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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 24, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 24, 2011Popular ReleasesASP.NET Comet Ajax Library (Reverse Ajax - Server Push): ASP.NET Reverse Ajax Samples: Chat, MVC Razor, DesktopClient, Reverse Ajax for VB.NET and C#Windows Azure SDK for PHP: Windows Azure SDK for PHP v4.0.5: INSTALLATION Windows Azure SDK for PHP requires no special installation steps. Simply download the SDK, extract it to the folder you would like to keep it in, and add the library directory to your PHP include_path. INSTALLATION VIA PEAR Maarten Balliauw provides an unofficial PEAR channel via http://www.pearplex.net. Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPAzure Or if you've already installed PHPAzure before: pear upgrade p...Anno 2070 Assistant: Beta v1.0 (STABLE): Anno 2070 Assistant Beta v1.0 Released! Features Included: Complete Building Layouts for Ecos, Tycoons & Techs Complete Production Chains for Ecos, Tycoons & Techs Completed Credits Screen Known Issues: Not all production chains and building layouts may be on the lists because they have not yet been discovered. However, data is still 99.9% complete. Currently the Supply & Demand, including Calculator screen are disabled until version 1.1.Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.7: Including updated Minecraft Biome Extractor and mcmap to support the new Minecraft 1.0.0 release (new block types, etc).Metro Pandora: Metro Pandora SDK V1: For more information on this release please see Metro Pandora SDK Introduction. Supported platforms: Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight Windows 8 .Net 4.0, WPF, WinformsVisual Leak Detector for Visual C++ 2008/2010: v2.2.1: Enhancements: * strdup and _wcsdup functions support added. * Preliminary support for VS 11 added. Bugs Fixed: * Low performance after upgrading from VLD v2.1. * Memory leaks with static linking fixed (disabled calloc support). * Runtime error R6002 fixed because of wrong memory dump format. * version.h fixed in installer. * Some PVS studio warning fixed.NetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.10: 3.6.0.10 22-Nov-2011 Update: Removed PreEmptive Platform integration (PreEmptive analytics) Removed all PreEmptive attributes Removed PreEmptive.dll assembly references from all projects Added first support to ADAM/AD LDS Thanks to PatBea. Work Item 9775: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/9775Developer Team Article System Management: DTASM v1.3: ?? ??? ???? 3 ????? ???? ???? ????? ??? : - ????? ?????? ????? ???? ?? ??? ???? ????? ?? ??? ? ?? ???? ?????? ???? ?? ???? ????? ?? . - ??? ?? ???? ????? ???? ????? ???? ???? ?? ????? , ?????? ????? ????? ?? ??? . - ??? ??????? ??? ??? ???? ?? ????? ????? ????? .VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF & Silverlight 5: VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF, SL5 - 2011.11.22: The new version contains Silverlight 5 library: Vlc.DotNet.Silverlight. A sample could be tested here The new version add and correct many features : Correction : Reinitialize some variables Deprecate : Logging API, since VLC 1.2 (08/20/2011) Add subitem in LocationMedia (for Youtube videos, ...) Update Wpf sample to use Youtube videos Many others correctionsSharePoint 2010 FBA Pack: SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack 1.2.0: Web parts are now fully customizable via html templates (Issue #323) FBA Pack is now completely localizable using resource files. Thank you David Chen for submitting the code as well as Chinese translations of the FBA Pack! The membership request web part now gives the option of having the user enter the password and removing the captcha (Issue # 447) The FBA Pack will now work in a zone that does not have FBA enabled (Another zone must have FBA enabled, and the zone must contain the me...SharePoint 2010 Education Demo Project: Release SharePoint SP1 for Education Solutions: This release includes updates to the Content Packs for SharePoint SP1. All Content Packs have been updated to install successfully under SharePoint SP1SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQLMon 4.1 alpha 6: 1. improved support for schema 2. added find reference when right click on object list 3. added object rename supportBugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.126: First stable release of version 0.9. Upgrades from 0.8 are fully supported and upgrades to future releases will also be supported. This release is now compiled against the .NET 4.0 framework and is a requirement. Because of this the web.config has significantly changed. After upgrading, you will need to configure the authentication settings for user registration and anonymous access again. Please see our installation / upgrade instructions for more details: http://wiki.bugnetproject.c...Free SharePoint 2010 Sites Templates: SharePoint Server 2010 Sites Templates: here is the list of sites templates to be downloadedVsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 30 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 30 (beta)New: Support for TortoiseSVN 1.7 added. (the download contains both setups, for TortoiseSVN 1.6 and 1.7) New: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog displays conflicted files now. New: OpenModifiedDocument allows to group items by changelist now. Fix: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog caused Visual Studio 2010 to freeze sometimes. Fix: The installer didn...nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.30: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • Back in stock notifications. • Product special price support. • Catalog mode (based on customer role) To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).WPF Converters: WPF Converters V1.2.0.0: support for enumerations, value types, and reference types in the expression converter's equality operators the expression converter now handles DependencyProperty.UnsetValue as argument values correctly (#4062) StyleCop conformance (more or less)Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 4: Change - JsonTextReader.Culture is now CultureInfo.InvariantCulture by default Change - KeyValurPairConverter no longer cares about the order of the key and value properties Change - Time zone conversions now use new TimeZoneInfo instead of TimeZone Fix - Fixed boolean values sometimes being capitalized when converting to XML Fix - Fixed error when deserializing ConcurrentDictionary Fix - Fixed serializing some Uris returning the incorrect value Fix - Fixed occasional error when...Media Companion: MC 3.423b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Replaced 'Rebuild' with 'Refresh' throughout entire code. Rebuild will now be known as Refresh. mc_com.exe has been fully updated TV Show Resolutions... Resolved issue #206 - having to hit save twice when updating runtime manually Shrunk cache size and lowered loading times f...ASP.net Awesome jQuery Ajax Controls Samples and Tutorials: 1.0 samples: Demos and Tutorials for ASP.net Awesome VS2008 are in .NET 3.5 VS2010 are in .NET 4.0 (demos for the ASP.net Awesome jQuery Ajax Controls)New Projects"My" Search SharePoint 2010 WebParts: Solution consists of two SharePoint 2010 web parts inheriting from core results web part. The "My Core Search Results" webpart and the "Sortable Results" web part.Alerta Mensagens: Projeto de alerta de mensagens.Analyzer GT3000: VU MIF PS1 "Utopine Amnezija" PSI projektasAutoReservation: Miniprojekt an der HSR im Fach MsTechContestMeter: Program for measuring participant scores in programming contests.CountriesWFA: oby ostatniDotNet.Framework.Common: <DotNet.Framework.Common> ASP.NET?????? Esaan Windows Phone 7 Application Compitition: Resource for Esaan Windows Phone 7 Application Excel add-in to enable users View Azure Storage Tables: An Excel 2007 add-in using Azure Storage REST APIs (no Azure libraries required) and Excel custom task pane. Uses of such Office 2007 add-in: 1. Read data from Azure storage, populate that in excel and use it by sorting (not directly available in Azure storage) and so on. 2. Write Sorted data back (in sorted order) back to Azure storage. 3. Have data used frequently (such as dictionary of legal terms, or math formulae, and so on) on Azure storage and let your Office Excel users use th...fastconv: fastconv, a fast charset encoding convertor.gaosu: this is a gaosu projectGems: Gossip-enabled monitoring system.GridIT: GridIT is a Puzzle written in Visual Basic.Habanero Faces: A set of user interface libraries for use with Habanero Core used to build Windows Forms or Visual WebGUI user interfaces for your business objects. HomeSite: HomeSiteHTML to docx Converter: This converts HTML into Word documents (docx format). The code is written in PHP and works with PHPWord.Image Curator: image curation programjLemon: jLemon is an LALR(1) parser generator. Lemon is similar to the much more famous programs "YACC", "BISON" and "LEMON". jLemon is a pure Java program and compatible with "LEMON".jngsoftware: JNG Computer ServicesKinectoid: Kinectoid is a Kinect based pong game based on Neat Game Engine.Linq Accelerator: coming soon!Linq to SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services): Linq to SSRS allows you as developer generate objects and map them to the repots on SQL Server Reporting Services in linq to sql fashion using lambda expressions and linq notation.MicroBitmap - Image Compressor: MicroBitmap is a image compressor which is different from all other compressors This compressor is focussed at compressing the bitmap and making it so small as possible so fast as possible You can find more information in the source codeOMX_AL_test_environment: OMX application layer simulation/testing environmentShuriken Plugins: Shuriken Plugins is a project for developing plugins for Shuriken, the free launcher app on Windows. Simple Command Line Backup Tool: Simple Command Line Backup Tool automates the backup of files from the command line for use in batch files. Includes file type filters/ recursive/non recursive and number days to keep backups for. Right now this is simply a quick app I created for a client of mine that needed a simple backup utility to go with a product I delivered. .NET 2.0 C# Console Application Hopefully this will morph into a useful utility with features not common in other command line backup utilities.SomethingSpacial: Initially designed via Interact Designer Ariel (http://www.facingblend.com/) Something Spacial as a design was used to help give some look and feel for the Silverlight User Group Starter Kit and then finally used as part of the Seattle Silverlight User Group Community Site.SqlServer Packer: SqlServer???????????????????，?????????。TVDBMetaData: Construct TV Series and Episode XML metadata from TheTvDB database.Ukázkové projekty: Obsahuje ukázkové projekty uživatele TenCoKaciStromy.Uzing Inklude: UI = Uzing + Inklude Uzing : Utility classes for .Net written in C# Inklude : Utility classes written in native C++ It supports very low level communications, but in very simple way. Current Capability - TCP, UDP, Thread in C# & C++ - String in C++ - Shared memory in C# - Communication between C# and C++ via shared memory Dependency: - TBB (http://threadingbuildingblocks.org/) - Boost (http://www.boost.org/) Even though it depends on such heavy libs, end developer does...Visual Studio Project Converter: This project is inspired by the original source code provided by Emmet Gray to convert Visual Studio solution and project files from one version to another (both backwards and forwards). This project has been converted to C# and updated to support new features.WarrantyPrint: WarrantyPrintWordPress???? on Windows Azure: WordPress?????Windows Azure Platform????????。 ???????SQL Azure??????。WPFResumeVideo: Play video on any computer, and resume where you left offWyvern's Depot: Personal code repository.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 22, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 22, 2012Popular ReleasesStackBuilder: StackBuilder 1.0.11.0: +Added Box/Case analysis...VidCoder: 1.4.7 Beta: Added view modes to the Preview window. Now you can see the image in 1:1 or in "Corners" mode to show a close-up of cropping results. Added the ability to set a custom completion sound. Gave the encoding settings command bar a more distinctive background color and extended it to the whole width of the window. Added the preview button to the command bar. Rearranged UI in Video tab and added back the section headers. Added the "Most" choice for the advanced x264 analysis option. Updat...ServiceMon - Extensible Real-time, Service Monitoring Utility for Windows: ServiceMon Release 1.2.0.58: Auto-uploaded from build serverImapX 2: ImapX 2.0.0.6: An updated release of the ImapX 2 library, containing many bugfixes for both, the library and the sample application.WiX Toolset: WiX v3.7 RC: WiX v3.7 RC (3.7.1119.0) provides feature complete Bundle update and reference tracking plus several bug fixes. For more information see Rob's blog post about the release: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/11/20/WiX-v3.7-Release-Candidate-availablePicturethrill: Version 2.11.20.0: Fixed up Bing image provider on Windows 8Excel AddIn to reset the last worksheet cell: XSFormatCleaner.xla: Modified the commandbar code to use CommandBar IDs instead of English names.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 11: New feature - Added ITraceWriter, MemoryTraceWriter, DiagnosticsTraceWriter New feature - Added StringEscapeHandling with options to escape HTML and non-ASCII characters New feature - Added non-generic JToken.ToObject methods New feature - Deserialize ISet<T> properties as HashSet<T> New feature - Added implicit conversions for Uri, TimeSpan, Guid New feature - Missing byte, char, Guid, TimeSpan and Uri explicit conversion operators added to JToken New feature - Special case...EntitiesToDTOs - Entity Framework DTO Generator: EntitiesToDTOs.v3.0: DTOs and Assemblers can be generated inside project folders! Choose the types you want to generate! Support for Visual Studio 2012 !!! Support for new Entity Framework EDMX (format used by VS2012) ! Support for Enum Types! Optional automatic check for updates! Added the following methods to Assemblers! IEnumerable<DTO>.ToEntities() : ICollection<Entity> IEnumerable<Entity>.ToDTOs() : ICollection<DTO> Indicate class identifier for DTOs and Assemblers! Cleaner Assemblers code....mojoPortal: 2.3.9.4: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2394-released Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0, but we recommend you to use .NET 4, we will probably drop support for .NET 3.5 once .NET 4.5 is available The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code and are not intended for use in Visual Studio. To download the source code see getting the lates...DotNetNuke® Store: 03.01.07: What's New in this release? IMPORTANT: this version requires DotNetNuke 04.06.02 or higher! DO NOT REPORT BUGS HERE IN THE ISSUE TRACKER, INSTEAD USE THE DotNetNuke Store Forum! Bugs corrected: - Replaced some hard coded references to the default address provider classes by the corresponding interfaces to allow the creation of another address provider with a different name. New Features: - Added the 'pickup' delivery option at checkout. - Added the 'no delivery' option in the Store Admin ...Bundle Transformer - a modular extension for ASP.NET Web Optimization Framework: Bundle Transformer 1.6.10: Version: 1.6.10 Published: 11/18/2012 Now almost all of the Bundle Transformer's assemblies is signed (except BundleTransformer.Yui.dll); In BundleTransformer.SassAndScss the SassAndCoffee.Ruby library was replaced by my own implementation of the Sass- and SCSS-compiler (based on code of the SassAndCoffee.Ruby library version 2.0.2.0); In BundleTransformer.CoffeeScript added support of CoffeeScript version 1.4.0-3; In BundleTransformer.TypeScript added support of TypeScript version 0....ExtJS based ASP.NET 2.0 Controls: FineUI v3.2.0: +2012-11-18 v3.2.0 -?????????????????SelectedValueArray????????（◇?◆:）。 -???????????????????RecoverPropertiesFromJObject????（〓?〓、????、??、Vian_Pan）。 -????????????，?????????????，???SelectedValueArray???????（sam.chang）。 -??Alert.Show???????????（swtseaman）。 -???????????????，??Icon??IconUrl????（swtseaman）。 -?????????TimePicker（??）。 -?????????，??/res.axd?css=blue.css&v=1。 -????????，?????????????，???????。 -????MenuCheckBox（???????）。 -?RadioButton??AutoPostBack??。 -???????FCKEditor?????????...BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 1.2: Please read our release notes for BugNET 1.2: http://blog.bugnetproject.com/bugnet-1-2-has-been-released Please do not post questions as reviews. Questions should be posted in the Discussions tab, where they will usually get promptly responded to. If you post a question as a review, you will pollute the rating, and you won't get an answer.Paint.NET PSD Plugin: 2.2.0: Changes: Layer group visibility is now applied to all layers within the group. This greatly improves the visual fidelity of complex PSD files that have hidden layer groups. Layer group names are prefixed so that users can get an indication of the layer group hierarchy. (Paint.NET has a flat list of layers, so the hierarchy is flattened out on load.) The progress bar now reports status when saving PSD files, instead of showing an indeterminate rolling bar. Performance improvement of 1...CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1116.7): [IMPROVED] Detailed error message descriptions for FaultException [FIX] Fixed bug in rule CrmOfflineAccessStateRule which had incorrect State attribute name [FIX] Fixed bug in rule EntityPropertyRule which was missing PropertyValue attribute [FIX] Current connection information was not displayed in status bar while refreshing list of entitiesSuper Metroid Randomizer: Super Metroid Randomizer v5: v5 -Added command line functionality for automation purposes. -Implented Krankdud's change to randomize the Etecoon's item. NOTE: this version will not accept seeds from a previous version. The seed format has changed by necessity. v4 -Started putting version numbers at the top of the form. -Added a warning when suitless Maridia is required in a parsed seed. v3 -Changed seed to only generate filename-legal characters. Using old seeds will still work exactly the same. -Files can now be saved...Caliburn Micro: WPF, Silverlight, WP7 and WinRT/Metro made easy.: Caliburn.Micro v1.4: Changes This version includes many bug fixes across all platforms, improvements to nuget support and...the biggest news of all...full support for both WinRT and WP8. Download Contents Debug and Release Assemblies Samples Readme.txt License.txt Packages Available on Nuget Caliburn.Micro – The full framework compiled into an assembly. Caliburn.Micro.Start - Includes Caliburn.Micro plus a starting bootstrapper, view model and view. Caliburn.Micro.Container – The Caliburn.Micro invers...DirectX Tool Kit: November 15, 2012: November 15, 2012 Added support for WIC2 when available on Windows 8 and Windows 7 with KB 2670838 Cleaned up warning level 4 warningsDotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.05: Major Highlights Updated the system so that it supports nested folders in the App_Code folder Updated the Global Error Handling so that when errors within the global.asax handler happen, they are caught and shown in a page displaying the original HTTP error code Fixed issue that stopped users from specifying Link URLs that open on a new window Security FixesFixed issue in the Member Directory module that could show members to non authenticated users Fixed issue in the Lists modul...New Projects1122case1325: It is a codeplex project1122case1327: Never be so greedy Accommodation Portal: This is a skeleton web site for holiday home owners, who wishes to rent their holiday accommodations to visitors from around the world. Analog Clock: This is project contains analog clock made in win forms.Android Socket Plus: ????Android??????。???????Android???????Socket???，?????????（?PC?Windows????????）??????Socket???，??，????????????；??????????????Socket???，??????????????Socket???。Bancosol: PFCBig Data Twitter Demo: This demo analyzes tweets in real-time, even including a dashboard. The tweets are also archived in Azure DB/Blob and Hadoop where Excel can be used for BI!Cloud For Science: This project serves as issue tracker for C4S components, and is used by participants of the C4S project. cwt: cwtDiary Application for Elementary Student: A Simple Diary Application Made for Elementary Student. Dice Dreams: Dice Dreams Dice Dreams is a dice game , the player must get 1.000.000 point to win, you start with 100.000 point. Dynamic Entity Framework Filtering: Generates linq to Entity Framework Queries by examining the EF data model, thus allowing for code reduction for queries to commonly requested entities.EazyErp: Enterprise Resource Planning System of Vf AsiaGoPlay: Tooke - add a project description here...HMyBlog: myblogHumanitarian Toolbox: This project is the publication site for bits built by the Humanitarian Toolbox ( http://humanitariantoolbox.net/).Impulse Media Player: Impulse Media Player is the ultimate media player for WindowsInspiration.Web: Description: A simple (but entertaining) ASP.NET MVC (C#) project to suggest random code names for projects. Intended audience: People who need a name (any name) to get started with their projects. Application written during Webcamp Singapore (4th Jun 2010 - 5th Jun 2010).iPictureUploader: Simple tool to upload images onto WEB and share via blogs/forums/etc lugionline: test projectMosaic Snake 3D: A clone of the popular Snake game for Windows 8. It contains a simple 3D engine based on SharpDX and is completely written in C# and Xaml.Outage Display: A simple web-based outage displayPrestaShop free Electronic Brown Shop Template - ModuleBazaar: Check out Latest and Best Featured PrestaShop Templates, Modules Magento Extensions, Opencart Extensions, Clone scripts from ModuleBazaarRackspace Cloud Files Manager: A simple Rackspace Cloud Files manager for static websitesRoll The Dice: Roll The Dice is a simple game developed by Erika Enggar Savitri and Queen Anugerah Aguslia who are currently studying Information System at Ma Chung UniversityRussian IDM: Russian IDM is free IdM solutionshootout: Comparing the speed of different languages and the constructs available within those languagessmart messaging connector: Sending fax from a PrintDocument or a file. Sending broadcast fax. Managing (Pause/Resume/Restart) current fax job. Managing configuration of the fax serverTeen Diary: Teen Diary Software - FREEWARE SOFTWARE. - SIMPLE, LIGHTWEIGHT, PORTABLE, COMPATIBLE. - made from .NET FRAMEWORK languange with XML data. Tekapo: Tekapo is a wizard style application that will help you manage your digital photos. Most digital cameras will store images as JPEG files. Information about the camera and how the camera has taken the photo is placed into the JPEG file along with the image data. One of the pieces of information stored is the date and time that the photo was taken. Tekapo uses the picture taken date to organise the photos.The Byte Kitchen's Open Sources: This project is related to The Byte Kitchen Blog (at thebytekitchen.com). It typically deals with Windows 8 apps, DirectX, and the Kinect for Windows.TheDiary: daily-self journalWCFsample: WCFsampleXNA Game Editor: This project will has familiar features like Unity Engine Editor.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 21, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 21, 2011Popular ReleasesSQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQLMon 4.1 alpha 6: 1. improved support for schema 2. added find reference when right click on object list 3. added object rename supportdns?????: 1.0: ???????。??????。BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.126: First stable release of version 0.9. Upgrades from 0.8 are fully supported and upgrades to future releases will also be supported. This release is now compiled against the .NET 4.0 framework and is a requirement. Because of this the web.config has significantly changed. After upgrading, you will need to configure the authentication settings for user registration and anonymous access again. Please see our installation / upgrade instructions for more details: http://wiki.bugnetproject.c...Anno 2070 Assistant: v0.1.0 (STABLE): Version 0.1.0 Features Production Chains Eco Production Chains (Complete) Tycoon Production Chains (Disabled - Incomplete) Tech Production Chains (Disabled - Incomplete) Supply (Disabled - Incomplete) Calculator (Disabled - Incomplete) Building Layouts Eco Building Layouts (Complete) Tycoon Building Layouts (Disabled - Incomplete) Tech Building Layouts (Disabled - Incomplete) Credits (Complete)Free SharePoint 2010 Sites Templates: SharePoint Server 2010 Sites Templates: here is the list of sites templates to be downloadedVsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 30 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 30 (beta)New: Support for TortoiseSVN 1.7 added. (the download contains both setups, for TortoiseSVN 1.6 and 1.7) New: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog displays conflicted files now. New: OpenModifiedDocument allows to group items by changelist now. Fix: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog caused Visual Studio 2010 to freeze sometimes. Fix: The installer didn...nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.30: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • Back in stock notifications. • Product special price support. • Catalog mode (based on customer role) To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).WPF Converters: WPF Converters V1.2.0.0: support for enumerations, value types, and reference types in the expression converter's equality operators the expression converter now handles DependencyProperty.UnsetValue as argument values correctly (#4062) StyleCop conformance (more or less)Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 4: Change - JsonTextReader.Culture is now CultureInfo.InvariantCulture by default Change - KeyValurPairConverter no longer cares about the order of the key and value properties Change - Time zone conversions now use new TimeZoneInfo instead of TimeZone Fix - Fixed boolean values sometimes being capitalized when converting to XML Fix - Fixed error when deserializing ConcurrentDictionary Fix - Fixed serializing some Uris returning the incorrect value Fix - Fixed occasional error when...Media Companion: MC 3.423b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Replaced 'Rebuild' with 'Refresh' throughout entire code. Rebuild will now be known as Refresh. mc_com.exe has been fully updated TV Show Resolutions... Resolved issue #206 - having to hit save twice when updating runtime manually Shrunk cache size and lowered loading times f...Delta Engine: Delta Engine Beta Preview v0.9.1: v0.9.1 beta release with lots of refactoring, fixes, new samples and support for iOS, Android and WP7 (you need a Marketplace account however). If you want a binary release for the games (like v0.9.0), just say so in the Forum or here and we will quickly prepare one. It is just not much different from v0.9.0, so I left it out this time. See http://DeltaEngine.net/Wiki.Roadmap for details.ASP.net Awesome Samples (Web-Forms): 1.0 samples: Full Demo VS2008 Very Simple Demo VS2010 and Tutorials (demos for the ASP.net Awesome jQuery Ajax Controls)SharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLR: SharpMap-0.9-AnyCPU-Trunk-2011.11.17: This is a build of SharpMap from the 0.9 development trunk as per 2011-11-17 For most applications the AnyCPU release is the recommended, but in case you need an x86 build that is included to. For some dataproviders (GDAL/OGR, SqLite, PostGis) you need to also referense the SharpMap.Extensions assembly For SqlServer Spatial you need to reference the SharpMap.SqlServerSpatial assemblyAJAX Control Toolkit: November 2011 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - November 2011 Release Version 51116November 2011 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 - Binary – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 - Binary – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - The current version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is not compatible with ASP.NET 2.0. The latest version that is compatible with ASP.NET 2.0 can be found h...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.5: Added: Now the DateRanteAttribute accepts complex expressions containing "Now" and "Today" as static minimum and maximum. Menu, MenuFor helpers capable of handling a "currently selected element". The developer can choose between using a standard nested menu based on a standard SimpleMenuItem class or specifying an item template based on a custom class. Added also helpers to build the tree structure containing all data items the menu takes infos from. Improved the pager. Now the developer ...SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.7: Reworked API to be more consistent. See Supported formats table. Added some more helper methods - e.g. OpenEntryStream (RarArchive/RarReader does not support this) Fixed up testsSilverlight Toolkit: Windows Phone Toolkit - Nov 2011 (7.1 SDK): This release is coming soon! What's new ListPicker once again works in a ScrollViewer LongListSelector bug fixes around OutOfRange exceptions, wrong ordering of items, grouping issues, and scrolling events. ItemTuple is now refactored to be the public type LongListSelectorItem to provide users better access to the values in selection changed handlers. PerformanceProgressBar binding fix for IsIndeterminate (item 9767 and others) There is no longer a GestureListener dependency with the C...DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 06.01.01: Major Highlights Fixed problem with the core skin object rendering CSS above the other framework inserted files, which caused problems when using core style skin objects Fixed issue with iFrames getting removed when content is saved Fixed issue with the HTML module removing styling and scripts from the content Fixed issue with inserting the link to jquery after the header of the page Security Fixesnone Updated Modules/Providers ModulesHTML version 6.1.0 ProvidersnoneSCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.8: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.8 is currently the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Added "Wake On LAN" action. WOL.EXE is now included. Added new action "Get all active advertisements" to list all machine based advertisements on remote computers. Added new action "Get all active user advertisements" to list all user based advertisements for logged on users on remote computers. Added config.ini setting "enablePingTest" to control whether ping test is ru...C.B.R. : Comic Book Reader: CBR 0.3: New featuresAdd magnifier size and scale New file info view in the backstage Add dynamic properties on book and settings Sorting and grouping in the explorer with new design Rework on conversion : Images, PDF, Cbr/rar, Cbz/zip, Xps to the destination formats Images, Cbz and XPS ImprovmentsSuppress MainViewModel and ExplorerViewModel dependencies Add view notifications and Messages from MVVM Light for ViewModel=>View notifications Make thread better on open catalog, no more ihm freeze, less t...New ProjectsAnno 2070 Assistant: Anno 2070 Assistant is a program that is useable with the Ubisoft game Anno 2070. It shows you production chain information, building layouts, population supplies, etc.ASINDO Administration: Administration pages for ASINDO Pediatrics.Birthright Campaign Manager: Birthright Campaign Manager is a tool made with Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 designed to help players manage and handle games of Birthright at the domain level, let it be pen and paper, or play by email games.buttons: toolbar buttonsCAML Viewer: CAML Viewer Web Part lets you view CAML Query from Views. This Web Part also helps you find internal names for fields.CapitaList: The Craigslist for current and aspiring entrepreneurs to get all the information to start and establish a local business. This application offers its users access to licensing and permit information, financing option, business proposals and federal grants and awards for the area.CountryProject: Again country gameCSSMMS: ???????????Distributed replay GUI: With release of SQL Server 2012 RC0 I was disaapointed to discover that there was not User Interface for Distributed Replay. This is my contribution. May it help Distributed Replay to get the attention it deserves.DSCop: DSCop is an open source tool that analyzes IBM InfoSphere DataStage jobs and reports information such as violation of some commonly accepted best practices. It's developed in C# and uses MEF from .NET 4 to provide plug-in based architecture.Emailing Files as Attachments in Sharepoint 2010: This solution makes it easy for Sharepoint 2010 users to email files as attachments from the Sharepoint Ribbon Menu. The user can select multiple documents at a time, as well as Folders of files and document sets. The form contains fields for external email addresses as well a Sharepoint People Picker for internal users. If you want to exclude either of them, then simply set the containing panel to invisible. This is described in the documentationExtendable JSON Serialization: Contains an interface (IJSONSerializable) and a collection of JSON objects (conforms to the document set out at http://www.json.org) that enable you to add JSON serialization to your own data access classes. FitLib: A .NET library to parse FIT files used by Garmin GPS receivers.FlyComet: A simple ASP .Net comet implementation enabling ActiveMQ JMS Publisher to push live updates to the client using IHttpAsyncHandler.Free SharePoint 2010 Sites Templates: in this project am pleased to offer these SharePoint 2010 custom templates. These templates are free to all and are provided “as is”. FullByte Tools: This is a test project of mine.GDL: This is the goddamn library. 'Nuff said.kimocsys: KiMoCSys stands for Kinect Motion Capture System. It captures the movement using the kinect hardware and kinect SDK for windows and generates a Collada file with the animation inside. Intended for indie game developers and enthusiasts. Use WPF and C#Leoscorp: This is a test.Nop 23 Multi Store: Nop Commerce Multi Store supportPaper Reader: Silverlight application for read rich text filesPivot Viewer for Office 365: Pivot Viewer Silverlight 5 control in a webpart for Office 365Projeto Teste: Projeto de testesReflective-C#: The Reflective-C# Project. It consists in a pre-preprocessor (yeah, still gotta work on that name xD ), which extends the C# language for more versatility and ease of use. The Project also includes a AOT compiler for IL assemblies, targeting inumerous plataforms.Secure Text Box for Windows Forms: A secure text box control that is implemented using SecureString for secure entering of passwords written in C#SharePoint Mystery: Source code for the SharePoint Mystery sample projectShenJH.Net: ShenJH NetSilverlight in the Enterprise: Project dedicated to Promoting Silverlight usage in the enterprise.Small demo: Call WCF web services using jQuery: Small asp.net web site used to show how to call a WCF service from JavaScript. The main goal is to add a custom BehaviorExtensionElement that will be used to log server errors. It's developed in C# (.net framework 4.0).ThapHaNoiGiaiThuatAKT: Demo d? án môn h?c Các Phuong Pháp L?p TrìnhVolgaTransTelecomClient: VolgaTransTelecomClient makes it easier for clients of "Volga TransTelecom" company to get info about account. It's developed in C#.Your Last Options Dialog: Are you tired of recreating the same option dialog logic for each Windows Phone app every time? "Your Last Options Dialog" is an attempt to create a generic, highly configurable implementation you can easily pull into your own app and set up for your needs quickly. It's extensible in case you need to add more features or want to change existing ones, and allows easy localization of the complete content to all of the languages supported by your app.

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• Elegance, thy Name is jQuery

  - by SGWellens

  So, I'm browsing though some questions over on the Stack Overflow website and I found a good jQuery question just a few minutes old. Here is a link to it. It was a tough question; I knew that by answering it, I could learn new stuff and reinforce what I already knew: Reading is good, doing is better. Maybe I could help someone in the process too. I cut and pasted the HTML from the question into my Visual Studio IDE and went back to Stack Overflow to reread the question. Dang, someone had already answered it! And it was a great answer. I never even had a chance to start analyzing the issue. Now I know what a one-legged man feels like in an ass-kicking contest. Nevertheless, since the question and answer were so interesting, I decided to dissect them and learn as much as possible. The HTML consisted of some divs separated by h3 headings.  Note the elements are laid out sequentially with no programmatic grouping: <h3 class="heading">Heading 1</h3> <div>Content</div> <div>More content</div> <div>Even more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 2</h3> <div>some content</div> <div>some more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 3</h3> <div>other content</div></form></body>  The requirement was to wrap a div around each h3 heading and the subsequent divs grouping them into sections. Why? I don't know, I suppose if you screen-scrapped some HTML from another site, you might want to reformat it before displaying it on your own. Anyways… Here is the marvelously, succinct posted answer: $('.heading').each(function(){ $(this).nextUntil('.heading').andSelf().wrapAll('<div class="section">');}); I was familiar with all the parts except for nextUntil and andSelf. But, I'll analyze the whole answer for completeness. I'll do this by rewriting the posted answer in a different style and adding a boat-load of comments: function Test(){ // $Sections is a jQuery object and it will contain three elements var $Sections = $('.heading'); // use each to iterate over each of the three elements $Sections.each(function () { // $this is a jquery object containing the current element // being iterated var $this = $(this); // nextUntil gets the following sibling elements until it reaches // an element with the CSS class 'heading' // andSelf adds in the source element (this) to the collection $this = $this.nextUntil('.heading').andSelf(); // wrap the elements with a div $this.wrapAll('<div class="section" >'); });}  The code here doesn't look nearly as concise and elegant as the original answer. However, unless you and your staff are jQuery masters, during development it really helps to work through algorithms step by step. You can step through this code in the debugger and examine the jQuery objects to make sure one step is working before proceeding on to the next. It's much easier to debug and troubleshoot when each logical coding step is a separate line. Note: You may think the original code runs much faster than this version. However, the time difference is trivial: Not enough to worry about: Less than 1 millisecond (tested in IE and FF). Note: You may want to jam everything into one line because it results in less traffic being sent to the client. That is true. However, most Internet servers now compress HTML and JavaScript by stripping out comments and white space (go to Bing or Google and view the source). This feature should be enabled on your server: Let the server compress your code, you don't need to do it. Free Career Advice: Creating maintainable code is Job One—Maximum Priority—The Prime Directive. If you find yourself suddenly transferred to customer support, it may be that the code you are writing is not as readable as it could be and not as readable as it should be. Moving on… I created a CSS class to see the results: .section{ background-color: yellow; border: 2px solid black; margin: 5px;} Here is the rendered output before:   …and after the jQuery code runs.   Pretty Cool! But, while playing with this code, the logic of nextUntil began to bother me: What happens in the last section? What stops elements from being collected since there are no more elements with the .heading class? The answer is nothing.  In this case it stopped because it was at the end of the page.  But what if there were additional HTML elements? I added an anchor tag and another div to the HTML: <h3 class="heading">Heading 1</h3> <div>Content</div> <div>More content</div> <div>Even more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 2</h3> <div>some content</div> <div>some more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 3</h3> <div>other content</div><a>this is a link</a><div>unrelated div</div> </form></body> The code as-is will include both the anchor and the unrelated div. This isn't what we want.   My first attempt to correct this used the filter parameter of the nextUntil function: nextUntil('.heading', 'div')  This will only collect div elements. But it merely skipped the anchor tag and it still collected the unrelated div:   The problem is we need a way to tell the nextUntil function when to stop. CSS selectors to the rescue: nextUntil('.heading, a')  This tells nextUntil to stop collecting sibling elements when it gets to an element with a .heading class OR when it gets to an anchor tag. In this case it solved the problem. FYI: The comma operator in a CSS selector allows multiple criteria.   Bingo! One final note, we could have broken the code down even more: We could have replaced the andSelf function here: $this = $this.nextUntil('.heading, a').andSelf(); With this: // get all the following siblings and then add the current item$this = $this.nextUntil('.heading, a');$this.add(this);  But in this case, the andSelf function reads real nice. In my opinion. Here's a link to a jsFiddle if you want to play with it. I hope someone finds this useful Steve Wellens CodeProject

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• Project Management Helps AmeriCares Deliver International Aid

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

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

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, January 22, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, January 22, 2011Popular ReleasesMinecraft Tools: Minecraft Topographical Survey 1.3: MTS requires version 4 of the .NET Framework - you must download it from Microsoft if you have not previously installed it. This version of MTS adds automatic block list updates, so MTS will recognize blocks added in game updates properly rather than drawing them in bright pink. New in this version of MTS: Support for all new blocks added since the Halloween update Auto-update of blockcolors.xml to support future game updates A splash screen that shows while the program searches for upd...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14996.000: New Features: ============= This release is just compiled against the latest release of JetBrains ReSharper 5.1.1766.4 Previous release: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 9: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 9 ChangesAdded support for lists and suggested users Fixes based on user feedback Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.1.6: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comjqGrid ASP.Net MVC Control: Version 1.2.0.0: jqGrid 3.8 support jquery 1.4 support New and exciting features Many bugfixes Complete separation from the jquery, & jqgrid codeMediaScout: MediaScout 3.0 Preview 4: Update ReleaseCoding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1MFCMAPI: January 2011 Release: Build: 6.0.0.1024 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the tool, get the executable. If you want to debug it, get the symbol file and the source. The 64 bit build will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit build, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.4: Added champion: Renekton Removed automatic file association Fix: The recent files combobox didn't always open a file when an item was selected Fix: Removing a recently opened file caused an errorDotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.01: Major Highlights Fixed issue to remove preCondition checks when upgrading to .Net 4.0 Fixed issue where some valid domains were failing email validation checks. Fixed issue where editing Host menu page settings assigns the page to a Portal. Fixed issue which caused XHTML validation problems in 5.6.0 Fixed issue where an aspx page in any subfolder was inaccessible. Fixed issue where Config.Touch method signature had an unintentional breaking change in 5.6.0 Fixed issue which caused...MiniTwitter: 1.65: MiniTwitter 1.65 ???? ?? List ????? in-reply-to ???????? ????????????????????????? ?? OAuth ????????????????????????????ASP.net Ribbon: Version 2.1: Tadaaa... So Version 2.1 brings a lot of things... Have a look at the homepage to see what's new. Also, I wanted to (really) improve the Designer. I wanted to add great things... but... it took to much time. And as some of you were waiting for fixes, I decided just to fix bugs and add some features. So have a look at the demo app to see new features. Thanks ! (You can expect some realeses if bugs are not fixed correctly... 2.2, 2.3, 2.4....)iTracker Asp.Net Starter Kit: Version 3.0.0: This is the inital release of the version 3.0.0 Visual Studio 2010 (.Net 4.0) remake of the ITracker application. I connsider this a working, stable application but since there are still some features missing to make it "complete" I'm leaving it listed as a "beta" release. I am hoping to make it feature complete for v3.1.0 but anything is possible.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.6.1: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager changes: RenderView controller extension works for razor also live demo switched to razorBloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.3.1: - Priority update to resolve a bug that was causing Boss damage to ignore Blood Shields entirelyRawr: Rawr 4.0.16 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of this release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Tracker. W...MvcContrib: an Outer Curve Foundation project: MVC 3 - 3.0.51.0: Please see the Change Log for a complete list of changes. MVC BootCamp Description of the releases: MvcContrib.Release.zip MvcContrib.dll MvcContrib.TestHelper.dll MvcContrib.Extras.Release.zip T4MVC. The extra view engines / controller factories and other functionality which is in the project. This file includes the main MvcContrib assembly. Samples are included in the release. You do not need MvcContrib if you download the Extras.Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net: Version 1.5.0.0 - Jalthi: Updated solution to VS2010. New: Work Item #4450 - Optional MSBuild task parameter :: Do not error if no files were found. Fixed: Work Item #5028 - Output file encoding is the same as the optional MSBuild task encoding argument. Fixed: Work Item #5824 - MSBuilds where slow, after the first build due to the Current Thread being forced to en-gb, on none en-gb systems. Changed: Work Item #6873 - Project license changed from MS-PL to GPLv2. New: Added all the unit tests from the Java YU...N2 CMS: 2.1.1: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. 2.1.1 Maintenance release List of changes 2.1 Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the template packs (above) and open...DNN Menu Provider: 01.00.00 (DNN 5.X and newer): DNN Menu Provider v1.0.0Our first release build is a stable release. It requires at least DotNetNuke 5.1.0. Previous DNN versions are not suported. Major Highlights: Easy to use template system build on a selfmade and powerful engine. Ready for multilingual websites. A flexible translation integration based on the ASP.NET Provider Model as well as an build in provider for DNN Localization (DNN 5.5.X > required) and an provider for EALO Translation API. Advanced in-memory caching function...VidCoder: 0.8.1: Adds ability to choose an arbitrary range (in seconds or frames) to encode. Adds ability to override the title number in the output file name when enqueing multiple titles. Updated presets: Added iPhone 4, Apple TV 2, fixed some existing presets that should have had weightp=0 or trellis=0 on them. Added {parent} option to auto-name format. Use {parent:2} to refer to a folder 2 levels above the input file. Added {title:2} option to auto-name format. Adds leading zeroes to reach the sp...New Projectsagap: Système de gestion d'application.Blog in Silverlight With BlogEngine: I love silverlight and want to build my blog in silverlight base on BlogEngine.NETCavemanTools: Easy to use toolkit with extension methods and special goodies for faster development, written in C# on .Net 3.5. CloudCompanion: Windows Azure performance measurement & analytics tools.Delivery Madness: XNA Game Development ExampledFactor: Visual Studio Add-in. Provides extended refactoring options.GpSpotMe: El objetivo final de GPSmapPoint es mostrar la posición del usuario sobre un mapa topográfico, pero eso no es mas que una escusa para aprender y divertirse programando. Esta desarrollado en C# sobre .NET Compact Framework 3.5 y puede ser usado en teléfonos con Windows Mobile 6.xInvestment Calculator: Allows you to evaluate how much money you could have today if you invested to one of the predefined investment opportunities in the database at a given date.jbucknor: jbucknorLoad Generation: Generates load according to a given pattern over a long period of time for the given number of users. It can vary the load in different patters such as linear, exponential etc. Load can be generated on custom or standard protocol Orchard Profile Module: Provides user profilesOrchard Super Classic Theme: This Orchard Theme is used to demonstrate the dynamic themes capabilities offered by Orchard. Based on the Classic Theme for Orchard, you can chose among different variations from the Dashboard.Orchard Youtube Field Module: Youtube field for orchard.Osac DataLayer: Database layer to simplify the use of database connection, sql queries and commands. Powerd by OSAC. http://www.osac.nlPascal Design: Pascal Design. pascal design is for users writing pascal application or to students learning pascal and don't need to workout the design and want to make same fast "screens". it's developed in C#PathEditor: This tool simplified the access to the environment path variable. No long line, a nice grid for editing easy and secure with directory checking. PLG Graphic File Analyzer: PLG Analyzer is an application that loads a graphic scene described in PLG format, parses the file and displays the information in it on the screen in 3D coordinates using OpenTK for C#. This project is a university project (homework, not final project) so please bear in mind :)Read Application Cofiguration in Javascript: Would it be good , if "AppSettings" is accessed with "Javascript.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ServiceUrl"]"?Route#: A Microsoft .NET 4.0 C#/F# application to load routes and find minimal paths. The application is meant to let user create a network of nodes and connections representing a web to route. Starting from a point A the application will find the minimal path to B.Send SMS: Send SMS allows you to send SMS (Short Messaging Service) to all mobile operators across India. It allows you to send SMS through popular service providers like Way2SMS, Full On Sms, Tezsms, Sms Inside and more.SocialMe: This is a simple Facebook, MySpace & Twitter client, but small!StockViewer: This is an interactive way to browse stocks.Thailand IC2011 Training: Using for IC2011 training at KU. Topic. Windows Presentation Foundation Silverlight Windows Phone 7 TipTip: Online oblozuvanjeWeb Content Compressor: The objective of this project is to compress any Javascript (js file or inline script at some web files) and Cascading Style Sheets to an efficient level that works exactly as the original source, before it was minified. The library also is integrated with MSBuildwuyuhu: wuyuhuXaml Mvp: With Xaml Mvp you can create Windows Phone 7 applications based on the MVP pattern. By seperating Data from Behaviour you still get the benefit of MVVM without your View Model becoming a fat-controller. Silverlight and WPF coming soon! Developed using C#XnaWavPack: Native C# wavpack decoder, intended for use with the dynamic sound API in XNA4.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, September 22, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, September 22, 2012Popular ReleasesWPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.5.0.8: Version: 2.5.0.8 (Milestone 8): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete WAF: Mark the class DataModel as serializable. InfoMan: Minor improvements. InfoMan: Add unit tests for all modules. Othe...LogicCircuit: LogicCircuit 2.12.9.20: Logic Circuit - is educational software for designing and simulating logic circuits. Intuitive graphical user interface, allows you to create unrestricted circuit hierarchy with multi bit buses, debug circuits behavior with oscilloscope, and navigate running circuits hierarchy. Changes of this versionToolbars on text note dialog are more flexible now. You can select font face, size, color, and background of text you are typing. RAM now can be initialized to one of the following: random va...$linq - A Javascript LINQ library: Version 1.1: Version 1.1 Implemented batch, equiZip, zipLongest, prepend, pad, padWith, toJQuery, pipe, singleOrFallback, indexOf, indexOfElement, lastIndexOf, lastIndexOfElement, scan, prescan, and aggregate operators.Huo Chess: Huo Chess 0.95: The Huo Chess 0.95 version has an improved chessboard analysis function so as to be able to see which squares are the dangerous squares in the chessboard. This allows the computer to understand better when it is threatened. Two editions are included: Huo Chess 0.95 Console Application (57 KB in size) Huo Chess 0.95 Windows Application with GUI (119 KB in size) See http://harmoniaphilosophica.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/how-to-develop-a-chess-program-for-2jszrulazj6wq-23/ for the infamous How...Symphony Framework: Symphony Framework v2.0.0.2: Symphony Framework version 2.0.0.2. General note: If you install Symphony Framework 2.0.0.2 you must also install CodeGen 4.1.10 because a number of templates now utilise new features added to the tool. Added the user token PROJECTNAMESPACE to the “Symphony_Content.tpl” template to ensure that we can correctly reference the collection classes of the selection lists. Also added the ability to create object references to fields defined as having selection windows assigned. This enhancement ...Community xPress MDS: Initial MDS and DQS Models: Initial MDS & DQS ModelsSiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.1.2020.421): New features: Disable a specific part of SiteMap to keep the data without displaying them in the CRM application. It simply comments XML part of the sitemap (thanks to rboyers for this feature request) Right click an item and click on "Disable" to disable it Items disabled are greyed and a suffix "- disabled" is added Right click an item and click on "Enable" to enable it Refresh list of web resources in the web resources pickerAJAX Control Toolkit: September 2012 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - September 2012 Release Version 60919September 2012 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - The current version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is not compatible with ...Lib.Web.Mvc & Yet another developer blog: Lib.Web.Mvc 6.1.0: Lib.Web.Mvc is a library which contains some helper classes for ASP.NET MVC such as strongly typed jqGrid helper, XSL transformation HtmlHelper/ActionResult, FileResult with range request support, custom attributes and more. Release contains: Lib.Web.Mvc.dll with xml documentation file Standalone documentation in chm file and change log Library source code Sample application for strongly typed jqGrid helper is available here. Sample application for XSL transformation HtmlHelper/ActionRe...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.1.2 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.1.2 Community EditionMain new featuresOur current release brings a lot of bugfixes, including the resolution of js/css editing cache issues, xlsx file handling from Office, expense claim demo workspace fixes and much more. Besides fixes 6.1.2 introduces workflow start options and other minor features like a reusable Reject client button for approval scenarios and resource editor enhancements. We have also fixed an issue with our install package to bring you a flawless installation...WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.3: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.5 RC: PTVS 1.5RC Available! We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 RC. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, etc. support. The primary new feature for the 1.5 release is Django including Azure support! The http://www.djangoproject.com is a pop...Launchbar: Lanchbar 4.0.0: This application requires .NET 4.5 which you can find here: www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/downloadsAssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.4 -: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we try to package for those OSes. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) Changelog: New logo Improved airstrike! Reset nukes...Extended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.7.0: Want an easier way to install the Extended WPF Toolkit?The Extended WPF Toolkit is available on Nuget. What's new in the 1.7.0 Release?New controls Zoombox Pie New features / bug fixes PropertyGrid.ShowTitle property added to allow showing/hiding the PropertyGrid title. Modifications to the PropertyGrid.EditorDefinitions collection will now automatically be applied to the PropertyGrid. Modifications to the PropertyGrid.PropertyDefinitions collection will now be reflected automaticaly...JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.2: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript to CRUD + Query data from different sources like OData, MongoDB, WebSQL, SqLite, Facebook or YQL. The library can be integrated with Knockout.js or Sencha Touch 2 and can be used on Node.js as well. See it in action in this 6 minutes video Sencha Touch 2 example app using JayData: Netflix browser. What's new in JayData 1.2 For detailed release notes check the release notes. JayData core: all async operations now support promises JayDa...????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 4: 2012?9?17??? ?????，???????????????。 ?????Release 3??????，???????，???，??? ??????????????????SDK，????????。 ??，??????? That's all.VidCoder: 1.4.0 Beta: First Beta release! Catches up to HandBrake nightlies with SVN 4937. Added PGS (Blu-ray) subtitle support. Additional framerates available: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates available: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates available for audio. Same as Source Constant Framerate available. Added Apple TV 3 preset. Added new Bob deinterlacing option. Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will keep running and continue pro...DNN Metro7 style Skin package: Metro7 style Skin for DotNetNuke 06.02.01: Stabilization release fixed this issues: Links not worked on FF, Chrome and Safari Modified packaging with own manifest file for install and source package. Moved the user Image on the Login to the left side. Moved h2 font-size to 24px. Note : This release Comes w/o source package about we still work an a solution. Who Needs the Visual Studio source files please go to source and download it from there. Known 16 CSS issues that related to the skin.css. All others are DNN default o...Visual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.1: This fixes a bug in the 1.5 release where it would crash when no language packs were installed for VS2010.New ProjectsCodePlexDeployment: Please ignore, this project is for testing out some features of the WAWS deployment integrationDotNetNuke Social Dashboard: The DotNetNuke Social Dashboard gives DotNetNuke Administrators and insight into the social statistics of their site.EESTEC LC Trieste: .Event Log Mailer: Mails events from Windows' system Event Log which matches rules in configuration. Runs as Windows service and has super simple configurationflx4432: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam facilisis condimentum nulla. Duis sed quam vitae nunc semper facilisis a eget leo.lanWOLf: Send wake-on-lan packets across subnets by utilizing powered-on machines on each subnet.Micro-Apps Framework: Micro-Apps is a revolutionary piece of software that allows you to have multiple programs running from 1 file under the same process!NJ: NJ Language Learning Helper type Config() = // Just Code Example member x.GetAll() = seq{ yield {Name="Admin" Dictionary = OtfPG: To generate reproducible complex passwords from simple pass phrases, allowing the user to 'remember; a simple phrase, rather that a complex password, without evProject92104: as ppProject92105: ppaProject92107: papaPython intellisense Enhancer: For the python code, the intellisense box will show after you input a character, just like c#.QR Code Reader (By Screen Capture): Reads the QR Codes displayed in webpages. (You need to capture the code area) Displays the code information.scenariov1706jabbr: helloSharePoint 2013 REST Test Web Part: A simple web part (placed in a farm solution) that helps SharePoint developers to test every HTTP call to the new REST interface of SharePoint 2013.SharePoint Resources Updater (2010 /2013): Project for SharePoint 2010/2013 IT pro's and dev's to adress App_GlobalResources difficulties when developping SharePoint solutions(or maintaining large farms)Word CustomXML data services: Services to add,change and read metadata embedded into a Word document. Metadata are stored in a custom XML file into the Word document. ??????: ge ren xiang mu

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• How to create a virtual network with Azure Connect

  - by Herve Roggero

  If you are trying to establish a virtual network between machines located in disparate networks, you can either use VPN, Virtual Network or Azure Connect. If you want to establish a connection between machines located in Windows Azure, you should consider using the Virtual Network service. If you want to establish a connection between local machines and Virtual Machines in Windows Azure, you may be able to use your existing VPN device (assuming you have one), as long as the device is supported by Microsoft. If the VPN device you are using isn’t supported, or if you are trying to create a virtual network between machines from disparate networks (such as machines located in another cloud provider), you can use Azure Connect. This blog post explains how Azure Connect can help you create virtual networks between multiple servers in the cloud, various servers in different cloud environments, and on-premise. Note: Azure Connect is currently in Technical Preview. About Azure Connect Let’s do a quick review of Azure Connect. This technology implements an IPSec tunnel from machines to to a relay service located in the Microsoft cloud (Azure). So in essence, Azure Connect doesn’t provide a point-to-point connection between machines; the network communication is tunneled through the relay service. The relay service in turn offers a mechanism to enforce basic communication rules that you define through Groups. We will review this later. You could network two or more VMs in the Azure cloud (although you should consider using a Virtual Network if you go this route), or servers in the Azure cloud and other machines in the Amazon cloud for example, or even two or more on-premise servers located in different locations for which a direct network connection is not an option. You can place any number of machines in your topology. Azure Connect gives you great flexibility on how you want to build your virtual network across various environments. So Azure Connect makes sense when you want to: Connect machines located in different cloud providers Connect on-premise machines running in different locations Connect Azure VMs with on-premise (if you do not have a VPN device, or if your device is not supported) Connect Azure Roles (Worker Roles, Web Roles) with on-premise servers or in other cloud providers The diagram below shows you a high level network topology that involves machines in the Windows Azure cloud, other cloud providers and on-premise. You should note that the only required component in this diagram is the Relay itself. The other machines are optional (although your network is useful only if you have two or more machines involved). Relay agents are currently available in three geographic areas: US, Europe and Asia. You can change which region you want to use in the Windows Azure management portal. High Level Network Topology With Azure Connect Azure Connect Agent Azure Connect establishes a virtual network and creates virtual adapters on your machines; these virtual adapters communicate through the Relay using IPSec. This is achieved by installing an agent (the Azure Connect Agent) on all the machines you want in your network topology. However, you do not need to install the agent on Worker Roles and Web Roles; that’s because the agent is already installed for you. Any other machine, including Virtual Machines in Windows Azure, needs the agent installed.  To install the agent, simply go to your Windows Azure portal (http://windows.azure.com) and click on Networks on the bottom left panel. You will see a list of subscriptions under Connect. If you select a subscription, you will be able to click on the Install Local Endpoint icon on top. Clicking on this icon will begin the download and installation process for the agent. Activating Roles for Azure Connect As previously mentioned, you do not need to install the Azure Connect Agent on Worker Roles and Web Roles because it is already loaded. However, you do need to activate them if you want the roles to participate in your network topology. To do this, you will need to click on the Get Activation Token icon. The activation token must then be copied and placed in the configuration file of your roles. For more information on how to perform this step, visit MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg432964.aspx. Firewall Rules Note that specific firewall rules must exist to allow the agent to communicate through the Relay. You will need to allow TCP 443 and ICMPv6. For additional information, please visit MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg433061.aspx. CA Certificates You can optionally require agents to sign their activation request with the Relay using a trusted certificate issued by a Certificate Authority (CA). Click on Activation Options to learn more. Groups To create your network topology you must first create a group. A group represents a logical container of endpoints (or machines) that can communicate through the Relay. You can create multiple groups allowing you to manage network communication differently. For example you could create a DEVELOPMENT group and a PRODUCTION group. To add an endpoint you must first install an agent that will create a virtual adapter on the machine on which it is installed (as discussed in the previous section). Once you have created a group and installed the agents, the machines will appear in the Windows Azure management portal and you can start assigning machines to groups. The next figure shows you that I created a group called LocalGroup and assigned two machines (both on-premise) to that group. Groups and Computers in Azure Connect As I mentioned previously you can allow these machines to establish a network connection. To do this, you must enable the Interconnected option in the group. The following diagram shows you the definition of the group. In this topology I chose to include local machines only, but I could also add worker roles and web roles in the Azure Roles section (you must first activate your roles, as discussed previously). You could also add other Groups, allowing you to manage inter-group communication. Defining a Group in Azure Connect Testing the Connection Now that my agents have been installed on my two machines, the group defined and the Interconnected option checked, I can test the connection between my machines. The next screenshot shows you that I sent a PING request to DEVLAP02 from DEVDSK02. The PING request was successful. Note however that the time is in the hundreds of milliseconds on average. That is to be expected because the machines are connecting through the Relay located in the cloud. Going through the Relay introduces an extra hop in the communication chain, so if your systems rely on high performance, you may want to conduct some basic performance tests. Sending a PING Request Through The Relay Conclusion As you can see, creating a network topology between machines using the Azure Connect service is simple. It took me less than five minutes to create the above configuration, including the time it took to install the Azure Connect agents on the two machines. The flexibility of Azure Connect allows you to create a virtual network between disparate environments, as long as your operating systems are supported by the agent. For more information on Azure Connect, visit the MSDN website at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg432997.aspx. About Herve Roggero Herve Roggero, Windows Azure MVP, is the founder of Blue Syntax Consulting, a company specialized in cloud computing products and services. Herve's experience includes software development, architecture, database administration and senior management with both global corporations and startup companies. Herve holds multiple certifications, including an MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD. He also holds a Master's degree in Business Administration from Indiana University. Herve is the co-author of "PRO SQL Azure" from Apress and runs the Azure Florida Association (on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4177626). For more information on Blue Syntax Consulting, visit www.bluesyntax.net. Special Thanks I would like thank those that helped me figure out how Azure Connect works: Marcel Meijer - http://blogs.msmvps.com/marcelmeijer/ Michael Wood - Http://www.mvwood.com Glenn Block - http://www.codebetter.com/glennblock Yves Goeleven - http://cloudshaper.wordpress.com/ Sandrino Di Mattia - http://fabriccontroller.net/ Mike Martin - http://techmike2kx.wordpress.com

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• Data-driven animation states

  - by user8363

  I'm trying to handle animations in a 2D game engine hobby project, without hard-coding them. Hard coding animation states seems like a common but very strange phenomenon, to me. A little background: I'm working with an entity system where components are bags of data and subsystems act upon them. I chose to use a polling system to update animation states. With animation states I mean: "walking_left", "running_left", "walking_right", "shooting", ... My idea to handle animations was to design it as a data driven model. Data could be stored in an xml file, a rdbms, ... And could be loaded at the start of a game / level/ ... This way you can easily edit animations and transitions without having to go change the code everywhere in your game. As an example I made an xml draft of the data definitions I had in mind. One very important piece of data would simply be the description of an animation. An animation would have a unique id (a descriptive name). It would hold a reference id to an image (the sprite sheet it uses, because different animations may use different sprite sheets). The frames per second to run the animation on. The "replay" here defines if an animation should be run once or infinitely. Then I defined a list of rectangles as frames. <animation id='WIZARD_WALK_LEFT'> <image id='WIZARD_WALKING' /> <fps>50</fps> <replay>true</replay> <frames> <rectangle> <x>0</x> <y>0</y> <width>45</width> <height>45</height> </rectangle> <rectangle> <x>45</x> <y>0</y> <width>45</width> <height>45</height> </rectangle> </frames> </animation> Animation data would be loaded and held in an animation resource pool and referenced by game entities that are using it. It would be treated as a resource like an image, a sound, a texture, ... The second piece of data to define would be a state machine to handle animation states and transitions. This defines each state a game entity can be in, which states it can transition to and what triggers that state change. This state machine would differ from entity to entity. Because a bird might have states "walking" and "flying" while a human would only have the state "walking". However it could be shared by different entities because multiple humans will probably have the same states (especially when you define some common NPCs like monsters, etc). Additionally an orc might have the same states as a human. Just to demonstrate that this state definition might be shared but only by a select group of game entities. <state id='IDLE'> <event trigger='LEFT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_LEFT' /> <event trigger='RIGHT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_RIGHT' /> </state> <state id='MOVING_LEFT'> <event trigger='LEFT_UP' goto='IDLE' /> <event trigger='RIGHT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_RIGHT' /> </state> <state id='MOVING_RIGHT'> <event trigger='RIGHT_UP' goto='IDLE' /> <event trigger='LEFT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_LEFT' /> </state> These states can be handled by a polling system. Each game tick it grabs the current state of a game entity and checks all triggers. If a condition is met it changes the entity's state to the "goto" state. The last part I was struggling with was how to bind animation data and animation states to an entity. The most logical approach seemed to me to add a pointer to the state machine data an entity uses and to define for each state in that machine what animation it uses. Here is an xml example how I would define the animation behavior and graphical representation of some common entities in a game, by addressing animation state and animation data id. Note that both "wizard" and "orc" have the same animation states but a different animation. Also, a different animation could mean a different sprite sheet, or even a different sequence of animations (an animation could be longer or shorter). <entity name="wizard"> <state id="IDLE" animation="WIZARD_IDLE" /> <state id="MOVING_LEFT" animation="WIZARD_WALK_LEFT" /> </entity> <entity name="orc"> <state id="IDLE" animation="ORC_IDLE" /> <state id="MOVING_LEFT" animation="ORC_WALK_LEFT" /> </entity> When the entity is being created it would add a list of states with state machine data and an animation data reference. In the future I would use the entity system to build whole entities by defining components in a similar xml format. -- This is what I have come up with after some research. However I had some trouble getting my head around it, so I was hoping op some feedback. Is there something here what doesn't make sense, or is there a better way to handle these things? I grasped the idea of iterating through frames but I'm having trouble to take it a step further and this is my attempt to do that.

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• Making swap faster, easier to use and exception-safe

  - by FredOverflow

  I could not sleep last night and started thinking about std::swap. Here is the familiar C++98 version: template <typename T> void swap(T& a, T& b) { T c(a); a = b; b = c; } If a user-defined class Foo uses external ressources, this is inefficient. The common idiom is to provide a method void Foo::swap(Foo& other) and a specialization of std::swap<Foo>. Note that this does not work with class templates since you cannot partially specialize a function template, and overloading names in the std namespace is illegal. The solution is to write a template function in one's own namespace and rely on argument dependent lookup to find it. This depends critically on the client to follow the "using std::swap idiom" instead of calling std::swap directly. Very brittle. In C++0x, if Foo has a user-defined move constructor and a move assignment operator, providing a custom swap method and a std::swap<Foo> specialization has little to no performance benefit, because the C++0x version of std::swap uses efficient moves instead of copies: #include <utility> template <typename T> void swap(T& a, T& b) { T c(std::move(a)); a = std::move(b); b = std::move(c); } Not having to fiddle with swap anymore already takes a lot of burden away from the programmer. Current compilers do not generate move constructors and move assignment operators automatically yet, but as far as I know, this will change. The only problem left then is exception-safety, because in general, move operations are allowed to throw, and this opens up a whole can of worms. The question "What exactly is the state of a moved-from object?" complicates things further. Then I was thinking, what exactly are the semantics of std::swap in C++0x if everything goes fine? What is the state of the objects before and after the swap? Typically, swapping via move operations does not touch external resources, only the "flat" object representations themselves. So why not simply write a swap template that does exactly that: swap the object representations? #include <cstring> template <typename T> void swap(T& a, T& b) { unsigned char c[sizeof(T)]; memcpy( c, &a, sizeof(T)); memcpy(&a, &b, sizeof(T)); memcpy(&b, c, sizeof(T)); } This is as efficient as it gets: it simply blasts through raw memory. It does not require any intervention from the user: no special swap methods or move operations have to be defined. This means that it even works in C++98 (which does not have rvalue references, mind you). But even more importantly, we can now forget about the exception-safety issues, because memcpy never throws. I can see two potential problems with this approach: First, not all objects are meant to be swapped. If a class designer hides the copy constructor or the copy assignment operator, trying to swap objects of the class should fail at compile-time. We can simply introduce some dead code that checks whether copying and assignment are legal on the type: template <typename T> void swap(T& a, T& b) { if (false) // dead code, never executed { T c(a); // copy-constructible? a = b; // assignable? } unsigned char c[sizeof(T)]; std::memcpy( c, &a, sizeof(T)); std::memcpy(&a, &b, sizeof(T)); std::memcpy(&b, c, sizeof(T)); } Any decent compiler can trivially get rid of the dead code. (There are probably better ways to check the "swap conformance", but that is not the point. What matters is that it's possible). Second, some types might perform "unusual" actions in the copy constructor and copy assignment operator. For example, they might notify observers of their change. I deem this a minor issue, because such kinds of objects probably should not have provided copy operations in the first place. Please let me know what you think of this approach to swapping. Would it work in practice? Would you use it? Can you identify library types where this would break? Do you see additional problems? Discuss!

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• Solaris 11 SRU / Update relationship explained, and blackout period on delivery of new bug fixes eliminated

  - by user12244672

  Relationship between SRUs and Update releases As you may know, Support Repository Updates (SRUs) for Oracle Solaris 11 are released monthly and are available to customers with an appropriate support contract.  SRUs primarily deliver bug fixes.  They may also deliver low risk feature enhancements. Solaris Update are typically released once or twice a year, containing support for new hardware, new software feature enhancements, and all bug fixes available at the time the Update content was finalized.  They also contain a significant number of new bug fixes, for issues found internally in Oracle and complex customer bug fixes which  require significant "soak" time to ensure their efficacy prior to release. Changes to SRU and Update Naming Conventions We're changing the naming convention of Update releases from a date based format such as Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 to a simpler "dot" version numbering, e.g. Oracle Solaris 11.1. Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 (i.e. the initial Oracle Solaris 11 release) may be referred to as 11.0. SRUs will simply be named as "dot.dot" releases, e.g. Oracle Solaris 11.1.1, for SRU1 after Oracle Solaris 11.1. Many Oracle products and infrastructure tools such as BugDB and MOS are tailored towards this "dot.dot" style of release naming, so these name changes align Oracle Solaris with these conventions. No Blackout Periods on Bug Fix Releases The Oracle Solaris 11 release process has been enhanced to eliminate blackout periods on the delivery of new bug fixes to customers. Previously, Oracle Solaris Updates were a superset of all preceding bug fix deliveries.  This made for a very simple update message - that which releases later is always a superset of that which was delivered previously. However, it had a downside.  Once the contents of an Update release were frozen prior to release, the release of new bug fixes for customer issues was also frozen to maintain the Update's superset relationship. Since the amount of change allowed into the final internal builds of an Update release is reduced to mitigate risk, this throttling back also impacted the release of new bug fixes to customers. This meant that there was effectively a 6 to 9 week hiatus on the release of new bug fixes prior to the release of each Update.  That wasn't good for customers awaiting critical bug fixes. We've eliminated this hiatus on the delivery of new bug fixes in Oracle Solaris 11 by allowing new bug fixes to continue to be released in SRUs even after the contents of the next Update release have been frozen. The release of SRUs will remain contiguous, with the first SRU released after the Update release effectively being a superset of both the the Update release and all preceding SRUs*.  That is, later SRUs are supersets of the content of previous SRUs. Therefore, the progression path from the final SRUs prior to the Update release is to the first SRU after the Update release, rather than to the Update release itself. The timeline / logical sequence of releases can be shown as follows: Updates: 11.0                                                11.1                               11.2     etc.                  \                                                         \                                    \ SRUs:       11.0.1, 11.0.2,...,11.0.12, 11.0.13, 11.1.1, 11.1.2,...,11.1.x, 11.2.1, etc. For example, for systems with Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 SRU12.4 or later installed, the recommended update path is to Oracle Solaris 11.1.1 (i.e. SRU1 after Solaris 11.1) or later rather than to the Solaris 11.1 release itself.  This will ensure no bug fixes are "lost" during the update. If for any reason you do wish to update from SRU12.4 or later to the 11.1 release itself - for example to update a test system - the instructions to do so are in the SRU12.4 README, https://updates.oracle.com/Orion/Services/download?type=readme&aru=15564533 For systems with Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 SRU11.4 or earlier installed, customers can update to either the 11.1 release or any 11.1 SRU as both will be supersets of their current version. Please do read the README of the SRU you are updating to, as it will contain important installation instructions which will save you time and effort. *Nerdy details: SRUs only contain the latest change delta relative to the Update on which they are based.  Their dependencies will, however, effectively pull in the Update content.  Customers maintaining a local Repo (e.g. behind their firewall), need to add both the 11.1 content and the relevant SRU content to their Repo, to enable the SRU's dependencies to be resolved.  Both will be available from the standard Support Repo and from MOS.  This is no different to existing SRUs for Oracle Solaris 11.0, whereby you may often get away with using just the SRU content to update, but the original 11.0 content may be needed in the Repo to resolve dependencies.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 01, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 01, 2012Popular ReleasesAccess 2010 Application Platform - Build Your Own Database: Application Platform - 0.0.1: Initial Release This is the first version of the database. At the moment is all contained in one file to make development easier, but the obvious idea would be to split it into Front and Back End for a production version of the tool. The features it contains at the moment are the "Core" features.Python Tools for Visual Studio: Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 RTM. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, etc. support. For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this video There are a number of exciting improvement in this release comp...Devpad: 4.25: Whats new for Devpad 4.25: New Theme support New Export Wordpress Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsAssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.5: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we try to package for those OSes. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) Changelog: Fixed potential bot bugs: Map change, OpenAL...Edi: Edi 1.0 with DarkExpression: Added DarkExpression theme (dialogs and message boxes are not completely themed, yet)MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.6: Changelog for 2.3.6 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Fixed a bug in multichannel audio conversion failure. AAC does not support 6 channel audio, MCEBuddy now checks for it and force the output to 2 channel if AAC codec is specified 2. Fixed a bug in Original Broadcast Date and Time. Original Broadcast Date and Time is reported in UTC timezone in WTV metadata. TVDB and MovieDB dates are reported in network timezone. It is assumed the video is recorded and converted on the same machine, i.e. local timezone...MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V4.1 for Visual Studio 2012: This version only supports Visual Studio 2012 (and all Express editions too). If you use Visual Studio 2010, please stay tuned, we will publish an update in a few days with support for VS10. V4.1 supports: Windows Phone 8 Windows 8 (Windows RT) Silverlight 5 Silverlight 4 WPF 4.5 WPF 4 WPF 3.5 And the following development environments: Visual Studio 2012 (Pro, Premium, Ultimate) Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows 8 Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Phone 8 Visual...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.73: Fix issue in Discussion #401101 (unreferenced var in a for-in statement was getting removed). add the grouping operator to the parsed output so that unminified parsed code is closer to the original. Will still strip unneeded parens later, if minifying. more cleaning of references as they are minified out of the code.Liberty: v3.4.0.1 Release 28th October 2012: Change Log -Fixed -H4 Fixed the save verification screen showing incorrect mission and difficulty information for some saves -H4 Hopefully fixed the issue where progress did not save between missions and saves would not revert correctly -H3 Fixed crashes that occurred when trying to load player information -Proper exception dialogs will now show in place of crashesPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 7): This release is compatible with the version of the Smooth Streaming SDK released today (10/26). Release 1 of the player framework is expected to be available next week. IMPROVEMENTS & FIXESIMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 6 Support for the latest smooth streaming SDK. Xaml only: Support for moving any of the UI elements outside the MediaPlayer (e.g. into the appbar). Note: Equivelent changes to the JS version due in coming week. Support for localizing all text used in t...Send multiple SMS via Way2SMS C#: SMS 1.1: Added support for 160by2Quick Launch: Quick Launch 1.0: A Lightweight and Fast Way to Manage and Launch Thousands of Tools and ApplicationsPress Win+Q and start to search and run. http://www.codeplex.com/Download?ProjectName=quicklaunch&DownloadId=523536Orchard Project: Orchard 1.6: Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.6: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-6-Release-Notes Please do not post questions as reviews. Questions should be posted in the Discussions tab, where they will usually get promptly responded to. If you post a question as a review, you will pollute the rating, and you won't get an answer.Media Companion: Media Companion 3.507b: Once again, it has been some time since our release, and there have been a number changes since then. It is hoped that these changes will address some of the issues users have been experiencing, and of course, work continues! New Features: Added support for adding Home Movies. Option to sort Movies by votes. Added 'selectedBrowser' preference used when opening links in an external browser. Added option to fallback to getting runtime from the movie file if not available on IMDB. Added new Big...MSBuild Extension Pack: October 2012: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack October 2012 release provides a collection of over 475 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GUI...NAudio: NAudio 1.6: Release notes at http://mark-dot-net.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/naudio-16-release-notes-10th.htmlPowerShell Community Extensions: 2.1 Production: PowerShell Community Extensions 2.1 Release NotesOct 25, 2012 This version of PSCX supports both Windows PowerShell 2.0 and 3.0. See the ReleaseNotes.txt download above for more information.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.9.1: Umbraco 4.9.1 is a bugfix release to fix major issues in 4.9.0 BugfixesThe full list of fixes can be found in the issue tracker's filtered results. A summary: Split buttons work again, you can now also scroll easier when the list is too long for the screen Media and Content pickers have information of the full path of the picked item Fixed: Publish status may not be accurate on nodes with large doctypes Fixed: 2 media folders and recycle bins after upgrade to 4.9 The template/code ...AcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v4.2.2: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2...Rawr: Rawr 5.0.2: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...New ProjectsAsbesto: Proyecto grupo: "2ravas" para Laboratorio de Computación IV de la carrera TSP de la UTN-FRGP Realizado en C# y ASP.NET en Visual Studio 2012 y SQL Server 2012C++ Diamond printer on console without if statement: prints just a diamond with stars(*). only one important and funny feature is that it's not using 'if' statement. C++ used.CloudTest: Test cloud computing projectEnumeration of objects Class Library C#: At core level in Java I like extension of traditional enum type permiting use as the elements instances of a class. The project implements the same idea by C# with some more advanced features like a set type with boolean operators extending idea of FlagsAttributeEquation Inversion: Visual Studion 2008 Add-in for equation inversions.ESENT Serialization Class Library: ESENT Serialization class library is built above Managed ESENT. It allows you to store your objects in the underlying extensible storage engine database.ForceHttps: Very simple httpModule to ensure that all http requests are https. 1. Drop the dll into your website's bin directory 2. Update httpModules section of your web.config to reference the dll 3. Make sure your Web Server can handle SSL requests for the URL ALL http requests will be redirected as https.forrajeriaPAV2: tp pav2 asd as asd as fasfjaijiasjifoa as asf asf as afs fas asf afs fsaGoogle Analytics for WinRT: A Windows Store (WinRT) class library for tracking Google Analytics page views, events, and custom variables for your Metro style desktop and tablet apps.huanglitest10312: mvc projectiMan: iMan will be your own port manager, which help to provide the information about all the ports open in your PC It's completely developed in .NET C#InjectionCop: Facilitates secure coding through static code analysis and contract annotations in the Common Language Infrastructure.Master of Olympus: Remake of Master of Olympus : Zeus, a game developed by Impressions Games in 2000.MediaScribe: MediaScribe is a note app for your media.MouseNestDotNet: A small personal website application.Project Estimator ???????? ?? ?????????????? ?? ???????: Project Estimator ? ???????? ??????????? ? ??????????? ?? ????? ? ???????? ????.Projekt grupowy 1: Project created only for school purpose.SecondHandApp: Warenwirtschaftsprogramm für denn SecondHand LädenSimple .NET XML Serialization: .NET's XML serialization using Linq XObject classes EG: XElement in an IXmlSerializable base classStrip Converter: A Very Handy Converter for 2D Games Developers Developer Website: http://www.bluebulk.infoSwitch JS Control (Client Side): Switch JS control is a very light client side library to create switch(es) on web applications or mobile applications.VisaSys: Visa System????????: TODO::????

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• We've completed the first iteration

  - by CliveT

  There are a lot of features in C# that are implemented by the compiler and not by the underlying platform. One such feature is a lambda expression. Since local variables cannot be accessed once the current method activation finishes, the compiler has to go out of its way to generate a new class which acts as a home for any variable whose lifetime needs to be extended past the activation of the procedure. Take the following example:     Random generator = new Random();     Func func = () = generator.Next(10); In this case, the compiler generates a new class called c_DisplayClass1 which is marked with the CompilerGenerated attribute. [CompilerGenerated] private sealed class c__DisplayClass1 {     // Fields     public Random generator;     // Methods     public int b__0()     {         return this.generator.Next(10);     } } Two quick comments on this: (i)    A display was the means that compilers for languages like Algol recorded the various lexical contours of the nested procedure activations on the stack. I imagine that this is what has led to the name. (ii)    It is a shame that the same attribute is used to mark all compiler generated classes as it makes it hard to figure out what they are being used for. Indeed, you could imagine optimisations that the runtime could perform if it knew that classes corresponded to certain high level concepts. We can see that the local variable generator has been turned into a field in the class, and the body of the lambda expression has been turned into a method of the new class. The code that builds the Func object simply constructs an instance of this class and initialises the fields to their initial values.     c__DisplayClass1 class2 = new c__DisplayClass1();     class2.generator = new Random();     Func func = new Func(class2.b__0); Reflector already contains code to spot this pattern of code and reproduce the form containing the lambda expression, so this is example is correctly decompiled. The use of compiler generated code is even more spectacular in the case of iterators. C# introduced the idea of a method that could automatically store its state between calls, so that it can pick up where it left off. The code can express the logical flow with yield return and yield break denoting places where the method should return a particular value and be prepared to resume.         {             yield return 1;             yield return 2;             yield return 3;         } Of course, there was already a .NET pattern for expressing the idea of returning a sequence of values with the computation proceeding lazily (in the sense that the work for the next value is executed on demand). This is expressed by the IEnumerable interface with its Current property for fetching the current value and the MoveNext method for forcing the computation of the next value. The sequence is terminated when this method returns false. The C# compiler links these two ideas together so that an IEnumerator returning method using the yield keyword causes the compiler to produce the implementation of an Iterator. Take the following piece of code.         IEnumerable GetItems()         {             yield return 1;             yield return 2;             yield return 3;         } The compiler implements this by defining a new class that implements a state machine. This has an integer state that records which yield point we should go to if we are resumed. It also has a field that records the Current value of the enumerator and a field for recording the thread. This latter value is used for optimising the creation of iterator instances. [CompilerGenerated] private sealed class d__0 : IEnumerable, IEnumerable, IEnumerator, IEnumerator, IDisposable {     // Fields     private int 1__state;     private int 2__current;     public Program 4__this;     private int l__initialThreadId; The body gets converted into the code to construct and initialize this new class. private IEnumerable GetItems() {     d__0 d__ = new d__0(-2);     d__.4__this = this;     return d__; } When the class is constructed we set the state, which was passed through as -2 and the current thread. public d__0(int 1__state) {     this.1__state = 1__state;     this.l__initialThreadId = Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId; } The state needs to be set to 0 to represent a valid enumerator and this is done in the GetEnumerator method which optimises for the usual case where the returned enumerator is only used once. IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator() {     if ((Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId == this.l__initialThreadId)               && (this.1__state == -2))     {         this.1__state = 0;         return this;     } The state machine itself is implemented inside the MoveNext method. private bool MoveNext() {     switch (this.1__state)     {         case 0:             this.1__state = -1;             this.2__current = 1;             this.1__state = 1;             return true;         case 1:             this.1__state = -1;             this.2__current = 2;             this.1__state = 2;             return true;         case 2:             this.1__state = -1;             this.2__current = 3;             this.1__state = 3;             return true;         case 3:             this.1__state = -1;             break;     }     return false; } At each stage, the current value of the state is used to determine how far we got, and then we generate the next value which we return after recording the next state. Finally we return false from the MoveNext to signify the end of the sequence. Of course, that example was really simple. The original method body didn't have any local variables. Any local variables need to live between the calls to MoveNext and so they need to be transformed into fields in much the same way that we did in the case of the lambda expression. More complicated MoveNext methods are required to deal with resources that need to be disposed when the iterator finishes, and sometimes the compiler uses a temporary variable to hold the return value. Why all of this explanation? We've implemented the de-compilation of iterators in the current EAP version of Reflector (7). This contrasts with previous version where all you could do was look at the MoveNext method and try to figure out the control flow. There's a fair amount of things we have to do. We have to spot the use of a CompilerGenerated class which implements the Enumerator pattern. We need to go to the class and figure out the fields corresponding to the local variables. We then need to go to the MoveNext method and try to break it into the various possible states and spot the state transitions. We can then take these pieces and put them back together into an object model that uses yield return to show the transition points. After that Reflector can carry on optimising using its usual optimisations. The pattern matching is currently a little too sensitive to changes in the code generation, and we only do a limited analysis of the MoveNext method to determine use of the compiler generated fields. In some ways, it is a pity that iterators are compiled away and there is no metadata that reflects the original intent. Without it, we are always going to dependent on our knowledge of the compiler's implementation. For example, we have noticed that the Async CTP changes the way that iterators are code generated, so we'll have to do some more work to support that. However, with that warning in place, we seem to do a reasonable job of decompiling the iterators that are built into the framework. Hopefully, the EAP will give us a chance to find examples where we don't spot the pattern correctly or regenerate the wrong code, and we can improve things. Please give it a go, and report any problems.

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• EM12c: Using the LIST verb in emcli

  - by SubinDaniVarughese

  Many of us who use EM CLI to write scripts and automate our daily tasks should not miss out on the new list verb released with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.3.0. The combination of list and Jython based scripting support in EM CLI makes it easier to achieve automation for complex tasks with just a few lines of code. Before I jump into a script, let me highlight the key attributes of the list verb and why it’s simply excellent! 1. Multiple resources under a single verb:A resource can be set of users or targets, etc. Using the list verb, you can retrieve information about a resource from the repository database.Here is an example which retrieves the list of administrators within EM.Standard mode$ emcli list -resource="Administrators" Interactive modeemcli>list(resource="Administrators")The output will be the same as standard mode.Standard mode$ emcli @myAdmin.pyEnter password :  ******The output will be the same as standard mode.Contents of myAdmin.py scriptlogin()print list(resource="Administrators",jsonout=False).out()To get a list of all available resources use$ emcli list -helpWith every release of EM, more resources are being added to the list verb. If you have a resource which you feel would be valuable then go ahead and contact Oracle Support to log an enhancement request with product development. Be sure to say how the resource is going to help improve your daily tasks. 2. Consistent Formatting:It is possible to format the output of any resource consistently using these options:  –column  This option is used to specify which columns should be shown in the output. Here is an example which shows the list of administrators and their account status$ emcli list -resource="Administrators" -columns="USER_NAME,REPOS_ACCOUNT_STATUS" To get a list of columns in a resource use:$ emcli list -resource="Administrators" -help You can also specify the width of the each column. For example, here the column width of user_type is set to 20 and department to 30. $ emcli list -resource=Administrators -columns="USER_NAME,USER_TYPE:20,COST_CENTER,CONTACT,DEPARTMENT:30"This is useful if your terminal is too small or you need to fine tune a list of specific columns for your quick use or improved readability.  –colsize  This option is used to resize column widths.Here is the same example as above, but using -colsize to define the width of user_type to 20 and department to 30.$ emcli list -resource=Administrators -columns="USER_NAME,USER_TYPE,COST_CENTER,CONTACT,DEPARTMENT" -colsize="USER_TYPE:20,DEPARTMENT:30" The existing standard EMCLI formatting options are also available in list verb. They are: -format="name:pretty" | -format="name:script” | -format="name:csv" | -noheader | -scriptThere are so many uses depending on your needs. Have a look at the resources and columns in each resource. Refer to the EMCLI book in EM documentation for more information.3. Search:Using the -search option in the list verb makes it is possible to search for a specific row in a specific column within a resource. This is similar to the sqlplus where clause. The following operators are supported:           =           !=           >           <           >=           <=           like           is (Must be followed by null or not null)Here is an example which searches for all EM administrators in the marketing department located in the USA.$emcli list -resource="Administrators" -search="DEPARTMENT ='Marketing'" -search="LOCATION='USA'" Here is another example which shows all the named credentials created since a specific date.  $emcli list -resource=NamedCredentials -search="CredCreatedDate > '11-Nov-2013 12:37:20 PM'"Note that the timestamp has to be in the format DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS AM/PM Some resources need a bind variable to be passed to get output. A bind variable is created in the resource and then referenced in the command. For example, this command will list all the default preferred credentials for target type oracle_database.Here is an example$ emcli list -resource="PreferredCredentialsDefault" -bind="TargetType='oracle_database'" -colsize="SetName:15,TargetType:15" You can provide multiple bind variables. To verify if a column is searchable or requires a bind variable, use the –help option. Here is an example:$ emcli list -resource="PreferredCredentialsDefault" -help 4. Secure accessWhen list verb collects the data, it only displays content for which the administrator currently logged into emcli, has access. For example consider this usecase:AdminA has access only to TargetA. AdminA logs into EM CLIExecuting the list verb to get the list of all targets will only show TargetA.5. User defined SQLUsing the –sql option, user defined sql can be executed. The SQL provided in the -sql option is executed as the EM user MGMT_VIEW, which has read-only access to the EM published MGMT$ database views in the SYSMAN schema. To get the list of EM published MGMT$ database views, go to the Extensibility Programmer's Reference book in EM documentation. There is a chapter about Using Management Repository Views. It’s always recommended to reference the documentation for the supported MGMT$ database views.  Consider you are using the MGMT$ABC view which is not in the chapter. During upgrade, it is possible, since the view was not in the book and not supported, it is likely the view might undergo a change in its structure or the data in it. Using a supported view ensures that your scripts using -sql will continue working after upgrade.Here’s an example  $ emcli list -sql='select * from mgmt$target' 6. JSON output support    JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) enables data to be displayed in a collection of name/value pairs. There is lot of reading material about JSON on line for more information.As an example, we had a requirement where an EM administrator had many 11.2 databases in their test environment and the developers had requested an Administrator to change the lifecycle status from Test to Production which meant the admin had to go to the EM “All targets” page and identify the set of 11.2 databases and then to go into each target database page and manually changes the property to Production. Sounds easy to say, but this Administrator had numerous targets and this task is repeated for every release cycle.We told him there is an easier way to do this with a script and he can reuse the script whenever anyone wanted to change a set of targets to a different Lifecycle status. Here is a jython script which uses list and JSON to change all 11.2 database target’s LifeCycle Property value.If you are new to scripting and Jython, I would suggest visiting the basic chapters in any Jython tutorials. Understanding Jython is important to write the logic depending on your usecase.If you are already writing scripts like perl or shell or know a programming language like java, then you can easily understand the logic.Disclaimer: The scripts in this post are subject to the Oracle Terms of Use located here.  1 from emcli import *  2  search_list = ['PROPERTY_NAME=\'DBVersion\'','TARGET_TYPE= \'oracle_database\'','PROPERTY_VALUE LIKE \'11.2%\'']  3 if len(sys.argv) == 2:  4    print login(username=sys.argv[0])  5    l_prop_val_to_set = sys.argv[1]  6      l_targets = list(resource="TargetProperties", search=search_list,   columns="TARGET_NAME,TARGET_TYPE,PROPERTY_NAME")  7    for target in l_targets.out()['data']:  8       t_pn = 'LifeCycle Status'  9      print "INFO: Setting Property name " + t_pn + " to value " +       l_prop_val_to_set + " for " + target['TARGET_NAME']  10      print  set_target_property_value(property_records=      target['TARGET_NAME']+":"+target['TARGET_TYPE']+":"+      t_pn+":"+l_prop_val_to_set)  11  else:  12   print "\n ERROR: Property value argument is missing"  13   print "\n INFO: Format to run this file is filename.py <username>   <Database Target LifeCycle Status Property Value>" You can download the script from here. I could not upload the file with .py extension so you need to rename the file to myScript.py before executing it using emcli.A line by line explanation for beginners: Line  1 Imports the emcli verbs as functions  2 search_list is a variable to pass to the search option in list verb. I am using escape character for the single quotes. In list verb to pass more than one value for the same option, you should define as above comma separated values, surrounded by square brackets.  3 This is an “if” condition to ensure the user does provide two arguments with the script, else in line #15, it prints an error message.  4 Logging into EM. You can remove this if you have setup emcli with autologin. For more details about setup and autologin, please go the EM CLI book in EM documentation.  5 l_prop_val_to_set is another variable. This is the property value to be set. Remember we are changing the value from Test to Production. The benefit of this variable is you can reuse the script to change the property value from and to any other values.  6 Here the output of the list verb is stored in l_targets. In the list verb I am passing the resource as TargetProperties, search as the search_list variable and I only need these three columns – target_name, target_type and property_name. I don’t need the other columns for my task.  7 This is a for loop. The data in l_targets is available in JSON format. Using the for loop, each pair will now be available in the ‘target’ variable.  8 t_pn is the “LifeCycle Status” variable. If required, I can have this also as an input and then use my script to change any target property. In this example, I just wanted to change the “LifeCycle Status”.  9 This a message informing the user the script is setting the property value for dbxyz.  10 This line shows the set_target_property_value verb which sets the value using the property_records option. Once it is set for a target pair, it moves to the next one. In my example, I am just showing three dbs, but the real use is when you have 20 or 50 targets. The script is executed as:$ emcli @myScript.py subin Production The recommendation is to first test the scripts before running it on a production system. We tested on a small set of targets and optimizing the script for fewer lines of code and better messaging.For your quick reference, the resources available in Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.4.0 with list verb are:$ emcli list -helpWatch this space for more blog posts using the list verb and EM CLI Scripting use cases. I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post and it has helped you gain more information about the list verb. Happy Scripting!!Disclaimer: The scripts in this post are subject to the Oracle Terms of Use located here. Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter mt=8">Download the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Mobile app

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• D2K to OA Framework Transition

  - by PRajkumar

  What is the difference between D2K form and OA Framework? It is a very innocent but important question for someone that desires to make transition from D2K to OA Framework. I hope you have already read and implemented OA Framework Getting Started. I will re-visit my own experience of implementing HelloWorld program in "OA Framework". When I implemented HelloWorld a year ago, I had no clue as to what I was doing & why I was doing those steps. I merely copied the steps from Oracle Tutorial without understanding them. Hence in this blog, I will try to explain in simple manner the meaning of OA Framework HelloWorld Program and compare the steps to D2K form [where possible]. To keep things simple, only basics will be discussed. Following key Steps were needed for HelloWorld Step 1 Create a new Workspace and a new Project as dictated by Oracle's tutorial. When defining project, you will specify a default package, which in this case was oracle.apps.ak.hello This means the following: - ak is the short name of the Application in Oracle           [means fnd_applications.short_name] hello is the name of your project Step 2 Next, you will create a OA Page within hello project Think OA Page as the fmx file itself in D2K. I am saying so because this page gets attached to the form function. This page will be created within hello project, hence the package name oracle.apps.ak.hello.webui Note the webui, it is a convention to have page in webui, means this page represents the Web User Interface You will assign the default AM [OAApplicationModule]. Think of AM "Connection Manager" and "Transaction State Manager" for your page          I can't co-relate this to anything in D2k, as there is no concept of Connection Pooling and that D2k is not stateless. Reason being that as soon as you kick off a D2K Form, it connects to a single session of Oracle and sticks to that single Oracle database session. So is not the case in OAF, hence AM is needed. Step 3 You create Region within the Page. ·         Region is what will store your fields. Text input fields will be of type messageTextInput. Think of Canvas in D2K. You can have nested regions. Stacked Canvas in D2K comes the closest to this component of OA Framework Step 4 Add a button to one of the nested regions The itemStyle should be submitButton, in case you want the page to be submitted when this button is clicked There is no WHEN-BUTTON-PRESSED trigger in OAF. In Framework, you will add a controller java code to handle events like Form Submit button clicks. JDeveloper generates the default code for you. Primarily two functions [should I call methods] will be created processRequest [for UI Rendering Handling] and processFormRequest          Think of processRequest as WHEN-NEW-FORM-INSTANCE, though processRequest is very restrictive. Note What is the difference between processRequest and processFormRequest? These two methods are available in the Default Controller class that gets created. processFormRequest This method is commonly used to react/respond to the event that has taken place, for example click of a button. Some examples are if(oapagecontext.getParameter("Cancel") != null) (Do your processing for Cancellation/ Rollback) if(oapagecontext.getParameter("Submit") != null) (Do your validations and commit here) if(oapagecontext.getParameter("Update") != null) (Do your validations and commit here) In the above three examples, you could be calling oapagecontext.forwardImmediately to re-direct the page navigation to some other page if needed. processRequest In this method, usually page rendering related code is written. Effectively, each GUI component is a bean that gets initialised during processRequest. Those who are familiar with D2K forms, something like pre-query may be written in this method. Step 5 In the controller to access the value in field "HelloName" the command is String userContent = pageContext.getParameter("HelloName"); In D2k, we used :block.field. In OAFramework, at submission of page, all the field values get passed into to OAPageContext object. Use getParameter to access the field value To set the value of the field, use OAMessageTextInputBean field HelloName = (OAMessageTextInputBean)webBean.findChildRecursive("HelloName"); fieldHelloName.setText(pageContext,"Setting the default value" ); Note when setting field value in controller: Note 1. Do not set the value in processFormRequest Note 2. If the field comes from View Object, then do not use setText in controller Note 3. For control fields [that are not based on View Objects], you can use setText to assign values in processRequest method Lets take some notes to expand beyond the HelloWorld Project Note 1 In D2K-forms we sort of created a Window, attached to Canvas, and then fields within that Canvas. However in OA Framework, think of Page being fmx/Window, think of Region being a Canvas, and fields being within Regions. This is not a formal/accurate understanding of analogy between D2k and Framework, but is close to being logical. Note 2 In D2k, your Forms fmb file was compiled to fmx. It was fmx file that was deployed on mid-tier. In case of OAF, your OA Page is nothing but a XML file. We call this MDS [meta data]. Whatever name you give to "Page" in OAF, an XML file of the same name gets created. This xml file must then be loaded into database by using XML Importer command. Note 3 Apart from MDS XML file, almost everything else is merely deployed to your mid-tier. Usually this is underneath $JAVA_TOP/oracle/apps/../.. All java files will go underneath java top/oracle/apps/../.. etc. Note 4 When building tutorial, ignore the steps for setting "Attribute Sets". These are not mandatory. Oracle might just have developed their tutorials without including these. Think of these like Visual Attributes of D2K forms Note 5 Controller is where you will write any java code in OA Framework. You can create a Controller per Page or have a different Controller for each of the Regions with the same Page. Note 6 In the method processFormRequest of the Controller, you can access the values of the page by using notation pageContext.getParameter("<fieldname here>"). This method processFormRequest is executed when the OAF Screen/Page is submitted by click of a button. Note 7 Inside the controller, all the Database Related interactions for example interaction with View Objects happen via Application Module. But why so? Because Application Module Manages the transaction state of the Application. OAApplicationModuleImpl oaapplicationmoduleimpl = OAApplicationModuleImpl)oapagecontext.getApplicationModule(oawebbean); OADBTransaction oadbtransaction = OADBTransaction)oaapplicationmoduleimpl.getDBTransaction(); Note 8 In D2K, we have control block or a block based on database view. Similarly, in OA Framework, if the field does not have view Object attached, then it is like a control field. Hence in HelloWorld example, field HelloName is a control field [in D2K terminology]. A view Object can either be based on a view/table, synonym or on a SQL statement. Note 9 I wish to access the fields in multi record block that is based on view Object. Can I do this in Controller? Sure you can. To traverse through those records, do the below ·         Get the reference to the View Object using (OAViewObject)oapagecontext.getApplicationModule(oawebbean).findViewObject("VO Name Here") ·         Loop through the records in View Objects using count returned from oaviewobject.getFetchedRowCount() ·         For each record, fetch the value of the fields within the loop as oracle.jbo.Row row = oaviewobject.getRowAtRangeIndex(loop index here); (String)row.getAttribute("Column name of VO here ");

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• laptop crashed: why?

  - by sds

  my linux (ubuntu 12.04) laptop crashed, and I am trying to figure out why. # last sds pts/4 :0 Tue Sep 4 10:01 still logged in sds pts/3 :0 Tue Sep 4 10:00 still logged in reboot system boot 3.2.0-29-generic Tue Sep 4 09:43 - 11:23 (01:40) sds pts/8 :0 Mon Sep 3 14:23 - crash (19:19) this seems to indicate a crash at 09:42 (= 14:23+19:19). as per another question, I looked at /var/log: auth.log: Sep 4 09:17:02 t520sds CRON[32744]: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user root Sep 4 09:43:17 t520sds lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm:session): session opened for user lightdm by (uid=0) no messages file syslog: Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819975] CPU0: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. kern.log: Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819969] CPU1: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819971] CPU2: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819974] CPU3: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819975] CPU0: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu I had a computation running until 9:24, but the system crashed 18 minutes later! kern.log has many pages of these: Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] total RAM covered: 8086M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 64K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 128K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 256K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 512K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 1M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 2M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 4M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 8M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 16M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] *BAD*gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 32M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: -16M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] *BAD*gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 64M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: -16M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 128M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 256M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 512M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 1G num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] *BAD*gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 2G num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: -1G does this mean that my RAM is bad?! it also says Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 2.944123] EXT4-fs (sda1): INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 2.944126] EXT4-fs (sda1): write access will be enabled during recovery Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 3.088001] firewire_core: created device fw0: GUID f0def1ff8fbd7dff, S400 Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 8.929243] EXT4-fs (sda1): orphan cleanup on readonly fs Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 8.929249] EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 658984 ... Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.343266] EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 525343 Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.343270] EXT4-fs (sda1): 56 orphan inodes deleted Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.343271] EXT4-fs (sda1): recovery complete Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.645799] EXT4-fs (sda1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) does this mean my HD is bad? As per FaultyHardware, I tried smartctl -l selftest, which uncovered no errors: smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.2.0-30-generic] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Seagate Momentus 7200.4 Device Model: ST9500420AS Serial Number: 5VJE81YK LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 0440defe3 Firmware Version: 0003LVM1 User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: ATA-8-ACS revision 4 Local Time is: Mon Sep 10 16:40:04 2012 EDT SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED See vendor-specific Attribute list for marginal Attributes. General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x82) Offline data collection activity was completed without error. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 0) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 1) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 109) minutes. Conveyance self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x103b) SCT Status supported. SCT Error Recovery Control supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 117 099 034 Pre-fail Always - 162843537 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 100 100 000 Pre-fail Always - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 571 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 069 060 030 Pre-fail Always - 17210154023 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 174362787320258 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 571 184 End-to-End_Error 0x0032 100 100 099 Old_age Always - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 061 043 045 Old_age Always In_the_past 39 (0 11 44 26) 191 G-Sense_Error_Rate 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 84 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 20 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 2434 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 039 057 000 Old_age Always - 39 (0 15 0 0) 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 041 041 000 Old_age Always - 162843537 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x000f 095 095 030 Pre-fail Always - 4540 (61955, 0) 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 254 Free_Fall_Sensor 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 4545 - SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1 SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS 1 0 0 Not_testing 2 0 0 Not_testing 3 0 0 Not_testing 4 0 0 Not_testing 5 0 0 Not_testing Selective self-test flags (0x0): After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk. If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay. Googling for the messages proved inconclusive, I can't even figure out whether the messages are routine or catastrophic. So, what do I do now?

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• SOA Suite Integration: Part 3: Loading files

  - by Anthony Shorten

  One of the most common scenarios in SOA Integration is the loading of a file into the product from an external source. In Oracle SOA Suite there is a File Adapter that can process many file types into your BPEL process. For this example I will use the File Adapter to load a file of user and emails to update the user object within the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. Remember you can repeat this process with other objects and other file types. Again I am illustrating the ease of integration. The first thing is to create an empty BPEL process that will hold our flow. In Oracle JDeveloper this can be achieved by specifying the Define Service Later template (as other templates have predefined inputs and outputs and in this case we want to specify those). So I will create simpleFileLoad process to house our process. You will start with an empty canvas so you need to first specify the load part of the process using the File Adapter. Select the File Adapter from the Component Palette under BPEL Services and drag and drop it to the left side Partner Links (left is input). You name the Service. In this case I chose LoadFile. Press Next. We will define the interface as part of the wizard so select Define from operation and schema (specified later). Press Next. We are going to choose Read File to denote that we will read the file and specify the default Operation Name as Read. Press Next. The next step is to tell the Adapter the location of the files, how to process them and what to do with them after they have been processed. I am using hardcoded locations in this example but you can have logical locations as well. Press Next. I am now going to tell the adapter how to recognize the files I want to load. In my case I am using CSV files and more importantly I am tell the adapter to run the process for each record in the file it encounters. Press Next. Now, I tell the adapter how often I want to poll for the files. I have taken the defaults. Press Next. At this stage I have no explanation of the format of the input. So I am going to invoke the Native Format Wizard which will guide me through the process of creating the file input format. Clicking the purple cog icon will start the wizard. After an introduction screen (not shown), you specify the format of the input file. The File Adapter supports multiple format types. For this example, I will use Delimited as I am going to load a CSV file. Press Next. The best way for the wizard to work is with a sample. I have a sample file and the wizard will ask how much of the file to use as a template. I will use the defaults. Note: If you are using a language that has other languages other than US-ASCII, it is at this point you specify the character set to use.  Press Next. The sample contains multiple instances of a single record type. The wizard supports complex types as well. We will use the appropriate setting for our file. Press Next. You have to specify the file element and the record element. This will be used by the input wizard to translate the CSV data into an XML structure (this will make sense later). I am using LoadUsers as my file delimiter (root element) and User Record as my record root element. Press Next. As the file is CSV the delimiter is "," so I will also specify that the End Of Line (EOL) indicator indicates the end of a record. Press Next. Up until this point your have not given the columns their names. In my case my sample includes the column names in the first record. This is not always the case but you can specify the names and formats of columns in this dialog (not shown). Press Next. The wizard now generates the schema for the input file. You can specify a name for the schema. I have used userupdate.xsd. We want to verify the schema so press Test. You can test the schema by specifying an input sample. and pressing the green play button. You will see the delimiters you specified earlier for the file and the records. Press Ok to continue. A confirmation screen will be displayed showing you the location of the schema in your project. Press Finish to return to the File Adapter configuration. You will now see the schema and elements prepopulated from the wizard. Press Next. The File Adapter configuration is now complete. Press Finish. Now you need to receive the input from the LoadFile component so we need to place a Receive node in the BPEL process by drag and dropping the Receive component from the Component Palette under BPEL Constructs onto the BPEL process. We link the receive process with the LoadFile component by dragging the left most connect node of the Receive node to the LoadFile component. Once the link is established you need to name the Receive node appropriately and as in the post of the last part of this series you need to generate input variables for the BPEL process to hold the input records in. You need to now add the product Web Service. The process is the same as described in the post of the last part of this series. You drop the Web Service BPEL Service onto the right side of the process and fill in the details of the WSDL URL . You also have to add an Invoke node to call the service and generate the input and outputs variables for the call in the Invoke node. Now, to get the inputs from File to the service. You have to use a Transform (you can use an Assign action but a Transform action is more flexible). You drag and drop the Transform component from the Component Palette under Oracle Extensions and place it between the Receive and Invoke nodes. We name the Transform Node, Mapper File and associate the source of the mapping the schema from the Receive node and the output will be the input variable from the Invoke node. We now build the transform. We first map the user and email attributes by drag and drop the elements from the left to the right. The reason we needed to use the transform is that we will be telling the AS-User service that we want to issue an update action. Remember when we registered the service we actually used Read as the default. If we do not otherwise inform the service to use the Update action it will use the Read action instead (which is not desired). To specify the update action you need to click on the transactionType node on the right and select Set Text to set the action. You need to specify the transactionType of UPD (for update). The mapping is now complete. The final BPEL process is ready for deployment. You then deploy the BPEL process to the server and to test the service by simply dropping a file, in the same pattern/name as you specified, in the directory you specified in the File Adapter. You will see each record as a separate instance entry in the Fusion Middleware Control console. You can now load files into the product. You can repeat this process for each type of file to process. While this was a simple example it illustrates the method of loading data can be achieved using SOA Suite in conjunction with our products.

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• Introduction to Human Workflow 11g

  - by agiovannetti

  Human Workflow is a component of SOA Suite just like BPEL, Mediator, Business Rules, etc. The Human Workflow component allows you to incorporate human intervention in a business process. You can use Human Workflow to create a business process that requires a manager to approve purchase orders greater than $10,000; or a business process that handles article reviews in which a group of reviewers need to vote/approve an article before it gets published. Human Workflow can handle the task assignment and routing as well as the generation of notifications to the participants. There are three common patterns or usages of Human Workflow: 1) Approval Scenarios: manage documents and other transactional data through approval chains . For example: approve expense report, vacation approval, hiring approval, etc. 2) Reviews by multiple users or groups: group collaboration and review of documents or proposals. For example, processing a sales quote which is subject to review by multiple people. 3) Case Management: workflows around work management or case management. For example, processing a service request. This could be routed to various people who all need to modify the task. It may also incorporate ad hoc routing which is unknown at design time. SOA 11g Human Workflow includes the following features: Assignment and routing of tasks to the correct users or groups. Deadlines, escalations, notifications, and other features required for ensuring the timely performance of a task. Presentation of tasks to end users through a variety of mechanisms, including a Worklist application. Organization, filtering, prioritization and other features required for end users to productively perform their tasks. Reports, reassignments, load balancing and other features required by supervisors and business owners to manage the performance of tasks. Human Workflow Architecture The Human Workflow component is divided into 3 modules: the service interface, the task definition and the client interface module. The Service Interface handles the interaction with BPEL and other components. The Client Interface handles the presentation of task data through clients like the Worklist application, portals and notification channels. The task definition module is in charge of managing the lifecycle of a task. Who should get the task assigned? What should happen next with the task? When must the task be completed? Should the task be escalated?, etc Stages and Participants When you create a Human Task you need to specify how the task is assigned and routed. The first step is to define the stages and participants. A stage is just a logical group. A participant can be a user, a group of users or an application role. The participants indicate the type of assignment and routing that will be performed. Stages can be sequential or in parallel. You can combine them to create any usage you require. See diagram below: Assignment and Routing There are different ways a task can be assigned and routed: Single Approver: task is assigned to a single user, group or role. For example, a vacation request is assigned to a manager. If the manager approves or rejects the request, the employee is notified with the decision. If the task is assigned to a group then once one of managers acts on it, the task is completed. Parallel : task is assigned to a set of people that must work in parallel. This is commonly used for voting. For example, a task gets approved once 50% of the participants approve it. You can also set it up to be a unanimous vote. Serial : participants must work in sequence. The most common scenario for this is management chain escalation. FYI (For Your Information) : task is assigned to participants who can view it, add comments and attachments, but can not modify or complete the task. Task Actions The following is the list of actions that can be performed on a task: Claim : if a task is assigned to a group or multiple users, then the task must be claimed first to be able to act on it. Escalate : if the participant is not able to complete a task, he/she can escalate it. The task is reassigned to his/her manager (up one level in a hierarchy). Pushback : the task is sent back to the previous assignee. Reassign :if the participant is a manager, he/she can delegate a task to his/her reports. Release : if a task is assigned to a group or multiple users, it can be released if the user who claimed the task cannot complete the task. Any of the other assignees can claim and complete the task. Request Information and Submit Information : use when the participant needs to supply more information or to request more information from the task creator or any of the previous assignees. Suspend and Resume :if a task is not relevant, it can be suspended. A suspension is indefinite. It does not expire until Resume is used to resume working on the task. Withdraw : if the creator of a task does not want to continue with it, for example, he wants to cancel a vacation request, he can withdraw the task. The business process determines what happens next. Renew : if a task is about to expire, the participant can renew it. The task expiration date is extended one week. Notifications Human Workflow provides a mechanism for sending notifications to participants to alert them of changes on a task. Notifications can be sent via email, telephone voice message, instant messaging (IM) or short message service (SMS). Notifications can be sent when the task status changes to any of the following: Assigned/renewed/delegated/reassigned/escalated Completed Error Expired Request Info Resume Suspended Added/Updated comments and/or attachments Updated Outcome Withdraw Other Actions (e.g. acquiring a task) Here is an example of an email notification: Worklist Application Oracle BPM Worklist application is the default user interface included in SOA Suite. It allows users to access and act on tasks that have been assigned to them. For example, from the Worklist application, a loan agent can review loan applications or a manager can approve employee vacation requests. Through the Worklist Application users can: Perform authorized actions on tasks, acquire and check out shared tasks, define personal to-do tasks and define subtasks. Filter tasks view based on various criteria. Work with standard work queues, such as high priority tasks, tasks due soon and so on. Work queues allow users to create a custom view to group a subset of tasks in the worklist, for example, high priority tasks, tasks due in 24 hours, expense approval tasks and more. Define custom work queues. Gain proxy access to part of another user's tasks. Define custom vacation rules and delegation rules. Enable group owners to define task dispatching rules for shared tasks. Collect a complete workflow history and audit trail. Use digital signatures for tasks. Run reports like Unattended tasks, Tasks productivity, etc. Here is a screenshoot of what the Worklist Application looks like. On the right hand side you can see the tasks that have been assigned to the user and the task's detail. References Introduction to SOA Suite 11g Human Workflow Webcast Note 1452937.2 Human Workflow Information Center Using the Human Workflow Service Component 11.1.1.6 Human Workflow Samples Human Workflow APIs Java Docs

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• Oracle Certification and virtualization Solutions.

  - by scoter

  As stated in official MOS ( My Oracle Support ) document 249212.1 support for Oracle products on non-Oracle VM platforms follow exactly the same stance as support for VMware and, so, the only x86 virtualization software solution certified for any Oracle product is "Oracle VM". Based on the fact that: Oracle VM is totally free ( you have the option to buy Oracle-Support ) Certified is pretty different from supported ( OracleVM is certified, others could be supported ) With Oracle VM you may not require to reproduce your issue(s) on physical server Oracle VM is the only x86 software solution that allows hard-partitioning *** *** see details to these Oracle public links: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/vm/ovm-hardpart-168217.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partitioning-070609.pdf people started asking to migrate from third party virtualization software (ex. RH KVM, VMWare) to Oracle VM. Migrating RH KVM guest to Oracle VM. OracleVM has a built-in P2V utility ( Official Documentation ) but in some cases we can't use it, due to : network inaccessibility between hypervisors ( KVM and OVM ) network slowness between hypervisors (KVM and OVM) size of the guest virtual-disks Here you'll find a step-by-step guide to "manually" migrate a guest machine from KVM to OVM. 1. Verify source guest characteristics. Using KVM web console you can verify characteristics of the guest you need to migrate, such as: CPU Cores details Defined Memory ( RAM ) Name of your guest Guest operating system Disks details ( number and size ) Network details ( number of NICs and network configuration ) 2. Export your guest in OVF / OVA format.  The export from Redhat KVM ( kernel virtual machine ) will create a structured export of your guest: [root@ovmserver1 mnt]# lltotal 12drwxrwx--- 5 36 36 4096 Oct 19 2012 b8296fca-13c4-4841-a50f-773b5139fcee b8296fca-13c4-4841-a50f-773b5139fcee is the ID of the guest exported from RH-KVM [root@ovmserver1 mnt]# cd b8296fca-13c4-4841-a50f-773b5139fcee/[root@ovmserver1 b8296fca-13c4-4841-a50f-773b5139fcee]# ls -ltrtotal 12drwxr-x--- 4 36 36 4096 Oct 19  2012 masterdrwxrwx--- 2 36 36 4096 Oct 29  2012 dom_mddrwxrwx--- 4 36 36 4096 Oct 31  2012 images images contains your virtual-disks exported [root@ovmserver1 b8296fca-13c4-4841-a50f-773b5139fcee]# cd images/[root@ovmserver1 images]# ls -ltratotal 16drwxrwx--- 5 36 36 4096 Oct 19  2012 ..drwxrwx--- 2 36 36 4096 Oct 31  2012 d4ef928d-6dc6-4743-b20d-568b424728a5drwxrwx--- 2 36 36 4096 Oct 31  2012 4b241ea0-43aa-4f3b-ab7d-2fc633b491a1drwxrwx--- 4 36 36 4096 Oct 31  2012 .[root@ovmserver1 images]# cd d4ef928d-6dc6-4743-b20d-568b424728a5/[root@ovmserver1 d4ef928d-6dc6-4743-b20d-568b424728a5]# ls -ltotal 5169092-rwxr----- 1 36 36 187904819200 Oct 31  2012 4c03b1cf-67cc-4af0-ad1e-529fd665dac1-rw-rw---- 1 36 36          341 Oct 31  2012 4c03b1cf-67cc-4af0-ad1e-529fd665dac1.meta[root@ovmserver1 d4ef928d-6dc6-4743-b20d-568b424728a5]# file 4c03b1cf-67cc-4af0-ad1e-529fd665dac14c03b1cf-67cc-4af0-ad1e-529fd665dac1: LVM2 (Linux Logical Volume Manager) , UUID: sZL1Ttpy0vNqykaPahEo3hK3lGhwspv 4c03b1cf-67cc-4af0-ad1e-529fd665dac1 is the first exported disk ( physical volume ) [root@ovmserver1 d4ef928d-6dc6-4743-b20d-568b424728a5]# cd ../4b241ea0-43aa-4f3b-ab7d-2fc633b491a1/[root@ovmserver1 4b241ea0-43aa-4f3b-ab7d-2fc633b491a1]# ls -ltotal 5568076-rwxr----- 1 36 36 107374182400 Oct 31  2012 9020f2e1-7b8a-4641-8f80-749768cc237a-rw-rw---- 1 36 36          341 Oct 31  2012 9020f2e1-7b8a-4641-8f80-749768cc237a.meta[root@ovmserver1 4b241ea0-43aa-4f3b-ab7d-2fc633b491a1]# file 9020f2e1-7b8a-4641-8f80-749768cc237a9020f2e1-7b8a-4641-8f80-749768cc237a: x86 boot sector; partition 1: ID=0x83, active, starthead 1, startsector 63, 401562 sectors; partition 2: ID=0x82, starthead 0, startsector 401625, 65529135 sectors; startsector 63, 401562 sectors; partition 2: ID=0x82, starthead 0, startsector 401625, 65529135 sectors; partition 3: ID=0x83, starthead 254, startsector 65930760, 8385930 sectors; partition 4: ID=0x5, starthead 254, startsector 74316690, 135395820 sectors, code offset 0x48 9020f2e1-7b8a-4641-8f80-749768cc237a is the second exported disk, with partition 1 bootable 3. Prepare the new guest on Oracle VM. By Ovm-Manager we can prepare the guest where we will move the exported virtual-disks; under the Tab "Servers and VMs": click on  and create your guest with parameters collected before (point 1): - add NICs on different networks: - add virtual-disks; in this case we add two disks of 1.0 GB each one; we will extend the virtual disk copying the source KVM virtual-disk ( see next steps ) - verify virtual-disks created ( under Repositories tab ) 4. Verify OVM virtual-disks names. [root@ovmserver1 VirtualMachines]# grep -r hyptest_rdbms * 0004fb0000060000a906b423f44da98e/vm.cfg:OVM_simple_name = 'hyptest_rdbms' [root@ovmserver1 VirtualMachines]# cd 0004fb0000060000a906b423f44da98e [root@ovmserver1 0004fb0000060000a906b423f44da98e]# more vm.cfgvif = ['mac=00:21:f6:0f:3f:85,bridge=0004fb001089128', 'mac=00:21:f6:0f:3f:8e,bridge=0004fb00101971d'] OVM_simple_name = 'hyptest_rdbms' vnclisten = '127.0.0.1' disk = ['file:/OVS/Repositories/0004fb00000300004f17b7368139eb41/ VirtualDisks/0004fb000012000097c1bfea9834b17d.img,xvda,w', 'file:/OVS/Repositories/0004fb00000300004f17b7368139eb41/VirtualDisks/ 0004fb0000120000cde6a11c3cb1d0be.img,xvdb,w'] vncunused = '1' uuid = '0004fb00-0006-0000-a906-b423f44da98e' on_reboot = 'restart' cpu_weight = 27500 memory = 32768 cpu_cap = 0 maxvcpus = 8 OVM_high_availability = True maxmem = 32768 vnc = '1' OVM_description = '' on_poweroff = 'destroy' on_crash = 'restart' name = '0004fb0000060000a906b423f44da98e' guest_os_type = 'linux' builder = 'hvm' vcpus = 8 keymap = 'en-us' OVM_os_type = 'Oracle Linux 5' OVM_cpu_compat_group = '' OVM_domain_type = 'xen_hvm' disk2 ovm ==> /OVS/Repositories/0004fb00000300004f17b7368139eb41/VirtualDisks/ 0004fb0000120000cde6a11c3cb1d0be.img disk1 ovm ==> /OVS/Repositories/0004fb00000300004f17b7368139eb41/VirtualDisks/ 0004fb000012000097c1bfea9834b17d.img Summarizing disk1 --source ==> /mnt/b8296fca-13c4-4841-a50f-773b5139fcee/images/4b241ea0-43aa-4f3b-ab7d-2fc633b491a1/9020f2e1-7b8a-4641-8f80-749768cc237a disk1 --dest ==> /OVS/Repositories/0004fb00000300004f17b7368139eb41/VirtualDisks/ 0004fb000012000097c1bfea9834b17d.img disk2 --source ==> /mnt/b8296fca-13c4-4841-a50f-773b5139fcee/images/d4ef928d-6dc6-4743-b20d-568b424728a5/4c03b1cf-67cc-4af0-ad1e-529fd665dac1 disk2 --dest ==> /OVS/Repositories/0004fb00000300004f17b7368139eb41/VirtualDisks/ 0004fb0000120000cde6a11c3cb1d0be.img 5. Copy KVM exported virtual-disks to OVM virtual-disks. Keeping your Oracle VM guest stopped you can copy KVM exported virtual-disks to OVM virtual-disks; what I did is only to locally mount the filesystem containing the exported virtual-disk ( by an usb device ) on my OVS; the copy automatically resize OVM virtual-disks ( previously created with a size of 1GB ) . nohup cp /mnt/b8296fca-13c4-4841-a50f-773b5139fcee/images/4b241ea0-43aa-4f3b-ab7d-2fc633b491a1/9020f2e1-7b8a-4641-8f80-749768cc237a /OVS/Repositories/0004fb00000300004f17b7368139eb41/VirtualDisks/0004fb000012000097c1bfea9834b17d.img & nohup cp /mnt/b8296fca-13c4-4841-a50f-773b5139fcee/images/d4ef928d-6dc6-4743-b20d-568b424728a5/4c03b1cf-67cc-4af0-ad1e-529fd665dac1 /OVS/Repositories/0004fb00000300004f17b7368139eb41/VirtualDisks/0004fb0000120000cde6a11c3cb1d0be.img & 7. When copy completed refresh repository to aknowledge the new-disks size. 7. After "refresh repository" is completed, start guest machine by Oracle VM manager. After the first start of your guest: - verify that you can see all disks and partitions - verify that your guest is network reachable ( MAC Address of your NICs changed ) Eventually you can also evaluate to convert your guest to PVM ( Paravirtualized virtual Machine ) following official Oracle documentation. Ciao Simon COTER ps: next-time I'd like to post an article reporting how to manually migrate Virtual-Iron guests to OracleVM.  Comments and corrections are welcome. 

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• Trying to reduce the speed overhead of an almost-but-not-quite-int number class

  - by Fumiyo Eda

  I have implemented a C++ class which behaves very similarly to the standard int type. The difference is that it has an additional concept of "epsilon" which represents some tiny value that is much less than 1, but greater than 0. One way to think of it is as a very wide fixed point number with 32 MSBs (the integer parts), 32 LSBs (the epsilon parts) and a huge sea of zeros in between. The following class works, but introduces a ~2x speed penalty in the overall program. (The program includes code that has nothing to do with this class, so the actual speed penalty of this class is probably much greater than 2x.) I can't paste the code that is using this class, but I can say the following: +, -, +=, <, > and >= are the only heavily used operators. Use of setEpsilon() and getInt() is extremely rare. * is also rare, and does not even need to consider the epsilon values at all. Here is the class: #include <limits> struct int32Uepsilon { typedef int32Uepsilon Self; int32Uepsilon () { _value = 0; _eps = 0; } int32Uepsilon (const int &i) { _value = i; _eps = 0; } void setEpsilon() { _eps = 1; } Self operator+(const Self &rhs) const { Self result = *this; result._value += rhs._value; result._eps += rhs._eps; return result; } Self operator-(const Self &rhs) const { Self result = *this; result._value -= rhs._value; result._eps -= rhs._eps; return result; } Self operator-( ) const { Self result = *this; result._value = -result._value; result._eps = -result._eps; return result; } Self operator*(const Self &rhs) const { return this->getInt() * rhs.getInt(); } // XXX: discards epsilon bool operator<(const Self &rhs) const { return (_value < rhs._value) || (_value == rhs._value && _eps < rhs._eps); } bool operator>(const Self &rhs) const { return (_value > rhs._value) || (_value == rhs._value && _eps > rhs._eps); } bool operator>=(const Self &rhs) const { return (_value >= rhs._value) || (_value == rhs._value && _eps >= rhs._eps); } Self &operator+=(const Self &rhs) { this->_value += rhs._value; this->_eps += rhs._eps; return *this; } Self &operator-=(const Self &rhs) { this->_value -= rhs._value; this->_eps -= rhs._eps; return *this; } int getInt() const { return(_value); } private: int _value; int _eps; }; namespace std { template<> struct numeric_limits<int32Uepsilon> { static const bool is_signed = true; static int max() { return 2147483647; } } }; The code above works, but it is quite slow. Does anyone have any ideas on how to improve performance? There are a few hints/details I can give that might be helpful: 32 bits are definitely insufficient to hold both _value and _eps. In practice, up to 24 ~ 28 bits of _value are used and up to 20 bits of _eps are used. I could not measure a significant performance difference between using int32_t and int64_t, so memory overhead itself is probably not the problem here. Saturating addition/subtraction on _eps would be cool, but isn't really necessary. Note that the signs of _value and _eps are not necessarily the same! This broke my first attempt at speeding this class up. Inline assembly is no problem, so long as it works with GCC on a Core i7 system running Linux!

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• Selling Federal Enterprise Architecture (EA)

  - by TedMcLaughlan

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

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• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 4

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Explain the characteristics of memory systems Describe the memory hierarchy Discuss cache memory principles Discuss issues relevant to cache design Describe the cache organization of the Pentium Computer Memory Systems There are key characteristics of memory… Location – internal or external Capacity – expressed in terms of bytes Unit of Transfer – the number of bits read out of or written into memory at a time Access Method – sequential, direct, random or associative From a users perspective the two most important characteristics of memory are… Capacity Performance – access time, memory cycle time, transfer rate The trade off for memory happens along three axis… Faster access time, greater cost per bit Greater capacity, smaller cost per bit Greater capacity, slower access time This leads to people using a tiered approach in their use of memory   As one goes down the hierarchy, the following occurs… Decreasing cost per bit Increasing capacity Increasing access time Decreasing frequency of access of the memory by the processor The use of two levels of memory to reduce average access time works in principle, but only if conditions 1 to 4 apply. A variety of technologies exist that allow us to accomplish this. Thus it is possible to organize data across the hierarchy such that the percentage of accesses to each successively lower level is substantially less than that of the level above. A portion of main memory can be used as a buffer to hold data temporarily that is to be read out to disk. This is sometimes referred to as a disk cache and improves performance in two ways… Disk writes are clustered. Instead of many small transfers of data, we have a few large transfers of data. This improves disk performance and minimizes processor involvement. Some data designed for write-out may be referenced by a program before the next dump to disk. In that case the data is retrieved rapidly from the software cache rather than slowly from disk. Cache Memory Principles Cache memory is substantially faster than main memory. A caching system works as follows.. When a processor attempts to read a word of memory, a check is made to see if this in in cache memory… If it is, the data is supplied, If it is not in the cache, a block of main memory, consisting of a fixed number of words is loaded to the cache. Because of the phenomenon of locality of references, when a block of data is fetched into the cache, it is likely that there will be future references to that same memory location or to other words in the block. Elements of Cache Design While there are a large number of cache implementations, there are a few basic design elements that serve to classify and differentiate cache architectures… Cache Addresses Cache Size Mapping Function Replacement Algorithm Write Policy Line Size Number of Caches Cache Addresses Almost all non-embedded processors support virtual memory. Virtual memory in essence allows a program to address memory from a logical point of view without needing to worry about the amount of physical memory available. When virtual addresses are used the designer may choose to place the cache between the MMU (memory management unit) and the processor or between the MMU and main memory. The disadvantage of virtual memory is that most virtual memory systems supply each application with the same virtual memory address space (each application sees virtual memory starting at memory address 0), which means the cache memory must be completely flushed with each application context switch or extra bits must be added to each line of the cache to identify which virtual address space the address refers to. Cache Size We would like the size of the cache to be small enough so that the overall average cost per bit is close to that of main memory alone and large enough so that the overall average access time is close to that of the cache alone. Also, larger caches are slightly slower than smaller ones. Mapping Function Because there are fewer cache lines than main memory blocks, an algorithm is needed for mapping main memory blocks into cache lines. The choice of mapping function dictates how the cache is organized. Three techniques can be used… Direct – simplest technique, maps each block of main memory into only one possible cache line Associative – Each main memory block to be loaded into any line of the cache Set Associative – exhibits the strengths of both the direct and associative approaches while reducing their disadvantages For detailed explanations of each approach – read the text book (page 148 – 154) Replacement Algorithm For associative and set associating mapping a replacement algorithm is needed to determine which of the existing blocks in the cache must be replaced by a new block. There are four common approaches… LRU (Least recently used) FIFO (First in first out) LFU (Least frequently used) Random selection Write Policy When a block resident in the cache is to be replaced, there are two cases to consider If no writes to that block have happened in the cache – discard it If a write has occurred, a process needs to be initiated where the changes in the cache are propagated back to the main memory. There are several approaches to achieve this including… Write Through – all writes to the cache are done to the main memory as well at the point of the change Write Back – when a block is replaced, all dirty bits are written back to main memory The problem is complicated when we have multiple caches, there are techniques to accommodate for this but I have not summarized them. Line Size When a block of data is retrieved and placed in the cache, not only the desired word but also some number of adjacent words are retrieved. As the block size increases from very small to larger sizes, the hit ratio will at first increase because of the principle of locality, which states that the data in the vicinity of a referenced word are likely to be referenced in the near future. As the block size increases, more useful data are brought into cache. The hit ratio will begin to decrease as the block becomes even bigger and the probability of using the newly fetched information becomes less than the probability of using the newly fetched information that has to be replaced. Two specific effects come into play… Larger blocks reduce the number of blocks that fit into a cache. Because each block fetch overwrites older cache contents, a small number of blocks results in data being overwritten shortly after they are fetched. As a block becomes larger, each additional word is farther from the requested word and therefore less likely to be needed in the near future. The relationship between block size and hit ratio is complex, and no set approach is judged to be the best in all circumstances.   Pentium 4 and ARM cache organizations The processor core consists of four major components: Fetch/decode unit – fetches program instruction in order from the L2 cache, decodes these into a series of micro-operations, and stores the results in the L2 instruction cache Out-of-order execution logic – Schedules execution of the micro-operations subject to data dependencies and resource availability – thus micro-operations may be scheduled for execution in a different order than they were fetched from the instruction stream. As time permits, this unit schedules speculative execution of micro-operations that may be required in the future Execution units – These units execute micro-operations, fetching the required data from the L1 data cache and temporarily storing results in registers Memory subsystem – This unit includes the L2 and L3 caches and the system bus, which is used to access main memory when the L1 and L2 caches have a cache miss and to access the system I/O resources

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• VNIC - New feature of AK8 - Working with VNICs

  - by Steve Tunstall

  One of the important new features of the AK8 code is the ability to use multiple IP addresses on the same physical network port. This feature is called VNICs, or Virtual NICs. This allows us to no longer "burn" a whole port in a cluster when one cluster peer owns a network port. Traditionally, we have had to leave Net0 empty on controller 2, because it was used for managing controller 1. Vise-versa for Net1 on Controller 1. Then, if you have data going over 10GigE ports, you probably only had half of your ports running at any given time, and the partner 10GigE port on the other controller just sat there, doing nothing, unless the first controller went down. What a waste. Those days are over.  I want to thank and give a big shout-out to our good partner, OnX Enterprise Solutions, for allowing me to come into their lab and play around with their 7320 to do this demo. They let me make a big mess of their lab for the day as I played around with VNICs. If you're looking for a partner who knows Oracle well and can also piece together a solution from multiple vendors to get you what you need, OnX is a good choice. If you would like to talk to your local OnX rep, you can contact Scott Gill at [email protected] and he can point you in the right direction for your area.  Here we go: Here is what your Datalinks window looks like BEFORE you upgrade to AK8. Here's what the same screen looks like after you upgrade. See the new box? So here is my current network setup. I have my 4 physical interfaces setup each with an IP address. If I ping them, no problems.  So I can ping 180, 181, 251, and 252. However, if I try to ping 240, it does not work, as the 240 address is not being used by any of these interfaces, right?Let's change that. Here, I'm going to make a new Datalink by clicking the Datalink "Plus sign" button. I will check the VNIC box and tell it to use igb2, even though another interface is already using it. Now, I will create a new Interface, and choose "v_dl2" for it's datalink. My new network screen looks like this. A few things to take note of here. First, when I click the "igb2" device, it only highlights dl2 and int2. It does not highlight v_dl2 or v_int2.I think it should, but OK, it looks like VNICs don't highlight when you click the device. Second, note how the underscore character in v_dl2 and v_int2 do not seem to show on this screen. You can see it plainly if you go in and edit them, but from here it looks like a space instead of an underscore. Just a cosmetic bug, but something to be aware of. Now, if I click the VNIC datalink "v_dl2", on the other hand, it DOES highlight the device it belongs to, as it should. Seen here: Note that it did not, however, highlight int2 with it, even though int2 is connected to igb2. That's because we clicked v_dl2, which int2 has nothing to do with. So I'm OK with that. So let's try pinging 240 now. Of course, it works great.  So I now make another VNIC, and call it v_dl3 using igb3, and v_int3 with an address of 241. I then setup three shares, using ports 251, 240, and 241.Remember that IP 251 and 240 both are using the same physical port of igb2, and IP 241 is using port igb3. Next, I copy a folder full of stuff over to all three shares at the same time. I have analytics going so I can see the traffic. My top chart is showing the logical interfaces, and the bottom chart is showing the physical ports.Sure enough, look at the igb2 and vnic1 interfaces. They equal the traffic going over the igb2 physical port on the second chart. VNIC2, on the other hand, gets igb3 all to itself. This would work the same way with 10Gig or Infiniband ports. You can now have multiple IP addresses and even completely different subnets sharing the same physical ports. You may need to make route table entries for that. This allows us to use all of the ports you paid for with no more waste.  Very, very cool.  One small "bug" I found when doing this. It's really not a bug, it was designed to do this when VNICs were not around. But now that we have NVIC capability, they should probably change this. I've alerted the engineering team about this and they're looking into it, so perhaps it will be fixed in a later code. Here it is. Remember when we made the new VNIC datalink, I specifically said to click on the "Plus Sign" button to create it? I don't always do that. I really like to use the drag-and-drop method to create my datalinks in the network screen.HOWEVER, if you were to do that for building a VNIC, it will mess you up a little. Watch this. Here, I'm dragging igb3 over to make a new datalink. igb3 is already being used by dl3, but I'm going to make this a VNIC, so who cares, right? Well, the ZFSSA does not KNOW you are going to make it a VNIC, now does it? So... it works as designed and REMOVES the igb3 device from the current dl3 datalink in the background. See how it's now missing? At the same time, the dl3 datalink choice is missing from my list of possible VNICs for me to choose from!!!! Hey!!! I wanted to pick dl3. Why isn't it on the list??? Well, it can't be on this list because dl3 no longer has a device associated with it. Bummer for you. When you click cancel, the device is still missing from dl3. The fix is easy. Just edit dl3 by clicking the pencil button, do absolutely nothing, and click "Apply". The device will magically come back. Now, make the VNIC datalink by clicking the "Plus Sign" button. Sure enough, once you check the VNIC box, dl3 is a valid choice. No problem.  That's it for now. Have fun with VNICs.

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• How to Load Oracle Tables From Hadoop Tutorial (Part 5 - Leveraging Parallelism in OSCH)

  - by Bob Hanckel

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Using OSCH: Beyond Hello World In the previous post we discussed a “Hello World” example for OSCH focusing on the mechanics of getting a toy end-to-end example working. In this post we are going to talk about how to make it work for big data loads. We will explain how to optimize an OSCH external table for load, paying particular attention to Oracle’s DOP (degree of parallelism), the number of external table location files we use, and the number of HDFS files that make up the payload. We will provide some rules that serve as best practices when using OSCH. The assumption is that you have read the previous post and have some end to end OSCH external tables working and now you want to ramp up the size of the loads. Using OSCH External Tables for Access and Loading OSCH external tables are no different from any other Oracle external tables.  They can be used to access HDFS content using Oracle SQL: SELECT * FROM my_hdfs_external_table; or use the same SQL access to load a table in Oracle. INSERT INTO my_oracle_table SELECT * FROM my_hdfs_external_table; To speed up the load time, you will want to control the degree of parallelism (i.e. DOP) and add two SQL hints. ALTER SESSION FORCE PARALLEL DML PARALLEL  8; ALTER SESSION FORCE PARALLEL QUERY PARALLEL 8; INSERT /*+ append pq_distribute(my_oracle_table, none) */ INTO my_oracle_table SELECT * FROM my_hdfs_external_table; There are various ways of either hinting at what level of DOP you want to use.  The ALTER SESSION statements above force the issue assuming you (the user of the session) are allowed to assert the DOP (more on that in the next section).  Alternatively you could embed additional parallel hints directly into the INSERT and SELECT clause respectively. /*+ parallel(my_oracle_table,8) *//*+ parallel(my_hdfs_external_table,8) */ Note that the "append" hint lets you load a target table by reserving space above a given "high watermark" in storage and uses Direct Path load.  In other doesn't try to fill blocks that are already allocated and partially filled. It uses unallocated blocks.  It is an optimized way of loading a table without incurring the typical resource overhead associated with run-of-the-mill inserts.  The "pq_distribute" hint in this context unifies the INSERT and SELECT operators to make data flow during a load more efficient. Finally your target Oracle table should be defined with "NOLOGGING" and "PARALLEL" attributes.   The combination of the "NOLOGGING" and use of the "append" hint disables REDO logging, and its overhead.  The "PARALLEL" clause tells Oracle to try to use parallel execution when operating on the target table. Determine Your DOP It might feel natural to build your datasets in Hadoop, then afterwards figure out how to tune the OSCH external table definition, but you should start backwards. You should focus on Oracle database, specifically the DOP you want to use when loading (or accessing) HDFS content using external tables. The DOP in Oracle controls how many PQ slaves are launched in parallel when executing an external table. Typically the DOP is something you want to Oracle to control transparently, but for loading content from Hadoop with OSCH, it's something that you will want to control. Oracle computes the maximum DOP that can be used by an Oracle user. The maximum value that can be assigned is an integer value typically equal to the number of CPUs on your Oracle instances, times the number of cores per CPU, times the number of Oracle instances. For example, suppose you have a RAC environment with 2 Oracle instances. And suppose that each system has 2 CPUs with 32 cores. The maximum DOP would be 128 (i.e. 2*2*32). In point of fact if you are running on a production system, the maximum DOP you are allowed to use will be restricted by the Oracle DBA. This is because using a system maximum DOP can subsume all system resources on Oracle and starve anything else that is executing. Obviously on a production system where resources need to be shared 24x7, this can’t be allowed to happen. The use cases for being able to run OSCH with a maximum DOP are when you have exclusive access to all the resources on an Oracle system. This can be in situations when your are first seeding tables in a new Oracle database, or there is a time where normal activity in the production database can be safely taken off-line for a few hours to free up resources for a big incremental load. Using OSCH on high end machines (specifically Oracle Exadata and Oracle BDA cabled with Infiniband), this mode of operation can load up to 15TB per hour. The bottom line is that you should first figure out what DOP you will be allowed to run with by talking to the DBAs who manage the production system. You then use that number to derive the number of location files, and (optionally) the number of HDFS data files that you want to generate, assuming that is flexible. Rule 1: Find out the maximum DOP you will be allowed to use with OSCH on the target Oracle system Determining the Number of Location Files Let’s assume that the DBA told you that your maximum DOP was 8. You want the number of location files in your external table to be big enough to utilize all 8 PQ slaves, and you want them to represent equally balanced workloads. Remember location files in OSCH are metadata lists of HDFS files and are created using OSCH’s External Table tool. They also represent the workload size given to an individual Oracle PQ slave (i.e. a PQ slave is given one location file to process at a time, and only it will process the contents of the location file.) Rule 2: The size of the workload of a single location file (and the PQ slave that processes it) is the sum of the content size of the HDFS files it lists For example, if a location file lists 5 HDFS files which are each 100GB in size, the workload size for that location file is 500GB. The number of location files that you generate is something you control by providing a number as input to OSCH’s External Table tool. Rule 3: The number of location files chosen should be a small multiple of the DOP Each location file represents one workload for one PQ slave. So the goal is to keep all slaves busy and try to give them equivalent workloads. Obviously if you run with a DOP of 8 but have 5 location files, only five PQ slaves will have something to do and the other three will have nothing to do and will quietly exit. If you run with 9 location files, then the PQ slaves will pick up the first 8 location files, and assuming they have equal work loads, will finish up about the same time. But the first PQ slave to finish its job will then be rescheduled to process the ninth location file, potentially doubling the end to end processing time. So for this DOP using 8, 16, or 32 location files would be a good idea. Determining the Number of HDFS Files Let’s start with the next rule and then explain it: Rule 4: The number of HDFS files should try to be a multiple of the number of location files and try to be relatively the same size In our running example, the DOP is 8. This means that the number of location files should be a small multiple of 8. Remember that each location file represents a list of unique HDFS files to load, and that the sum of the files listed in each location file is a workload for one Oracle PQ slave. The OSCH External Table tool will look in an HDFS directory for a set of HDFS files to load.  It will generate N number of location files (where N is the value you gave to the tool). It will then try to divvy up the HDFS files and do its best to make sure the workload across location files is as balanced as possible. (The tool uses a greedy algorithm that grabs the biggest HDFS file and delegates it to a particular location file. It then looks for the next biggest file and puts in some other location file, and so on). The tools ability to balance is reduced if HDFS file sizes are grossly out of balance or are too few. For example suppose my DOP is 8 and the number of location files is 8. Suppose I have only 8 HDFS files, where one file is 900GB and the others are 100GB. When the tool tries to balance the load it will be forced to put the singleton 900GB into one location file, and put each of the 100GB files in the 7 remaining location files. The load balance skew is 9 to 1. One PQ slave will be working overtime, while the slacker PQ slaves are off enjoying happy hour. If however the total payload (1600 GB) were broken up into smaller HDFS files, the OSCH External Table tool would have an easier time generating a list where each workload for each location file is relatively the same.  Applying Rule 4 above to our DOP of 8, we could divide the workload into160 files that were approximately 10 GB in size.  For this scenario the OSCH External Table tool would populate each location file with 20 HDFS file references, and all location files would have similar workloads (approximately 200GB per location file.) As a rule, when the OSCH External Table tool has to deal with more and smaller files it will be able to create more balanced loads. How small should HDFS files get? Not so small that the HDFS open and close file overhead starts having a substantial impact. For our performance test system (Exadata/BDA with Infiniband), I compared three OSCH loads of 1 TiB. One load had 128 HDFS files living in 64 location files where each HDFS file was about 8GB. I then did the same load with 12800 files where each HDFS file was about 80MB size. The end to end load time was virtually the same. However when I got ridiculously small (i.e. 128000 files at about 8MB per file), it started to make an impact and slow down the load time. What happens if you break rules 3 or 4 above? Nothing draconian, everything will still function. You just won’t be taking full advantage of the generous DOP that was allocated to you by your friendly DBA. The key point of the rules articulated above is this: if you know that HDFS content is ultimately going to be loaded into Oracle using OSCH, it makes sense to chop them up into the right number of files roughly the same size, derived from the DOP that you expect to use for loading. Next Steps So far we have talked about OLH and OSCH as alternative models for loading. That’s not quite the whole story. They can be used together in a way that provides for more efficient OSCH loads and allows one to be more flexible about scheduling on a Hadoop cluster and an Oracle Database to perform load operations. The next lesson will talk about Oracle Data Pump files generated by OLH, and loaded using OSCH. It will also outline the pros and cons of using various load methods.  This will be followed up with a final tutorial lesson focusing on how to optimize OLH and OSCH for use on Oracle's engineered systems: specifically Exadata and the BDA. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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