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• Use Advanced Font Ligatures in Office 2010

  - by Matthew Guay

  Fonts can help your documents stand out and be easier to read, and Office 2010 helps you take your fonts even further with support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, and more.  Here’s a quick look at these new font features in Office 2010. Introduction Starting with Windows 7, Microsoft has made an effort to support more advanced font features across their products.  Windows 7 includes support for advanced OpenType font features and laid the groundwork for advanced font support in programs with the new DirectWrite subsystem.  It also includes the new font Gabriola, which includes an incredible number of beautiful stylistic sets and ligatures. Now, with the upcoming release of Office 2010, Microsoft is bringing advanced typographical features to the Office programs we love.  This includes support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, number forms, contextual alternative characters, and more.  These new features are available in Word, Outlook, and Publisher 2010, and work the same on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Please note that Windows does include several OpenType fonts that include these advanced features.  Calibri, Cambria, Constantia, and Corbel all include multiple number forms, while Consolas, Palatino Linotype, and Gabriola (Windows 7 only) include all the OpenType features.  And, of course, these new features will work great with any other OpenType fonts you have that contain advanced ligatures, stylistic sets, and number forms. Using advanced typography in Word To use the new font features, open a new document, select an OpenType font, and enter some text.  Here we have Word 2010 in Windows 7 with some random text in the Gabriola font.  Click the arrow on the bottom of the Font section of the ribbon to open the font properties. Alternately, select the text and click Font. Now, click on the Advanced tab to see the OpenType features. You can change the ligatures setting… Choose Proportional or Tabular number spacing… And even select Lining or Old-style number forms. Here’s a comparison of Lining and Old-style number forms in Word 2010 with the Calibri font. Finally, you can choose various Stylistic sets for your font.  The dialog always shows 20 styles, whether or not your font includes that many.  Most include only 1 or 2; Gabriola includes 6. Here’s lorem ipsum text, using the Gabriola font with Stylistic set 6. Impressive, huh?  The font ligatures change based on context, so they will automatically change as you are typing.  Watch the transition as we typed the word Microsoft in Word with Gabriola stylistic set 6. Here’s another example, showing the fi and tt ligatures in Calibri. These effects work great in Word 2010 in XP, too. And, since Outlook uses Word as it’s editing engine, you can use the same options in Outlook 2010.  Note that these font effects may not show up the same if the recipient’s email client doesn’t support advanced OpenType typography.  It will, of course, display perfectly if the recipient is using Outlook 2010. Using advanced typography in Publisher 2010 Publisher 2010 includes the same advanced font features.  This is especially nice for those using Publisher for professional layout and design.  Simply insert a text box, enter some text, select it, and click the arrow on the bottom of the font box as in Word to open the font properties. This font options dialog is actually more advanced than Word’s font options.  You can preview your font changes on sample text right in the properties box.  You can also choose to add or remove a swash from your characters.   Conclusion Advanced typographical effects are a welcome addition to Word and Publisher 2010, and they are very impressive when coupled with modern fonts such as Gabriola.  From designing elegant headers to using old-style numbers, these features are very useful and fun. Do you have a favorite OpenType font that includes advanced typographical features?  Let us know in the comments! More Reading Advances in typography in Windows 7 – Engineering 7 Blog New features in Microsoft Word 2010 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change the Default Font in Excel 2007Ask the Readers: Do You Use a Laptop, Desktop, or Both?Keep Websites From Using Tiny Fonts in SafariAdd or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteFriday Fun: Desktop Tower Defense Pro TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional SpeedyFox Claims to Speed up your Firefox Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users

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• ODI and OBIEE 11g Integration

  - by David Allan

  Here we will see some of the connectivity options to OBIEE 11g using the JDBC driver. You’ll see based upon some connection properties how the physical or presentation layers can be utilized. In the integrators guide for OBIEE 11g you will find a brief statement indicating that there actually is a JDBC driver for OBIEE. In OBIEE 11g its now possible to connect directly to the physical layer, Venkat has an informative post here on this topic. In ODI 11g the Oracle BI technology is shipped with the product along with KMs for reverse engineering, and using OBIEE models for a data source. When you install OBIEE in 11g a light weight demonstration application is preinstalled in the server, when you open this in the BI Administration tool we see the regular 3 panel view within the administration tool. To interrogate this system via JDBC (just like ODI does using the KMs) need a couple of things; the JDBC driver from OBIEE 11g, a java client program and the credentials. In my java client program I want to connect to the OBIEE system, when I connect I can interrogate what the JDBC driver presents for the metadata. The metadata projected via the JDBC connection’s DatabaseMetadata changes depending on whether the property NQ_SESSION.SELECTPHYSICAL is set when the java client connects. Let’s use the sample app to illustrate. I have a java client program here that will print out the tables in the DatabaseMetadata, it will also output the catalog and schema. For example if I execute without any special JDBC properties as follows; java -classpath .;%BIHOMEDIR%\clients\bijdbc.jar meta_jdbc oracle.bi.jdbc.AnaJdbcDriver jdbc:oraclebi://localhost:9703/ weblogic mypass Then I get the following returned representing the presentation layer, the sample I used is XML, and has no schema; Catalog Schema Table Sample Sales Lite null Base Facts Sample Sales Lite null Calculated Facts …     Sample Targets Lite null Base Facts …     Now if I execute with the only difference being the JDBC property NQ_SESSION.SELECTPHYSICAL with the value Yes, then I see a different set of values representing the physical layer in OBIEE; java -classpath .;%BIHOMEDIR%\clients\bijdbc.jar meta_jdbc oracle.bi.jdbc.AnaJdbcDriver jdbc:oraclebi://localhost:9703/ weblogic mypass NQ_SESSION.SELECTPHYSICAL=Yes The following is returned; Catalog Schema Table Sample App Lite Data null D01 Time Day Grain Sample App Lite Data null F10 Revenue Facts (Order grain) …     System DB (Update me)     …     If this was a database system such as Oracle, the catalog value would be the OBIEE database name and the schema would be the Oracle database schema. Other systems which have real catalog structure such as SQLServer would use its catalog value. Its this ‘Catalog’ and ‘Schema’ value that is important when integration OBIEE with ODI. For the demonstration application in OBIEE 11g, the following illustration shows how the information from OBIEE is related via the JDBC driver through to ODI. In the XML example above, within ODI’s physical schema definition on the right, we leave the schema blank since the XML data source has no schema. When I did this at first, I left the default value that ODI places in the Schema field since which was ‘<Undefined>’ (like image below) but this string is actually used in the RKM so ended up not finding any tables in this schema! Entering an empty string resolved this. Below we see a regular Oracle database example that has the database, schema, physical table structure, and how this is defined in ODI.   Remember back to the physical versus presentation layer usage when we passed the special property, well to do this in ODI, the data server has a panel for properties where you can define key/value pairs. So if you want to select physical objects from the OBIEE server, then you must set this property. An additional changed in ODI 11g is the OBIEE connection pool support, this has been implemented via a ‘Connection Pool’ flex field for the Oracle BI data server. So here you set the connection pool name from the OBIEE system that you specifically want to use and this is used by the Oracle BI to Oracle (DBLINK) LKM, so if you are using this you must set this flex field. Hopefully a useful insight into some of the mechanics of how this hangs together.

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• Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 2

  - by rajbk

  We continue building our report in this three part series. Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 1 Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 3 Creating the Client Report Definition file (RDLC) Add a folder called “RDLC”. This will hold our RDLC report.   Right click on the RDLC folder, select “Add new item..” and add an “RDLC” name of “Products”. We will use the “Report Wizard” to walk us through the steps of creating the RDLC.   In the next dialog, give the dataset a name called “ProductDataSet”. Change the data source to “NorthwindReports.DAL” and select “ProductRepository(GetProductsProjected)”. The fields that are returned from the method are shown on the right. Click next.   Drag and drop the ProductName, CategoryName, UnitPrice and Discontinued into the Values container. Note that you can create much more complex grouping using this UI. Click Next.   Most of the selections on this screen are grayed out because we did not choose a grouping in the previous screen. Click next. Choose a style for your report. Click next. The report graphic design surface is now visible. Right click on the report and add a page header and page footer. With the report design surface active, drag and drop a TextBox from the tool box to the page header. Drag one more textbox to the page header. We will use the text boxes to add some header text as shown in the next figure. You can change the font size and other properties of the textboxes using the formatting tool bar (marked in red). You can also resize the columns by moving your cursor in between columns and dragging. Adding Expressions Add two more text boxes to the page footer. We will use these to add the time the report was generated and page numbers. Right click on the first textbox in the page footer and select “Expression”. Add the following expression for the print date (note the = sign at the left of the expression in the dialog below) "© Northwind Traders " & Format(Now(),"MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm tt") Right click on the second text box and add the following for the page count.   Globals.PageNumber & " of " & Globals.TotalPages Formatting the page footer is complete.   We are now going to format the “Unit Price” column so it displays the number in currency format.  Right click on the [UnitPrice] column (not header) and select “Text Box Properties..” Under “Number”, select “Currency”. Hit OK. Adding a chart With the design surface active, go to the toolbox and drag and drop a chart control. You will need to move the product list table down first to make space for the chart contorl. The document can also be resized by dragging on the corner or at the page header/footer separator. In the next dialog, pick the first chart type. This can be changed later if needed. Click OK. The chart gets added to the design surface.   Click on the blue bars in the chart (not legend). This will bring up drop locations for dropping the fields. Drag and drop the UnitPrice and CategoryName into the top (y axis) and bottom (x axis) as shown below. This will give us the total unit prices for a given category. That is the best I could come up with as far as what report to render, sorry :-) Delete the legend area to get more screen estate. Resize the chart to your liking. Change the header, x axis and y axis text by double clicking on those areas. We made it this far. Let’s impress the client by adding a gradient to the bar graph :-) Right click on the blue bar and select “Series properties”. Under “Fill”, add a color and secondary color and select the Gradient style. We are done designing our report. In the next section you will see how to add the report to the report viewer control, bind to the data and make it refresh when the filter criteria are changed.   Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 3

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• Algorithmia Source Code released on CodePlex

  - by FransBouma

  Following the release of our BCL Extensions Library on CodePlex, we have now released the source-code of Algorithmia on CodePlex! Algorithmia is an algorithm and data-structures library for .NET 3.5 or higher and is one of the pillars LLBLGen Pro v3's designer is built on. The library contains many data-structures and algorithms, and the source-code is well documented and commented, often with links to official descriptions and papers of the algorithms and data-structures implemented. The source-code is shared using Mercurial on CodePlex and is licensed under the friendly BSD2 license. User documentation is not available at the moment but will be added soon. One of the main design goals of Algorithmia was to create a library which contains implementations of well-known algorithms which weren't already implemented in .NET itself. This way, more developers out there can enjoy the results of many years of what the field of Computer Science research has delivered. Some algorithms and datastructures are known in .NET but are re-implemented because the implementation in .NET isn't efficient for many situations or lacks features. An example is the linked list in .NET: it doesn't have an O(1) concat operation, as every node refers to the containing LinkedList object it's stored in. This is bad for algorithms which rely on O(1) concat operations, like the Fibonacci heap implementation in Algorithmia. Algorithmia therefore contains a linked list with an O(1) concat feature. The following functionality is available in Algorithmia: Command, Command management. This system is usable to build a fully undo/redo aware system by building your object graph using command-aware classes. The Command pattern is implemented using a system which allows transparent undo-redo and command grouping so you can use it to make a class undo/redo aware and set properties, use its contents without using commands at all. The Commands namespace is the namespace to start. Classes you'd want to look at are CommandifiedMember, CommandifiedList and KeyedCommandifiedList. See the CommandQueueTests in the test project for examples. Graphs, Graph algorithms. Algorithmia contains a sophisticated graph class hierarchy and algorithms implemented onto them: non-directed and directed graphs, as well as a subgraph view class, which can be used to create a view onto an existing graph class which can be self-maintaining. Algorithms include transitive closure, topological sorting and others. A feature rich depth-first search (DFS) crawler is available so DFS based algorithms can be implemented quickly. All graph classes are undo/redo aware, as they can be set to be 'commandified'. When a graph is 'commandified' it will do its housekeeping through commands, which makes it fully undo-redo aware, so you can remove, add and manipulate the graph and undo/redo the activity automatically without any extra code. If you define the properties of the class you set as the vertex type using CommandifiedMember, you can manipulate the properties of vertices and the graph contents with full undo/redo functionality without any extra code. Heaps. Heaps are data-structures which have the largest or smallest item stored in them always as the 'root'. Extracting the root from the heap makes the heap determine the next in line to be the 'maximum' or 'minimum' (max-heap vs. min-heap, all heaps in Algorithmia can do both). Algorithmia contains various heaps, among them an implementation of the Fibonacci heap, one of the most efficient heap datastructures known today, especially when you want to merge different instances into one. Priority queues. Priority queues are specializations of heaps. Algorithmia contains a couple of them. Sorting. What's an algorithm library without sort algorithms? Algorithmia implements a couple of sort algorithms which sort the data in-place. This aspect is important in situations where you want to sort the elements in a buffer/list/ICollection in-place, so all data stays in the data-structure it already is stored in. PropertyBag. It re-implements Tony Allowatt's original idea in .NET 3.5 specific syntax, which is to have a generic property bag and to be able to build an object in code at runtime which can be bound to a property grid for editing. This is handy for when you have data / settings stored in XML or other format, and want to create an editable form of it without creating many editors. IEditableObject/IDataErrorInfo implementations. It contains default implementations for IEditableObject and IDataErrorInfo (EditableObjectDataContainer for IEditableObject and ErrorContainer for IDataErrorInfo), which make it very easy to implement these interfaces (just a few lines of code) without having to worry about bookkeeping during databinding. They work seamlessly with CommandifiedMember as well, so your undo/redo aware code can use them out of the box. EventThrottler. It contains an event throttler, which can be used to filter out duplicate events in an event stream coming into an observer from an event. This can greatly enhance performance in your UI without needing to do anything other than hooking it up so it's placed between the event source and your real handler. If your UI is flooded with events from data-structures observed by your UI or a middle tier, you can use this class to filter out duplicates to avoid redundant updates to UI elements or to avoid having observers choke on many redundant events. Small, handy stuff. A MultiValueDictionary, which can store multiple unique values per key, instead of one with the default Dictionary, and is also merge-aware so you can merge two into one. A Pair class, to quickly group two elements together. Multiple interfaces for helping with building a de-coupled, observer based system, and some utility extension methods for the defined data-structures. We regularly update the library with new code. If you have ideas for new algorithms or want to share your contribution, feel free to discuss it on the project's Discussions page or send us a pull request. Enjoy!

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• Configure Oracle SOA JMSAdatper to Work with WLS JMS Topics

  - by fip

  The WebLogic JMS Topic are typically running in a WLS cluster. So as your SOA composites that receive these Topic messages. In some situation, the two clusters are the same while in others they are sepearate. The composites in SOA cluster are subscribers to the JMS Topic in WebLogic cluster. As nature of JMS Topic is meant to distribute the same copy of messages to all its subscribers, two questions arise immediately when it comes to load balancing the JMS Topic messages against the SOA composites: How to assure all of the SOA cluster members receive different messages instead of the same (duplicate) messages, even though the SOA cluster members are all subscribers to the Topic? How to make sure the messages are evenly distributed (load balanced) to SOA cluster members? Here we will walk through how to configure the JMS Topic, the JmsAdapter connection factory, as well as the composite so that the JMS Topic messages will be evenly distributed to same composite running off different SOA cluster nodes without causing duplication. 2. The typical configuration In this typical configuration, we achieve the load balancing of JMS Topic messages to JmsAdapters by configuring a partitioned distributed topic along with sharable subscriptions. You can reference the documentation for explanation of PDT. And this blog posting does a very good job to visually explain how this combination of configurations would message load balancing among clients of JMS Topics. Our job is to apply this configuration in the context of SOA JMS Adapters. To do so would involve the following steps: Step A. Configure JMS Topic to be UDD and PDT, at the WebLogic cluster that house the JMS Topic Step B. Configure JCA Connection Factory with proper ServerProperties at the SOA cluster Step C. Reference the JCA Connection Factory and define a durable subscriber name, at composite's JmsAdapter (or the *.jca file) Here are more details of each step: Step A. Configure JMS Topic to be UDD and PDT, You do this at the WebLogic cluster that house the JMS Topic. You can follow the instructions at Administration Console Online Help to create a Uniform Distributed Topic. If you use WebLogic Console, then at the same administration screen you can specify "Distribution Type" to be "Uniform", and the Forwarding policy to "Partitioned", which would make the JMS Topic Uniform Distributed Destination and a Partitioned Distributed Topic, respectively Step B: Configure ServerProperties of JCA Connection Factory You do this step at the SOA cluster. This step is to make the JmsAdapter that connect to the JMS Topic through this JCA Connection Factory as a certain type of "client". When you configure the JCA Connection Factory for the JmsAdapter, you define the list of properties in FactoryProperties field, in a semi colon separated list: ClientID=myClient;ClientIDPolicy=UNRESTRICTED;SubscriptionSharingPolicy=SHARABLE;TopicMessageDistributionAll=false You can refer to Chapter 8.4.10 Accessing Distributed Destinations (Queues and Topics) on the WebLogic Server JMS of the Adapter User Guide for the meaning of these properties. Please note: Except for ClientID, other properties such as the ClientIDPolicy=UNRESTRICTED, SubscriptionSharingPolicy=SHARABLE and TopicMessageDistributionAll=false are all default settings for the JmsAdapter's connection factory. Therefore you do NOT have to explicitly specify them explicitly. All you need to do is the specify the ClientID. The ClientID is different from the subscriber ID that we are to discuss in the later steps. To make it simple, you just need to remember you need to specify the client ID and make it unique per connection factory. Here is the example setting: Step C. Reference the JCA Connection Factory and define a durable subscriber name, at composite's JmsAdapter (or the *.jca file) In the following example, the value 'MySubscriberID-1' was given as the value of property 'DurableSubscriber': <adapter-config name="subscribe" adapter="JMS Adapter" wsdlLocation="subscribe.wsdl" xmlns="http://platform.integration.oracle/blocks/adapter/fw/metadata"> <connection-factory location="eis/wls/MyTestUDDTopic" UIJmsProvider="WLSJMS" UIConnectionName="ateam-hq24b"/> <endpoint-activation portType="Consume_Message_ptt" operation="Consume_Message"> <activation-spec className="oracle.tip.adapter.jms.inbound.JmsConsumeActivationSpec"> <property name="DurableSubscriber" value="MySubscriberID-1"/> <property name="PayloadType" value="TextMessage"/> <property name="UseMessageListener" value="false"/> <property name="DestinationName" value="jms/MyTestUDDTopic"/> </activation-spec> </endpoint-activation> </adapter-config> You can set the durable subscriber name either at composite's JmsAdapter wizard,or by directly editing the JmsAdapter's *.jca file within the Composite project. 2.The "atypical" configurations: For some systems, there may be restrictions that do not allow the afore mentioned "typical" configurations be applied. For examples, some deployments may be required to configure the JMS Topic to be Replicated Distributed Topic rather than Partition Distributed Topic. We would like to discuss those scenarios here: Configuration A: The JMS Topic is NOT PDT In this case, you need to define the message selector 'NOT JMS_WL_DDForwarded' in the adapter's *.jca file, to filter out those "replicated" messages. Configuration B. The ClientIDPolicy=RESTRICTED In this case, you need separate factories for different composites. More accurately, you need separate factories for different *.jca file of JmsAdapter. References: Managing Durable Subscription WebLogic JMS Partitioned Distributed Topics and Shared Subscriptions JMS Troubleshooting: Configuring JMS Message Logging: Advanced Programming with Distributed Destinations Using the JMS Destination Availability Helper API

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• Configuring Expert Search in Communicator 14 and SharePoint 2010

  Communicator 14 provides functionality to be able to search for contacts not just by name, but by skill.  For example a customer service agent at an airline can search for other agents with Travel Advisory experience by typing the search criteria into the Communicator search box and performing a search by keyword.  The search results will return users who have specified that skill in their profile on their SharePoint My Site.  This is actually pretty easy to configure, Ill show you how. Create Search and People Search Results Pages in SharePoint Communicator 14 Expert Search works by using the SharePoint 2010 Search Service to search SharePoint for user profiles with matching keywords.  This requires that you have an Enterprise Search site in your site collection which includes the search service and also the People Results pages.  The easiest way to do this is to create a Search Center site in your site collection. Note: I get an error when trying to create an Enterprise Search site in a Team Site in the SharePoint 2010 RTM bits, so I created it as a site collection that is evident in the URLs you see below. In the screenshots below, you can see that the URL of the SharePoint search service in the Search site collection is http://sps2010/sites/search/_vti_bin/search.asmx, and the URL of the People Search Results page is http://sps2010/sites/Search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx. Point Communications Server 14 to Search and People Search Results Pages For Communicator 14 to be able to perform an Expert Search, you need to configure Communications Server 14 to point to the Search Service and People Search Results page URLs. From a server with the OCS Core bits installed, fire up the Communications Server Management Shell and type Get-CsClientPolicy. Scroll down to the bottom of the output, were interested in setting the values of: SPSearchInternalURL SPSearchExternalURL SPSearchCenterInternalURL SPSearchCenterExternalURL SPSearchInternalURL and SPSearchExternalURL correspond to the internal and external URLs of the SharePoint search service in the Search site collection, while SPSearchCenterInternalURL and SPSearchCenterExternalURL correspond to the internal and external URLs of the people search results pages. Well use the Communications Server Management Shell to set the values of these CS policy properties. For simplicity, Im only going to set the internal URLs here. Set-CsClientPolicy SPSearchInternalURL http://sps2010/sites/search/_vti_bin/search.asmx     -SPSearchCenterInternalURL http://sps2010/sites/Search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx Log out and back into Communicator.  You can verify that these settings were applied by running the Get-CsClientPolicy cmdlet again from the Communications Server Management Shell. However, theres another super-secret ninja trick to verify that the settings were applied: Find the Communicator icon in the Windows System Tray Hold down the Ctrl button Click (left) the Communicator icon in the Windows System Tray do not depress the Ctrl button You should now see an extra menu item called Configuration Information, click it. Scroll down and locate the Expert Search URL and SharePoint Search Center URL keys and verify that their values correspond to those you set using the Set-CsClientPolicy PowerShell cmdlet. Configure a Sharepoint User Profile Import Im not going to provide detailed steps here except to say that you need to configure the SharePoint 2010 User Profile  Service Application to import user account details from Active Directory on a scheduled basis. This is a critical step because there are several user profile properties e.g. SipAddress that are only populated by a user profile import.  When performing an Expert Search, Communicator can only render results for users who have a SipAddress specified. Add Skills to User Profiles Navigate to your My Site and click on My Profile.  This page allows you to set many contact details that are searchable in SharePoint.  Were particularly interested in the Ask Me About property of a users profile.  Expert Search searches against this property to find users with matching skills. Configure a SharePoint Search Crawl Ensure that you have a scheduled job to crawl your Local SharePoint Sites content source.  Depending on how you have this configured, it will also crawl the My Site site collection and add user properties such as Ask Me About to the search index. Thats It! SharePoint 2010 provides new social and collaboration features to help users find other users with similar skills or interests. Expert Search extends this functionality directly into Microsoft Communicator 14, allowing you to interact with the users directly from the search results. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• SQL Developer Data Modeler v3.3 Early Adopter: Collaborative Design via Excel?

  - by thatjeffsmith

  As you may have heard last week, we have a new version of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler now available as an Early Adopter release. Version 3.3 has quite a few new features and I’ll be previewing them here. Today’s topic is our new Excel integration. It builds off of last week’s lesson: Search, so you may want to go read that first. They say it takes a village to raise a child. I say it takes a team to build a data model. You have your techie folks, your business folks, your in-betweeners, and your database geeks. Who gets to define how customers are represented and stored in your database? That data lives forever, so you better get it right from the beginning, or you’ll be living in a hacker’s paradise for years to come. Lots of good rantings, ravings, and advice on this topic in general on Karen Lopez’s (@datachick) blog. But let’s say you are the primary modeler on a project. You dutifully interview the business folks for their requirements. You sit down and start to model and think you’re pretty close. Now you need someone to confirm your assumptions and provide some feedback. Do you send your model over? Take a screenshot and blow it up on a whiteboard? Export to HTML and let them take a magic marker to their monitors? Or maybe you bite the bullet and install your modeling software on their desktops and take the hours or days required to train them up on how to use the the tool. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could just mark up their corrections in Excel and let you suck the updates back in? This is what we have started to build in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Let’s say you have a new table called ‘UT_STARTUPS.’ It looks a little something like this: A table in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler What I would like to do is have my team or co-worker review how I have defined those columns. Perhaps TIMESTAMP is overkill or maybe the column names themselves aren’t up to snuff. What I am going to do is now search for all the columns in my table, then export that to Excel. So do a search for UT_STARTUPS. Search, filter, then Report With the filter set to ‘Columns,’ if I do a report I’ll be only getting the columns that are resolving to my search term. So as long as my table name is unique in the model, I should get what I’m looking for. Here’s what I see when I click on the Report button: XLS or XLSX, either format is just fine I want to decide how the Column data is exported to Excel though, so I’m going to create a report template that I can use going forward. So click the ‘Manage’ button and setup a new template. I’m going to call mine ‘CollaborativeDevelopment.’ The templates allow me to define what properties are included in the reports. Once this is set, I’ll have the XLS file generated, and get to work Now let the Excel junkies do their stuff Note that not ALL of the report properties are update-able (yes, I made up a new word there) via Excel. We’ll have the full list of properties documented going forward, but in my Excel sheet, note that I can’t change the table name or the data types for the columns. I’m going to update some column names and supply ‘nice’ comments so the database users know what’s what. Here’s my input for the designer/architect/database dude: Be kind, please rew…use comments. Save the file, email it back to your modeler. Update the model from Excel That’s right, it’s a right mouse click from your model in the tree If everything goes right, you’ll see a nice confirmation message: It’s alive! Another to-do item on tap – making this dialog more informative. We’ll be showing exactly what in your model was updated from Excel. Let’s take another look at the model now Voila! Why are we doing this again? The goal is to reduce the number of round-trips from the modeler and the business process owner. One is used to working with Excel – why not allow them to mark up their changes in the tool they already know? This is an early adopter release and I anticipate this feature getting a good bit of tuning up before we release. Why don’t you download 3.3, give it a whirl, and let us know what you think?

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• JavaScript Class Patterns

  - by Liam McLennan

  To write object-oriented programs we need objects, and likely lots of them. JavaScript makes it easy to create objects: var liam = { name: "Liam", age: Number.MAX_VALUE }; But JavaScript does not provide an easy way to create similar objects. Most object-oriented languages include the idea of a class, which is a template for creating objects of the same type. From one class many similar objects can be instantiated. Many patterns have been proposed to address the absence of a class concept in JavaScript. This post will compare and contrast the most significant of them. Simple Constructor Functions Classes may be missing but JavaScript does support special constructor functions. By prefixing a call to a constructor function with the ‘new’ keyword we can tell the JavaScript runtime that we want the function to behave like a constructor and instantiate a new object containing the members defined by that function. Within a constructor function the ‘this’ keyword references the new object being created -  so a basic constructor function might be: function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; this.toString = function() { return this.name + " is " + age + " years old."; }; } var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); Note that by convention the name of a constructor function is always written in Pascal Case (the first letter of each word is capital). This is to distinguish between constructor functions and other functions. It is important that constructor functions be called with the ‘new’ keyword and that not constructor functions are not. There are two problems with the pattern constructor function pattern shown above: It makes inheritance difficult The toString() function is redefined for each new object created by the Person constructor. This is sub-optimal because the function should be shared between all of the instances of the Person type. Constructor Functions with a Prototype JavaScript functions have a special property called prototype. When an object is created by calling a JavaScript constructor all of the properties of the constructor’s prototype become available to the new object. In this way many Person objects can be created that can access the same prototype. An improved version of the above example can be written: function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; } Person.prototype = { toString: function() { return this.name + " is " + this.age + " years old."; } }; var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); In this version a single instance of the toString() function will now be shared between all Person objects. Private Members The short version is: there aren’t any. If a variable is defined, with the var keyword, within the constructor function then its scope is that function. Other functions defined within the constructor function will be able to access the private variable, but anything defined outside the constructor (such as functions on the prototype property) won’t have access to the private variable. Any variables defined on the constructor are automatically public. Some people solve this problem by prefixing properties with an underscore and then not calling those properties by convention. function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; } Person.prototype = { _getName: function() { return this.name; }, toString: function() { return this._getName() + " is " + this.age + " years old."; } }; var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); Note that the _getName() function is only private by convention – it is in fact a public function. Functional Object Construction Because of the weirdness involved in using constructor functions some JavaScript developers prefer to eschew them completely. They theorize that it is better to work with JavaScript’s functional nature than to try and force it to behave like a traditional class-oriented language. When using the functional approach objects are created by returning them from a factory function. An excellent side effect of this pattern is that variables defined with the factory function are accessible to the new object (due to closure) but are inaccessible from anywhere else. The Person example implemented using the functional object construction pattern is: var personFactory = function(name, age) { var privateVar = 7; return { toString: function() { return name + " is " + age * privateVar / privateVar + " years old."; } }; }; var john2 = personFactory("John Lennon", 40); console.log(john2.toString()); Note that the ‘new’ keyword is not used for this pattern, and that the toString() function has access to the name, age and privateVar variables because of closure. This pattern can be extended to provide inheritance and, unlike the constructor function pattern, it supports private variables. However, when working with JavaScript code bases you will find that the constructor function is more common – probably because it is a better approximation of mainstream class oriented languages like C# and Java. Inheritance Both of the above patterns can support inheritance but for now, favour composition over inheritance. Summary When JavaScript code exceeds simple browser automation object orientation can provide a powerful paradigm for controlling complexity. Both of the patterns presented in this article work – the choice is a matter of style. Only one question still remains; who is John Galt?

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• JavaScript Class Patterns

  - by Liam McLennan

  To write object-oriented programs we need objects, and likely lots of them. JavaScript makes it easy to create objects: var liam = { name: "Liam", age: Number.MAX_VALUE }; But JavaScript does not provide an easy way to create similar objects. Most object-oriented languages include the idea of a class, which is a template for creating objects of the same type. From one class many similar objects can be instantiated. Many patterns have been proposed to address the absence of a class concept in JavaScript. This post will compare and contrast the most significant of them. Simple Constructor Functions Classes may be missing but JavaScript does support special constructor functions. By prefixing a call to a constructor function with the ‘new’ keyword we can tell the JavaScript runtime that we want the function to behave like a constructor and instantiate a new object containing the members defined by that function. Within a constructor function the ‘this’ keyword references the new object being created -  so a basic constructor function might be: function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; this.toString = function() { return this.name + " is " + age + " years old."; }; } var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); Note that by convention the name of a constructor function is always written in Pascal Case (the first letter of each word is capital). This is to distinguish between constructor functions and other functions. It is important that constructor functions be called with the ‘new’ keyword and that not constructor functions are not. There are two problems with the pattern constructor function pattern shown above: It makes inheritance difficult The toString() function is redefined for each new object created by the Person constructor. This is sub-optimal because the function should be shared between all of the instances of the Person type. Constructor Functions with a Prototype JavaScript functions have a special property called prototype. When an object is created by calling a JavaScript constructor all of the properties of the constructor’s prototype become available to the new object. In this way many Person objects can be created that can access the same prototype. An improved version of the above example can be written: function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; } Person.prototype = { toString: function() { return this.name + " is " + this.age + " years old."; } }; var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); In this version a single instance of the toString() function will now be shared between all Person objects. Private Members The short version is: there aren’t any. If a variable is defined, with the var keyword, within the constructor function then its scope is that function. Other functions defined within the constructor function will be able to access the private variable, but anything defined outside the constructor (such as functions on the prototype property) won’t have access to the private variable. Any variables defined on the constructor are automatically public. Some people solve this problem by prefixing properties with an underscore and then not calling those properties by convention. function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; } Person.prototype = { _getName: function() { return this.name; }, toString: function() { return this._getName() + " is " + this.age + " years old."; } }; var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); Note that the _getName() function is only private by convention – it is in fact a public function. Functional Object Construction Because of the weirdness involved in using constructor functions some JavaScript developers prefer to eschew them completely. They theorize that it is better to work with JavaScript’s functional nature than to try and force it to behave like a traditional class-oriented language. When using the functional approach objects are created by returning them from a factory function. An excellent side effect of this pattern is that variables defined with the factory function are accessible to the new object (due to closure) but are inaccessible from anywhere else. The Person example implemented using the functional object construction pattern is: var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); var personFactory = function(name, age) { var privateVar = 7; return { toString: function() { return name + " is " + age * privateVar / privateVar + " years old."; } }; }; var john2 = personFactory("John Lennon", 40); console.log(john2.toString()); Note that the ‘new’ keyword is not used for this pattern, and that the toString() function has access to the name, age and privateVar variables because of closure. This pattern can be extended to provide inheritance and, unlike the constructor function pattern, it supports private variables. However, when working with JavaScript code bases you will find that the constructor function is more common – probably because it is a better approximation of mainstream class oriented languages like C# and Java. Inheritance Both of the above patterns can support inheritance but for now, favour composition over inheritance. Summary When JavaScript code exceeds simple browser automation object orientation can provide a powerful paradigm for controlling complexity. Both of the patterns presented in this article work – the choice is a matter of style. Only one question still remains; who is John Galt?

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• How to get sound on macbook pro 4,1

  - by Thomas

  I have just installed Xubuntu 12.04.2. My soundcard is detected: thomas@thomas-pc:~$ sudo aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** Home directory /home/thomas not ours. card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889A Analog [ALC889A Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889A Digital [ALC889A Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 Everything is put to max in alsamixer and nothing is muted (all the sliders are on OO. My speakers do not work, but when I plug in a headphone I hear it very soft. When I connect my stereo and put the sound VERY loud (3-blocks-of-complaining-neighbours loud) I hear it on a normal level but crackling. I added options snd-hda-intel model=mbp5 amixer set IEC958 off to at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf. When it's still not working I tried everything here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting 1 >>> list-sinks 1 sink(s) available. * index: 0 name: <alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo> driver: <module-alsa-card.c> flags: HARDWARE HW_MUTE_CTRL HW_VOLUME_CTRL DECIBEL_VOLUME LATENCY DYNAMIC_LATENCY state: SUSPENDED suspend cause: IDLE priority: 9959 volume: 0: 100% 1: 100% 0: 0.00 dB 1: 0.00 dB balance 0.00 base volume: 100% 0.00 dB volume steps: 65537 muted: no current latency: 0.00 ms max request: 0 KiB max rewind: 0 KiB monitor source: 0 sample spec: s16le 2ch 44100Hz channel map: front-left,front-right Stereo used by: 0 linked by: 0 configured latency: 0.00 ms; range is 0.50 .. 371.52 ms card: 0 <alsa_card.pci-0000_00_1b.0> module: 4 properties: alsa.resolution_bits = "16" device.api = "alsa" device.class = "sound" alsa.class = "generic" alsa.subclass = "generic-mix" alsa.name = "ALC889A Analog" alsa.id = "ALC889A Analog" alsa.subdevice = "0" alsa.subdevice_name = "subdevice #0" alsa.device = "0" alsa.card = "0" alsa.card_name = "HDA Intel" alsa.long_card_name = "HDA Intel at 0x9b500000 irq 46" alsa.driver_name = "snd_hda_intel" device.bus_path = "pci-0000:00:1b.0" sysfs.path = "/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0" device.bus = "pci" device.vendor.id = "8086" device.vendor.name = "Intel Corporation" device.product.name = "82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller" device.form_factor = "internal" device.string = "front:0" device.buffering.buffer_size = "65536" device.buffering.fragment_size = "32768" device.access_mode = "mmap+timer" device.profile.name = "analog-stereo" device.profile.description = "Analog Stereo" device.description = "Built-in Audio Analog Stereo" alsa.mixer_name = "Realtek ALC889A" alsa.components = "HDA:10ec0885,106b3a00,00100103" module-udev-detect.discovered = "1" device.icon_name = "audio-card-pci" ports: analog-output-speaker: Speakers (priority 10000, available: unknown) properties: analog-output-headphones: Headphones (priority 9000, available: no) properties: active port: <analog-output-speaker> 2 and 3: Doesn't seem an permission issue, the sound is very far away (See opening paragraph). 4 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ sudo aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** Home directory /home/thomas not ours. card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889A Analog [ALC889A Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889A Digital [ALC889A Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 5 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ find /lib/modules/`uname -r` | grep snd /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-hwdep.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-pcm.ko [.. huge lists continues ..] /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/pcmcia/pdaudiocf/snd-pdaudiocf.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/pcmcia/vx/snd-vxpocket.ko thomas@thomas-pc:~$ 6 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio" 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: Apple Inc. Device 00a4 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 46 Memory at 9b500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel 7 I guess it's supported. Linux mint and Xubuntu 13.04 had no trouble with sounds. Everything worked out of the box Thanks in advance Edit: alsa-info.sh output: WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf line 45: ignoring bad line starting with 'amixer' ALSA Information Script v 0.4.62 -------------------------------- This script visits the following commands/files to collect diagnostic information about your ALSA installation and sound related hardware. dmesg lspci lsmod aplay amixer alsactl /proc/asound/ /sys/class/sound/ ~/.asoundrc (etc.) See './alsa-info.sh --help' for command line options. WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf line 45: ignoring bad line starting with 'amixer' Automatically upload ALSA information to www.alsa-project.org? [y/N] : y Uploading information to www.alsa-project.org ... Done! Your ALSA information is located at http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=6cffc584284d4c0b266eb53249824ef83d6c4e3e Please inform the person helping you. thomas@thomas-pc:~$

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• Plan your SharePoint 2010 Content Type Hub carefully

  - by Wayne

  Currently setting up a new environment on SharePoint 2010 (which was made available for download yesterday if anyone missed that :-). One of the new features of SharePoint 2010 is to set up a Content Type Hub (which is a part of the Metadata Service Application), which is a hub for all Content Types that other Site Collections can subscribe to. That is you only need to manage your content types in one location. Setting up the Content Type Hub is not that difficult but you must make it very careful to avoid a lot of work and troubleshooting. Here is a short tutorial with a few tips and tricks to make it easy for you to get started. Determine location of Content Type Hub First of all you need to decide in which Site Collection to place your Content Type Hub; in the root site collection or a specific one. I think using a specific Site Collection that only acts as a Content Type Hub is the best way, there are no best practice as of now. So I create a new Site Collection, at for instance http://server/sites/CTH/. The top-level site of this site collection should be for instance a Team Site. You cannot use Blank Site by default, which would have been the best option IMHO, since that site does not have the Taxonomy feature stapled upon it (check the TaxonomyFeatureStapler feature for which site templates that can be used). Configure Managed Metadata Service Application Next you need to create your Managed Metadata Service Application or configure the existing one, Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications. Select the Managed Metadata service application and click Properties if you already have created it. In the bottom of the dialog window when you are creating the service application or when you are editing the properties is a section to fill in the Content Type Hub. In this text box fill in the URL of the Content Type Hub. It is essential that you have decided where your Content Type Hub will reside, since once this is set you cannot change it. The only way to change it is to rebuild the whole managed metadata service application! Also make sure that you enter the URL correctly. I did copy and paste the URL once and got the /default.aspx in the URL which funked the whole service up. Make sure that you only use the URL to the Site Collection of the hub. Now you have to set up so that other Site Collections can consume the content types from the hub. This is done by selecting the connection for the managed metadata service application and clicking properties. A new dialog window opens and there you need to click the Consumes content types from the Content Type Gallery at nnnn. Now you are free to syndicate your Content Types from the Hub. Publish Content Types To publish a Content Type from the hub you need to go to Site Settings > Content Types and select the content type that you would like to publish. Then select Manage publishing for this content type. This takes you to a page from where you can Publish, Unpublish or Republish the content type. Once the content type is published it can take up to an hour for the subscribing Site Collections to get it. This is controlled by the Content Type Subscriber job that is scheduled to run once an hour. To speed up your publishing just go to Central Administration > Monitoring > Review Job Definitions > Content Type Subscriber and click Run now and you content type is very soon available for use. Published Content Type status You can check the status of the content type publishing in your destination site collections by selecting Site Settings > Content Type Publishing. From here you can force a refresh of all subscribed content types, see which ones that are subscribed and finally check the publishing error log. This error log is very useful for detecting errors during the publishing. For instance if you use any features such as ratings, metadata, document ids in your content type hub and your destination site collection does not have those features available this will be reported here.

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• Customizing Spaces UI

  - by vijaykumar.yenne

  In most common scenarios we stumble up on use cases to customize the Web center spaces UI. Is the Spaces UI customizable? What is the extent to which we can customize? How do i customize it? These are some questions that developers/architects normally come across. Well to clear the air, OOTB spaces comes with some default "site templates" and it also gives a flexibility to create custom site templates suiting the organization needs. The site templates concept has been introduced in the latest PS1 release of webcenter and to customize/create the the new site template, we have to leverage the Extend Spaces Project available on OTN. You could download the the project from here. Also there is white paper available on what all can be customized/extended from spaces perspective listed here . There is a specific details outlined on how to create custom site template in the Customizing Site Template white paper. One of the things the white paper high lights is "While you can create new site templates and modify the sample site templates but you cannot modify either of the out-of-the-box site templates ie the default and maximized. So if my need is to either increase the size of header to fit in a bigger logo or introduce couple of extra links on the default/maximized lay out how do i achieve this? All you need to do is customize the OOTB shell (shell-config.xml). 1. Copy the shell config's available in the Source Files Directory of the extended spaces unzipped directory into the CustomSite Template Project ExtendWebCenterSpaces\CustomSiteTemplate\custom\oracle\webcenter\webcenterapp\metadata\shell 2. Modify the appropriate shell 3. Deploy the CustomSite Template as ADF Jar 4. ensure you have the profile dependency on the aboproject int he custom webcenter spaces project 5. Deploy the Spaces Extension on the Webcenter Spaces Instance. (Details in the first white paper). You should see the changes immediately. eg: In the default shell, i have changed the height from 30 to 60 to increase the header size height="60" This is what i get to see : If you have worked on the R1 release time frame, where you created a custom shell/chrome, how do we make them compatible and make it available in the Spaces PS1 instance? All you need to do is the following: 1. Copy the custom shell in to the shell directory of the custom site template project 2. Register the shell with WCSiteTemplates.xml available in the same project. Eg : Yo can add the below entry pagePath="/oracle/webcenter/webcenterapp/view/templates/MyShellTemplate.jspx" pageDefPath="/oracle/webcenter/webcenterapp/bindings/pageDefs/oracle_webcenter_webcenterapp_view_templates_WebCenterAppShellTemplatePageDef.xml" displayName="myShell" chromeLevel="myShell"/ Note : pagePath - Absolute path of the template JSPX file. This path must be unique. So you might have to do the following to get your custom chrome working absolutely fine with no problems at all: 1. Create a jspx page, say /custom/mysite/SiteTemplate.jspx 2. Include the the default jspx in the new site template like following SiteTemplate.jspx ------------------ 3. Add the newly created site template in the WCSiteTemplate.xml file like following - pagePath="/custom/mysite/SiteTemplate.jspx" pageDefPath="/oracle/webcenter/webcenterapp/bindings/pageDefs/oracle_webcenter_webcenterapp_view_templates_WebCenterAppShellTemplatePageDef.xml" displayName="myShell" chromeLevel="myShell"/

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• CLR via C# 3rd Edition is out

  - by Abhijeet Patel

  Time for some book news update. CLR via C#, 3rd Edition seems to have been out for a little while now. The book was released in early Feb this year, and needless to say my copy is on it’s way. I can barely wait to dig in and chew on the goodies that one of the best technical authors and software professionals I respect has in store. The 2nd edition of the book was an absolute treat and this edition promises to be no less. Here is a brief description of what’s new and updated from the 2nd edition. Part I – CLR Basics Chapter 1-The CLR’s Execution Model Added about discussion about C#’s /optimize and /debug switches and how they relate to each other. Chapter 2-Building, Packaging, Deploying, and Administering Applications and Types Improved discussion about Win32 manifest information and version resource information. Chapter 3-Shared Assemblies and Strongly Named Assemblies Added discussion of TypeForwardedToAttribute and TypeForwardedFromAttribute. Part II – Designing Types Chapter 4-Type Fundamentals No new topics. Chapter 5-Primitive, Reference, and Value Types Enhanced discussion of checked and unchecked code and added discussion of new BigInteger type. Also added discussion of C# 4.0’s dynamic primitive type. Chapter 6-Type and Member Basics No new topics. Chapter 7-Constants and Fields No new topics. Chapter 8-Methods Added discussion of extension methods and partial methods. Chapter 9-Parameters Added discussion of optional/named parameters and implicitly-typed local variables. Chapter 10-Properties Added discussion of automatically-implemented properties, properties and the Visual Studio debugger, object and collection initializers, anonymous types, the System.Tuple type and the ExpandoObject type. Chapter 11-Events Added discussion of events and thread-safety as well as showing a cool extension method to simplify the raising of an event. Chapter 12-Generics Added discussion of delegate and interface generic type argument variance. Chapter 13-Interfaces No new topics. Part III – Essential Types Chapter 14-Chars, Strings, and Working with Text No new topics. Chapter 15-Enums Added coverage of new Enum and Type methods to access enumerated type instances. Chapter 16-Arrays Added new section on initializing array elements. Chapter 17-Delegates Added discussion of using generic delegates to avoid defining new delegate types. Also added discussion of lambda expressions. Chapter 18-Attributes No new topics. Chapter 19-Nullable Value Types Added discussion on performance. Part IV – CLR Facilities Chapter 20-Exception Handling and State Management This chapter has been completely rewritten. It is now about exception handling and state management. It includes discussions of code contracts and constrained execution regions (CERs). It also includes a new section on trade-offs between writing productive code and reliable code. Chapter 21-Automatic Memory Management Added discussion of C#’s fixed state and how it works to pin objects in the heap. Rewrote the code for weak delegates so you can use them with any class that exposes an event (the class doesn’t have to support weak delegates itself). Added discussion on the new ConditionalWeakTable class, GC Collection modes, Full GC notifications, garbage collection modes and latency modes. I also include a new sample showing how your application can receive notifications whenever Generation 0 or 2 collections occur. Chapter 22-CLR Hosting and AppDomains Added discussion of side-by-side support allowing multiple CLRs to be loaded in a single process. Added section on the performance of using MarshalByRefObject-derived types. Substantially rewrote the section on cross-AppDomain communication. Added section on AppDomain Monitoring and first chance exception notifications. Updated the section on the AppDomainManager class. Chapter 23-Assembly Loading and Reflection Added section on how to deploy a single file with dependent assemblies embedded inside it. Added section comparing reflection invoke vs bind/invoke vs bind/create delegate/invoke vs C#’s dynamic type. Chapter 24-Runtime Serialization This is a whole new chapter that was not in the 2nd Edition. Part V – Threading Chapter 25-Threading Basics Whole new chapter motivating why Windows supports threads, thread overhead, CPU trends, NUMA Architectures, the relationship between CLR threads and Windows threads, the Thread class, reasons to use threads, thread scheduling and priorities, foreground thread vs background threads. Chapter 26-Performing Compute-Bound Asynchronous Operations Whole new chapter explaining the CLR’s thread pool. This chapter covers all the new .NET 4.0 constructs including cooperative cancelation, Tasks, the aralle class, parallel language integrated query, timers, how the thread pool manages its threads, cache lines and false sharing. Chapter 27-Performing I/O-Bound Asynchronous Operations Whole new chapter explaining how Windows performs synchronous and asynchronous I/O operations. Then, I go into the CLR’s Asynchronous Programming Model, my AsyncEnumerator class, the APM and exceptions, Applications and their threading models, implementing a service asynchronously, the APM and Compute-bound operations, APM considerations, I/O request priorities, converting the APM to a Task, the event-based Asynchronous Pattern, programming model soup. Chapter 28-Primitive Thread Synchronization Constructs Whole new chapter discusses class libraries and thread safety, primitive user-mode, kernel-mode constructs, and data alignment. Chapter 29-Hybrid Thread Synchronization Constructs Whole new chapter discussion various hybrid constructs such as ManualResetEventSlim, SemaphoreSlim, CountdownEvent, Barrier, ReaderWriterLock(Slim), OneManyResourceLock, Monitor, 3 ways to solve the double-check locking technique, .NET 4.0’s Lazy and LazyInitializer classes, the condition variable pattern, .NET 4.0’s concurrent collection classes, the ReaderWriterGate and SyncGate classes.

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• Editing sqlcmdvariable nodes in SSDT Publish Profile files using msbuild

  - by jamiet

  Publish profile files are a new feature of SSDT database projects that enable you to package up all environment-specific properties into a single file for use at publish time; I have written about them before at Publish Profile Files in SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and if it wasn’t obvious from that blog post, I’m a big fan! As I have used Publish Profile files more and more I have realised that there may be times when you need to edit those Publish profile files during your build process, you may think of such an operation as a kind of pre-processor step. In my case I have a sqlcmd variable called DeployTag, it holds a value representing the current build number that later gets inserted into a table using a Post-Deployment script (that’s a technique that I wrote about in Implementing SQL Server solutions using Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects – a compendium of project experiences – search for “Putting a build number into the DB”). Here are the contents of my Publish Profile file (simplified for demo purposes) : Notice that DeployTag defaults to “UNKNOWN”. On my current project we are using msbuild scripts to control what gets built and what I want to do is take the build number from our build engine and edit the Publish profile files accordingly. Here is the pertinent portion of the the msbuild script I came up with to do that:   <ItemGroup>     <Namespaces Include="myns">       <Prefix>myns</Prefix>       <Uri>http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003</Uri>     </Namespaces>   </ItemGroup>   <Target Name="UpdateBuildNumber">     <ItemGroup>       <SSDTPublishFiles Include="$(DESTINATION)\**\$(CONFIGURATION)\**\*.publish.xml" />     </ItemGroup>     <MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Xml.XmlFile Condition="%(SSDTPublishFiles.Identity) != ''"                                        TaskAction="UpdateElement"                                        File="%(SSDTPublishFiles.Identity)"                                        Namespaces="@(Namespaces)"                                         XPath="//myns:SqlCmdVariable[@Include='DeployTag']/myns:Value"                                         InnerText="$(BuildNumber)"/>   </Target> The important bits here are the definition of the namespace http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003: and the XPath expression //myns:SqlCmdVariable[@Include='DeployTag']/myns:Value: Some extra info: I use a fantastic tool called XMLPad to discover/test XPath expressions, read more at XMLPad – a new tool in my developer utility belt MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Xml.XmlFile is a msbuild task used to edit XML files and is available from Mike Fourie’s MSBuild Extension Pack I’m using a property called $(BuildNumber) to hold the value to substitute into the file and also $(DESTINATION)\**\$(CONFIGURATION)\**\*.publish.xml to define an ItemGroup all of my Publish Profile files. Populating those properties is basic msbuild stuff and is therefore outside the scope of this blog post however if you want to learn more check out MSBuild properties & How To: Use Wildcards to Build All Files in a Directory. Hope this is useful! @Jamiet

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• Aggregating cache data from OCEP in CQL

  - by Manju James

  There are several use cases where OCEP applications need to join stream data with external data, such as data available in a Coherence cache. OCEP’s streaming language, CQL, supports simple cache-key based joins of stream data with data in Coherence (more complex queries will be supported in a future release). However, there are instances where you may need to aggregate the data in Coherence based on input data from a stream. This blog describes a sample that does just that. For our sample, we will use a simplified credit card fraud detection use case. The input to this sample application is a stream of credit card transaction data. The input stream contains information like the credit card ID, transaction time and transaction amount. The purpose of this application is to detect suspicious transactions and send out a warning event. For the sake of simplicity, we will assume that all transactions with amounts greater than $1000 are suspicious. The transaction history is available in a Coherence distributed cache. For every suspicious transaction detected, a warning event must be sent with maximum amount, total amount and total number of transactions over the past 30 days, as shown in the diagram below. Application Input Stream input to the EPN contains events of type CCTransactionEvent. This input has to be joined with the cache with all credit card transactions. The cache is configured in the EPN as shown below: <wlevs:caching-system id="CohCacheSystem" provider="coherence"/> <wlevs:cache id="CCTransactionsCache" value-type="CCTransactionEvent" key-properties="cardID, transactionTime" caching-system="CohCacheSystem"> </wlevs:cache> Application Output The output that must be produced by the application is a fraud warning event. This event is configured in the spring file as shown below. Source for cardHistory property can be seen here. <wlevs:event-type type-name="FraudWarningEvent"> <wlevs:properties type="tuple"> <wlevs:property name="cardID" type="CHAR"/> <wlevs:property name="transactionTime" type="BIGINT"/> <wlevs:property name="transactionAmount" type="DOUBLE"/> <wlevs:property name="cardHistory" type="OBJECT"/> </wlevs:properties </wlevs:event-type> Cache Data Aggregation using Java Cartridge In the output warning event, cardHistory property contains data from the cache aggregated over the past 30 days. To get this information, we use a java cartridge method. This method uses Coherence’s query API on credit card transactions cache to get the required information. Therefore, the java cartridge method requires a reference to the cache. This may be set up by configuring it in the spring context file as shown below: <bean class="com.oracle.cep.ccfraud.CCTransactionsAggregator"> <property name="cache" ref="CCTransactionsCache"/> </bean> This is used by the java class to set a static property: public void setCache(Map cache) { s_cache = (NamedCache) cache; } The code snippet below shows how the total of all the transaction amounts in the past 30 days is computed. Rest of the information required by CardHistory object is calculated in a similar manner. Complete source of this class can be found here. To find out more information about using Coherence's API to query a cache, please refer Coherence Developer’s Guide. public static CreditHistoryData(String cardID) { … Filter filter = QueryHelper.createFilter("cardID = :cardID and transactionTime :transactionTime", map); CardHistoryData history = new CardHistoryData(); Double sum = (Double) s_cache.aggregate(filter, new DoubleSum("getTransactionAmount")); history.setTotalAmount(sum); … return history; } The java cartridge method is used from CQL as seen below: select cardID, transactionTime, transactionAmount, CCTransactionsAggregator.execute(cardID) as cardHistory from inputChannel where transactionAmount1000 This produces a warning event, with history data, for every credit card transaction over $1000. That is all there is to it. The complete source for the sample application, along with the configuration files, is available here. In the sample, I use a simple java bean to load the cache with initial transaction history data. An input adapter is used to create and send transaction events for the input stream.

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• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and things I wish were more intuitive

  - by pjohnson

  I've started using Windows Workflow Foundation, and so far ran into a few things that aren't incredibly obvious. Microsoft did a good job of providing a ton of samples, which is handy because you need them to get anywhere with WF. The docs are thin, so I've been bouncing between samples and downloadable labs to figure out how to implement various activities in a workflow. Code separation or not? You can create a workflow and activity in Visual Studio with or without code separation, i.e. just a .cs "Component" style object with a Designer.cs file, or a .xoml XML markup file with code behind (beside?) it. Absence any obvious advantage to one or the other, I used code separation for workflows and any complex custom activities, and without code separation for custom activities that just inherit from the Activity class and thus don't have anything special in the designer. So far, so good. Workflow Activity Library project type - What's the point of this separate project type? So far I don't see much advantage to keeping your custom activities in a separate project. I prefer to have as few projects as needed (and no fewer). The Designer's Toolbox window seems to find your custom activities just fine no matter where they are, and the debugging experience doesn't seem to be any different. Designer Properties - This is about the designer, and not specific to WF, but nevertheless something that's hindered me a lot more in WF than in Windows Forms or elsewhere. The Properties window does a good job of showing you property values when you hover the mouse over the values. But they don't do the same to find out what a control's type is. So maybe if I named all my activities "x1" and "x2" instead of helpful self-documenting names like "listenForStatusUpdate", then I could easily see enough of the type to determine what it is, but any names longer than those and all I get of the type is "System.Workflow.Act" or "System.Workflow.Compone". Even hitting the dropdown doesn't expand any wider, like the debugger quick watch "smart tag" popups do when you scroll through members. The only way I've found around this in VS 2008 is to widen the Properties dialog, losing precious designer real estate, then shrink it back down when you're done to see what you were doing. Really? WF Designer - This is about the designer, and I believe is specific to WF. I should be able to edit the XML in a .xoml file, or drag and drop using the designer. With WPF (at least in VS 2010 Ultimate), these are side by side, and changes to one instantly update the other. With WF, I have to right-click on the .xoml file, choose Open With, and pick XML Editor to edit the text. It looks like this is one way where WF didn't get the same attention WPF got during .NET Fx 3.0 development. Service - In the WF world, this is simply a class that talks to the workflow about things outside the workflow, not to be confused with how the term "service" is used in every other context I've seen in the Windows and .NET world, i.e. an executable that waits for events or requests from a client and services them (Windows service, web service, WCF service, etc.). ListenActivity - Such a great concept, yet so unintuitive. It seems you need at least two branches (EventDrivenActivity instances), one for your positive condition and one for a timeout. The positive condition has a HandleExternalEventActivity, and the timeout has a DelayActivity followed by however you want to handle the delay, e.g. a ThrowActivity. The timeout is simple enough; wiring up the HandleExternalEventActivity is where things get fun. You need to create a service (see above), and an interface for that service (this seems more complex than should be necessary--why not have activities just wire to a service directly?). And you need to create a custom EventArgs class that inherits from ExternalDataEventArgs--you can't create an ExternalDataEventArgs event handler directly, even if you don't need to add any more information to the event args, despite ExternalDataEventArgs not being marked as an abstract class, nor a compiler error nor warning nor any other indication that you're doing something wrong, until you run it and find that it always times out and get to check every place mentioned here to see why. Your interface and service need an event that consumes your custom EventArgs class, and a method to fire that event. You need to call that method from somewhere. Then you get to hope that you did everything just right, or that you can step through code in the debugger before your Delay timeout expires. Yes, it's as much fun as it sounds. TransactionScopeActivity - I had the bright idea of putting one in as a placeholder, then filling in the database updates later. That caused this error: The workflow hosting environment does not have a persistence service as required by an operation on the workflow instance "[GUID]". ...which is about as helpful as "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and even more fun to debug. Google led me to this Microsoft Forums hit, and from there I figured out it didn't like that the activity had no children. Again, a Validator on TransactionScopeActivity would have pointed this out to me at design time, rather than handing me a nearly useless error at runtime. Easily enough, I disabled the activity and that fixed it. I still see huge potential in my work where WF could make things easier and more flexible, but there are some seriously rough edges at the moment. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how much easier and more intuitive development elsewhere in the .NET Framework is.

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• OS Analytics with Oracle Enterprise Manager (by Eran Steiner)

  - by Zeynep Koch

  Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides a feature called "OS Analytics". This feature allows you to get a better understanding of how the Operating System is being utilized. You can research the historical usage as well as real time data. This post will show how you can benefit from OS Analytics and how it works behind the scenes. The recording of our call to discuss this blog is available here: https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/ldr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=71517797&rKey=4ec9d4a3508564b3Download the presentation here See also: Blog about Alert Monitoring and Problem Notification Blog about Using Operational Profiles to Install Packages and other content Here is quick summary of what you can do with OS Analytics in Ops Center: View historical charts and real time value of CPU, memory, network and disk utilization Find the top CPU and Memory processes in real time or at a certain historical day Determine proper monitoring thresholds based on historical data Drill down into a process details Where to start To start with OS Analytics, choose the OS asset in the tree and click the Analytics tab. You can see the CPU utilization, Memory utilization and Network utilization, along with the current real time top 5 processes in each category (click the image to see a larger version):  In the above screen, you can click each of the top 5 processes to see a more detailed view of that process. Here is an example of one of the processes: One of the cool things is that you can see the process tree for this process along with some port binding and open file descriptors. Next, click the "Processes" tab to see real time information of all the processes on the machine: An interesting column is the "Target" column. If you configured Ops Center to work with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, then the two products will talk to each other and Ops Center will display the correlated target from Cloud Control in this table. If you are only using Ops Center - this column will remain empty. The "Threshold" tab is particularly helpful - you can view historical trends of different monitored values and based on the graph - determine what the monitoring values should be: You can ask Ops Center to suggest monitoring levels based on the historical values or you can set your own. The different colors in the graph represent the current set levels: Red for critical, Yellow for warning and Blue for Information, allowing you to quickly see how they're positioned against real data. It's important to note that when looking at longer periods, Ops Center smooths out the data and uses averages. So when looking at values such as CPU Usage, try shorter time frames which are more detailed, such as one hour or one day. Applying new monitoring values When first applying new values to monitored attributes - a popup will come up asking if it's OK to get you out of the current Monitoring Policy. This is OK if you want to either have custom monitoring for a specific machine, or if you want to use this current machine as a "Gold image" and extract a Monitoring Policy from it. You can later apply the new Monitoring Policy to other machines and also set it as a default Monitoring Profile. Once you're done with applying the different monitoring values, you can review and change them in the "Monitoring" tab. You can also click the "Extract a Monitoring Policy" in the actions pane on the right to save all the new values to a new Monitoring Policy, which can then be found under "Plan Management" -> "Monitoring Policies". Visiting the past Under the "History" tab you can "go back in time". This is very helpful when you know that a machine was busy a few hours ago (perhaps in the middle of the night?), but you were not around to take a look at it in real time. Here's a view into yesterday's data on one of the machines: You can see an interesting CPU spike happening at around 3:30 am along with some memory use. In the bottom table you can see the top 5 CPU and Memory consumers at the requested time. Very quickly you can see that this spike is related to the Solaris 11 IPS repository synchronization process using the "pkgrecv" command. The "time machine" doesn't stop here - you can also view historical data to determine which of the zones was the busiest at a given time: Under the hood The data collected is stored on each of the agents under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/historical/ An "os.zip" file exists for the main OS. Inside you will find many small text files, named after the Epoch time stamp in which they were taken If you have any zones, there will be a file called "guests.zip" containing the same small files for all the zones, as well as a folder with the name of the zone along with "os.zip" in it If this is the Enterprise Controller or the Proxy Controller, you will have folders called "proxy" and "sat" in which you will find the "os.zip" for that controller The actual script collecting the data can be viewed for debugging purposes as well: On Linux, the location is: /opt/sun/xvmoc/private/os_analytics/collect If you would like to redirect all the standard error into a file for debugging, touch the following file and the output will go into it: # touch /tmp/.collect.stderr   The temporary data is collected under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/.collectdb until it is zipped. If you would like to review the properties for the Analytics, you can view those per each agent in /opt/sun/n1gc/lib/XVM.properties. Find the section "Analytics configurable properties for OS and VSC" to view the Analytics specific values. I hope you find this helpful! Please post questions in the comments below. Eran Steiner

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• Silverlight Cream for January 11, 2011 -- #1024

  - by Dave Campbell

  1,000 blogposts is quite a few, but to die-hard geeks, 1000 isn't the number... 1K is the number, and today is my 1K blogpost! I've been working up to this for at least 11 months. Way back at MIX10, I approached some vendors about an idea I had. A month ago I contacted them and others, and everyone I contacted was very generous and supportive of my idea. My idea was not to run a contest, but blog as normal, and whoever ended up on my 1K post would get some swag... and I set a cut-off at 13 posts. So... blogging normally, I had some submittals, and then ran my normal process to pick up the next posts until I hit a total of 13. To provide a distribution channel for the swag, everyone on the list, please send me your snail mail (T-shirts) and email (licenses) addresses as soon as possible.   I'd like to thank the following generous sponsors for their contributions to my fun (in alphabetic order): and Rachel Hawley for contributing 4 Silverlight control sets First Floor Software and Koen Zwikstra for contributing 13 licenses for Silverlight Spy and Sara Faatz/Jason Beres for contributing 13 licenses for Silverlight Data Visualization controls and Svetla Stoycheva for contributing T-Shirts for everyone on the post and Ina Tontcheva for contributing 13 licenses for RadControls for Silverlight + RadControls for Windows Phone and Charlene Kozlan for contributing 1 combopack standard, 2 DataGrid for Silverlight, and 2 Listbox for Silverlight Standard And now finally...in this Issue: Nigel Sampson, Jeremy Likness, Dan Wahlin, Kunal Chowdhurry, Alex Knight, Wei-Meng Lee, Michael Crump, Jesse Liberty, Peter Kuhn, Michael Washington, Tau Sick, Max Paulousky, Damian Schenkelman Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties" Dan Wahlin WP7: "Using Windows Phone Gestures as Triggers" Nigel Sampson Expression Blend: "PathListBox: making data look cool" Alex Knight From SilverlightCream.com: Using Windows Phone Gestures as Triggers Nigel Sampson blogged about WP7 Gestures, the Toolkit, and using Gestures as Triggers, and actually makes it looks simple :) Jounce Part 9: Static and Dynamic Module Management Jeremy Likness has episode 9 of his explanation of his MVVM framework, Jounce, up... and a big discussion of Modules and Module Management from a Jounce perspective. Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties Dan Wahlin takes a page from one of his teaching opportunities, and shares his knowledge of Dependency Properties with us... beginning with what they are, defining them in code, and demonstrating their use. Customizing Silverlight ChildWindow Style using Blend Kunal Chowdhurry has a great post up about getting your Child Windows to match the look & feel of the rest of youra app... plus a bunch of Blend goodness thrown in. PathListBox: making data look cool File this post by Alex Knight in the 'holy crap' file along with the others in this series! ... just check out that cool Ticker Style Path ListBox at the top of the blog... too cool! Web Access in Windows Phone 7 Apps Wei-Meng Lee has the 3rd part of his series on WP7 development up and in this one is discussing Web Access... I mean *discussing* it... tons of detail, code, and explanation... great post. Prevent your Silverlight XAP file from caching in your browser. Michael Crump helps relieve stress on Silverlight developers everywhere by exploring how to avoid caching of your XAP in the browser... (WPFS) MVVM Light Toolkit: Soup To Nuts Part I Jesse Liberty continues his Windows Phone from Scratch series with a new segment exploring Laurent Bugnion's MVVMLight Toolkit beginning with acquiring and installing the toolkit, then proceeds to discuss linking the View and ViewModel, the ViewModel Locator, and page navigation. Silverlight: Making a DateTimePicker Peter Kuhn attacks a problem that crops up on the forums a lot -- a DateTimePicker control for Silverlight... following the "It's so simple to build one yourself" advice, he did so, and provides the code for all of us! Windows Phone 7 Animated Button Press Michael Washington took exception to button presses that gave no visual feedback and produced a behavior that does just that. Using TweetSharp in a Windows Phone 7 app Tau Sick demonstrates using TweetSharp to put a twitter feed into a WP7 app, as he did in "Hangover Helper"... all the instructions from getting Tweeetshaprt to the code necessary. Bindable Application Bar Extensions for Windows Phone 7 Max Paulousky has a post discussing some real extensions to the ApplicationBar for WP7.. he begins with a bindable application bar by Nicolas Humann that I've missed, probably because his blog is in French... and extends it to allow using DelegateCommand. How to: Load Prism modules packaged in a separate XAP file in an OOB application Damian Schenkelman posts about Prism, AppModules in separate XAPs and running OOB... if you've tried this, you know it's a hassle.. Damian has the solution. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• BizTalk Envelopes explained

  - by Robert Kokuti

  Recently I've been trying to get some order into an ESB-BizTalk pub/sub scenario, and decided to wrap the payload into standardized envelopes. I have used envelopes before in a 'light weight' fashion, and I found that they can be quite useful and powerful if used systematically. Here is what I learned. The Theory In my experience, Envelopes are often underutilised in a BizTalk solution, and quite often their full potential is not well understood. Here I try to simplify the theory behind the Envelopes within BizTalk.   Envelopes can be used to attach additional data to the ‘real’ data (payload). This additional data can contain all routing and processing information, and allows treating the business data as a ‘black box’, possibly compressed and/or encrypted etc. The point here is that the infrastructure does not need to know anything about the business data content, just as a post man does not need to know the letter within the envelope. BizTalk has built-in support for envelopes through the XMLDisassembler and XMLAssembler pipeline components (these are part of the XMLReceive and XMLSend default pipelines). These components, among other things, perform the following: XMLDisassembler Extracts the payload from the envelope into the Message Body Copies data from the envelope into the message context, as specified by the property schema(s) associated by the envelope schema. Typically, once the envelope is through the XMLDisassembler, the payload is submitted into the Messagebox, and the rest of the envelope data are copied into the context of the submitted message. The XMLDisassembler uses the Property Schemas, referenced by the Envelope Schema, to determine the name of the promoted Message Context element.   XMLAssembler Wraps the Message Body inside the specified envelope schema Populates the envelope values from the message context, as specified by the property schema(s) associated by the envelope schema. Notice that there are no requirements to use the receiving envelope schema when sending. The sent message can be wrapped within any suitable envelope, regardless whether the message was originally received within an envelope or not. However, by sharing Property Schemas between Envelopes, it is possible to pass values from the incoming envelope to the outgoing envelope via the Message Context. The Practice Creating the Envelope Add a new Schema to the BizTalk project:   Envelopes are defined as schemas, with the <Schema> Envelope property set to Yes, and the root node’s Body XPath property pointing to the node which contains the payload. Typically, you’d create an envelope structure similar to this: Click on the <Schema> node and set the Envelope property to Yes. Then, click on the Envelope node, and set the Body XPath property pointing to the ‘Body’ node:   The ‘Body’ node is a Child Element, and its Data Structure Type is set to xs:anyType.  This allows the Body node to carry any payload data. The XMLReceive pipeline will submit the data found in the Body node, while the XMLSend pipeline will copy the message into the Body node, before sending to the destination. Promoting Properties Once you defined the envelope, you may want to promote the envelope data (anything other than the Body) as Property Fields, in order to preserve their value in the message context. Anything not promoted will be lost when the XMLDisassembler extracts the payload from the Body. Typically, this means you promote everything in the Header node. Property promotion uses associated Property Schemas. These are special BizTalk schemas which have a flat field structure. Property Schemas define the name of the promoted values in the Message Context, by combining the Property Schema’s Namespace and the individual Field names. It is worth being systematic when it comes to naming your schemas, their namespace and type name. A coherent method will make your life easier when it comes to referencing the schemas during development, and managing subscriptions (filters) in BizTalk Administration. I developed a fairly coherent naming convention which I’ll probably share in another article. Because the property schema must be flat, I recommend creating one for each level in the envelope header hierarchy. Property schemas are very useful in passing data between incoming as outgoing envelopes. As I mentioned earlier, in/out envelopes do not have to be the same, but you can use the same property schema when you promote the outgoing envelope fields as you used for the incoming schema.  As you can reference many property schemas for field promotion, you can pick data from a variety of sources when you define your outgoing envelope. For example, the outgoing envelope can carry some of the incoming envelope’s promoted values, plus some values from the standard BizTalk message context, like the AdapterReceiveCompleteTime property from the BizTalk message-tracking properties. The values you promote for the outgoing envelope will be automatically populated from the Message Context by the XMLAssembler pipeline component. Using the Envelope Receiving Enveloped messages are automatically recognized by the XMLReceive pipeline, or any other custom pipeline which includes the XMLDisassembler component. The Body Path node will become the Message Body, while the rest of the envelope values will be added to the Message context, as defined by the Property Shemas referenced by the Envelope Schema. Sending The Send Port’s filter expression can use the promoted properties from the incoming envelope. If you want to enclose the sent message within an envelope, the Send Port XMLAssembler component must be configured with the fully qualified envelope name:   One way of obtaining the fully qualified envelope name is copy it off from the envelope schema property page: The full envelope schema name is constructed as <Name>, <Assembly> The outgoing envelope is populated by the XMLAssembler pipeline component. The Message Body is copied to the specified envelope’s Body Path node, while the rest of the envelope fields are populated from the Message Context, according to the Property Schemas associated with the Envelope Schema. That’s all for now, happy enveloping!

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• Populate a WCF syndication podcast using MP3 ID3 metadata tags

  - by brian_ritchie

  In the last post, I showed how to create a podcast using WCF syndication.  A podcast is an RSS feed containing a list of audio files to which users can subscribe.  The podcast not only contains links to the audio files, but also metadata about each episode.  A cool approach to building the feed is reading this metadata from the ID3 tags on the MP3 files used for the podcast. One library to do this is TagLib-Sharp.  Here is some sample code: .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: var taggedFile = TagLib.File.Create(f); 2: var fileInfo = new FileInfo(f); 3: var item = new iTunesPodcastItem() 4: { 5: title = taggedFile.Tag.Title, 6: size = fileInfo.Length, 7: url = feed.baseUrl + fileInfo.Name, 8: duration = taggedFile.Properties.Duration, 9: mediaType = feed.mediaType, 10: summary = taggedFile.Tag.Comment, 11: subTitle = taggedFile.Tag.FirstAlbumArtist, 12: id = fileInfo.Name 13: }; 14: if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(taggedFile.Tag.Album)) 15: item.publishedDate = DateTimeOffset.Parse(taggedFile.Tag.Album); This reads the ID3 tags into an object for later use in creating the syndication feed.  When the MP3 is created, these tags are set...or they can be set after the fact using the Properties dialog in Windows Explorer.  The only "hack" is that there isn't an easily accessible tag for "subtitle" or "published date" so I used other tags in this example. Feel free to change this to meet your purposes.  You could remove the subtitle & use the file modified data for example. That takes care of the episodes, for the feed level settings we'll load those from an XML file: .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <iTunesPodcastFeed 3: baseUrl ="" 4: title="" 5: subTitle="" 6: description="" 7: copyright="" 8: category="" 9: ownerName="" 10: ownerEmail="" 11: mediaType="audio/mp3" 12: mediaFiles="*.mp3" 13: imageUrl="" 14: link="" 15: /> Here is the full code put together. Read the feed XML file and deserialize it into an iTunesPodcastFeed classLoop over the files in a directory reading the ID3 tags from the audio files .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: public static iTunesPodcastFeed CreateFeedFromFiles(string podcastDirectory, string podcastFeedFile) 2: { 3: XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(iTunesPodcastFeed)); 4: iTunesPodcastFeed feed; 5: using (var fs = File.OpenRead(Path.Combine(podcastDirectory, podcastFeedFile))) 6: { 7: feed = (iTunesPodcastFeed)serializer.Deserialize(fs); 8: } 9: foreach (var f in Directory.GetFiles(podcastDirectory, feed.mediaFiles)) 10: { 11: try 12: { 13: var taggedFile = TagLib.File.Create(f); 14: var fileInfo = new FileInfo(f); 15: var item = new iTunesPodcastItem() 16: { 17: title = taggedFile.Tag.Title, 18: size = fileInfo.Length, 19: url = feed.baseUrl + fileInfo.Name, 20: duration = taggedFile.Properties.Duration, 21: mediaType = feed.mediaType, 22: summary = taggedFile.Tag.Comment, 23: subTitle = taggedFile.Tag.FirstAlbumArtist, 24: id = fileInfo.Name 25: }; 26: if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(taggedFile.Tag.Album)) 27: item.publishedDate = DateTimeOffset.Parse(taggedFile.Tag.Album); 28: feed.Items.Add(item); 29: } 30: catch 31: { 32: // ignore files that can't be accessed successfully 33: } 34: } 35: return feed; 36: } Usually putting a "try...catch" like this is bad, but in this case I'm just skipping over files that are locked while they are being uploaded to the web site.Here is the code from the last couple of posts.  

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• Extreme Optimization – Numerical Algorithm Support

  - by JoshReuben

  Function Delegates Many calculations involve the repeated evaluation of one or more user-supplied functions eg Numerical integration. The EO MathLib provides delegate types for common function signatures and the FunctionFactory class can generate new delegates from existing ones. RealFunction delegate - takes one Double parameter – can encapsulate most of the static methods of the System.Math class, as well as the classes in the Extreme.Mathematics.SpecialFunctions namespace: var sin = new RealFunction(Math.Sin); var result = sin(1); BivariateRealFunction delegate - takes two Double parameters: var atan2 = new BivariateRealFunction (Math.Atan2); var result = atan2(1, 2); TrivariateRealFunction delegate – represents a function takes three Double arguments ParameterizedRealFunction delegate - represents a function taking one Integer and one Double argument that returns a real number. The Pow method implements such a function, but the arguments need order re-arrangement: static double Power(int exponent, double x) { return ElementaryFunctions.Pow(x, exponent); } ... var power = new ParameterizedRealFunction(Power); var result = power(6, 3.2); A ComplexFunction delegate - represents a function that takes an Extreme.Mathematics.DoubleComplex argument and also returns a complex number. MultivariateRealFunction delegate - represents a function that takes an Extreme.Mathematics.LinearAlgebra.Vector argument and returns a real number. MultivariateVectorFunction delegate - represents a function that takes a Vector argument and returns a Vector. FastMultivariateVectorFunction delegate - represents a function that takes an input Vector argument and an output Matrix argument – avoiding object construction  The FunctionFactory class RealFromBivariateRealFunction and RealFromParameterizedRealFunction helper methods - transform BivariateRealFunction or a ParameterizedRealFunction into a RealFunction delegate by fixing one of the arguments, and treating this as a new function of a single argument. var tenthPower = FunctionFactory.RealFromParameterizedRealFunction(power, 10); var result = tenthPower(x); Note: There is no direct way to do this programmatically in C# - in F# you have partial value functions where you supply a subset of the arguments (as a travelling closure) that the function expects. When you omit arguments, F# generates a new function that holds onto/remembers the arguments you passed in and "waits" for the other parameters to be supplied. let sumVals x y = x + y     let sumX = sumVals 10     // Note: no 2nd param supplied.     // sumX is a new function generated from partially applied sumVals.     // ie "sumX is a partial application of sumVals." let sum = sumX 20     // Invokes sumX, passing in expected int (parameter y from original)  val sumVals : int -> int -> int val sumX : (int -> int) val sum : int = 30 RealFunctionsToVectorFunction and RealFunctionsToFastVectorFunction helper methods - combines an array of delegates returning a real number or a vector into vector or matrix functions. The resulting vector function returns a vector whose components are the function values of the delegates in the array. var funcVector = FunctionFactory.RealFunctionsToVectorFunction(     new MultivariateRealFunction(myFunc1),     new MultivariateRealFunction(myFunc2));  The IterativeAlgorithm<T> abstract base class Iterative algorithms are common in numerical computing - a method is executed repeatedly until a certain condition is reached, approximating the result of a calculation with increasing accuracy until a certain threshold is reached. If the desired accuracy is achieved, the algorithm is said to converge. This base class is derived by many classes in the Extreme.Mathematics.EquationSolvers and Extreme.Mathematics.Optimization namespaces, as well as the ManagedIterativeAlgorithm class which contains a driver method that manages the iteration process.  The ConvergenceTest abstract base class This class is used to specify algorithm Termination , convergence and results - calculates an estimate for the error, and signals termination of the algorithm when the error is below a specified tolerance. Termination Criteria - specify the success condition as the difference between some quantity and its actual value is within a certain tolerance – 2 ways: absolute error - difference between the result and the actual value. relative error is the difference between the result and the actual value relative to the size of the result. Tolerance property - specify trade-off between accuracy and execution time. The lower the tolerance, the longer it will take for the algorithm to obtain a result within that tolerance. Most algorithms in the EO NumLib have a default value of MachineConstants.SqrtEpsilon - gives slightly less than 8 digits of accuracy. ConvergenceCriterion property - specify under what condition the algorithm is assumed to converge. Using the ConvergenceCriterion enum: WithinAbsoluteTolerance / WithinRelativeTolerance / WithinAnyTolerance / NumberOfIterations Active property - selectively ignore certain convergence tests Error property - returns the estimated error after a run MaxIterations / MaxEvaluations properties - Other Termination Criteria - If the algorithm cannot achieve the desired accuracy, the algorithm still has to end – according to an absolute boundary. Status property - indicates how the algorithm terminated - the AlgorithmStatus enum values:NoResult / Busy / Converged (ended normally - The desired accuracy has been achieved) / IterationLimitExceeded / EvaluationLimitExceeded / RoundOffError / BadFunction / Divergent / ConvergedToFalseSolution. After the iteration terminates, the Status should be inspected to verify that the algorithm terminated normally. Alternatively, you can set the ThrowExceptionOnFailure to true. Result property - returns the result of the algorithm. This property contains the best available estimate, even if the desired accuracy was not obtained. IterationsNeeded / EvaluationsNeeded properties - returns the number of iterations required to obtain the result, number of function evaluations.  Concrete Types of Convergence Test classes SimpleConvergenceTest class - test if a value is close to zero or very small compared to another value. VectorConvergenceTest class - test convergence of vectors. This class has two additional properties. The Norm property specifies which norm is to be used when calculating the size of the vector - the VectorConvergenceNorm enum values: EuclidianNorm / Maximum / SumOfAbsoluteValues. The ErrorMeasure property specifies how the error is to be measured – VectorConvergenceErrorMeasure enum values: Norm / Componentwise ConvergenceTestCollection class - represent a combination of tests. The Quantifier property is a ConvergenceTestQuantifier enum that specifies how the tests in the collection are to be combined: Any / All  The AlgorithmHelper Class inherits from IterativeAlgorithm<T> and exposes two methods for convergence testing. IsValueWithinTolerance<T> method - determines whether a value is close to another value to within an algorithm's requested tolerance. IsIntervalWithinTolerance<T> method - determines whether an interval is within an algorithm's requested tolerance.

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• Adding a DLL to the GAC in Windows 7

  - by Jim Giercyk

  I recently created a DLL and I wanted to reference it from a project I was developing in Visual Studio.  In previous versions of Windows, doing so was simply a matter of dropping the DLL file in the C:\Windows\assembly folder.  That would add the DLL to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and make it accessible in Visual Studio.  However, as is often the case, Window 7 is different.  Even if you have Administrator privileges on your machine, you still do not have permission to drop a file in the assembly folder.  Undaunted, I thought about using the old DOS command line utility gacutil.exe.  Microsoft developed the tool as part of the .Net framework, and it is available in the Windows SDK Framework Tools.  If you have never used gacutil.exe before, you can find out everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ex0ss12c(v=vs.80).aspx .  Unfortunately, if you do not have the Windows SDK loaded on your development machine, you will need to install it to use gacutil, but it is relatively quick and painless, and the framework tools are very useful.  Look here for your latest SDK: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/search.aspx?q=Windows%20SDK .   After installing the SDK, I tried installing my DLL to the GAC by running gacutil from a DOS command line: That’s odd.  Microsoft is shipping a tool that cannot be executed even with Administrator rights?  Let me stop here and say that I am by no means a Windows security expert, so I actually did contact my system administrators, and they were not sure how to fix the problem….there must be a super administrator access level, but it isn’t available to your average developer in my company.  The solution outlined here is working within the boundaries of a normal windows Administrator. So, now the hacker in me bubbles to the surface.  What if I were to create a simple BAT file containing the gacutil command?  It’s so crazy it just might work!  Ugh!  I was starting to think this would never work, but then I realized that simply executing a batch program did not change my level of access.  Typically in Windows 7, you would select the “Run As Administrator” option to temporarily act as an administrator for the purpose of executing a process.  However, that option is not available for BAT files run from the command line.  SOLUTION: Create a desktop shortcut to execute the BAT file, which in turn will execute the line command…..are you still with me?  I created a shortcut and pointed it to my batch file.  Theoretically, all I need to do now is right-click on the shortcut and select “Run As Administrator” and we’re good, right?  Well, kinda.  If you notice the syntax of my BAT file, the name of the DLL is passed in as a parameter.  Therefore, I either have to hard-code the file name in the BAT program (YUCK!!), or I can leave the parameter and drag the DLL file to the shortcut and drop it.  Sweet, drag-and-drop works for me…..but if I use the drag-and-drop method, there is no way for me to right-click and select “Run As Administrator”.  That is not a problem…..I simply have to adjust the properties of the shortcut I created and I am in business.  I Right-clicked on the shortcut and select “Properties”.  Under the “Shortcut” tab there is an “Advanced” button…..I clicked it. All I needed to do was check the “Run As Administrator” box: In summary, what I have done is create a BAT file to execute a command line utility, gacutil.exe.  Then, rather than executing the BAT file from the command line, I created a desktop shortcut to run it and set the shortcut properties to “Run As Administrator”.  This will effectively mean I am executing the command line utility with Administrator privileges.  Pretty sneaky. Now, when I drag the DLL file  over to the shortcut, it starts the BAT file and adds the DLL to the assembly cache.  I created another BAT file to remove a DLL from the GAC in case the need should arise.  The code for that is: Give it a try.  I can’t imagine why updating the GAC has been made into such a chore in Windows 7.  Hopefully there is a service pack in the works that will give developers the functionality they had in Windows XP, but in the meantime, this workaround is extremely useful.

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• A deadlock was detected while trying to lock variables in SSIS

  Error: 0xC001405C at SQL Log Status: A deadlock was detected while trying to lock variables "User::RowCount" for read/write access. A lock cannot be acquired after 16 attempts. The locks timed out. Have you ever considered variable locking when building your SSIS packages? I expect many people haven’t just because most of the time you never see an error like the one above. I’ll try and explain a few key concepts about variable locking and hopefully you never will see that error. First of all, what is all this variable locking all about? Put simply SSIS variables have to be locked before they can be accessed, and then of course unlocked once you have finished with them. This is baked into SSIS, presumably to reduce the risk of race conditions, but with that comes some additional overhead in that you need to be careful to avoid lock conflicts in some scenarios. The most obvious place you will come across any hint of locking (no pun intended) is the Script Task or Script Component with their ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables properties. These two properties allow you to enter lists of variables to be used within the task, or to put it another way, these lists of variables to be locked, so that they are available within the task. During the task pre-execute phase the variables and locked, you then use them during the execute phase when you code is run, and then unlocked for you during the post-execute phase. So by entering the variable names in one of the two list, the locking is taken care of for you, and you just read and write to the Dts.Variables collection that is exposed in the task for the purpose. As you can see in the image above, the variable PackageInt is specified, which means when I write the code inside that task I don’t have to worry about locking at all, as shown below. public void Main() { // Set the variable value to something new Dts.Variables["PackageInt"].Value = 199; // Raise an event so we can play in the event handler bool fireAgain = true; Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Script Task Code", "This is the script task raising an event.", null, 0, ref fireAgain); Dts.TaskResult = (int)ScriptResults.Success; } As you can see as well as accessing the variable, hassle free, I also raise an event. Now consider a scenario where I have an event hander as well as shown below. Now what if my event handler uses tries to use the same variable as well? Well obviously for the point of this post, it fails with the error quoted previously. The reason why is clearly illustrated if you consider the following sequence of events. Package execution starts Script Task in Control Flow starts Script Task in Control Flow locks the PackageInt variable as specified in the ReadWriteVariables property Script Task in Control Flow executes script, and the On Information event is raised The On Information event handler starts Script Task in On Information event handler starts Script Task in On Information event handler attempts to lock the PackageInt variable (for either read or write it doesn’t matter), but will fail because the variable is already locked. The problem is caused by the event handler task trying to use a variable that is already locked by the task in Control Flow. Events are always raised synchronously, therefore the task in Control Flow that is raising the event will not regain control until the event handler has completed, so we really do have un-resolvable locking conflict, better known as a deadlock. In this scenario we can easily resolve the problem by managing the variable locking explicitly in code, so no need to specify anything for the ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables properties. public void Main() { // Set the variable value to something new, with explicit lock control Variables lockedVariables = null; Dts.VariableDispenser.LockOneForWrite("PackageInt", ref lockedVariables); lockedVariables["PackageInt"].Value = 199; lockedVariables.Unlock(); // Raise an event so we can play in the event handler bool fireAgain = true; Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Script Task Code", "This is the script task raising an event.", null, 0, ref fireAgain); Dts.TaskResult = (int)ScriptResults.Success; } Now the package will execute successfully because the variable lock has already been released by the time the event is raised, so no conflict occurs. For those of you with a SQL Engine background this should all sound strangely familiar, and boils down to getting in and out as fast as you can to reduce the risk of lock contention, be that SQL pages or SSIS variables. Unfortunately we cannot always manage the locking ourselves. The Execute SQL Task is very often used in conjunction with variables, either to pass in parameter values or get results out. Either way the task will manage the locking for you, and will fail when it cannot lock the variables it requires. The scenario outlined above is clear cut deadlock scenario, both parties are waiting on each other, so it is un-resolvable. The mechanism used within SSIS isn’t actually that clever, and whilst the message says it is a deadlock, it really just means it tried a few times, and then gave up. The last part of the error message is actually the most accurate in terms of the failure, A lock cannot be acquired after 16 attempts. The locks timed out.  Now this may come across as a recommendation to always manage locking manually in the Script Task or Script Component yourself, but I think that would be an overreaction. It is more of a reminder to be aware that in high concurrency scenarios, especially when sharing variables across multiple objects, locking is important design consideration. Update – Make sure you don’t try and use explicit locking as well as leaving the variable names in the ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables lock lists otherwise you’ll get the deadlock error, you cannot lock a variable twice!

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• Unable to fix broken packages with sudo apt-get install -f

  - by Bob

  Here's my result, of sudo apt-get install -f. i have Ran it twice and got negative result. I believe there is an error at "error in Version string '0:3.6.1-dates for language English Translation data updates for all supported packages for: English" This same statement "error in Version string, caused me three days of attempting to download version 12.04. There is a bug report concerning the quoted text as well. Is there anyway to download the version without the language packs, why would I corrupt version 11.10? Also, when attempting to download Synaptic using sudo apt-get install synaptic, I get the same error message. Again I point out the initial download problems and the same error message receipt. Thanks b0b@b0b-IC780M-A:~$ sudo apt-get install -f [sudo] password for b0b: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 298 not upgraded. b0b@b0b-IC780M-A:~$ sudo apt-get install -f Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 298 not upgraded. b0b@b0b-IC780M-A:~$ sudo apt-get upgrade install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages have been kept back: linux-headers-generic software-center The following packages will be upgraded: accountsservice acpi-support acpid aisleriot alsa-utils app-install-data-partner appmenu-qt apport apport-gtk apt-transport-https apt-utils aptdaemon aptdaemon-data apturl apturl-common banshee banshee-extension-soundmenu banshee-extension-ubuntuonemusicstore baobab bind9-host binutils bluez-alsa bluez-cups bluez-gstreamer brasero brasero-cdrkit brasero-common checkbox checkbox-gtk command-not-found command-not-found-data compiz compiz-core compiz-gnome compiz-plugins-default compiz-plugins-main-default cups cups-bsd cups-client cups-common cups-ppdc deja-dup desktop-file-utils dnsutils empathy empathy-common eog evince evince-common evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-common file-roller firefox firefox-globalmenu firefox-gnome-support gbrainy gcalctool gconf2 gconf2-common gedit gedit-common ghostscript ghostscript-cups ghostscript-x gir1.2-atspi-2.0 gir1.2-gconf-2.0 gir1.2-gnomebluetooth-1.0 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-gtksource-3.0 gir1.2-totem-1.0 gir1.2-unity-4.0 gir1.2-webkit-3.0 gnome-accessibility-themes gnome-bluetooth gnome-control-center gnome-control-center-data gnome-desktop3-data gnome-font-viewer gnome-games-common gnome-icon-theme gnome-mahjongg gnome-online-accounts gnome-orca gnome-power-manager gnome-screenshot gnome-search-tool gnome-session gnome-session-bin gnome-session-canberra gnome-session-common gnome-settings-daemon gnome-sudoku gnome-system-log gnome-system-monitor gnome-utils-common gnomine gstreamer0.10-gconf gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio gvfs gvfs-backends gvfs-bin gvfs-fuse gwibber gwibber-service gwibber-service-facebook gwibber-service-identica gwibber-service-twitter hpijs hplip hplip-cups hplip-data indicator-datetime indicator-session indicator-sound isc-dhcp-client isc-dhcp-common jockey-common jockey-gtk language-selector-common language-selector-gnome libaccountsservice0 libapt-inst1.3 libarchive1 libasound2-plugins libatk-adaptor libbind9-60 libbrasero-media3-1 libcamel-1.2-29 libcanberra-gtk-module libcanberra-gtk0 libcanberra-gtk3-0 libcanberra-gtk3-module libcanberra-pulse libcanberra0 libdecoration0 libdns69 libebackend-1.2-1 libebook1.2-12 libecal1.2-10 libedata-book-1.2-11 libedata-cal-1.2-13 libedataserver1.2-15 libedataserverui-3.0-1 libevince3-3 libgconf2-4 libgnome-bluetooth8 libgnome-control-center1 libgnome-desktop-3-2 libgoa-1.0-0 libgrip0 libgs9 libgs9-common libgtk-3-bin libgtksourceview-3.0-0 libgtksourceview-3.0-common libgweather-3-0 libgweather-common libgwibber-gtk2 libgwibber2 libhpmud0 libimobiledevice2 libisc62 libisccc60 libisccfg62 libjasper1 liblightdm-gobject-1-0 liblwres60 libmetacity-private0 libmission-control-plugins0 libmono-zeroconf1.0-cil libnautilus-extension1 libnm-glib-vpn1 libnm-glib4 libnm-util2 libnotify0.4-cil libnux-1.0-0 libnux-1.0-common libpam-gnome-keyring libreoffice-emailmerge libreoffice-style-human libsane-hpaio libsmbclient libsnmp-base libsnmp15 libsyncdaemon-1.0-1 libt1-5 libtotem0 libubuntuone-1.0-1 libubuntuone1.0-cil libunity-2d-private0 libunity-core-4.0-4 libunity6 libusbmuxd1 libwbclient0 libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 libwebkitgtk-1.0-common libwebkitgtk-3.0-0 libwebkitgtk-3.0-common libxml2 linux-generic linux-image-generic metacity metacity-common mobile-broadband-provider-info modemmanager mousetweaks multiarch-support nautilus nautilus-data nautilus-sendto-empathy network-manager nux-tools onboard openssl pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat pulseaudio-module-bluetooth pulseaudio-module-gconf pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils python-apport python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-aptdaemon.gtk3widgets python-aptdaemon.gtkwidgets python-brlapi python-cups python-cupshelpers python-gobject-cairo python-httplib2 python-launchpadlib python-libxml2 python-pam python-papyon python-pkg-resources python-problem-report python-pyatspi2 python-software-properties python-ubuntuone-client python-ubuntuone-storageprotocol samba-common samba-common-bin seahorse shotwell simple-scan smbclient sni-qt software-properties-common software-properties-gtk sudo system-config-printer-common system-config-printer-gnome system-config-printer-udev telepathy-indicator telepathy-mission-control-5 thunderbird thunderbird-globalmenu thunderbird-gnome-support tomboy totem totem-common totem-mozilla totem-plugins ttf-opensymbol ubuntu-desktop ubuntu-minimal ubuntu-standard ubuntuone-client ubuntuone-client-gnome ubuntuone-couch unity unity-2d unity-2d-launcher unity-2d-panel unity-2d-places unity-2d-spread unity-common unity-lens-applications unity-services update-manager update-manager-core update-notifier update-notifier-common usbmuxd vim-common vim-tiny vinagre vino xorg xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xul-ext-ubufox 296 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/159 MB of archives. After this operation, 10.1 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y Extracting templates from packages: 100% Preconfiguring packages ... dpkg: error: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 4131 package 'python-zope.interface': error in Version string '0:3.6.1-dates for language English Translation data updates for all supported packages for: English . language-pack-en-base provides the bulk of translation data and is updated only seldom. This package provides frequent translation updates.': version string has embedded spaces E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2) b0b@b0b-IC780M-A:~$

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• WebLogic JDBC Use of Oracle Wallet for SSL

  - by Steve Felts

  Introduction Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) can be used to secure the connection between the middle tier “client”, WebLogic Server (WLS) in this case, and the Oracle database server.  Data between WLS and database can be encrypted.  The server can be authenticated so you have proof that the database can be trusted by validating a certificate from the server.  The client can be authenticated so that the database only accepts connections from clients that it trusts. Similar to the discussion in an earlier article about using the Oracle wallet for database credentials, the Oracle wallet can also be used with SSL to store the keys and certificates.  By using it correctly, clear text passwords can be eliminated from the JDBC configuration and client/server configuration can be simplified by sharing the wallet across multiple datasources. There is a very good Oracle Technical White Paper on using SSL with the Oracle thin driver at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/wp-oracle-jdbc-thin-ssl-130128.pdf [LINK1].  The link http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/weblogic/index-087556.html [LINK2] describes how to use WebLogic Server with Oracle JDBC Driver SSL. The information in this article is a guide on what steps need to be taken in the variety of available options; use the links above for details. SSL from the driver to the database server is basically turned on by specifying a protocol of “tcps” in the URL.  However, there is a fair amount of setup needed.  Also remember that there is an overhead in performance. Creating the wallets The common use cases are 1. “data encryption and server-only authentication”, requiring just a trust store, or 2. “data encryption and authentication of both tiers” (client and server), requiring a trust store and a key store. It is recommended to use the auto-login wallet type so that clear text passwords are not needed in the datasource configuration to open the wallet.  The store type for an auto-login wallet is “SSO” (Single Sign On), not “JKS” or “PKCS12” as in [LINK2].  The file name is “cwallet.sso”. Wallets are created using the orapki tool.  They need to be created based on the usage (encryption and/or authentication).  This is discussed in detail in [LINK1] in Appendix B or in the Advanced Security Administrator’s Guide of the Database documentation. Database Server Configuration It is necessary to update the sqlnet.ora and listener.ora files with the directory location of the wallet using WALLET_LOCATION.  These files also indicate whether or not SSL_CLIENT_AUTHENTICATION is being used (true or false). The Oracle Listener must also be configured to use the TCPS protocol.  The recommended port is 2484. LISTENER = (ADDRESS_LIST= (ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcps)(HOST=servername)(PORT=2484))) WebLogic Server Classpath The WebLogic Server CLASSPATH must have three additional security files. The files that need to be added to the WLS CLASSPATH are $MW_HOME/modules/com.oracle.osdt_cert_1.0.0.0.jar $MW_HOME/modules/com.oracle.osdt_core_1.0.0.0.jar $MW_HOME/modules/com.oracle.oraclepki_1.0.0.0.jar One way to do this is to add them to PRE_CLASSPATH environment variable for use with the standard WebLogic scripts. Setting the Oracle Security Provider It’s necessary to enable the Oracle PKI provider on the client side.  This can either be done statically by updating the java.security file under the JRE or dynamically by setting it in a WLS startup class using java.security.Security.insertProviderAt(new oracle.security.pki.OraclePKIProvider (), 3); See the full example of the startup class in [LINK2]. Datasource Configuration When creating a WLS datasource, set the PROTOCOL in the URL to tcps as in the following. jdbc:oracle:thin:@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcps)(HOST=host)(PORT=port))(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=myservice))) For encryption and server authentication, use the datasource connection properties: - javax.net.ssl.trustStore=location of wallet file on the client - javax.net.ssl.trustStoreType=”SSO” For client authentication, use the datasource connection properties: - javax.net.ssl.keyStore=location of wallet file on the client - javax.net.ssl.keyStoreType=”SSO” Note that the driver connection properties for the wallet require a file name, not a directory name. Active GridLink ONS over SSL For completeness, there is another SSL usage for WLS datasources.  The communication with the Oracle Notification Service (ONS) for load balancing information and node up/down events can use SSL also. Create an auto-login wallet and use the wallet on the client and server.  The following is a sample sequence to create a test wallet for use with ONS. orapki wallet create -wallet ons -auto_login -pwd ONS_Wallet orapki wallet add -wallet ons -dn "CN=ons_test,C=US" -keysize 1024 -self_signed -validity 9999 -pwd ONS_Wallet orapki wallet export -wallet ons -dn "CN=ons_test,C=US" -cert ons/cert.txt -pwd ONS_Wallet On the database server side, it’s necessary to define the walletfile directory in the file $CRS_HOME/opmn/conf/ons.config and run onsctl stop/start. When configuring an Active GridLink datasource, the connection to the ONS must be defined.  In addition to the host and port, the wallet file directory must be specified.  By not giving a password, a SSO wallet is assumed. Summary To use SSL with the Oracle thin driver without any clear text passwords, use an SSO Oracle Wallet.  SSL support in the Oracle thin driver is available starting in 10g Release 2.

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