today, but also in some new associative areas that will expand our reach into new business sectors. Notably, thanks to the Exastack community we were invited on stage at last year's Oracle OpenWorld conference. Appearing so publically with Oracle senior VP Judson Althoff elevated awareness and visibility of cVidya and has enabled us to participate in a number of other events with Oracle over the past eight months. We've been involved in speaking opportunities, forums and exhibitions, providing us with invaluable opportunities that we wouldn't otherwise have got close to." How has Exastack differentiated cVidya as an ISV, and helped you to evolve your business to the next level? "When we are selling to our core customer base of Tier 1 telecommunications providers, we know that they want more than just software. They want an enduring partnership that will last many years, they want innovation, and a forward thinking partner who knows how to guide them on where they need to be to meet market demand three, five or seven years down the line. Membership of respected global bodies, such as the Telemanagement Forum enables us to lead standard adherence in our area of business, giving us a lot of credibility, but Oracle is also involved in this forum with its own telecommunications portfolio, strengthening our position still further. When we approach CEOs, CTOs and CIOs at the very largest Tier 1 operators, not only can we easily show them that our technology is fantastic, we can also talk about our strong partnership with Oracle, and our joint embracing of today's standards and tomorrow's innovation." Where would you like cVidya to be in one year's time? "We want to get all of our relevant products Oracle Exastack Optimized. Our MoneyMap Revenue Assurance solution is already Exastack Optimised, our DRMAP Data Retention Solution should be Exastack Optimised within the next month, and our FraudView Fraud Management solution within the next two to three months. We'd then like to extend our Oracle accreditation out to include other members of the Oracle Engineered Systems family. We are moving into the 'Big Data' space, and so we're obviously very keen to work closely with Oracle to conduct pilots, map new technologies onto Oracle Big Data platforms, and embrace and measure the benefits of other Oracle systems, namely Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster. We would also like to examine how the Oracle Database Appliance might benefit our Tier 2 service provider customers. Finally, we'd also like to continue working with the Oracle Communications Global Business Unit (CGBU), furthering our integration with Oracle billing products so that we are able to quickly deploy fraud solutions into Oracle's Engineered System stack, give operational benefits to our clients that are pre-integrated, more cost-effective, and can be rapidly deployed rapidly and producing benefits in three months, not nine months." Chris Baker ,Senior Vice President, Oracle Worldwide ISV-OEM-Java Sales Chris Baker is the Global Head of ISV/OEM Sales responsible for working with ISV/OEM partners to maximise Oracle's business through those partners, whilst maximising those partners' business to their end users. Chris works with partners, customers, innovators, investors and employees to develop innovative business solutions using Oracle products, services and skills. Firstly, could you please explain Oracle's current strategy for ISV partners, globally and in EMEA? "Oracle customers use independent software vendor (ISV) applications to run their businesses. They use them to generate revenue and to fulfil obligations to their own customers. Our strategy is very straight-forward. We want all of our ISV partners and OEMs to concentrate on the things that they do the best – building applications to meet the unique industry and functional requirements of their customer. We want to ensure that we deliver a best in class application platform so the ISV is free to concentrate their effort on their application functionality and user experience We invest over four billion dollars in research and development every year, and we want our ISVs to benefit from all of that investment in operating systems, virtualisation, databases, middleware, engineered systems, and other hardware. By doing this, we help them to reduce their costs, gain more consistency and agility for quicker implementations, and also rapidly differentiate themselves from other application vendors. It's all about simplification because we believe that around 25 to 30 percent of the development costs incurred by many ISVs are caused by customising infrastructure and have nothing to do with their applications. Our strategy is to enable our ISV partners to standardise their application platform using engineered architecture, so they can write once to the Oracle stack and deploy seamlessly in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid deployments. It's really important that architecture is the same in order to keep cost and time overheads at a minimum, so we provide standardisation and an environment that enables our ISVs to concentrate on the core business that makes them the most money and brings them success." How do you believe this strategy is helping the ISVs to work hand-in-hand with Oracle to ensure that end customers get the industry-leading solutions that they need? "We work with our ISVs not just to help them be successful, but also to help them market themselves. We have something called the 'Oracle Exastack Ready Program', which enables ISVs to publicise themselves as 'Ready' to run the core software platforms that run on Oracle's engineered systems including Exadata and Exalogic. So, for example, they can become 'Database Ready' which means that they use the latest version of Oracle Database and therefore can run their application without modification on Exadata or the Oracle Database Appliance. Alternatively, they can become WebLogic Ready, Oracle Linux Ready and Oracle Solaris Ready which means they run on the latest release and therefore can run their application, with no new porting work, on Oracle Exalogic. Those 'Ready' logos are important in helping ISVs advertise to their customers that they are using the latest technologies which have been fully tested. We now also have Exadata Ready and Exalogic Ready programmes which allow ISVs to promote the certification of their applications on these platforms. This highlights these partners to Oracle customers as having solutions that run fluently on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud or one of our other engineered systems. This makes it easy for customers to identify solutions and provides ISVs with an avenue to connect with Oracle customers who are rapidly adopting engineered systems. We have also taken this programme to the next level in the shape of 'Oracle Exastack Optimized' for partners whose applications run best on the Oracle stack and have invested the time to fully optimise application performance. We ensure that Exastack Optimized partner status is promoted and supported by press releases, and we help our ISVs go to market and differentiate themselves through the use our technology and the standardisation it delivers. To date we have had several hundred organisations successfully work through our Exastack Optimized programme." How does Oracle's strategy of offering pre-integrated open platform software and hardware allow ISVs to bring their products to market more quickly? "One of the problems for many ISVs is that they have to think very carefully about the technology on which their solutions will be deployed, particularly in the cloud or hosted environments. They have to think hard about how they secure these environments, whether the concern is, for example, middleware, identity management, or securing personal data. If they don't use the technology that we build-in to our products to help them to fulfil these roles, they then have to build it themselves. This takes time, requires testing, and must be maintained. By taking advantage of our technology, partners will now know that they have a standard platform. They will know that they can confidently talk about implementation being the same every time they do it. Very large ISV applications could once take a year or two to be implemented at an on-premise environment. But it wasn't just the configuration of the application that took the time, it was actually the infrastructure - the different hardware configurations, operating systems and configurations of databases and middleware. Now we strongly believe that it's all about standardisation and repeatability. It's about making sure that our partners can do it once and are then able to roll it out many different times using standard componentry." What actions would you recommend for existing ISV partners that are looking to do more business with Oracle and its customer base, not only to maximise benefits, but also to maximise partner relationships? "My team, around the world and in the EMEA region, is available and ready to talk to any of our ISVs and to explore the possibilities together. We run programmes like 'Excite' and 'Insight' to help us to understand how we can help ISVs with architecture and widen their environments. But we also want to work with, and look at, new opportunities - for example, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market or 'The Internet of Things'. Over the next few years, many millions, indeed billions of devices will be collecting massive amounts of data and communicating it back to the central systems where ISVs will be running their applications. The only way that our partners will be able to provide a single vendor 'end-to-end' solution is to use Oracle integrated systems at the back end and Java on the 'smart' devices collecting the data – a complete solution from device to data centre. So there are huge opportunities to work closely with our ISVs, using Oracle's complete M2M platform, to provide the infrastructure that enables them to extract maximum value from the data collected. If any partners don't know where to start or who to contact, then they can contact me directly at [email protected] or indeed any of our teams across the EMEA region. We want to work with ISVs to help them to be as successful as they possibly can through simplification and speed to market, and we also want all of the top ISVs in the world based on Oracle." What opportunities are immediately opened to new ISV partners joining the OPN? "As you know OPN is very, very important. New members will discover a huge amount of content that instantly becomes accessible to them. They can access a wealth of no-cost training and enablement materials to build their expertise in Oracle technology. They can download Oracle software and use it for development projects. They can help themselves become more competent by becoming part of a true community and uncovering new opportunities by working with Oracle and their peers in the Oracle Partner Network. As well as publishing massive amounts of information on OPN, we also hold our global Oracle OpenWorld event, at which partners play a huge role. This takes place at the end of September and the beginning of October in San Francisco. Attending ISV partners have an unrivalled opportunity to contribute to elements such as the OpenWorld / OPN Exchange, at which they can talk to other partners and really begin thinking about how they can move their businesses on and play key roles in a very large ecosystem which revolves around technology and standardisation." Finally, are there any other messages that you would like to share with the Oracle ISV community? "The crucial message that I always like to reinforce is architecture, architecture and architecture! The key opportunities that ISVs have today revolve around standardising their architectures so that they can confidently think: “I will I be able to do exactly the same thing whenever a customer is looking to deploy on-premise, hosted or in the cloud”. The right architecture is critical to being competitive and to really start changing the game. We want to help our ISV partners to do just that; to establish standard architecture and to seize the opportunities it opens up for them. New market opportunities like M2M are enormous - just look at how many devices are all around you right now. We can help our partners to interface with these devices more effectively while thinking about their entire ecosystem, rather than just the piece that they have traditionally focused upon. With standardised architecture, we can help people dramatically improve their speed, reach, agility and delivery of enhanced customer satisfaction and value all the way from the Java side to their centralised systems. All Oracle ISV partners must take advantage of these opportunities, which is why Oracle will continue to invest in and support them." -- Gergely Strbik is Oracle Hardware and Software Product Manager for Avnet in Hungary. Avnet Technology Solutions is an OracleValue Added Distributor focused on the development of the existing Oracle channel. This includes the recruitment and enablement of Oracle partners as well as driving deeper adoption of Oracle's technology and application products within the IT channel. "The main business benefits of ODA for our customers and partners are scalability, flexibility, a great price point for the high performance delivered, and the easily configurable embedded Linux operating system. People welcome a lower point of entry and the ability to grow capacity on demand as their business expands." "Marketing and selling the ODA requires another way of thinking because it is an appliance. We have to transform the ways in which our partners and customers think from buying hardware and software independently to buying complete solutions. Successful early adopters and satisfied customer reactions will certainly help us to sell the ODA. We will have more experience with the product after the first deliveries and installations—end users need to see the power and benefits for themselves." "Our typical ODA customers will be those looking for complete solutions from a single reseller partner who is also able to manage the appliance. They will have enjoyed using Oracle Database but now want a new product that is able to unlock new levels of performance. A higher proportion of potential customers will come from our existing Oracle base, with around 30% from new business, but we intend to evangelise the ODA on the market to see how we can change this balance as all our customers adjust to the concept of 'Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together'. -- Back to the welcome page

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  • Mouse Clicks, Reactive Extensions and StreamInsight Mashup

    I had an hour spare this afternoon so I wanted to have another play with Reactive Extensions in .Net and StreamInsight.  I also didn’t want to simply use a console window as a way of gathering events so I decided to use a windows form instead. The task I set myself was this. Whenever I click on my form I want to subscribe to the event and output its location to the console window and also the timestamp of the event.  In addition to this I want to know for every mouse click I do, how many mouse clicks have happened in the last 5 seconds. The second point here is really interesting.  I have often found this when working with people on problems.  It is how you ask the question that determines how you tackle the problem.  I will show 2 ways of possibly answering the second question depending on how the question was interpreted. As a side effect of this example I will show how time in StreamInsight can stand still.  This is an important concept and we can see it in the output later. Now to the code.  I will break it all down in this blogpost but you can download the solution and see it all together. I created a Console application and then instantiate a windows form.   frm = new Form(); Thread g = new Thread(CallUI); g.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); g.Start();   Call UI looks like this   static void CallUI() { System.Windows.Forms.Application.Run(frm); frm.Activate(); frm.BringToFront(); }   Now what we need to do is create an observable from the MouseClick event on the form.  For this we use the Reactive Extensions.   var lblevt = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(frm, "MouseClick").Timestamp();   As mentioned earlier I have two objectives in this example and to solve the first I am going to again use the Reactive extensions.  Let’s subscribe to the MouseClick event and output the location and timestamp to the console. lblevt.Subscribe(evt => { Console.WriteLine("Clicked: {0}, {1} ", evt.Value.EventArgs.Location,evt.Timestamp); }); That should take care of obective #1 but what about the second objective.  For that we need some temporal windowing and this means StreamInsight.  First we need to turn our Observable collection of MouseClick events into a PointStream Server s = Server.Create("Default"); Microsoft.ComplexEventProcessing.Application a = s.CreateApplication("MouseClicks"); var input = lblevt.ToPointStream( a, evt => PointEvent.CreateInsert( evt.Timestamp, new { loc = evt.Value.EventArgs.Location.ToString(), ts = evt.Timestamp.ToLocalTime().ToString() }), AdvanceTimeSettings.IncreasingStartTime);   Now that we have created out PointStream we need to do something with it and this is where we get to our second objective.  It is pretty clear that we want some kind of windowing but what? Here is one way of doing it.  It might not be what you wanted but again it is how the second objective is interpreted   var q = from i in input.TumblingWindow(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5), HoppingWindowOutputPolicy.ClipToWindowEnd) select new { CountOfClicks = i.Count() };   The above code creates tumbling windows of 5 seconds and counts the number of events in the windows.  If there are no events in the window then no result is output.  Likewise until an event (MouseClick) is issued then we do not see anything in the output (that is not strictly true because it is the CTI strapped to our MouseClick events that flush the events through the StreamInsight engine not the events themselves).  This approach is centred around the windows and not the events.  Until the windows complete and a CTI is issued then no events are pushed through. An alternate way of answering our second question is below   var q = from i in input.AlterEventDuration(evt => TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5)).SnapshotWindow(SnapshotWindowOutputPolicy.Clip) select new { CountOfClicks = i.Count() };   In this code we extend the duration of each MouseClick to five seconds.  We then create  Snapshot Windows over those events.  Snapshot windows are discussed in detail here.  With this solution we are centred around the events.  It is the events that are driving the output.  Let’s have a look at the output from this solution as it may be a little confusing. First though let me show how we get the output from StreamInsight into the Console window. foreach (var x in q.ToPointEnumerable().Where(e => e.EventKind != EventKind.Cti)) { Console.WriteLine(x.Payload.CountOfClicks); }   Ok so now to the output.   The table at the top shows the output from our routine and the table at the bottom helps to explain the output.  One of the things that will help as well is, you will note that for our PointStream we set the issuing of CTIs to be IncreasingStartTime.  What this means is that the CTI is placed right at the start of the event so will not flush the event with which it was issued but will flush those prior to it.  In the bottom table the Blue fill is where we issued a click.  Yellow fill is the duration and boundaries of our events.  The numbers at the bottom indicate the count of events   Clicked 22:40:16                                 Clicked 23:40:18                                 1                                   Clicked 23:40:20                                 2                                   Clicked 23:40:22                                 3                                   2                                   Clicked 23:40:24                                 3                                   2                                   Clicked 23:40:32                                 3                                   2                                   1                                                                                                         secs 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32                                                                                                                                                                                                                         counts   1   2 3 2 3 2 3   2   1           What we can see here in the output is that the counts include all the end edges that have occurred between the mouse clicks.  If we look specifically at the mouse click at 22:40:32. then we see that 3 events are returned to us. These include the following End Edge count at 22:40:25 End Edge count at 22:40:27 End Edge count at 22:40:29 Another thing we notice is that until we actually issue a CTI at 22:40:32 then those last 3 snapshot window counts will never be reported. Hopefully this has helped to explain  a few concepts around StreamInsight and the IObservable() pattern.   You can download this solution from here and play.  You will need the Reactive Framework from here and StreamInsight 1.1

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  • How to print PCL Directly to the printer? Vb.net VS 2010

    - by Justin
    Good day, I've been trying to upgrade an old Print Program that prints raw pcl directly to the printer. The print program takes a PCL Mask and a PCL Batch Spool File (just pcl with page turn commands, I think) merges them and sends them off to the printer. I'm able to send to the Printer a file stream of PCL but I get mixed results and i do not understand why printing is so difficult under .net. I mean yes there is the PrintDocument class, but to print PCL... Let's just say I'm ready to detach my printer from the network and burn it a live. Here is my class PrintDirect (rather a hybrid class) Imports System Imports System.Text Imports System.Runtime.InteropServices <StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)> _ Public Structure DOCINFO <MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)> _ Public pDocName As String <MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)> _ Public pOutputFile As String <MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)> _ Public pDataType As String End Structure 'DOCINFO Public Class PrintDirect <DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet:=CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling:=False, CallingConvention:=CallingConvention.StdCall)> _ Public Shared Function OpenPrinter(ByVal pPrinterName As String, ByRef phPrinter As IntPtr, ByVal pDefault As Integer) As Long End Function <DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet:=CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling:=False, CallingConvention:=CallingConvention.StdCall)> _ Public Shared Function StartDocPrinter(ByVal hPrinter As IntPtr, ByVal Level As Integer, ByRef pDocInfo As DOCINFO) As Long End Function <DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet:=CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling:=True, CallingConvention:=CallingConvention.StdCall)> _ Public Shared Function StartPagePrinter(ByVal hPrinter As IntPtr) As Long End Function <DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet:=CharSet.Ansi, ExactSpelling:=True, CallingConvention:=CallingConvention.StdCall)> _ Public Shared Function WritePrinter(ByVal hPrinter As IntPtr, ByVal data As String, ByVal buf As Integer, ByRef pcWritten As Integer) As Long End Function <DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet:=CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling:=True, CallingConvention:=CallingConvention.StdCall)> _ Public Shared Function EndPagePrinter(ByVal hPrinter As IntPtr) As Long End Function <DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet:=CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling:=True, CallingConvention:=CallingConvention.StdCall)> _ Public Shared Function EndDocPrinter(ByVal hPrinter As IntPtr) As Long End Function <DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet:=CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling:=True, CallingConvention:=CallingConvention.StdCall)> _ Public Shared Function ClosePrinter(ByVal hPrinter As IntPtr) As Long End Function 'Helps uses to work with the printer Public Class PrintJob ''' <summary> ''' The address of the printer to print to. ''' </summary> ''' <remarks></remarks> Public PrinterName As String = "" Dim lhPrinter As New System.IntPtr() ''' <summary> ''' The object deriving from the Win32 API, Winspool.drv. ''' Use this object to overide the settings defined in the PrintJob Class. ''' </summary> ''' <remarks>Only use this when absolutly nessacary.</remarks> Public OverideDocInfo As New DOCINFO() ''' <summary> ''' The PCL Control Character or the ascii escape character. \x1b ''' </summary> ''' <remarks>ChrW(27)</remarks> Public Const PCL_Control_Character As Char = ChrW(27) ''' <summary> ''' Opens a connection to a printer, if false the connection could not be established. ''' </summary> ''' <returns></returns> ''' <remarks></remarks> Public Function OpenPrint() As Boolean Dim rtn_val As Boolean = False PrintDirect.OpenPrinter(PrinterName, lhPrinter, 0) If Not lhPrinter = 0 Then rtn_val = True End If Return rtn_val End Function ''' <summary> ''' The name of the Print Document. ''' </summary> ''' <value></value> ''' <returns></returns> ''' <remarks></remarks> Public Property DocumentName As String Get Return OverideDocInfo.pDocName End Get Set(ByVal value As String) OverideDocInfo.pDocName = value End Set End Property ''' <summary> ''' The type of Data that will be sent to the printer. ''' </summary> ''' <value>Send the print data type, usually "RAW" or "LPR". To overide use the OverideDocInfo Object</value> ''' <returns>The DataType as it was provided, if it is not part of the enumeration it is set to "UNKNOWN".</returns> ''' <remarks></remarks> Public Property DocumentDataType As PrintDataType Get Select Case OverideDocInfo.pDataType.ToUpper Case "RAW" Return PrintDataType.RAW Case "LPR" Return PrintDataType.LPR Case Else Return PrintDataType.UNKOWN End Select End Get Set(ByVal value As PrintDataType) OverideDocInfo.pDataType = [Enum].GetName(GetType(PrintDataType), value) End Set End Property Public Property DocumentOutputFile As String Get Return OverideDocInfo.pOutputFile End Get Set(ByVal value As String) OverideDocInfo.pOutputFile = value End Set End Property Enum PrintDataType UNKOWN = 0 RAW = 1 LPR = 2 End Enum ''' <summary> ''' Initializes the printing matrix ''' </summary> ''' <param name="PrintLevel">I have no idea what the hack this is...</param> ''' <remarks></remarks> Public Sub OpenDocument(Optional ByVal PrintLevel As Integer = 1) PrintDirect.StartDocPrinter(lhPrinter, PrintLevel, OverideDocInfo) End Sub ''' <summary> ''' Starts the next page. ''' </summary> ''' <remarks></remarks> Public Sub StartPage() PrintDirect.StartPagePrinter(lhPrinter) End Sub ''' <summary> ''' Writes a string to the printer, can be used to write out a section of the document at a time. ''' </summary> ''' <param name="data">The String to Send out to the Printer.</param> ''' <returns>The pcWritten as an integer, 0 may mean the writter did not write out anything.</returns> ''' <remarks>Warning the buffer is automatically created by the lenegth of the string.</remarks> Public Function WriteToPrinter(ByVal data As String) As Integer Dim pcWritten As Integer = 0 PrintDirect.WritePrinter(lhPrinter, data, data.Length - 1, pcWritten) Return pcWritten End Function Public Sub EndPage() PrintDirect.EndPagePrinter(lhPrinter) End Sub Public Sub CloseDocument() PrintDirect.EndDocPrinter(lhPrinter) End Sub Public Sub ClosePrint() PrintDirect.ClosePrinter(lhPrinter) End Sub ''' <summary> ''' Opens a connection to a printer and starts a new document. ''' </summary> ''' <returns>If false the connection could not be established. </returns> ''' <remarks></remarks> Public Function Open() As Boolean Dim rtn_val As Boolean = False rtn_val = OpenPrint() If rtn_val Then OpenDocument() End If Return rtn_val End Function ''' <summary> ''' Closes the document and closes the connection to the printer. ''' </summary> ''' <remarks></remarks> Public Sub Close() CloseDocument() ClosePrint() End Sub End Class End Class 'PrintDirect Here is how I print my file. I'm simple printing the PCL Masks, to show proof of concept. But I can't even do that. I can effectively create PCL and send it the printer without reading the file and it works fine... Plus I get mixed results with different stream reader text encoding as well. Dim pJob As New PrintDirect.PrintJob pJob.DocumentName = " test doc" pJob.DocumentDataType = PrintDirect.PrintJob.PrintDataType.RAW pJob.PrinterName = sPrinter.GetDevicePath '//This is where you'd stick your device name, sPrinter stands for Selected Printer from a dropdown (combobox). 'pJob.DocumentOutputFile = "C:\temp\test-spool.txt" If Not pJob.OpenPrint() Then MsgBox("Unable to connect to " & pJob.PrinterName, MsgBoxStyle.OkOnly, "Print Error") Exit Sub End If pJob.OpenDocument() pJob.StartPage() Dim sr As New IO.StreamReader(Me.txtFile.Text, Text.Encoding.ASCII) '//I've got best results with ASCII before, but only mized. Dim line As String = sr.ReadLine 'Fix for fly code on first run 'If line = 27 Then line = PrintDirect.PrintJob.PCL_Control_Character Do While (Not line Is Nothing) pJob.WriteToPrinter(line) line = sr.ReadLine Loop 'pJob.WriteToPrinter(ControlChars.FormFeed) pJob.EndPage() pJob.CloseDocument() sr.Close() sr.Dispose() sr = Nothing pJob.Close() I was able to get to print the mask, in the morning... now I'm getting strange printer characters scattered through 5 pages... I'm totally clueless. I must have changed something or the printer is at fault. You can access my test Check Mask, here http://kscserver.com/so/chk_mask.zip .

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  • C++ Multithreading with pthread is blocking (including sockets)

    - by Sebastian Büttner
    I am trying to implement a multi threaded application with pthread. I did implement a thread class which looks like the following and I call it later twice (or even more), but it seems to block instead of execute the threads parallel. Here is what I got until now: The Thread Class is an abstract class which has the abstract method "exec" which should contain the thread code in a derive class (I did a sample of this, named DerivedThread) Thread.hpp #ifndef THREAD_H_ #define THREAD_H_ #include <pthread.h> class Thread { public: Thread(); void start(); void join(); virtual int exec() = 0; int exit_code(); private: static void* thread_router(void* arg); void exec_thread(); pthread_t pth_; int code_; }; #endif /* THREAD_H_ */ And Thread.cpp #include <iostream> #include "Thread.hpp" /*****************************/ using namespace std; Thread::Thread(): code_(0) { cout << "[Thread] Init" << endl; } void Thread::start() { cout << "[Thread] Created Thread" << endl; pthread_create( &pth_, NULL, Thread::thread_router, reinterpret_cast<void*>(this)); } void Thread::join() { cout << "[Thread] Join Thread" << endl; pthread_join(pth_, NULL); } int Thread::exit_code() { return code_; } void Thread::exec_thread() { cout << "[Thread] Execute" << endl; code_ = exec(); } void* Thread::thread_router(void* arg) { cout << "[Thread] exec_thread function in thread" << endl; reinterpret_cast<Thread*>(arg)->exec_thread(); return NULL; } DerivedThread.hpp #include "Thread.hpp" class DerivedThread : public Thread { public: DerivedThread(); virtual ~DerivedThread(); int exec(); void Close() = 0; DerivedThread.cpp [...] #include "DerivedThread.cpp" [...] int DerivedThread::exec() { //code to be executed do { cout << "Thread executed" << endl; usleep(1000000); } while (true); //dummy, just to let it run for a while } [...] Basically, I am calling this like the here: DerivedThread *thread; cout << "Creating Thread" << endl; thread = new DerivedThread(); cout << "Created thread, starting..." << endl; thread->start(); cout << "Started thread" << endl; cout << "Creating 2nd Thread" << endl; thread = new DerivedThread(); cout << "Created 2nd thread, starting..." << endl; thread->start(); cout << "Started 2nd thread" << endl; What is working great if I am only starting one of these Threads , but if I start multiple which should run together (not synced, only parallel) . But I discovered, that the thread is created, then as it tries to execute it (via start) the problem seems to block until the thread has closed. After that the next Thread is processed. I thought that pthread would do it unblocked for me, so what did I wrong? A sample output might be: Creating Thread [Thread] Thread Init Created thread, starting... [Thread] Created thread [Thread] exec_thread function in thread [Thread] Execute Thread executed Thread executed Thread executed Thread executed Thread executed Thread executed Thread executed .... Until Thread 1 is not terminated, a Thread 2 won't be created not executed. The process above is executed in an other class. Just for the information: I am trying to create a multi threaded server. The concept is like this: MultiThreadedServer Class has a main loop, like this one: ::inet::ServerSock *sock; //just a simple self made wrapper class for sockets DerivedThread *thread; for (;;) { sock = new ::inet::ServerSock(); this->Socket->accept( *sock ); cout << "Creating Thread" << endl; //Threads (according to code sample above) thread = new DerivedThread(sock); //I did not mentoine the parameter before as it was not neccesary, in fact, I pass the socket handle with the connected socket to the thread cout << "Created thread, starting..." << endl; thread->start(); cout << "Started thread" << endl; } So I thought that this would loop over and over and wait for new connections to accept. and when a new client arrives, I am creating a new thread and give the thread the connected socket as a parameter. In the DerivedThread::exec I am doing the handling for the connected client. Like: [...] do { [...] if (this-sock_-read( Buffer, sizeof(PacketStruc) ) 0) { cout << "[Handler_Base] Recv Packet" << endl; //handle the packet } else { Connected = false; } delete Buffer; } while ( Connected ); So I loop in the created thread as long as the client keeps the connection. I think, that the socket may cause the blocking behaviour. Edit: I figured out, that it is not the read() loop in the DerivedThread Class as I simply replaced it with a loop over a simple cout-usleep part. It did also only execute the first one and after first thread finished, the 2nd one was executed. Many thanks and best regards, Sebastian

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  • Get the current location of the Gps? Showing the default one

    - by Gagandeep
    Need help Urgent!!!!! Did changes with help but still unsuccessful... I have to request location updates, but I am unsuccessful in implementing that... i modified the code but need help so that i can see the current location. PLEASE look through my code and help please.. I am learning this and new to this concept and android.. any help would be appreciated here is my code: package com.GoogleMaps; import java.util.List; import com.google.android.maps.GeoPoint; import com.google.android.maps.MapActivity; import com.google.android.maps.MapController; import com.google.android.maps.MapView; import com.google.android.maps.Overlay; import android.content.Context; import android.graphics.Bitmap; import android.graphics.BitmapFactory; import android.graphics.Canvas; import android.graphics.Paint; import android.graphics.Point; import android.graphics.drawable.Drawable; import android.location.Location; import android.location.LocationListener; import android.location.LocationManager; import android.os.Bundle; import android.widget.Toast; public class MapsActivity extends MapActivity { /** Called when the activity is first created. */ private MapView mapView; private LocationManager lm; private LocationListener ll; private MapController mc; GeoPoint p = null; Drawable defaultMarker = null; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); mapView = (MapView)findViewById(R.id.mapview); //show zoom in/out buttons mapView.setBuiltInZoomControls(true); //Standard view of the map(map/sat) mapView.setSatellite(false); // get zoom tool mapView.setBuiltInZoomControls(true); //get controller of the map for zooming in/out mc = mapView.getController(); // Zoom Level mc.setZoom(18); lm = (LocationManager)getSystemService(Context.LOCATION_SERVICE); ll = new MyLocationListener(); lm.requestLocationUpdates( LocationManager.GPS_PROVIDER, 0, 0, ll); //Get the current location in start-up lm = (LocationManager)getSystemService(Context.LOCATION_SERVICE); ll = new MyLocationListener(); lm.requestLocationUpdates( LocationManager.GPS_PROVIDER, 0, 0, ll); //Get the current location in start-up if (lm.getLastKnownLocation(LocationManager.GPS_PROVIDER) != null){ GeoPoint p = new GeoPoint( (int)(lm.getLastKnownLocation(LocationManager.GPS_PROVIDER).getLatitude()*1000000), (int)(lm.getLastKnownLocation(LocationManager.GPS_PROVIDER).getLongitude()*1000000)); mc.animateTo(p); } MyLocationOverlay myLocationOverlay = new MyLocationOverlay(); List<Overlay> list = mapView.getOverlays(); list.add(myLocationOverlay); } protected class MyLocationOverlay extends com.google.android.maps.Overlay { @Override public boolean draw(Canvas canvas, MapView mapView, boolean shadow, long when) { Paint paint = new Paint(); super.draw(canvas, mapView, shadow); GeoPoint p = null; // Converts lat/lng-Point to OUR coordinates on the screen. Point myScreenCoords = new Point(); mapView.getProjection().toPixels(p, myScreenCoords); paint.setStrokeWidth(1); paint.setARGB(255, 255, 255, 255); paint.setStyle(Paint.Style.STROKE); Bitmap bmp = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.ic_launcher); canvas.drawBitmap(bmp, myScreenCoords.x, myScreenCoords.y, paint); canvas.drawText("I am here...", myScreenCoords.x, myScreenCoords.y, paint); return true; } } private class MyLocationListener implements LocationListener{ public void onLocationChanged(Location argLocation) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub p = new GeoPoint((int)(argLocation.getLatitude()*1000000), (int)(argLocation.getLongitude()*1000000)); Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), "New location latitude [" +argLocation.getLatitude() + "] longitude [" + argLocation.getLongitude()+"]", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show(); mc.animateTo(p); mapView.invalidate(); // call this so UI of map was updated } public void onProviderDisabled(String provider) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } public void onProviderEnabled(String provider) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } public void onStatusChanged(String provider, int status, Bundle extras) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } } protected boolean isRouteDisplayed() { return false; } } catlog: 11-29 17:40:42.699: D/dalvikvm(371): GC_FOR_MALLOC freed 6074 objects / 369952 bytes in 74ms 11-29 17:40:42.970: I/MapActivity(371): Handling network change notification:CONNECTED 11-29 17:40:42.980: E/MapActivity(371): Couldn't get connection factory client 11-29 17:40:43.190: D/AndroidRuntime(371): Shutting down VM 11-29 17:40:43.190: W/dalvikvm(371): threadid=1: thread exiting with uncaught exception (group=0x4001d800) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): FATAL EXCEPTION: main 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): java.lang.NullPointerException 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at com.google.android.maps.PixelConverter.toPixels(PixelConverter.java:71) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at com.google.android.maps.PixelConverter.toPixels(PixelConverter.java:61) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at com.GoogleMaps.MapsActivity$MyLocationOverlay.draw(MapsActivity.java:106) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at com.google.android.maps.OverlayBundle.draw(OverlayBundle.java:42) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at com.google.android.maps.MapView.onDraw(MapView.java:494) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.View.draw(View.java:6740) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.ViewGroup.drawChild(ViewGroup.java:1640) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchDraw(ViewGroup.java:1367) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.ViewGroup.drawChild(ViewGroup.java:1638) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchDraw(ViewGroup.java:1367) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.View.draw(View.java:6743) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.widget.FrameLayout.draw(FrameLayout.java:352) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.ViewGroup.drawChild(ViewGroup.java:1640) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchDraw(ViewGroup.java:1367) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.ViewGroup.drawChild(ViewGroup.java:1638) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchDraw(ViewGroup.java:1367) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.View.draw(View.java:6743) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.widget.FrameLayout.draw(FrameLayout.java:352) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at com.android.internal.policy.impl.PhoneWindow$DecorView.draw(PhoneWindow.java:1842) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.ViewRoot.draw(ViewRoot.java:1407) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.ViewRoot.performTraversals(ViewRoot.java:1163) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.view.ViewRoot.handleMessage(ViewRoot.java:1727) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:123) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4627) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:521) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:868) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:626) 11-29 17:40:43.280: E/AndroidRuntime(371): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) 11-29 17:40:45.779: D/dalvikvm(371): GC_FOR_MALLOC freed 5970 objects / 506624 bytes in 1179ms 11-29 17:40:45.779: I/dalvikvm-heap(371): Grow heap (frag case) to 3.147MB for 17858-byte allocation 11-29 17:40:45.870: D/dalvikvm(371): GC_FOR_MALLOC freed 56 objects / 2304 bytes in 92ms 11-29 17:40:45.960: D/dalvikvm(371): GC_EXPLICIT freed 3459 objects / 196432 bytes in 74ms 11-29 17:40:48.310: D/dalvikvm(371): GC_EXPLICIT freed 116 objects / 41448 bytes in 68ms 11-29 17:40:49.540: I/Process(371): Sending signal. PID: 371 SIG: 9

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  • Unusually high dentry cache usage

    - by Wolfgang Stengel
    Problem A CentOS machine with kernel 2.6.32 and 128 GB physical RAM ran into trouble a few days ago. The responsible system administrator tells me that the PHP-FPM application was not responding to requests in a timely manner anymore due to swapping, and having seen in free that almost no memory was left, he chose to reboot the machine. I know that free memory can be a confusing concept on Linux and a reboot perhaps was the wrong thing to do. However, the mentioned administrator blames the PHP application (which I am responsible for) and refuses to investigate further. What I could find out on my own is this: Before the restart, the free memory (incl. buffers and cache) was only a couple of hundred MB. Before the restart, /proc/meminfo reported a Slab memory usage of around 90 GB (yes, GB). After the restart, the free memory was 119 GB, going down to around 100 GB within an hour, as the PHP-FPM workers (about 600 of them) were coming back to life, each of them showing between 30 and 40 MB in the RES column in top (which has been this way for months and is perfectly reasonable given the nature of the PHP application). There is nothing else in the process list that consumes an unusual or noteworthy amount of RAM. After the restart, Slab memory was around 300 MB If have been monitoring the system ever since, and most notably the Slab memory is increasing in a straight line with a rate of about 5 GB per day. Free memory as reported by free and /proc/meminfo decreases at the same rate. Slab is currently at 46 GB. According to slabtop most of it is used for dentry entries: Free memory: free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 129048 76435 52612 0 144 7675 -/+ buffers/cache: 68615 60432 Swap: 8191 0 8191 Meminfo: cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 132145324 kB MemFree: 53620068 kB Buffers: 147760 kB Cached: 8239072 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 20300940 kB Inactive: 6512716 kB Active(anon): 18408460 kB Inactive(anon): 24736 kB Active(file): 1892480 kB Inactive(file): 6487980 kB Unevictable: 8608 kB Mlocked: 8608 kB SwapTotal: 8388600 kB SwapFree: 8388600 kB Dirty: 11416 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 18436224 kB Mapped: 94536 kB Shmem: 6364 kB Slab: 46240380 kB SReclaimable: 44561644 kB SUnreclaim: 1678736 kB KernelStack: 9336 kB PageTables: 457516 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 72364108 kB Committed_AS: 22305444 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 480164 kB VmallocChunk: 34290830848 kB HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB AnonHugePages: 12216320 kB HugePages_Total: 2048 HugePages_Free: 2048 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 HugePages_Surp: 0 Hugepagesize: 2048 kB DirectMap4k: 5604 kB DirectMap2M: 2078720 kB DirectMap1G: 132120576 kB Slabtop: slabtop --once Active / Total Objects (% used) : 225920064 / 226193412 (99.9%) Active / Total Slabs (% used) : 11556364 / 11556415 (100.0%) Active / Total Caches (% used) : 110 / 194 (56.7%) Active / Total Size (% used) : 43278793.73K / 43315465.42K (99.9%) Minimum / Average / Maximum Object : 0.02K / 0.19K / 4096.00K OBJS ACTIVE USE OBJ SIZE SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME 221416340 221416039 3% 0.19K 11070817 20 44283268K dentry 1123443 1122739 99% 0.41K 124827 9 499308K fuse_request 1122320 1122180 99% 0.75K 224464 5 897856K fuse_inode 761539 754272 99% 0.20K 40081 19 160324K vm_area_struct 437858 223259 50% 0.10K 11834 37 47336K buffer_head 353353 347519 98% 0.05K 4589 77 18356K anon_vma_chain 325090 324190 99% 0.06K 5510 59 22040K size-64 146272 145422 99% 0.03K 1306 112 5224K size-32 137625 137614 99% 1.02K 45875 3 183500K nfs_inode_cache 128800 118407 91% 0.04K 1400 92 5600K anon_vma 59101 46853 79% 0.55K 8443 7 33772K radix_tree_node 52620 52009 98% 0.12K 1754 30 7016K size-128 19359 19253 99% 0.14K 717 27 2868K sysfs_dir_cache 10240 7746 75% 0.19K 512 20 2048K filp VFS cache pressure: cat /proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure 125 Swappiness: cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness 0 I know that unused memory is wasted memory, so this should not necessarily be a bad thing (especially given that 44 GB are shown as SReclaimable). However, apparently the machine experienced problems nonetheless, and I'm afraid the same will happen again in a few days when Slab surpasses 90 GB. Questions I have these questions: Am I correct in thinking that the Slab memory is always physical RAM, and the number is already subtracted from the MemFree value? Is such a high number of dentry entries normal? The PHP application has access to around 1.5 M files, however most of them are archives and not being accessed at all for regular web traffic. What could be an explanation for the fact that the number of cached inodes is much lower than the number of cached dentries, should they not be related somehow? If the system runs into memory trouble, should the kernel not free some of the dentries automatically? What could be a reason that this does not happen? Is there any way to "look into" the dentry cache to see what all this memory is (i.e. what are the paths that are being cached)? Perhaps this points to some kind of memory leak, symlink loop, or indeed to something the PHP application is doing wrong. The PHP application code as well as all asset files are mounted via GlusterFS network file system, could that have something to do with it? Please keep in mind that I can not investigate as root, only as a regular user, and that the administrator refuses to help. He won't even run the typical echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches test to see if the Slab memory is indeed reclaimable. Any insights into what could be going on and how I can investigate any further would be greatly appreciated. Updates Some further diagnostic information: Mounts: cat /proc/self/mounts rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0 proc /proc proc rw,relatime 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs rw,relatime 0 0 devtmpfs /dev devtmpfs rw,relatime,size=66063000k,nr_inodes=16515750,mode=755 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw,relatime 0 0 /dev/mapper/sysvg-lv_root / ext4 rw,relatime,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 /proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw,relatime 0 0 /dev/sda1 /boot ext4 rw,relatime,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 tmpfs /phptmp tmpfs rw,noatime,size=1048576k,nr_inodes=15728640,mode=777 0 0 tmpfs /wsdltmp tmpfs rw,noatime,size=1048576k,nr_inodes=15728640,mode=777 0 0 none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,relatime 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/cpuset cgroup rw,relatime,cpuset 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/cpu cgroup rw,relatime,cpu 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/cpuacct cgroup rw,relatime,cpuacct 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/memory cgroup rw,relatime,memory 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/devices cgroup rw,relatime,devices 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/freezer cgroup rw,relatime,freezer 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/net_cls cgroup rw,relatime,net_cls 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/blkio cgroup rw,relatime,blkio 0 0 /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-www.vol /var/www fuse.glusterfs rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,max_read=131072 0 0 /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-upload.vol /var/upload fuse.glusterfs rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,max_read=131072 0 0 sunrpc /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw,relatime 0 0 172.17.39.78:/www /data/www nfs rw,relatime,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,port=38467,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=172.17.39.78,mountvers=3,mountport=38465,mountproto=tcp,local_lock=none,addr=172.17.39.78 0 0 Mount info: cat /proc/self/mountinfo 16 21 0:3 / /proc rw,relatime - proc proc rw 17 21 0:0 / /sys rw,relatime - sysfs sysfs rw 18 21 0:5 / /dev rw,relatime - devtmpfs devtmpfs rw,size=66063000k,nr_inodes=16515750,mode=755 19 18 0:11 / /dev/pts rw,relatime - devpts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 20 18 0:16 / /dev/shm rw,relatime - tmpfs tmpfs rw 21 1 253:1 / / rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/mapper/sysvg-lv_root rw,barrier=1,data=ordered 22 16 0:15 / /proc/bus/usb rw,relatime - usbfs /proc/bus/usb rw 23 21 8:1 / /boot rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/sda1 rw,barrier=1,data=ordered 24 21 0:17 / /phptmp rw,noatime - tmpfs tmpfs rw,size=1048576k,nr_inodes=15728640,mode=777 25 21 0:18 / /wsdltmp rw,noatime - tmpfs tmpfs rw,size=1048576k,nr_inodes=15728640,mode=777 26 16 0:19 / /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc rw,relatime - binfmt_misc none rw 27 21 0:20 / /cgroup/cpuset rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuset 28 21 0:21 / /cgroup/cpu rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpu 29 21 0:22 / /cgroup/cpuacct rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuacct 30 21 0:23 / /cgroup/memory rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,memory 31 21 0:24 / /cgroup/devices rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,devices 32 21 0:25 / /cgroup/freezer rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,freezer 33 21 0:26 / /cgroup/net_cls rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,net_cls 34 21 0:27 / /cgroup/blkio rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,blkio 35 21 0:28 / /var/www rw,relatime - fuse.glusterfs /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-www.vol rw,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,max_read=131072 36 21 0:29 / /var/upload rw,relatime - fuse.glusterfs /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-upload.vol rw,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,max_read=131072 37 21 0:30 / /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rw,relatime - rpc_pipefs sunrpc rw 39 21 0:31 / /data/www rw,relatime - nfs 172.17.39.78:/www rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,port=38467,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=172.17.39.78,mountvers=3,mountport=38465,mountproto=tcp,local_lock=none,addr=172.17.39.78 GlusterFS config: cat /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-www.vol volume remote1 type protocol/client option transport-type tcp option remote-host 172.17.39.71 option ping-timeout 10 option transport.socket.nodelay on # undocumented option for speed # http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2009-September/003158.html option remote-subvolume /data/www end-volume volume remote2 type protocol/client option transport-type tcp option remote-host 172.17.39.72 option ping-timeout 10 option transport.socket.nodelay on # undocumented option for speed # http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2009-September/003158.html option remote-subvolume /data/www end-volume volume remote3 type protocol/client option transport-type tcp option remote-host 172.17.39.73 option ping-timeout 10 option transport.socket.nodelay on # undocumented option for speed # http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2009-September/003158.html option remote-subvolume /data/www end-volume volume remote4 type protocol/client option transport-type tcp option remote-host 172.17.39.74 option ping-timeout 10 option transport.socket.nodelay on # undocumented option for speed # http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2009-September/003158.html option remote-subvolume /data/www end-volume volume replicate1 type cluster/replicate option lookup-unhashed off # off will reduce cpu usage, and network option local-volume-name 'hostname' subvolumes remote1 remote2 end-volume volume replicate2 type cluster/replicate option lookup-unhashed off # off will reduce cpu usage, and network option local-volume-name 'hostname' subvolumes remote3 remote4 end-volume volume distribute type cluster/distribute subvolumes replicate1 replicate2 end-volume volume iocache type performance/io-cache option cache-size 8192MB # default is 32MB subvolumes distribute end-volume volume writeback type performance/write-behind option cache-size 1024MB option window-size 1MB subvolumes iocache end-volume ### Add io-threads for parallel requisitions volume iothreads type performance/io-threads option thread-count 64 # default is 16 subvolumes writeback end-volume volume ra type performance/read-ahead option page-size 2MB option page-count 16 option force-atime-update no subvolumes iothreads end-volume

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  • Building applications with WPF, MVVM and Prism(aka CAG)

    - by skjagini
    In this article I am going to walk through an application using WPF and Prism (aka composite application guidance, CAG) which simulates engaging a taxi (cab).  The rules are simple, the app would have3 screens A login screen to authenticate the user An information screen. A screen to engage the cab and roam around and calculating the total fare Metered Rate of Fare The meter is required to be engaged when a cab is occupied by anyone $3.00 upon entry $0.35 for each additional unit The unit fare is: one-fifth of a mile, when the cab is traveling at 6 miles an hour or more; or 60 seconds when not in motion or traveling at less than 12 miles per hour. Night surcharge of $.50 after 8:00 PM & before 6:00 AM Peak hour Weekday Surcharge of $1.00 Monday - Friday after 4:00 PM & before 8:00 PM New York State Tax Surcharge of $.50 per ride. Example: Friday (2010-10-08) 5:30pm Start at Lexington Ave & E 57th St End at Irving Pl & E 15th St Start = $3.00 Travels 2 miles at less than 6 mph for 15 minutes = $3.50 Travels at more than 12 mph for 5 minutes = $1.75 Peak hour Weekday Surcharge = $1.00 (ride started at 5:30 pm) New York State Tax Surcharge = $0.50 Before we dive into the app, I would like to give brief description about the framework.  If you want to jump on to the source code, scroll all the way to the end of the post. MVVM MVVM pattern is in no way related to the usage of PRISM in your application and should be considered if you are using WPF irrespective of PRISM or not. Lets say you are not familiar with MVVM, your typical UI would involve adding some UI controls like text boxes, a button, double clicking on the button,  generating event handler, calling a method from business layer and updating the user interface, it works most of the time for developing small scale applications. The problem with this approach is that there is some amount of code specific to business logic wrapped in UI specific code which is hard to unit test it, mock it and MVVM helps to solve the exact problem. MVVM stands for Model(M) – View(V) – ViewModel(VM),  based on the interactions with in the three parties it should be called VVMM,  MVVM sounds more like MVC (Model-View-Controller) so the name. Why it should be called VVMM: View – View Model - Model WPF allows to create user interfaces using XAML and MVVM takes it to the next level by allowing complete separation of user interface and business logic. In WPF each view will have a property, DataContext when set to an instance of a class (which happens to be your view model) provides the data the view is interested in, i.e., view interacts with view model and at the same time view model interacts with view through DataContext. Sujith, if view and view model are interacting directly with each other how does MVVM is helping me separation of concerns? Well, the catch is DataContext is of type Object, since it is of type object view doesn’t know exact type of view model allowing views and views models to be loosely coupled. View models aggregate data from models (data access layer, services, etc) and make it available for views through properties, methods etc, i.e., View Models interact with Models. PRISM Prism is provided by Microsoft Patterns and Practices team and it can be downloaded from codeplex for source code,  samples and documentation on msdn.  The name composite implies, to compose user interface from different modules (views) without direct dependencies on each other, again allowing  loosely coupled development. Well Sujith, I can already do that with user controls, why shall I learn another framework?  That’s correct, you can decouple using user controls, but you still have to manage some amount of coupling, like how to do you communicate between the controls, how do you subscribe/unsubscribe, loading/unloading views dynamically. Prism is not a replacement for user controls, provides the following features which greatly help in designing the composite applications. Dependency Injection (DI)/ Inversion of Control (IoC) Modules Regions Event Aggregator  Commands Simply put, MVVM helps building a single view and Prism helps building an application using the views There are other open source alternatives to Prism, like MVVMLight, Cinch, take a look at them as well. Lets dig into the source code.  1. Solution The solution is made of the following projects Framework: Holds the common functionality in building applications using WPF and Prism TaxiClient: Start up project, boot strapping and app styling TaxiCommon: Helps with the business logic TaxiModules: Holds the meat of the application with views and view models TaxiTests: To test the application 2. DI / IoC Dependency Injection (DI) as the name implies refers to injecting dependencies and Inversion of Control (IoC) means the calling code has no direct control on the dependencies, opposite of normal way of programming where dependencies are passed by caller, i.e inversion; aside from some differences in terminology the concept is same in both the cases. The idea behind DI/IoC pattern is to reduce the amount of direct coupling between different components of the application, the higher the dependency the more tightly coupled the application resulting in code which is hard to modify, unit test and mock.  Initializing Dependency Injection through BootStrapper TaxiClient is the starting project of the solution and App (App.xaml)  is the starting class that gets called when you run the application. From the App’s OnStartup method we will invoke BootStrapper.   namespace TaxiClient { /// <summary> /// Interaction logic for App.xaml /// </summary> public partial class App : Application { protected override void OnStartup(StartupEventArgs e) { base.OnStartup(e);   (new BootStrapper()).Run(); } } } BootStrapper is your contact point for initializing the application including dependency injection, creating Shell and other frameworks. We are going to use Unity for DI and there are lot of open source DI frameworks like Spring.Net, StructureMap etc with different feature set  and you can choose a framework based on your preferences. Note that Prism comes with in built support for Unity, for example we are deriving from UnityBootStrapper in our case and for any other DI framework you have to extend the Prism appropriately   namespace TaxiClient { public class BootStrapper: UnityBootstrapper { protected override IModuleCatalog CreateModuleCatalog() { return new ConfigurationModuleCatalog(); } protected override DependencyObject CreateShell() { Framework.FrameworkBootStrapper.Run(Container, Application.Current.Dispatcher);   Shell shell = new Shell(); shell.ResizeMode = ResizeMode.NoResize; shell.Show();   return shell; } } } Lets take a look into  FrameworkBootStrapper to check out how to register with unity container. namespace Framework { public class FrameworkBootStrapper { public static void Run(IUnityContainer container, Dispatcher dispatcher) { UIDispatcher uiDispatcher = new UIDispatcher(dispatcher); container.RegisterInstance<IDispatcherService>(uiDispatcher);   container.RegisterType<IInjectSingleViewService, InjectSingleViewService>( new ContainerControlledLifetimeManager());   . . . } } } In the above code we are registering two components with unity container. You shall observe that we are following two different approaches, RegisterInstance and RegisterType.  With RegisterInstance we are registering an existing instance and the same instance will be returned for every request made for IDispatcherService   and with RegisterType we are requesting unity container to create an instance for us when required, i.e., when I request for an instance for IInjectSingleViewService, unity will create/return an instance of InjectSingleViewService class and with RegisterType we can configure the life time of the instance being created. With ContaienrControllerLifetimeManager, the unity container caches the instance and reuses for any subsequent requests, without recreating a new instance. Lets take a look into FareViewModel.cs and it’s constructor. The constructor takes one parameter IEventAggregator and if you try to find all references in your solution for IEventAggregator, you will not find a single location where an instance of EventAggregator is passed directly to the constructor. The compiler still finds an instance and works fine because Prism is already configured when used with Unity container to return an instance of EventAggregator when requested for IEventAggregator and in this particular case it is called constructor injection. public class FareViewModel:ObservableBase, IDataErrorInfo { ... private IEventAggregator _eventAggregator;   public FareViewModel(IEventAggregator eventAggregator) { _eventAggregator = eventAggregator; InitializePropertyNames(); InitializeModel(); PropertyChanged += OnPropertyChanged; } ... 3. Shell Shells are very similar in operation to Master Pages in asp.net or MDI in Windows Forms. And shells contain regions which display the views, you can have as many regions as you wish in a given view. You can also nest regions. i.e, one region can load a view which in itself may contain other regions. We have to create a shell at the start of the application and are doing it by overriding CreateShell method from BootStrapper From the following Shell.xaml you shall notice that we have two content controls with Region names as ‘MenuRegion’ and ‘MainRegion’.  The idea here is that you can inject any user controls into the regions dynamically, i.e., a Menu User Control for MenuRegion and based on the user action you can load appropriate view into MainRegion.    <Window x:Class="TaxiClient.Shell" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:Regions="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Practices.Prism.Regions;assembly=Microsoft.Practices.Prism" Title="Taxi" Height="370" Width="800"> <Grid Margin="2"> <ContentControl Regions:RegionManager.RegionName="MenuRegion" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" VerticalContentAlignment="Stretch" />   <ContentControl Grid.Row="1" Regions:RegionManager.RegionName="MainRegion" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" VerticalContentAlignment="Stretch" /> <!--<Border Grid.ColumnSpan="2" BorderThickness="2" CornerRadius="3" BorderBrush="LightBlue" />-->   </Grid> </Window> 4. Modules Prism provides the ability to build composite applications and modules play an important role in it. For example if you are building a Mortgage Loan Processor application with 3 components, i.e. customer’s credit history,  existing mortgages, new home/loan information; and consider that the customer’s credit history component involves gathering data about his/her address, background information, job details etc. The idea here using Prism modules is to separate the implementation of these 3 components into their own visual studio projects allowing to build components with no dependency on each other and independently. If we need to add another component to the application, the component can be developed by in house team or some other team in the organization by starting with a new Visual Studio project and adding to the solution at the run time with very little knowledge about the application. Prism modules are defined by implementing the IModule interface and each visual studio project to be considered as a module should implement the IModule interface.  From the BootStrapper.cs you shall observe that we are overriding the method by returning a ConfiguratingModuleCatalog which returns the modules that are registered for the application using the app.config file  and you can also add module using code. Lets take a look into configuration file.   <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <configSections> <section name="modules" type="Microsoft.Practices.Prism.Modularity.ModulesConfigurationSection, Microsoft.Practices.Prism"/> </configSections> <modules> <module assemblyFile="TaxiModules.dll" moduleType="TaxiModules.ModuleInitializer, TaxiModules" moduleName="TaxiModules"/> </modules> </configuration> Here we are adding TaxiModules project to our solution and TaxiModules.ModuleInitializer implements IModule interface   5. Module Mapper With Prism modules you can dynamically add or remove modules from the regions, apart from that Prism also provides API to control adding/removing the views from a region within the same module. Taxi Information Screen: Engage the Taxi Screen: The sample application has two screens, ‘Taxi Information’ and ‘Engage the Taxi’ and they both reside in same module, TaxiModules. ‘Engage the Taxi’ is again made of two user controls, FareView on the left and TotalView on the right. We have created a Shell with two regions, MenuRegion and MainRegion with menu loaded into MenuRegion. We can create a wrapper user control called EngageTheTaxi made of FareView and TotalView and load either TaxiInfo or EngageTheTaxi into MainRegion based on the user action. Though it will work it tightly binds the user controls and for every combination of user controls, we need to create a dummy wrapper control to contain them. Instead we can apply the principles we learned so far from Shell/regions and introduce another template (LeftAndRightRegionView.xaml) made of two regions Region1 (left) and Region2 (right) and load  FareView and TotalView dynamically.  To help with loading of the views dynamically I have introduce an helper an interface, IInjectSingleViewService,  idea suggested by Mike Taulty, a must read blog for .Net developers. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel;   namespace Framework.PresentationUtility.Navigation {   public interface IInjectSingleViewService : INotifyPropertyChanged { IEnumerable<CommandViewDefinition> Commands { get; } IEnumerable<ModuleViewDefinition> Modules { get; }   void RegisterViewForRegion(string commandName, string viewName, string regionName, Type viewType); void ClearViewFromRegion(string viewName, string regionName); void RegisterModule(string moduleName, IList<ModuleMapper> moduleMappers); } } The Interface declares three methods to work with views: RegisterViewForRegion: Registers a view with a particular region. You can register multiple views and their regions under one command.  When this particular command is invoked all the views registered under it will be loaded into their regions. ClearViewFromRegion: To unload a specific view from a region. RegisterModule: The idea is when a command is invoked you can load the UI with set of controls in their default position and based on the user interaction, you can load different contols in to different regions on the fly.  And it is supported ModuleViewDefinition and ModuleMappers as shown below. namespace Framework.PresentationUtility.Navigation { public class ModuleViewDefinition { public string ModuleName { get; set; } public IList<ModuleMapper> ModuleMappers; public ICommand Command { get; set; } }   public class ModuleMapper { public string ViewName { get; set; } public string RegionName { get; set; } public Type ViewType { get; set; } } } 6. Event Aggregator Prism event aggregator enables messaging between components as in Observable pattern, Notifier notifies the Observer which receives notification it is interested in. When it comes to Observable pattern, Observer has to unsubscribes for notifications when it no longer interested in notifications, which allows the Notifier to remove the Observer’s reference from it’s local cache. Though .Net has managed garbage collection it cannot remove inactive the instances referenced by an active instance resulting in memory leak, keeping the Observers in memory as long as Notifier stays in memory.  Developers have to be very careful to unsubscribe when necessary and it often gets overlooked, to overcome these problems Prism Event Aggregator uses weak references to cache the reference (Observer in this case)  and releases the reference (memory) once the instance goes out of scope. Using event aggregator is very simple, declare a generic type of CompositePresenationEvent by inheriting from it. using Microsoft.Practices.Prism.Events; using TaxiCommon.BAO;   namespace TaxiCommon.CompositeEvents { public class TaxiOnMoveEvent:CompositePresentationEvent<TaxiOnMove> { } }   TaxiOnMove.cs includes the properties which we want to exchange between the parties, FareView and TotalView. using System;   namespace TaxiCommon.BAO { public class TaxiOnMove { public TimeSpan MinutesAtTweleveMPH { get; set; } public double MilesAtSixMPH { get; set; } } }   Lets take a look into FareViewodel (Notifier) and how it raises the event.  Here we are raising the event by getting the event through GetEvent<..>() and publishing it with the payload private void OnAddMinutes(object obj) { TaxiOnMove payload = new TaxiOnMove(); if(MilesAtSixMPH != null) payload.MilesAtSixMPH = MilesAtSixMPH.Value; if(MinutesAtTweleveMPH != null) payload.MinutesAtTweleveMPH = new TimeSpan(0,0,MinutesAtTweleveMPH.Value,0);   _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiOnMoveEvent>().Publish(payload); ResetMinutesAndMiles(); } And TotalViewModel(Observer) subscribes to notifications by getting the event through GetEvent<..>() namespace TaxiModules.ViewModels { public class TotalViewModel:ObservableBase { .... private IEventAggregator _eventAggregator;   public TotalViewModel(IEventAggregator eventAggregator) { _eventAggregator = eventAggregator; ... }   private void SubscribeToEvents() { _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiStartedEvent>() .Subscribe(OnTaxiStarted, ThreadOption.UIThread,false,(filter) => true); _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiOnMoveEvent>() .Subscribe(OnTaxiMove, ThreadOption.UIThread, false, (filter) => true); _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiResetEvent>() .Subscribe(OnTaxiReset, ThreadOption.UIThread, false, (filter) => true); }   ... private void OnTaxiMove(TaxiOnMove taxiOnMove) { OnMoveFare fare = new OnMoveFare(taxiOnMove); Fares.Add(fare); SetTotalFare(new []{fare}); }   .... 7. MVVM through example In this section we are going to look into MVVM implementation through example.  I have all the modules declared in a single project, TaxiModules, again it is not necessary to have them into one project. Once the user logs into the application, will be greeted with the ‘Engage the Taxi’ screen which is made of two user controls, FareView.xaml and TotalView.Xaml. As you can see from the solution explorer, each of them have their own code behind files and  ViewModel classes, FareViewMode.cs, TotalViewModel.cs Lets take a look in to the FareView and how it interacts with FareViewModel using MVVM implementation. FareView.xaml acts as a view and FareViewMode.cs is it’s view model. The FareView code behind class   namespace TaxiModules.Views { /// <summary> /// Interaction logic for FareView.xaml /// </summary> public partial class FareView : UserControl { public FareView(FareViewModel viewModel) { InitializeComponent(); this.Loaded += (s, e) => { this.DataContext = viewModel; }; } } } The FareView is bound to FareViewModel through the data context  and you shall observe that DataContext is of type Object, i.e. the FareView doesn’t really know the type of ViewModel (FareViewModel). This helps separation of View and ViewModel as View and ViewModel are independent of each other, you can bind FareView to FareViewModel2 as well and the application compiles just fine. Lets take a look into FareView xaml file  <UserControl x:Class="TaxiModules.Views.FareView" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:Toolkit="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Controls;assembly=WPFToolkit" xmlns:Commands="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Practices.Prism.Commands;assembly=Microsoft.Practices.Prism"> <Grid Margin="10" > ....   <Border Style="{DynamicResource innerBorder}" Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="0" Grid.RowSpan="11" Grid.ColumnSpan="2" Panel.ZIndex="1"/>   <Label Grid.Row="0" Content="Engage the Taxi" Style="{DynamicResource innerHeader}"/> <Label Grid.Row="1" Content="Select the State"/> <ComboBox Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1" ItemsSource="{Binding States}" Height="auto"> <ComboBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}"/> </DataTemplate> </ComboBox.ItemTemplate> <ComboBox.SelectedItem> <Binding Path="SelectedState" Mode="TwoWay"/> </ComboBox.SelectedItem> </ComboBox> <Label Grid.Row="2" Content="Select the Date of Entry"/> <Toolkit:DatePicker Grid.Row="2" Grid.Column="1" SelectedDate="{Binding DateOfEntry, ValidatesOnDataErrors=true}" /> <Label Grid.Row="3" Content="Enter time 24hr format"/> <TextBox Grid.Row="3" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding TimeOfEntry, TargetNullValue=''}"/> <Button Grid.Row="4" Grid.Column="1" Content="Start the Meter" Commands:Click.Command="{Binding StartMeterCommand}" />   <Label Grid.Row="5" Content="Run the Taxi" Style="{DynamicResource innerHeader}"/> <Label Grid.Row="6" Content="Number of Miles &lt;@6mph"/> <TextBox Grid.Row="6" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding MilesAtSixMPH, TargetNullValue='', ValidatesOnDataErrors=true}"/> <Label Grid.Row="7" Content="Number of Minutes @12mph"/> <TextBox Grid.Row="7" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding MinutesAtTweleveMPH, TargetNullValue=''}"/> <Button Grid.Row="8" Grid.Column="1" Content="Add Minutes and Miles " Commands:Click.Command="{Binding AddMinutesCommand}"/> <Label Grid.Row="9" Content="Other Operations" Style="{DynamicResource innerHeader}"/> <Button Grid.Row="10" Grid.Column="1" Content="Reset the Meter" Commands:Click.Command="{Binding ResetCommand}"/>   </Grid> </UserControl> The highlighted code from the above code shows data binding, for example ComboBox which displays list of states has it’s ItemsSource bound to States property, with DataTemplate bound to Name and SelectedItem  to SelectedState. You might be wondering what are all these properties and how it is able to bind to them.  The answer lies in data context, i.e., when you bound a control, WPF looks for data context on the root object (Grid in this case) and if it can’t find data context it will look into root’s root, i.e. FareView UserControl and it is bound to FareViewModel.  Each of those properties have be declared on the ViewModel for the View to bind correctly. To put simply, View is bound to ViewModel through data context of type object and every control that is bound on the View actually binds to the public property on the ViewModel. Lets look into the ViewModel code (the following code is not an exact copy of FareViewMode.cs, pasted relevant code for this section)   namespace TaxiModules.ViewModels { public class FareViewModel:ObservableBase, IDataErrorInfo { public List<USState> States { get { return USStates.StateList; } }   public USState SelectedState { get { return _selectedState; } set { _selectedState = value; RaisePropertyChanged(_selectedStatePropertyName); } }   public DateTime? DateOfEntry { get { return _dateOfEntry; } set { _dateOfEntry = value; RaisePropertyChanged(_dateOfEntryPropertyName); } }   public TimeSpan? TimeOfEntry { get { return _timeOfEntry; } set { _timeOfEntry = value; RaisePropertyChanged(_timeOfEntryPropertyName); } }   public double? MilesAtSixMPH { get { return _milesAtSixMPH; } set { _milesAtSixMPH = value; RaisePropertyChanged(_distanceAtSixMPHPropertyName); } }   public int? MinutesAtTweleveMPH { get { return _minutesAtTweleveMPH; } set { _minutesAtTweleveMPH = value; RaisePropertyChanged(_minutesAtTweleveMPHPropertyName); } }   public ICommand StartMeterCommand { get { if(_startMeterCommand == null) { _startMeterCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(OnStartMeter, CanStartMeter); } return _startMeterCommand; } }   public ICommand AddMinutesCommand { get { if(_addMinutesCommand == null) { _addMinutesCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(OnAddMinutes, CanAddMinutes); } return _addMinutesCommand; } }   public ICommand ResetCommand { get { if(_resetCommand == null) { _resetCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(OnResetCommand); } return _resetCommand; } }   } private void OnStartMeter(object obj) { _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiStartedEvent>().Publish( new TaxiStarted() { EngagedOn = DateOfEntry.Value.Date + TimeOfEntry.Value, EngagedState = SelectedState.Value });   _isMeterStarted = true; OnPropertyChanged(this,null); } And views communicate user actions like button clicks, tree view item selections, etc using commands. When user clicks on ‘Start the Meter’ button it invokes the method StartMeterCommand, which calls the method OnStartMeter which publishes the event to TotalViewModel using event aggregator  and TaxiStartedEvent. namespace TaxiModules.ViewModels { public class TotalViewModel:ObservableBase { ... private IEventAggregator _eventAggregator;   public TotalViewModel(IEventAggregator eventAggregator) { _eventAggregator = eventAggregator;   InitializePropertyNames(); InitializeModel(); SubscribeToEvents(); }   public decimal? TotalFare { get { return _totalFare; } set { _totalFare = value; RaisePropertyChanged(_totalFarePropertyName); } } .... private void SubscribeToEvents() { _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiStartedEvent>().Subscribe(OnTaxiStarted, ThreadOption.UIThread,false,(filter) => true); _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiOnMoveEvent>().Subscribe(OnTaxiMove, ThreadOption.UIThread, false, (filter) => true); _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiResetEvent>().Subscribe(OnTaxiReset, ThreadOption.UIThread, false, (filter) => true); }   private void OnTaxiStarted(TaxiStarted taxiStarted) { Fares.Add(new EntryFare()); Fares.Add(new StateTaxFare(taxiStarted)); Fares.Add(new NightSurchargeFare(taxiStarted)); Fares.Add(new PeakHourWeekdayFare(taxiStarted));   SetTotalFare(Fares); }   private void SetTotalFare(IEnumerable<IFare> fares) { TotalFare = (_totalFare ?? 0) + TaxiFareHelper.GetTotalFare(fares); } ....   } }   TotalViewModel subscribes to events, TaxiStartedEvent and rest. When TaxiStartedEvent gets invoked it calls the OnTaxiStarted method which sets the total fare which includes entry fee, state tax, nightly surcharge, peak hour weekday fare.   Note that TotalViewModel derives from ObservableBase which implements the method RaisePropertyChanged which we are invoking in Set of TotalFare property, i.e, once we update the TotalFare property it raises an the event that  allows the TotalFare text box to fetch the new value through the data context. ViewModel is communicating with View through data context and it has no knowledge about View, helping in loose coupling of ViewModel and View.   I have attached the source code (.Net 4.0, Prism 4.0, VS 2010) , download and play with it and don’t forget to leave your comments.  

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  • Tip/Trick: Fix Common SEO Problems Using the URL Rewrite Extension

    - by ScottGu
    Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large % of traffic to sites now comes directly from search engines, and improving your site’s search relevancy will lead to more users visiting your site from search engine queries.  This can directly or indirectly increase the money you make through your site. This blog post covers how you can use the free Microsoft URL Rewrite Extension to fix a bunch of common SEO problems that your site might have.  It takes less than 15 minutes (and no code changes) to apply 4 simple URL Rewrite rules to your site, and in doing so cause search engines to drive more visitors and traffic to your site.  The techniques below work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based sites.  They also works with all versions of ASP.NET (and even work with non-ASP.NET content). [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Measuring the SEO of your website with the Microsoft SEO Toolkit A few months ago I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit that we’ve shipped.  This useful tool enables you to automatically crawl/scan your site for SEO correctness, and it then flags any SEO issues it finds.  I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on.  It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in your site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further. Below is a simple example of a report I ran against one of my sites (www.scottgu.com) prior to applying the URL Rewrite rules I’ll cover later in this blog post:   Search Relevancy and URL Splitting Two of the important things that search engines evaluate when assessing your site’s “search relevancy” are: How many other sites link to your content.  Search engines assume that if a lot of people around the web are linking to your content, then it is likely useful and so weight it higher in relevancy. The uniqueness of the content it finds on your site.  If search engines find that the content is duplicated in multiple places around the Internet (or on multiple URLs on your site) then it is likely to drop the relevancy of the content. One of the things you want to be very careful to avoid when building public facing sites is to not allow different URLs to retrieve the same content within your site.  Doing so will hurt with both of the situations above.  In particular, allowing external sites to link to the same content with multiple URLs will cause your link-count and page-ranking to be split up across those different URLs (and so give you a smaller page rank than what it would otherwise be if it was just one URL).  Not allowing external sites to link to you in different ways sounds easy in theory – but you might wonder what exactly this means in practice and how you avoid it. 4 Really Common SEO Problems Your Sites Might Have Below are 4 really common scenarios that can cause your site to inadvertently expose multiple URLs for the same content.  When this happens external sites linking to yours will end up splitting their page links across multiple URLs - and as a result cause you to have a lower page ranking with search engines than you deserve. SEO Problem #1: Default Document IIS (and other web servers) supports the concept of a “default document”.  This allows you to avoid having to explicitly specify the page you want to serve at either the root of the web-site/application, or within a sub-directory.  This is convenient – but means that by default this content is available via two different publically exposed URLs (which is bad).  For example: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx SEO Problem #2: Different URL Casings Web developers often don’t realize URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web.  This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx SEO Problem #3: Trailing Slashes Consider the below two URLs – they might look the same at first, but they are subtly different. The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ SEO Problem #4: Canonical Host Names Sometimes sites support scenarios where they support a web-site with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself.  This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling: http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx/ http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx/ How to Easily Fix these SEO Problems in 10 minutes (or less) using IIS Rewrite If you haven’t been careful when coding your sites, chances are you are suffering from one (or more) of the above SEO problems.  Addressing these issues will improve your search engine relevancy ranking and drive more traffic to your site. The “good news” is that fixing the above 4 issues is really easy using the URL Rewrite Extension.  This is a completely free Microsoft extension available for IIS 7.x (on Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 and Windows Vista).  The great thing about using the IIS Rewrite extension is that it allows you to fix the above problems *without* having to change any code within your applications.  You can easily install the URL Rewrite Extension in under 3 minutes using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (a free tool we ship that automates setting up web servers and development machines).  Just click the green “Install Now” button on the URL Rewrite Spotlight page to install it on your Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 or Windows Vista machine: Once installed you’ll find that a new “URL Rewrite” icon is available within the IIS 7 Admin Tool: Double-clicking the icon will open up the URL Rewrite admin panel – which will display the list of URL Rewrite rules configured for a particular application or site: Notice that our rewrite rule list above is currently empty (which is the default when you first install the extension).  We can click the “Add Rule…” link button in the top-right of the panel to add and enable new URL Rewriting logic for our site.  Scenario 1: Handling Default Document Scenarios One of the SEO problems I discussed earlier in this post was the scenario where the “default document” feature of IIS causes you to inadvertently expose two URLs for the same content on your site.  For example: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the second URL to instead go to the first one.  We will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve.  Let’s look at how we can create such a rule.  We’ll begin by clicking the “Add Rule” link in the screenshot above.  This will cause the below dialog to display: We’ll select the “Blank Rule” template within the “Inbound rules” section to create a new custom URL Rewriting rule.  This will display an empty pane like below: Don’t worry – setting up the above rule is easy.  The following 4 steps explain how to do so: Step 1: Name the Rule Our first step will be to name the rule we are creating.  Naming it with a descriptive name will make it easier to find and understand later.  Let’s name this rule our “Default Document URL Rewrite” rule: Step 2: Setup the Regular Expression that Matches this Rule Our second step will be to specify a regular expression filter that will cause this rule to execute when an incoming URL matches the regex pattern.   Don’t worry if you aren’t good with regular expressions - I suck at them too. The trick is to know someone who is good at them or copy/paste them from a web-site.  Below we are going to specify the following regular expression as our pattern rule: (.*?)/?Default\.aspx$ This pattern will match any URL string that ends with Default.aspx. The "(.*?)" matches any preceding character zero or more times. The "/?" part says to match the slash symbol zero or one times. The "$" symbol at the end will ensure that the pattern will only match strings that end with Default.aspx.  Combining all these regex elements allows this rule to work not only for the root of your web site (e.g. http://scottgu.com/default.aspx) but also for any application or subdirectory within the site (e.g. http://scottgu.com/photos/default.aspx.  Because the “ignore case” checkbox is selected it will match both “Default.aspx” as well as “default.aspx” within the URL.   One nice feature built-into the rule editor is a “Test pattern” button that you can click to bring up a dialog that allows you to test out a few URLs with the rule you are configuring: Above I've added a “products/default.aspx” URL and clicked the “Test” button.  This will give me immediate feedback on whether the rule will execute for it.  Step 3: Setup a Permanent Redirect Action We’ll then setup an action to occur when our regular expression pattern matches the incoming URL: In the dialog above I’ve changed the “Action Type” drop down to be a “Redirect” action.  The “Redirect Type” will be a HTTP 301 Permanent redirect – which means search engines will follow it. I’ve also set the “Redirect URL” property to be: {R:1}/ This indicates that we want to redirect the web client requesting the original URL to a new URL that has the originally requested URL path - minus the "Default.aspx" in it.  For example, requests for http://scottgu.com/default.aspx will be redirected to http://scottgu.com/, and requests for http://scottgu.com/photos/default.aspx will be redirected to http://scottgu.com/photos/ The "{R:N}" regex construct, where N >= 0, is called a back-reference and N is the back-reference index. In the case of our pattern "(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$", if the input URL is "products/Default.aspx" then {R:0} will contain "products/Default.aspx" and {R:1} will contain "products".  We are going to use this {R:1}/ value to be the URL we redirect users to.  Step 4: Apply and Save the Rule Our final step is to click the “Apply” button in the top right hand of the IIS admin tool – which will cause the tool to persist the URL Rewrite rule into our application’s root web.config file (under a <system.webServer/rewrite> configuration section): <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Because IIS 7.x and ASP.NET share the same web.config files, you can actually just copy/paste the above code into your web.config files using Visual Studio and skip the need to run the admin tool entirely.  This also makes adding/deploying URL Rewrite rules with your ASP.NET applications really easy. Step 5: Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx Notice that the second URL automatically redirects to the first one.  Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and should update the page ranking of http://scottgu.com to include links to http://scottgu.com/default.aspx as well. Scenario 2: Different URL Casing Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post is that URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web.  This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL to instead go to the second (all lower-case) one.  Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve. To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again.  This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: Unlike the previous scenario (where we created a “Blank Rule”), with this scenario we can take advantage of a built-in “Enforce lowercase URLs” rule template.  When we click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that enforces the use of lowercase letters in URLs: When we click the “Yes” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if an incoming URL has upper-case characters in it – and automatically send users to a lower-case version of the URL: We can click the “Apply” button to use this rule “as-is” and have it apply to all incoming URLs to our site.  Because my www.scottgu.com site uses ASP.NET Web Forms, I’m going to make one small change to the rule we generated above – which is to add a condition that will ensure that URLs to ASP.NET’s built-in “WebResource.axd” handler are excluded from our case-sensitivity URL Rewrite logic.  URLs to the WebResource.axd handler will only come from server-controls emitted from my pages – and will never be linked to from external sites.  While my site will continue to function fine if we redirect these URLs to automatically be lower-case – doing so isn’t necessary and will add an extra HTTP redirect to many of my pages.  The good news is that adding a condition that prevents my URL Rewriting rule from happening with certain URLs is easy.  We simply need to expand the “Conditions” section of the form above We can then click the “Add” button to add a condition clause.  This will bring up the “Add Condition” dialog: Above I’ve entered {URL} as the Condition input – and said that this rule should only execute if the URL does not match a regex pattern which contains the string “WebResource.axd”.  This will ensure that WebResource.axd URLs to my site will be allowed to execute just fine without having the URL be re-written to be all lower-case. Note: If you have static resources (like references to .jpg, .css, and .js files) within your site that currently use upper-case characters you’ll probably want to add additional condition filter clauses so that URLs to them also don’t get redirected to be lower-case (just add rules for patterns like .jpg, .gif, .js, etc).  Your site will continue to work fine if these URLs get redirected to be lower case (meaning the site won’t break) – but it will cause an extra HTTP redirect to happen on your site for URLs that don’t need to be redirected for SEO reasons.  So setting up a condition clause makes sense to add. When I click the “ok” button above and apply our lower-case rewriting rule the admin tool will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx Notice that the first URL (which has a capital “A”) automatically does a redirect to a lower-case version of the URL.  Scenario 3: Trailing Slashes Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post is the scenario of trailing slashes within URLs.  The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that does not have a trailing slash) to instead go to the second one that does.  Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve.  To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again.  This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in “Append or remove the trailing slash symbol” rule template.  When we select it and click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that automatically redirects users to a URL with a trailing slash if one isn’t present: Like within our previous lower-casing rewrite rule we’ll add one additional condition clause that will exclude WebResource.axd URLs from being processed by this rule.  This will avoid an unnecessary redirect for happening for those URLs. When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL doesn’t have a trailing slash – and if the URL is not processed by either a directory or a file.  This will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*[^/])$" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ Notice that the first URL (which has no trailing slash) automatically does a redirect to a URL with the trailing slash.  Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and update the page ranking. Scenario 4: Canonical Host Names The final SEO problem I discussed earlier are scenarios where a site works with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself.  This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling: http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that has a www prefix) to instead go to the second URL.  Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve.  To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again.  This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in “Canonical domain name” rule template.  When we select it and click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a redirect rule that automatically redirects users to a primary host name URL: Above I’m entering the primary URL address I want to expose to the web: scottgu.com.  When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL has another leading domain name prefix.  This will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Cannonical Hostname">                     <match url="(.*)" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^scottgu\.com$" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="http://scottgu.com/{R:1}" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*[^/])$" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx Notice that the first URL (which has the “www” prefix) now automatically does a redirect to the second URL which does not have the www prefix.  Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and update the page ranking. 4 Simple Rules for Improved SEO The above 4 rules are pretty easy to setup and should take less than 15 minutes to configure on existing sites you already have.  The beauty of using a solution like the URL Rewrite Extension is that you can take advantage of it without having to change code within your web-site – and without having to break any existing links already pointing at your site.  Users who follow existing links will be automatically redirected to the new URLs you wish to publish.  And search engines will start to give your site a higher search relevancy ranking – which will list your site higher in search results and drive more traffic to it. Customizing your URL Rewriting rules further is easy to-do either by editing the web.config file directly, or alternatively, just double click the URL Rewrite icon within the IIS 7.x admin tool and it will list all the active rules for your web-site or application: Clicking any of the rules above will open the rules editor back up and allow you to tweak/customize/save them further. Summary Measuring and improving SEO is something every developer building a public-facing web-site needs to think about and focus on.  If you haven’t already, download and use the SEO Toolkit to analyze the SEO of your sites today. New URL Routing features in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms 4 make it much easier to build applications that have more control over the URLs that are published.  Tools like the URL Rewrite Extension that I’ve talked about in this blog post make it much easier to improve the URLs that are published from sites you already have built today – without requiring you to change a lot of code. The URL Rewrite Extension provides a bunch of additional great capabilities – far beyond just SEO - as well.  I’ll be covering these additional capabilities more in future blog posts. Hope this helps, Scott

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  • SQLAuthority News – TechEd India – April 12-14, 2010 Bangalore – An Unforgettable Experience – An Op

    - by pinaldave
    TechEd India was one of the largest Technology events in India led by Microsoft. This event was attended by more than 3,000 technology enthusiasts, making it one of the most well-organized events of the year. Though I attempted to attend almost all the technology events here, I have not seen any bigger or better event in Indian subcontinents other than this. There are 21 Technical Tracks at Tech·Ed India 2010 that span more than 745 learning opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this whole event as a speaker and a delegate, as well. TechEd India Speaker Badge and A Token of Lifetime Hotel Selection I presented three different sessions at TechEd India and was also a part of panel discussion. (The details of the sessions are given at the end of this blog post.) Due to extensive traveling, I stay away from my family occasionally. For this reason, I took my wife – Nupur and daughter Shaivi (8 months old) to the event along with me. We stayed at the same hotel where the event was organized so as to maximize my time bonding with my family and to have more time in networking with technology community, at the same time. The hotel Lalit Ashok is the largest and most luxurious venue one can find in Bangalore, located in the middle of the city. The cost of the hotel was a bit pricey, but looking at all the advantages, I had decided to ask for a booking there. Hotel Lalit Ashok Nupur Dave and Shaivi Dave Arrival Day – DAY 0 – April 11, 2010 I reached the event a day earlier, and that was one wise decision for I was able to relax a bit and go over my presentation for the next day’s course. I am a kind of person who likes to get everything ready ahead of time. I was also able to enjoy a pleasant evening with several Microsoft employees and my family friends. I even checked out the location where I would be doing presentations the next day. I was fortunate enough to meet Bijoy Singhal from Microsoft who helped me out with a few of the logistics issues that occured the day before. I was not aware of the fact that the very next day he was going to be “The Man” of the TechEd 2010 event. Vinod Kumar from Microsoft was really very kind as he talked to me regarding my subsequent session. He gave me some suggestions which were really helpful that I was able to incorporate them during my presentation. Finally, I was able to meet Abhishek Kant from Microsoft; his valuable suggestions and unlimited passion have inspired many people like me to work with the Community. Pradipta from Microsoft was also around, being extremely busy with logistics; however, in those busy times, he did find some good spare time to have a chat with me and the other Community leaders. I also met Harish Ranganathan and Sachin Rathi, both from Microsoft. It was so interesting to listen to both of them talking about SharePoint. I just have no words to express my overwhelmed spirit because of all these passionate young guys - Pradipta,Vinod, Bijoy, Harish, Sachin and Ahishek (of course!). Map of TechEd India 2010 Event Day 1 – April 12, 2010 From morning until night time, today was truly a very busy day for me. I had two presentations and one panel discussion for the day. Needless to say, I had a few meetings to attend as well. The day started with a keynote from S. Somaseger where he announced the launch of Visual Studio 2010. The keynote area was really eye-catching because of the very large, bigger-than- life uniform screen. This was truly one to show. The title music of the keynote was very interesting and it featured Bijoy Singhal as the model. It was interesting to talk to him afterwards, when we laughed at jokes together about his modeling assignment. TechEd India Keynote Opening Featuring Bijoy TechEd India 2010 Keynote – S. Somasegar Time: 11:15pm – 11:45pm Session 1: True Lies of SQL Server – SQL Myth Buster Following the excellent keynote, I had my very first session on the subject of SQL Server Myth Buster. At first, I was a bit nervous as right after the keynote, for this was my very first session and during my presentation I saw lots of Microsoft Product Team members. Well, it really went well and I had a really good discussion with attendees of the session. I felt that a well begin was half-done and my confidence was regained. Right after the session, I met a few of my Community friends and had meaningful discussions with them on many subjects. The abstract of the session is as follows: In this 30-minute demo session, I am going to briefly demonstrate few SQL Server Myths and their resolutions as I back them up with some demo. This demo presentation is a must-attend for all developers and administrators who would come to the event. This is going to be a very quick yet fun session. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch with Somasegar After the session I went to see my daughter, and then I headed right away to the lunch with S. Somasegar – the keynote speaker and senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I really thank to Abhishek who made it possible for us. Because of his efforts, all the MVPs had the opportunity to meet such a legendary person and had to talk with them on Microsoft Technology. Though Somasegar is currently holding such a high position in Microsoft, he is very polite and a real gentleman, and how I wish that everybody in industry is like him. Believe me, if you spread love and kindness, then that is what you will receive back. As soon as lunch time was over, I ran to the session hall as my second presentation was about to start. Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm Session 2: Master Data Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence is a subject which was widely talked about at TechEd. Everybody was interested in this subject, and I did not excuse myself from this great concept as well. I consider myself fortunate as I was presenting on the subject of Master Data Services at TechEd. When I had initially learned this subject, I had a bit of confusion about the usage of this tool. Later on, I decided that I would tackle about how we all developers and DBAs are not able to understand something so simple such as this, and even worst, creating confusion about the technology. During system designing, it is very important to have a reference material or master lookup tables. Well, I talked about the same subject and presented the session keeping that as my center talk. The session went very well and I received lots of interesting questions. I got many compliments for talking about this subject on the real-life scenario. I really thank Rushabh Mehta (CEO, Solid Quality Mentors India) for his supportive suggestions that helped me prepare the slide deck, as well as the subject. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: SQL Server Master Data Services will ship with SQL Server 2008 R2 and will improve Microsoft’s platform appeal. This session provides an in-depth demonstration of MDS features and highlights important usage scenarios. Master Data Services enables consistent decision-making process by allowing you to create, manage and propagate changes from a single master view of your business entities. Also, MDS – Master Data-hub which is a vital component, helps ensure the consistency of reporting across systems and deliver faster and more accurate results across the enterprise. We will talk about establishing the basis for a centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data in the enterprise. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The day was still not over for me. I had ran into several friends but we were not able keep our enthusiasm under control about all the rumors saying that SQL Server 2008 R2 was about to be launched tomorrow in the keynote. I then ran to my third and final technical event for the day- a panel discussion with the top technologies of India. Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm Panel Discussion: Harness the power of Web – SEO and Technical Blogging As I have delivered two technical sessions by this time, I was a bit tired but  not less enthusiastic when I had to talk about Blog and Technology. We discussed many different topics there. I told them that the most important aspect for any blog is its content. We discussed in depth the issues with plagiarism and how to avoid it. Another topic of discussion was how we technology bloggers can create awareness in the Community about what the right kind of blogging is and what morally and technically wrong acts are. A couple of questions were raised about what type of liberty a person can have in terms of writing blogs. Well, it was generically agreed that a blog is mainly a representation of our ideas and thoughts; it should not be governed by external entities. As long as one is writing what they really want to say, but not providing incorrect information or not practicing plagiarism, a blogger should be allowed to express himself. This panel discussion was supposed to be over in an hour, but the interest of the participants was remarkable and so it was extended for 30 minutes more. Finally, we decided to bring to a close the discussion and agreed that we will continue the topic next year. TechEd India Panel Discussion on Web, Technology and SEO Surprisingly, the day was just beginning after doing all of these. By this time, I have almost met all the MVP who arrived at the event, as well as many Microsoft employees. There were lots of Community folks present, too. I decided that I would go to meet several friends from the Community and continue to communicate with me on SQLAuthority.com. I also met Abhishek Baxi and had a good talk with him regarding Win Mobile and Twitter. He also took a very quick video of me wherein I spoke in my mother’s tongue, Gujarati. It was funny that I talked in Gujarati almost all the day, but when I was talking in the interview I could not find the right Gujarati words to speak. I think we all think in English when we think about Technology, so as to address universality. After meeting them, I headed towards the Speakers’ Dinner. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Speakers Dinner The Speakers’ dinner was indeed a wonderful opportunity for all the speakers to get together and relax. We talked so many different things, from XBOX to Hindi Movies, and from SQL to Samosas. I just could not express how much fun I had. After a long evening, when I returned tmy room and met Shaivi, I just felt instantly relaxed. Kids are really gifts from God. Today was a really long but exciting day. So many things happened in just one day: Visual Studio Lanch, lunch with Somasegar, 2 technical sessions, 1 panel discussion, community leaders meeting, speakers dinner and, last but not leas,t playing with my child! A perfect day! Day 2 – April 13, 2010 Today started with a bang with the excellent keynote by Kamal Hathi who launched SQL Server 2008 R2 in India and demonstrated the power of PowerPivot to all of us. 101 Million Rows in Excel brought lots of applause from the audience. Kamal Hathi Presenting Keynote at TechEd India 2010 The day was a bit easier one for me. I had no sessions today and no events planned. I had a few meetings planned for the second day of the event. I sat in the speaker’s lounge for half a day and met many people there. I attended nearly 9 different meetings today. The subjects of the meetings were very different. Here is a list of the topics of the Community-related meetings: SQL PASS and its involvement in India and subcontinents How to start community blogging Forums and developing aptitude towards technology Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar User Groups and their developments SharePoint and SQL Business Meeting – a client meeting Business Meeting – a potential performance tuning project Business Meeting – Solid Quality Mentors (SolidQ) And family friends Pinal Dave at TechEd India The day passed by so quickly during this meeting. In the evening, I headed to Partners Expo with friends and checked out few of the booths. I really wanted to talk about some of the products, but due to the freebies there was so much crowd that I finally decided to just take the contact details of the partner. I will now start sending them with my queries and, hopefully, I will have my questions answered. Nupur and Shaivi had also one meeting to attend; it was with our family friend Vijay Raj. Vijay is also a person who loves Technology and loves it more than anybody. I see him growing and learning every day, but still remaining as a ‘human’. I believe that if someone acquires as much knowledge as him, that person will become either a computer or cyborg. Here, Vijay is still a kind gentleman and is able to stay as our close family friend. Shaivi was really happy to play with Uncle Vijay. Pinal Dave and Vijay Raj Renuka Prasad, a Microsoft MVP, impressed me with his passion and knowledge of SQL. Every time he gives me credit for his success, I believe that he is very humble. He has way more certifications than me and has worked many more years with SQL compared to me. He is an excellent photographer as well. Most of the photos in this blog post have been taken by him. I told him if ever he wants to do a part time job, he can do the photography very well. Pinal Dave and Renuka Prasad I also met L Srividya from Microsoft, whom I was looking forward to meet. She is a bundle of knowledge that everyone would surely learn a lot from her. I was able to get a few minutes from her and well, I felt confident. She enlightened me with SQL Server BI concepts, domain management and SQL Server security and few other interesting details. I also had a wonderful time talking about SharePoint with fellow Solid Quality Mentor Joy Rathnayake. He is very passionate about SharePoint but when you talk .NET and SQL with him, he is still overwhelmingly knowledgeable. In fact, while talking to him, I figured out that the recent training he delivered was on SQL Server 2008 R2. I told him a joke that it hurts my ego as he is more popular now in SQL training and consulting than me. I am sure all of you agree that working with good people is a gift from God. I am fortunate enough to work with the best of the best Industry experts. It was a great pleasure to hang out with my Community friends – Ahswin Kini, HimaBindu Vejella, Vasudev G, Suprotim Agrawal, Dhananjay, Vikram Pendse, Mahesh Dhola, Mahesh Mitkari,  Manu Zacharia, Shobhan, Hardik Shah, Ashish Mohta, Manan, Subodh Sohani and Sanjay Shetty (of course!) .  (Please let me know if I have met you at the event and forgot your name to list here). Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Community Leaders Dinner After lots of meetings, I headed towards the Community Leaders dinner meeting and met almost all the folks I met in morning. The discussion was almost the same but the real good thing was that we were enjoying it. The food was really good. Nupur was invited in the event, but Shaivi could not come. When Nupur tried to enter the event, she was stopped as Shaivi did not have the pass to enter the dinner. Nupur expressed that Shaivi is only 8 months old and does not eat outside food as well and could not stay by herself at this age, but the door keeper did not agree and asked that without the entry details Shaivi could not go in, but Nupur could. Nupur called me on phone and asked me to help her out. By the time, I was outside; the organizer of the event reached to the door and happily approved Shaivi to join the party. Once in the party, Shaivi had lots of fun meeting so many people. Shaivi Dave and Abhishek Kant Dean Guida (Infragistics President and CEO) and Pinal Dave (SQLAuthority.com) Day 3 – April 14, 2010 Though, it was last day, I was very much excited today as I was about to present my very favorite session. Query Optimization and Performance Tuning is my domain expertise and I make my leaving by consulting and training the same. Today’s session was on the same subject and as an additional twist, another subject about Spatial Database was presented. I was always intrigued with Spatial Database and I have enjoyed learning about it; however, I have never thought about Spatial Indexing before it was decided that I will do this session. I really thank Solid Quality Mentor Dr. Greg Low for his assistance in helping me prepare the slide deck and also review the content. Furthermore, today was really what I call my ‘learning day’ . So far I had not attended any session in TechEd and I felt a bit down for that. Everybody spends their valuable time & money to learn something new and exciting in TechEd and I had not attended a single session at the moment thinking that it was already last day of the event. I did have a plan for the day and I attended two technical sessions before my session of spatial database. I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller and there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod is syhe speaker. He did not have a single time disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL. Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance I really had a fun time attending this session. Vinod made this session very interactive. The entire audience really got into the presentation and started participating in the event. Vinod was presenting a small problem with Query Tuning, which any developer would have encountered and solved with their help in such a fashion that a developer feels he or she have already resolved it. In one question, I was the only one who was ready to answer and Vinod told me in a light tone that I am now allowed to answer it! The audience really found it very amusing. There was a huge crowd around Vinod after the session. Vinod – A master storyteller! Time: 3:45pm-4:45pm Data Recovery / consistency with CheckDB This session was much heavier than the earlier one, and I must say this is my most favorite session I EVER attended in India. In this TechEd I have only attended two sessions, but in my career, I have attended numerous technical sessions not only in India, but all over the world. This session had taken my breath away. One by one, Vinod took the different databases, and started to corrupt them in different ways. Each database has some unique ways to get corrupted. Once that was done, Vinod started to show the DBCC CEHCKDB and demonstrated how it can solve your problem. He finally fixed all the databases with this single tool. I do have a good knowledge of this subject, but let me honestly admit that I have learned a lot from this session. I enjoyed and cheered during this session along with other attendees. I had total satisfaction that, just like everyone, I took advantage of the event and learned something. I am now TECHnically EDucated. Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar After two very interactive and informative SQL Sessions from Vinod Kumar, the next turn me presenting on Spatial Database and Indexing. I got once again nervous but Vinod told me to stay natural and do my presentation. Well, once I got a huge stage with a total of four projectors and a large crowd, I felt better. Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Session 3: Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 I kicked off this session with Michael J Swart‘s beautiful spatial image. This session was the last one for the day but, to my surprise, I had more than 200+ attendees. Slowly, the rain was starting outside and I was worried that the hall would not be full; despite this, there was not a single seat available in the first five minutes of the session. Thanks to all of you for attending my presentation. I had demonstrated the map of world (and India) and quickly explained what  Geographic and Geometry data types in Spatial Database are. This session had interesting story of Indexing and Comparison, as well as how different traditional indexes are from spatial indexing. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Due to the heavy rain during this event, the power went off for about 22 minutes (just an accident – nobodies fault). During these minutes, there were no audio, no video and no light. I continued to address the mass of 200+ people without any audio device and PowerPoint. I must thank the audience because not a single person left from the session. They all stayed in their place, some moved closure to listen to me properly. I noticed that the curiosity and eagerness to learn new things was at the peak even though it was the very last session of the TechEd. Everybody wanted get the maximum knowledge out of this whole event. I was touched by the support from audience. They listened and participated in my session even without any kinds of technology (no ppt, no mike, no AC, nothing). During these 22 minutes, I had completed my theory verbally. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 After a while, we got the projector back online and we continued with some exciting demos. Many thanks to Microsoft people who worked energetically in background to get the backup power for project up. I had a very interesting demo wherein I overlaid Bangalore and Hyderabad on the India Map and find their aerial distance between them. After finding the aerial distance, we browsed online and found that SQL Server estimates the exact aerial distance between these two cities, as compared to the factual distance. There was a huge applause from the crowd on the subject that SQL Server takes into the count of the curvature of the earth and finds the precise distances based on details. During the process of finding the distance, I demonstrated a few examples of the indexes where I expressed how one can use those indexes to find these distances and how they can improve the performance of similar query. I also demonstrated few examples wherein we were able to see in which data type the Index is most useful. We finished the demos with a few more internal stuff. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Despite all issues, I was mostly satisfied with my presentation. I think it was the best session I have ever presented at any conference. There was no help from Technology for a while, but I still got lots of appreciation at the end. When we ended the session, the applause from the audience was so loud that for a moment, the rain was not audible. I was truly moved by the dedication of the Technology enthusiasts. Pinal Dave After Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers new spatial data types that enable you to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications. Attend this session to learn how to use spatial functionality in next version of SQL Server to build and optimize spatial queries. This session outlines the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it, take advantage of new spatial indexes for high performance queries, use the new spatial results tab to quickly and easily view spatial query results directly from within Management Studio, extend spatial data capabilities by building or integrating location-enabled applications through support for spatial standards and specifications and much more. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Dinner by Sponsors After the lively session during the day, there was another dinner party courtesy of one of the sponsors of TechEd. All the MVPs and several Community leaders were present at the dinner. I would like to express my gratitude to Abhishek Kant for organizing this wonderful event for us. It was a blast and really relaxing in all angles. We all stayed there for a long time and talked about our sweet and unforgettable memories of the event. Pinal Dave and Bijoy Singhal It was really one wonderful event. After writing this much, I say that I have no words to express about how much I enjoyed TechEd. However, it is true that I shared with you only 1% of the total activities I have done at the event. There were so many people I have met, yet were not mentioned here although I wanted to write their names here, too . Anyway, I have learned so many things and up until now, I am not able to get over all the fun I had in this event. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2010 The Next Days – April 15, 2010 – till today I am still not able to get my mind out of the whole experience I had at TechEd India 2010. It was like a whole Microsoft Family working together to celebrate a happy occasion. TechEd India – Truly An Unforgettable Experience! Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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