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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, January 07, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, January 07, 2011Popular ReleasesAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.2: Implemented the Auto Updater Fix: Your settings will no longer be cleared with new releases of AutoLoL The mastery Editor and Browser now have their own tabs instead of nested tabs The Browser tab will only show the masteries matching ALL filters instead of just one Added a 'Browse' button in the Mastery Editor tab to open the Masteries Directory The Browser tab now shows a message when there are no mastery files in the Masteries Directory Fix: Fixed the Save As dialog again, for ...Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter: 2.1 latest stable: V2.1 is stable, and is in maintenance mode. This is v2.1.1.25. It is a bug-fix release. There are no new features. 28629 29172 28722 27626 28074 29164 27659 27900 many documentation updates and fixes proper x64 build environment. This release includes x64 binaries in zip form, but no x64 MSI file. You'll have to manually install x64 servers, following the instructions in the documentation.StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14980.000: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new ObjectBasedEnvironment object does not resolve the StyleCop installation path, thus it does not return the correct path ...VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.1: New release with bug fixes and updates for performance.SSH.NET Library: 2011.1.6: Fixes CommandTimeout default value is fixed to infinite. Port Forwarding feature improvements Memory leaks fixes New Features Add ErrorOccurred event to handle errors that occurred on different thread New and improve SFTP features SftpFile now has more attributes and some operations Most standard operations now available Allow specify encoding for command execution KeyboardInteractiveConnectionInfo class added for "keyboard-interactive" authentication. Add ability to specify bo....NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library for C# and VB.NET: Release 2011.03: Added lot's of new extensions and new projects for MVC and Entity Framework. object.FindTypeByRecursion Int32.InRange String.RemoveAllSpecialCharacters String.IsEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IsNotEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IfEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.ToUpperFirstLetter String.GetBytes String.ToTitleCase String.ToPlural DateTime.GetDaysInYear DateTime.GetPeriodOfDay IEnumberable.RemoveAll IEnumberable.Distinct ICollection.RemoveAll IList.Join IList.Match IList.Cast Array.IsNullOrEmpty Array.W...VidCoder: 0.8.0: Added x64 version. Made the audio output preview more detailed and accurate. If the chosen encoder or mixdown is incompatible with the source, the fallback that will be used is displayed. Added "Auto" to the audio mixdown choices. Reworked non-anamorphic size calculation to work better with non-standard pixel aspect ratios and cropping. Reworked Custom anamorphic to be more intuitive and allow display width to be set automatically (Thanks, Statick). Allowing higher bitrates for 6-ch....NET Voice Recorder: Auto-Tune Release: This is the source code and binaries to accompany the article on the Coding 4 Fun website. It is the Auto Tuner release of the .NET Voice Recorder application.BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.2.0: - Simulation Log is now automatically disabled and hidden when running 10 or more iterations - Hit and Expertise are now entered by Rating, and include option for a Racial Expertise bonus - Added option for boss to use a periodic magic ability (Dragon Breath) - Added option for boss to periodically Enrage, gaining a Damage/Attack Speed buffASP.NET MVC CMS ( Using CommonLibrary.NET ): CommonLibrary.NET CMS 0.9.5 Alpha: CommonLibrary CMSA simple yet powerful CMS system in ASP.NET MVC 2 using C# 4.0. ActiveRecord based components for Blogs, Widgets, Pages, Parts, Events, Feedback, BlogRolls, Links Includes several widgets ( tag cloud, archives, recent, user cloud, links twitter, blog roll and more ) Built using the http://commonlibrarynet.codeplex.com framework. ( Uses TDD, DDD, Models/Entities, Code Generation ) Can run w/ In-Memory Repositories or Sql Server Database See Documentation tab for Ins...AllNewsManager.NET: AllNewsManager.NET 1.2.1: AllNewsManager.NET 1.2.1 It is a minor update from version 1.2EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.9 BETA: 2.2.9 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in the Gobl...xUnit.net - Unit Testing for .NET: xUnit.net 1.7 Beta: xUnit.net release 1.7 betaBuild #1533 Important notes for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. This release adds the following new features: Added support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Added Assert.Equal(double expected, double actual, int precision)...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: New feature - Added Windows Phone 7 project New feature - Added dynamic support to LINQ to JSON New feature - Added dynamic support to serializer New feature - Added INotifyCollectionChanged to JContainer in .NET 4 build New feature - Added ReadAsDateTimeOffset to JsonReader New feature - Added ReadAsDecimal to JsonReader New feature - Added covariance to IJEnumerable type parameter New feature - Added XmlSerializer style Specified property support New feature - Added ...DbDocument: DbDoc Initial Version: DbDoc Initial versionASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.2: Atomic CMS 2.1.2 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide N2 CMS: 2.1: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) All-round improvements and bugfixes File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the template packs (above) and open the proj...Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 0.1.11.10: IMPORTANT CHANGESThis release changes the way some WURFL capabilities and attributes are exposed to .NET developers. If you cast MobileCapabilities to return some values then please read the Release Note before implementing this release. The following code snippet can be used to access any WURFL capability. For instance, if the device is a tablet: string capability = Request.Browser["is_tablet"]; SummaryNew attributes have been added to the redirect section: originalUrlAsQueryString If se...Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 1.0: - Norwegian translation - French translation - German translation - WBFS dump for analysis - Scalable full HQ cover - Support for log file - Load game images improved - Support for image splitting - Diff for images after transfer - Support for scrubbing modes - Search functionality for log - Recurse depth for Files/Load - Show progress while downloading game cover - Supports more databases for cover download - Game cover loading routines improvedBlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.0: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.0 instructions. To get started, be sure to check out our installatio...New Projects9192631770: This project is created for learning .net 3.5 personally. However it may not suffice for anyone to give a start point. (9192631770) is equivalent to 1 sec in atomic clock.AGS: AGSAll-In-One Code Framework Prerelease: All-In-One Code Framework PrereleaseAwait Events with "yield": This is a library that allows you to stop running the code wherever you want in order to await an event using the functionality of "yield" sentence. It's useful when you want to await asynchronous events or when you have to deal with many events in a sequential way.Battle.net SDK: This is a SDK that retrieves it's information from the Battle.Net community site. At the moment blizzard only supports this for World of Warcraft, so that's what our main aim is at the momeen.t C++ Hash Container Benchmark: C++ Hash Container Benchmark for STL map, C++0x unordered map, Boost unordered map, ATL map and ATL hash map for STL wide string and ATL CString.Colour Lovers .NET: A .NET library for the Colour Lovers API.DatingGame: Course to teach high-school aged girls basic T-SQL using a fun scenario - querying to find the hottest boys! Used at Microsoft DigiGirlz and TKP events. Included DDL script, CSV for bcp with data, PPTX, T-SQL Cheat Sheet and teaching tips. Enjoy!do-Dots open .NET SDK: The do-Dots open SDK brings developers a full set of classes that allow to build applications based on do-Dots, a framework for M2M communication. It's developed in C#. EFMVC - ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First: Demo web app using ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code FirstGS1: D is a 2D game demo written in C++ and using an API : HAPI for the graphic part and the audio part. All the xml files are handled with tinyXML. It is a vertical scrolling shoot'em up where the player controls a dragon flying in Central Park.GS2: In Zombies, you are a wizard, the most powerful wizard in the world, and two days ago, the Devil forces began to attack our world. The only person capable of stopping them is you, this is why the Devil himself came to you and took your powers. You're now alone, without any weaponIPProvider: DFGiwtfly: ????iwtfly26050: iwtfly2Knowledge Exchange .Net: This is my learning experience with creating an enterprise scale .NET application with tools such as Tortoise SVN, NANT, and Linq to SQLLinqPad Data Context Driver for SharePoint: The SharePoint Data Context Driver for LinqPad makes it easer for SharePoint 2010 Developers to develop, maintain and just play around with Linq To SharePoint statements via LinqPad. It is developed in C# and enables SharePoint 2010 Support to LinqPad.MaxLeafWebSiteK3: MaxLeafWebSiteK3Open ASP.NET CMS: Open ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Plug 'N Play Settings Manager: Plug 'N Play Settings Manager will be an application to configure settings on a windows computer by waiting for a usb thumbstick with a configuration file to be inserted, the application would then read and apply those settings. The early focus will be applying network settings.project windy: Windy - enhanced window manager. windy does window management a breeze. It started as a windows alternative to divvy, but now it has evolved with into its own. Thanks to the generous feedback from you folks. whats different from divvy? - first - its free. - has divvy likeRiaMVVM : MVVM Friendly WCF Ria Services: Simple, light-weight, MVVM friendly access to WCF Ria Services. Written in C# for use with Silverlight 4.SharePoint Designer 2007 Policy: Enable or Disable SharePoint Designer 2007 per site web application and per site colleciton. Spruckus - SharePoint ReUsable Content Keystamp Usage Search: Adds a keystamp to all html type items in the SharePoint Reusable Content list and adds a context item to the reusable content list that will find usages of that reusable content in your site using search.Student Insiders: Student InsidersTea: Tea Web Operator SystemVegas.NET: Projeto teste de TransportadoraXNA 4 Game state management system: XNA 4 Game State Management??????: aa

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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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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, November 16, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, November 16, 2011Popular ReleasesMVC 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 ...Public Key Infrastructure PowerShell module: PowerShell PKI Module v0.9.2: Installation guide: Use default installation path to install this module for all users To install this module for current user only — use the following path: %MyDocs%\WindowsPowerShell\Modules Note: you MUST uninstall previously installed module versions. Direct upgrade is not supported! Note: at this time PowerShell 3.0 CTP1 is not supported. Release notes for version 0.9.2: updated and corrected help for several commands. added online help for all commands. Get-CertificationAuthorit...Files Name Copier: 1.0.0.1: Files Name Copier is a simple easy to use utility that allows you to drag and drop any number of files onto it. The clipboard will now contain the list of files you just dropped.SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQLMon 4.1 alpha 3: 1. improved object search, now show previous/next navigation 2. shows server start up time 3. shows process cpu/ioCODE Framework: 4.0.11115.0: Added support for partial views in the WPF framework, as well as a new helper feature that allows hooking commands/actions to all WPF events.Silverlight 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 ProvidersnoneDotNetNuke Performance Settings: 01.00.00: First release of DotNetNuke SQL update queries to set the DNN installation for optimimal performance. Please review and rate this release... (stars are welcome)SCCM 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...Windows Azure SDK for PHP: Windows Azure SDK for PHP v4.0.4: 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...QuickGraph, Graph Data Structures And Algorithms for .Net: 3.6.61116.0: Portable library build that allows to use QuickGraph in any .NET environment: .net 4.0, silverlight 4.0, WP7, Win8 Metro apps.Devpad: 4.7: Whats new for Devpad 4.7: New export to Rich Text New export to FlowDocument Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsDesktop Google Reader: 1.4.2: This release remove the like and the broadcast buttons as Google Reader stopped supporting them (no, we don't like this decission...) Additionally and to have at least a small plus: the login window now automaitcally logs you in if you stored username and passwort (no more extra click needed) Finally added WebKit .NET to the about window and removed Awesomium MD5-Hash: 5fccf25a2fb4fecc1dc77ebabc8d3897 SHA-Hash: d44ff788b123bd33596ad1a75f3b9fa74a862fdbRDRemote: Remote Desktop remote configurator V 1.0.0: Remote Desktop remote configurator V 1.0.0Rawr: Rawr 4.2.7: 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 AddonWe 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 bag and bank items) like Char...VidCoder: 1.2.2: Updated Handbrake core to svn 4344. Fixed the 6-channel discrete mixdown option not appearing for AAC encoders. Added handling for possible exceptions when copying to the clipboard, added retries and message when it fails. Fixed issue with audio bitrate UI not appearing sometimes when switching audio encoders. Added extra checks to protect against reported crashes. Added code to upgrade encoding profiles on old queued items.Media Companion: MC 3.422b 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) TV Show Resolutions... Made the TV Shows folder list sorted. Re-visibled 'Manually Add Path' in Root Folders. Sorted list to process during new tv episode search Rebuild Movies now processes thru folders alphabetically Fix for issue #208 - Display Missing Episodes is not popu...XPath Visualizer: XPathVisualizer v1.3 Latest: This is v1.3.0.6 of XpathVisualizer. This is an update release for v1.3. These workitems have been fixed since v1.3.0.5: 7429 7432 7427MSBuild Extension Pack: November 2011: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack November 2011 release provides a collection of over 415 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, GU...Extensions for Reactive Extensions (Rxx): Rxx 1.2: What's NewRelated Work Items Please read the latest release notes for details about what's new. Content SummaryRxx provides the following features. See the Documentation for details. Many IObservable<T> extension methods and IEnumerable<T> extension methods. Many useful types such as ViewModel, CommandSubject, ListSubject, DictionarySubject, ObservableDynamicObject, Either<TLeft, TRight>, Maybe<T> and others. Various interactive labs that illustrate the runtime behavior of the extensio...New Projects#foo MigratorFoo: Migration generator for NHibernate projects with integrated NuGet console commands.Best music production software: Programmers needed to make the perfect open source music production software: I have a well structured creative idea based on the following principle "powerful simplicity"...Bricks: Bricks is a development foundation for different technologyCultiv Jupiter Contact Form: A contact form package for Umbraco v5 (Jupiter)DNN Fan Gate: A simple module for fan gating content in DotNetNukeDobo: DoboDotNetNuke Performance Settings: A set of SQL queries that will change the (Host & Schedule) settings of your DotNetNuke installation for maximal production performance or set it optimal for Development. These queries were used in my presentation on DotNetNuke World 2011.Experiment Manager: This project was developed as a response to the requirements for an experiment manager software for clinical psychology experiments. Feedbook: Feedbook supports any RSS and Atom news feeds, It can also download podcasts saliently and play it within Feedbook. It integrates with Twitter and Google Buzz very well, you can send tweets/post easily and can also subscribe to twitter timelines/buzz feeds. Characters like # & @ also recognize as special keywords, so that you can subscribe to feeds of any on going topic on twitter like #download, #movie or #cricket. http://feedbook.orgFiles Name Copier: Files Name Copier is a simple easy to use utility that allows you to drag and drop any number of files onto it. The clipboard will now contain the list of files you just dropped.Kinban: Kinect + TFS This is a WPF representation of a Kanban board that can be manipulated with the Kinect.MapTeamsPolls: This is an ASP.Net ajax polls user controls. Using ajax and jQuery. This user controls can be used in any ASP.Net 4.0 projects. Use the build script to create Umbraco package for the user controls and the admin page. As a bonus, there is a ruby rake build script for the package.MetroButton with Converter Image SVG2XAML Silverlight: - Control library SL4 with Button Metro Style - Windows application for download and convert SVG to Resource.xaml for silverlightMetroIoc - a simple WinRT IoC container: A WinRT port of the MicroIoc container... MetroIoc is a native WinRT Inversion of Control container, for use in Metro style apps. Check the license for usage rights of this projectMTN Library: .NET library with extensions for LINQ and Entity Framework as well as useful extensions. Contains many extensions, features for display methods using jquery Ajax. Has a proxy to create and use methods with cache as much as in the ajax methods.myDeck: Main goal of this project is to show best practices and patterns for unit testing in Silverlight Technology. It is developed as part of BAThesisNetwork extensions for .net Micro Framework and Gadgeteer: Adds .net Microframework support for - BinaryReader - BinaryWriter Adds a FEZ way for TCP and UDP networking to the Gadgeteer platformNewSunse: this card creating projectOrchard CMS ImageResizer: resize or scale images in orchard simply by url or using the build-in HtmlHelperReportCenter: ReportCenterSharePoint 2010 Extended Lookup Field: This project installs a custom lookup field, which allows the user to choose the item through a SharePoint 2010 popup. Here are the features offered by this field: - high extensibility - high performance when woking with very large lists - small size for new and edit list forms - posibility to specify you own search page - SharePoint 2010 lookup and feel The project is a VS2010 SharePoint 2010 project. Simplicity Framework: Simplicity is a framework to automatic generate dataccess an UI code for crudlstackoverflowstore: Homenaje a stackoverflow.Stoc: Aplicatia Stoc simplifica generarea facturilor si a retelor, gestionand stocul marfii unei firme. Student PAS: Student PAS is a simple webapp for assign tasks for students. It was created with educational purposes. Thus, it is not an serious usable software.System Center 2012 - Operations Manager Managed Module Samples: Sample Visual Studio 2010 projects that illustrate how you can create custom module types for System Center 2012 - Operations Manager. The project contains the C# code for creating data source, write action, probe and condition detection modules and more.Tecnosop: Sistema de facturacion de TecnosopUtilityLibrary.FormControl: FormControlWebRequestFrequencyControl: This project intends to solve the web request frequency control problem. This solution is based on HttpModule and highly configurable. If you need to limit the frequency of requests, you may interest in this.Windows Phone Marketplace Analytics: Libraries (and data) to help you access and analyze the different information provided by the MS marketplace.Windows Troubleshooting Platform Starter Packs: Starter Packs are open source packages based on the Windows Troubleshooting Platform that can be modified by developers to suit their specific needs. Starter Packs are an easy way for developers to create and distribute a Windows Troubleshooting Pack to diagnose computer problems.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 10, 2014

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 10, 2014Popular ReleasesTerraMap (Terraria World Map Viewer): TerraMap 1.0.3.14652: Added support for the new Terraria v1.2.4 update. New items, walls, and tiles The setup file will make sure .NET 4 is installed, install TerraMap, create desktop and start menu shortcuts, add a .wld file association, and launch TerraMap. If you prefer the zip file, make sure you have .NET Framework v4.5 installed, then just download and extract the ZIP file, and run TerraMap.exe.R.NET: R.NET 1.5.12: R.NET 1.5.12 is a beta release towards R.NET 1.6. You are encouraged to use 1.5.12 now and give feedback. See the documentation for setup and usage instructions. Main changes for R.NET 1.5.12: The C stack limit was not disabled on Windows. For reasons possibly peculiar to R, this means that non-concurrent access to R from multiple threads was not stable. This is now fixed, with the fix validated with a unit test. Thanks to Odugen, skyguy94, and previously others (evolvedmicrobe, tomasp) fo...CTI Text Encryption: CTI Text Encryption 5.2: Change log: 5.2 - Remove Cut button. - Fixed Reset All button does not reset encrypted text column. - Switch button location between Copy and Paste. - Enable users to use local fonts to display characters of their language correctly. (A font settings file will be saved at the same folder of this program.) 5.1 - Improve encryption process. - Minor UI update. - Version 5.1 is not compatible with older version. 5.0 - Improve encryption algorithm. - Simply inner non-encryption related mec...SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.029.006 Release 1: Fix to allow keyboard search on load dialog. (type the first few letters of your save) Fixed check for new release. Changed the way ship details are loaded to alleviate load time for worlds with very large ships (100,000+ blocks). Fixed Image importer, was incorrectly listing 'Asteroid' as import option. Minor changes to menus (text and appearance) for clarity and OS consistency. Added in reading of world palette for color dialog editor. WIP on subsystem editor. Can now multiselec...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.597b: Thank you for being patient, againThere are a number of fixes in place with this release. and some new features added. Most are self explanatory, so check out the options in Preferences. Couple of new Features:* Movie - Allow save Title and Sort Title in Title Case format. * Movie - Allow save fanart.jpg if movie in folder. * TV - display episode source. Get episode source from episode filename. Fixed:* Movie - Added Fill Tags from plot keywords to Batch Rescraper. * Movie - Fixed TMDB s...SimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.3.0.0: Contains several bugfixes, newly identified properties and some UI improvements. Main new features UI overhaul for the main index list: Icons for each different index, including icons for different property files Tooltips for all relevant fields Removed clutter Identified hundreds of additional properties (thanks to MaxisGuillaume) - this should make modding gameplay easierSeal Report: Seal Report 1.4: New Features: Report Designer: New option to convert a Report Source into a Repository Source. Report Designer: New contextual helper menus to select, remove, copy, prompt elements in a model. Web Server: New option to expand sub-folders displayed in the tree view. Web Server: Web Folder Description File can be a .cshtml file to display a MVC View. Views: additional CSS parameters for some DIVs. NVD3 Chart: Some default configuration values have been changed. Issues Addressed:16 ...Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.9.002: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.9.0.VidCoder: 1.5.22 Beta: Added ability to burn SRT subtitles. Updated to HandBrake SVN 6169. Added checks to prevent VidCoder from running with a database version newer than it expects. Tooltips in the Advanced Video panel now trigger on the field labels as well as the fields themselves. Fixed updating preset/profile/tune/level settings on changing video encoder. This should resolve some problems with QSV encoding. Fixed tunes and profiles getting set to blank when switching between x264 and x265. Fixed co...NuGet: NuGet 2.8.2: We will be releasing a 2.8.2 version of our own NuGet packages and the NuGet.exe command-line tool. The 2.8.2 release will not include updated VS or WebMatrix extensions. NuGet.Server.Extensions.dll needs to be used alongside NuGet-Signed.exe to provide the NuGet.exe mirror functionality.DNN CMS Platform: 07.03.00 BETA (Not For Production Use): DNN 7.3 release is focused on performance and we have made a variety of changes to improve the run-time characteristics of the platform. End users will notice faster page response time and administrators will appreciate a more responsive user experience, especially on larger scale web sites. This is a BETA release and is NOT recommended for production use. There is no upgrade path offered from this release to the final DNN 7.3 release. Known Issues - The Telerik RAD Controls for ASP.NET AJA...SmartStore.NET - Free ASP.NET MVC Ecommerce Shopping Cart Solution: SmartStore.NET 2.0.2: SmartStore.NET 2.0.2 is primarily a maintenance release for version 2.0.0, which has been released on April 04 2014. It contains several improvements & important fixes. BugfixesIMPORTANT FIX: Memory leak leads to OutOfMemoryException in application after a while Installation fix: some varchar(MAX) columns get created as varchar(4000). Added a migration to fix the column specs. Installation fix: Setup fails with exception Value cannot be null. Parameter name: stream Bugfix for stock iss...Channel9's Absolute Beginner Series: Windows Phone 8.1: Entire source code for Windows Phone 8.1 Absolute Beginner Series.BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6.6: This BIDS Helper beta release brings support for SQL Server 2014 and SSDTBI for Visual Studio 2013. (Note that SSDTBI for Visual Studio 2013 is currently unavailable to download from Microsoft. We are releasing BIDS Helper support to help those who downloaded it before it became unavailable, and we will recheck BIDS Helper 2014 is compatible after SSDTBI becomes available to download again.) BIDS Helper 2014 Beta Limitations: SQL Server 2014 support for Biml is still in progress, so this bet...Windows Phone IsoStoreSpy (a cool WP8.1 + WP8 Isolated Storage Explorer): IsoStoreSpy WP8.1 3.0.0.0 (Win8 only): 3.0.0.0 + WP8.1 & WP8 device allowed + Local, Roaming or Temp directory Selector for WindowsRuntime apps + Version number in the title :)CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.24.0: ShortcutMapping panel now allows direct modification of the shortcuts. Custom updater dropped support for MSI installation but it still allows downloading of MSI http://www.csscript.net/npp/codeplex/non_msi_update.pngProDinner - ASP.NET MVC Sample (EF5, N-Tier, jQuery): 8.2: upgrade to mvc 5 upgrade to ASP.net MVC Awesome 4.0, EF 6.1, latest jcrop, Windsor Castle etc. ability to show/hide the dog using tinymce for the feedback page mobile friendly uiASP.net MVC Awesome - jQuery Ajax Helpers: 4.0: version 4.0 ========================== - added InitPopup, InitPopupForm helpers, open initialized popups using awe.open(name, params) - added Tag or Tags for all helpers, usable in mod code - added popup aweclose, aweresize events - popups have api accessible via .data('api'), with methods open, close and destroy - all popups have .awe-popup class - popups can be grouped using .Group(string), only 1 popup in the same group can exist at the same time - added awebeginload event for...ScreenToGif: Release 1.0: What's new: • Small UI tweaks everywhere. • You can add Text, Subtitles and Title Frames. • Processing the gif now takes less time. • Languages: Spanish, Italian and Tamil added. • Single .exe multi language. • Takes less time to apply blur and pixelated efect. • Restart button. • Language picker. (If the user wants to select a diferent language than the system's) • "Encoding Finished" page with a link to open the file. • GreenScreen unchanged pixels to save kilobytes. • "Check for Updates" t...Touchmote: Touchmote 1.0 beta 11: Changes Support for multiple monitor setup Additional settings for analog sticks More reliable pairing Bug fixes and improvementsNew ProjectsADO: copy rightAntilop: Antilop is a professionnal C# business and data access framework.Bit Consulting Business Information Technology Blog: Espacio creado para todos los interesados en intercambiar información, opinar, preguntar todo lo relacionado con los productos ofrecidos por BIT CONSULTING.Black Desert C# emulator(Necroz Project): Development Black Desert emulatorDSLK: bai tap ctdl&gtFreelancerWebSecurity: FreelancerWebSecurityGlobal Machine Access: The project provides an intuitive interface computer control via the command line window. Features: - Login, logout, change password. - Execute commands inHeadTS: An alternative to the HeadJS script loader that provides a more focused, robust, promise-based script management system.How to develop an autodialer / predictive dialer in C#: This project demonstrates how to build a VoIP autodialer in C# in order to be able to make a huge amount of simultaneous calls automatically.html5demo: demo web app.NetPipe: A new piece of software in python that will allow programs to be executed on other computers / servers over a network.Observer Pattern: This project shows how the observer design pattern works.Our wedding: Ruben y Sarahi wedding 19-09-2014SpreadsheetComputations: Good stuffSpurnUI: jQuery based professional ASP.NET Controls for moblieStrategy Pattern: This project shows how the strategy design pattern works.TagIt-MP3: TagIt-MP3 is a free audio file data tagging ID3 format editor, support ID3 tag version, this audio tool can read and write metadata tags for MP3 audio files.TeamProjectDaNang: Ðà N?ng nhóm l?p trình :DThaumcraft4 Research: A small application to help players of Minecraft / Thaumcraft 4 complete their research projects.Visualize and Analyze Demand for Coding Skills, Using WPF: Use data visualization app to figure-out which job skills are most in demand. WPlayer: This project using ffmpeg library, based on Media Foundation. Yammer API SDK: A C# Yammer API SDK?????-?????【??】???????: ????????????????、?????????,??????、??????????????????,???????.??????????,????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,???????、????、????、??????、???????,??????,???????????。?????-?????【??】???????: ??????????1992?,????????????????。??????????????????????。????????????,????,????????! ?????-?????【??】?????????: ???????????????,???????、???????????,????????,????,?????????,??????,??????! ?????-?????【??】?????????: ???????,??????,?????????????????????,???????????????????????。?????-?????【??】???????: ???????????:?????,??????!???????????????,???????、?????、??????“??”????,????,????!?????-?????【??】???????: ???????????????????,???,??????????、???????????????????。??????,????、????,??????! ?????-?????【??】???????: ???????????????,????,?????、???、?????,???????,?????,???????????100%。??????! ?????-?????【??】????? ??: ?????????????????????????,???????????,??????,??????????????...????????。??????!??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,??:??????,????,????,????,?????,??????????????.??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????,?????????????,???????????.????????????,????????????! ?????-?????【??】???????: ?????????????????????????,???????????,??????,??????????????...????????。??????!????-????【??】????????: ????????????????、?????、?????、????、?????,??????????。????????????????!?????-?????【??】?????????: ??????,??,????????。 ... ??????????????????、??????????????????...?????-?????【??】?????????: ?????????????:????,????,????,???????,????????,??????:????????,?????!??????-??????【??】????????: ?????????????????????、????、????、??????、???????,??????、??????。??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????,??????,?????????????????????,???????????????????????。 ?????-?????【??】???????: ??????????????????????????,??????,???????????,????????????????,????????.??????. ????-????【??】????????: ??????????????,???????、???????????,????????,????,?????????,??????,??????!?????-?????【??】?????: ?????????????????,???????、????、????、??????、???????,??????,???????????。?????-?????【??】???????: ????????????、????、????、??????、????、???????,?????,?????????!?????-?????【??】?????????: ???????????????????????、??????,????、?????、????, ?????????,?????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????????、????、????、??????、???????,??????、??????。?????-??????【??】???????: ?????????,???????????,??????????,????:??,????,???????? ??????????,????????。??????!?????-?????【??】?????????: ???????????????????????、??????,????、?????、????, ?????????,?????????????!?????-?????【??】?????????: ??????????????、????、????、??????、????、???????,?????,?????????!??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????"????,????"???,????????????????????????,??????????????。 ?????-?????【??】???????: ????????????????、?????????,??????、??????????????????,???????.??????????,????????。 ????-????【??】????????: ????????????????????????,???????????????,????????????????! ?????-?????【??】?????????: ?????,?????????,?????????????。?????????????,?????????,???????。??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,????:????,????,????,??????,?????,???????????????!?????-?????【??】???????: ???????????:?????,??????!???????????????,???????、?????、??????“??”????,????,????! ?????-?????【??】?????????: ?????????????????????????、??????????????,??????????????。?????-?????【??】?????????: ???????????????,????????????,?????????????????,??????,????????!?????-?????【??】?????????: ??????????????????????,????????????,?????、??、????,?????,??????! ?????-?????【??】???????: ????????????????????????,????,????“???、???、???”?????,?????,?????????????????。??????! ??????-??????【??】????????: ??????????????????????????、??????????????,??????????????。??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????"????,????"???,????????????????????????,??????????????。????-????【??】????????: ????,?????????,?????????????。?????????????,?????????,???????。 ?????-?????【??】???????: ?????????????????、????、??????、????????,????????????,???????????!?????-?????【??】???????: ???????????????,????????????,?????????????????,??????,????????!?????-?????【??】?????????: ???????????????,????:????,????,????,??????,?????,???????????????! ??????-??????【??】????: ???????????????:?????? ???? ??????,???????,??????,???????。??????-??????【??】????????: ??????????????????、????、??????、????????,????????????,???????????!?????-?????【??】???????: ???????????????????,????????????,????????,???,???????????,????,????。?????,??????.????-????【??】??????: ?????????????????????????,???????????????????????,???????。?????-?????【??】???????: ???????????,????,??????????? ???? ???? ?????????,???,??,?????!

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  • HTML5 CSS3 layout not working

    - by John.Weland
    I have been asked by a local MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) School to help them develop a website. For the life of me I CANNOT get the layout to work correctly. When I get one section set where it should be another moves out of place! here is a pic of the layout: here The header should be a set height as should the footer the entire site at its widest point should be 1250px with the header/content area/footer and the like being 1240px the black in the picture is a scaling background to expand wider as larger resolution systems are viewing them. The full site should be a minimum-height of 100% but scale virtually as content in the target area deems necessary. My biggest issue currently is that my "sticky" footer doesn't stick once the content has stretched the content target area virtually. the Code is not pretty but here it is: HTML5 <!doctype html> <html> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" href="menu.css" type="text/css" media="screen"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="master.css" type="text/css" media="screen"> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Untitled Document</title> </head> <body bottommargin="0" leftmargin="0" rightmargin="0" topmargin="0"> <div id="wrap" class="wrap"><div id="logo" class="logo"><img src="images/comalogo.png" width="100" height="150"></div> <div id="header" class="header">College of Martial Arts</div> <div id="nav" class="nav"> <ul id="menu"><b> <li><a href="#">News</a></li> <li>·</li> <li><a href="#">About Us</a> <ul> <li><a href="#">The Instructors</a></li> <li><a href="#">Our Arts</a></li> </li> </ul> <li>·</li> <li><a href="#">Location</a></li> <li>·</li> <li><a href="#">Gallery</a></li> <li>·</li> <li><a href="#">MMA.tv</a></li> <li>·</li> <li><a href="#">Schedule</a></li> <li>·</li> <li><a href="#">Fight Gear</a></li></b> </div> <div id="social" class="social"> <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Canyon-Lake-College-of-Martial-Arts/189432551104674"><img src="images/soc/facebook.png"></a> <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/CanyonLakeMMA"><img src="images/soc/twitter.png"></a> <a href="https://plus.google.com/108252414577423199314/"><img src="images/soc/google+.png"></a> <a href="http://youtube.com/user/clmmatv"><img src="images/soc/youtube.png"></a></div> <div id="mid" class="mid">test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br>test <br></div> <div id="footer" class="footer"> <div id="contact" style="left:0px;">tel: (830) 214-4591<br /> e: [email protected]<br /> add: 1273 FM 2673, Sattler, TX 78133<br /> </div> <div id="affiliates" style="right:0px;">Hwa Rang World Tang soo Do</div> <div id="copyright">Copyright © College of Martial Arts</div> </div> </body> </html> CSS3 -Dropdown Menu- @charset "utf-8"; /* CSS Document */ /* Main */ #menu { width: 100%; margin: 0; padding: 10px 0 0 0; list-style: none; background: #444; background: -moz-linear-gradient(#000, #333); background: -webkit-gradient(linear,left bottom,left top,color-stop(0, #444),color-stop(1, #000)); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(#000, #333); background: -o-linear-gradient(#000, #333); background: -ms-linear-gradient(#000, #333); background: linear-gradient(#000, #333); -moz-border-radius: 5px; border-radius: 5px; -moz-box-shadow: 0 2px 1px #9c9c9c; -webkit-box-shadow: 0 2px 1px #9c9c9c; box-shadow: 0 8px 8px #9c9c9c; /* outline:#000 solid thin; */ } #menu li { left:150px; float: left; padding: 0 0 10px 0; position:relative; color: #FC0; font-size:15px; font-family:'freshman' cursive; line-height:15px; } #menu a { float: left; height: 15px; line-height:15px; padding: 0 10px; color: #FC0; font-size:15px; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: 1 1px 0 #000; text-align:center; } #menu li:hover > a { color: #fafafa; } *html #menu li a:hover /* IE6 */ { color: #fafafa; } #menu li:hover > ul { display: block; } /* Sub-menu */ #menu ul { list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; display: none; position: absolute; top: 25px; left: 0; z-index: 99999; background: #444; background: -moz-linear-gradient(#000, #333); background: -webkit-gradient(linear,left bottom,left top,color-stop(0, #111),color-stop(1, #444)); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(#000, #333); background: -o-linear-gradient(#000, #333); background: -ms-linear-gradient(#000, #333); background: linear-gradient(#000, #333); -moz-border-radius: 5px; border-radius: 5px; /* outline:#000 solid thin; */ } #menu ul li { left:0; -moz-box-shadow: none; -webkit-box-shadow: none; box-shadow: none; } #menu ul a { padding: 10px; height: auto; line-height: 1; display: block; white-space: nowrap; float: none; text-transform: none; } *html #menu ul a /* IE6 */ { height: 10px; width: 200px; } *:first-child+html #menu ul a /* IE7 */ { height: 10px; width: 200px; } /*#menu ul a:hover { background: #000; background: -moz-linear-gradient(#000, #333); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#04acec), to(#0186ba)); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(#000, #333); background: -o-linear-gradient(#000, #333); background: -ms-linear-gradient(#000, #333); background: linear-gradient(#000, #333); }*/ /* Clear floated elements */ #menu:after { visibility: hidden; display: block; font-size: 0; content: " "; clear: both; height: 0; } * html #menu { zoom: 1; } /* IE6 */ *:first-child+html #menu { zoom: 1; } /* IE7 */ CSS3 -Master Style Sheet- @charset "utf-8"; /* CSS Document */ a:link {color:#FC0; text-decoration:none;} /* unvisited link */ a:visited {color:#FC0; text-decoration:none;} /* visited link */ a:hover {color:#FFF; text-decoration:none;} /* mouse over link */ a:active {color:#FC0; text-decoration:none;} /* selected link */ ul.a {list-style-type:none;} ul.b {list-style-type:inherit} html { } body { /*background-image:url(images/cagebg.jpg);*/ background-repeat:repeat; background-position:top; } div.wrap { margin: 0 auto; min-height: 100%; position: relative; width: 1250px; } div.logo{ top:25px; left:20px; position:absolute; float:top; height:150px; } /*Freshman FONT is on my computer needs to be uploaded to the webhost and rendered host side like a webfont*/ div.header{ background-color:#999; color:#FC0; margin-left:5px; height:80px; width:1240px; line-height:70px; font-family:'freshman' cursive; font-size:50px; text-shadow:8px 8px #9c9c9c; text-outline:1px 1px #000; text-align:center; background-color:#999; clear: both; } div.social{ height:50px; margin-left:5px; width:1240px; font-family:'freshman' cursive; font-size:50px; text-align:right; color:#000; background-color:#999; line-height:30px; box-sizing: border-box; ms-box-sizing: border-box; webkit-box-sizing: border-box; moz-box-sizing: border-box; padding-right:5px; } div.mid{ position:absolute; min-height:100%; margin-left:5px; width:1240px; font-family:'freshman' cursive; font-size:50px; text-align:center; color:#000; background-color:#999; } /*SIDE left and right should be 40px wide and a minimum height (100% the area from nav-footer) to fill between the NAV and the footer yet stretch as displayed content streatches the page longer (scrollable)*/ div #side.sright{ top:96px; right:0; position:absolute; float:right; height:100%; min-height:100%; width:40px; background-image:url(images/border.png); } /*Container should vary in height in acordance to content displayed*/ div #content.container{ } /*Footer should stick at ABSOLUTE BOTTOM of the page*/ div #footer{ font-family:'freshman' cursive; position:fixed; bottom:0; background-color:#000000; margin-left:5px; width:1240px; color:#FC0; clear: both; /*this clear property forces the .container to understand where the columns end and contain them*/ } /*HTML 5 support - Sets new HTML 5 tags to display:block so browsers know how to render the tags properly.*/ header, section, footer, aside, nav, article, figure { display: block; } Eventually once the layout is correct I have to use PHP to make calls for where data should be displayed from what database. If anyone can help me to fix this layout and clean up the crap code, I'd be much appreciated.. I've spent weeks trying to figure this out.

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  • Office 2010: It&rsquo;s not just DOC(X) and XLS(X)

    - by andrewbrust
    Office 2010 has released to manufacturing.  The bits have left the (product team’s) building.  Will you upgrade? This version of Office is officially numbered 14, a designation that correlates with the various releases, through the years, of Microsoft Word.  There were six major versions of Word for DOS, during whose release cycles came three 16-bit Windows versions.  Then, starting with Word 95 and counting through Word 2007, there have been six more versions – all for the 32-bit Windows platform.  Skip version 13 to ward off folksy bad luck (and, perhaps, the bugs that could come with it) and that brings us to version 14, which includes implementations for both 32- and 64-bit Windows platforms.  We’ve come a long way baby.  Or have we? As it does every three years or so, debate will now start to rage on over whether we need a “14th” version the PC platform’s standard word processor, or a “13th” version of the spreadsheet.  If you accept the premise of that question, then you may be on a slippery slope toward answering it in the negative.  Thing is, that premise is valid for certain customers and not others. The Microsoft Office product has morphed from one that offered core word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and email functionality to a suite of applications that provides unique, new value-added features, and even whole applications, in the context of those core services.  The core apps thus grow in mission: Excel is a BI tool.  Word is a collaborative editorial system for the production of publications.  PowerPoint is a media production platform for for live presentations and, increasingly, for delivering more effective presentations online.  Outlook is a time and task management system.  Access is a rich client front-end for data-driven self-service SharePoint applications.  OneNote helps you capture ideas, corral random thoughts in a semi-structured way, and then tie them back to other, more rigidly structured, Office documents. Google Docs and other cloud productivity platforms like Zoho don’t really do these things.  And there is a growing chorus of voices who say that they shouldn’t, because those ancillary capabilities are over-engineered, over-produced and “under-necessary.”  They might say Microsoft is layering on superfluous capabilities to avoid admitting that Office’s core capabilities, the ones people really need, have become commoditized. It’s hard to take sides in that argument, because different people, and the different companies that employ them, have different needs.  For my own needs, it all comes down to three basic questions: will the new version of Office save me time, will it make the mundane parts of my job easier, and will it augment my services to customers?  I need my time back.  I need to spend more of it with my family, and more of it focusing on my own core capabilities rather than the administrative tasks around them.  And I also need my customers to be able to get more value out of the services I provide. Help me triage my inbox, help me get proposals done more quickly and make them easier to read.  Let me get my presentations done faster, make them more effective and make it easier for me to reuse materials from other presentations.  And, since I’m in the BI and data business, help me and my customers manage data and analytics more easily, both on the desktop and online. Those are my criteria.  And, with those in mind, Office 2010 is looking like a worthwhile upgrade.  Perhaps it’s not earth-shattering, but it offers a combination of incremental improvements and a few new major capabilities that I think are quite compelling.  I provide a brief roundup of them here.  It’s admittedly arbitrary and not comprehensive, but I think it tells the Office 2010 story effectively. Across the Suite More than any other, this release of Office aims to give collaboration a real workout.  In certain apps, for the first time, documents can be opened simultaneously by multiple users, with colleagues’ changes appearing in near real-time.  Web-browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote will be available to extend collaboration to contributors who are off the corporate network. The ribbon user interface is now more pervasive (for example, it appears in OneNote and in Outlook’s main window).  It’s also customizable, allowing users to add, easily, buttons and options of their choosing, into new tabs, or into new groups within existing tabs. Microsoft has also taken the File menu (which was the “Office Button” menu in the 2007 release) and made it into a full-screen “Backstage” view where document-wide operations, like saving, printing and online publishing are performed. And because, more and more, heavily formatted content is cut and pasted between documents and applications, Office 2010 makes it easier to manage the retention or jettisoning of that formatting right as the paste operation is performed.  That’s much nicer than stripping it off, or adding it back, afterwards. And, speaking of pasting, a number of Office apps now make it especially easy to insert screenshots within their documents.  I know that’s useful to me, because I often document or critique applications and need to show them in action.  For the vast majority of users, I expect that this feature will be more useful for capturing snapshots of Web pages, but we’ll have to see whether this feature becomes popular.   Excel At first glance, Excel 2010 looks and acts nearly identically to the 2007 version.  But additional glances are necessary.  It’s important to understand that lots of people in the working world use Excel as more of a database, analytics and mathematical modeling tool than merely as a spreadsheet.  And it’s also important to understand that Excel wasn’t designed to handle such workloads past a certain scale.  That all changes with this release. The first reason things change is that Excel has been tuned for performance.  It’s been optimized for multi-threaded operation; previously lengthy processes have been shortened, especially for large data sets; more rows and columns are allowed and, for the first time, Excel (and the rest of Office) is available in a 64-bit version.  For Excel, this means users can take advantage of more than the 2GB of memory that the 32-bit version is limited to. On the analysis side, Excel 2010 adds Sparklines (tiny charts that fit into a single cell and can therefore be presented down an entire column or across a row) and Slicers (a more user-friendly filter mechanism for PivotTables and charts, which visually indicates what the filtered state of a given data member is).  But most important, Excel 2010 supports the new PowerPIvot add-in which brings true self-service BI to Office.  PowerPivot allows users to import data from almost anywhere, model it, and then analyze it.  Rather than forcing users to build “spreadmarts” or use corporate-built data warehouses, PowerPivot models function as true columnar, in-memory OLAP cubes that can accommodate millions of rows of data and deliver fast drill-down performance. And speaking of OLAP, Excel 2010 now supports an important Analysis Services OLAP feature called write-back.  Write-back is especially useful in financial forecasting scenarios for which Excel is the natural home.  Support for write-back is long overdue, but I’m still glad it’s there, because I had almost given up on it.   PowerPoint This version of PowerPoint marks its progression from a presentation tool to a video and photo editing and production tool.  Whether or not it’s successful in this pursuit, and if offering this is even a sensible goal, is another question. Regardless, the new capabilities are kind of interesting.  A greatly enhanced set of slide transitions with 3D effects; in-product photo and video editing; accommodation of embedded videos from services such as YouTube; and the ability to save a presentation as a video each lay testimony to PowerPoint’s transformation into a media tool and away from a pure presentation tool. These capabilities also recognize the importance of the Web as both a source for materials and a channel for disseminating PowerPoint output. Congruent with that is PowerPoint’s new ability to broadcast a slide presentation, using a quickly-generated public URL, without involving the hassle or expense of a Web meeting service like GoToMeeting or Microsoft’s own LiveMeeting.  Slides presented through this broadcast feature retain full color fidelity and transitions and animations are preserved as well.   Outlook Microsoft’s ubiquitous email/calendar/contact/task management tool gains long overdue speed improvements, especially against POP3 email accounts.  Outlook 2010 also supports multiple Exchange accounts, rather than just one; tighter integration with OneNote; and a new Social Connector providing integration with, and presence information from, online social network services like LinkedIn and Facebook (not to mention Windows Live).  A revamped conversation view now includes messages that are part of a given thread regardless of which folder they may be stored in. I don’t know yet how well the Social Connector will work or whether it will keep Outlook relevant to those who live on Facebook and LinkedIn.  But among the other features, there’s very little not to like.   OneNote To me, OneNote is the part of Office that just keeps getting better.  There is one major caveat to this, which I’ll cover in a moment, but let’s first catalog what new stuff OneNote 2010 brings.  The best part of OneNote, is the way each of its versions have managed hierarchy: Notebooks have sections, sections have pages, pages have sub pages, multiple notes can be contained in either, and each note supports infinite levels of indentation.  None of that is new to 2010, but the new version does make creation of pages and subpages easier and also makes simple work out of promoting and demoting pages from sub page to full page status.  And relationships between pages are quite easy to create now: much like a Wiki, simply typing a page’s name in double-square-brackets (“[[…]]”) creates a link to it. OneNote is also great at integrating content outside of its notebooks.  With a new Dock to Desktop feature, OneNote becomes aware of what window is displayed in the rest of the screen and, if it’s an Office document or a Web page, links the notes you’re typing, at the time, to it.  A single click from your notes later on will bring that same document or Web page back on-screen.  Embedding content from Web pages and elsewhere is also easier.  Using OneNote’s Windows Key+S combination to grab part of the screen now allows you to specify the destination of that bitmap instead of automatically creating a new note in the Unfiled Notes area.  Using the Send to OneNote buttons in Internet Explorer and Outlook result in the same choice. Collaboration gets better too.  Real-time multi-author editing is better accommodated and determining author lineage of particular changes is easily carried out. My one pet peeve with OneNote is the difficulty using it when I’m not one a Windows PC.  OneNote’s main competitor, Evernote, while I believe inferior in terms of features, has client versions for PC, Mac, Windows Mobile, Android, iPhone, iPad and Web browsers.  Since I have an Android phone and an iPad, I am practically forced to use it.  However, the OneNote Web app should help here, as should a forthcoming version of OneNote for Windows Phone 7.  In the mean time, it turns out that using OneNote’s Email Page ribbon button lets you move a OneNote page easily into EverNote (since every EverNote account gets a unique email address for adding notes) and that Evernote’s Email function combined with Outlook’s Send to OneNote button (in the Move group of the ribbon’s Home tab) can achieve the reverse.   Access To me, the big change in Access 2007 was its tight integration with SharePoint lists.  Access 2010 and SharePoint 2010 continue this integration with the introduction of SharePoint’s Access Services.  Much as Excel Services provides a SharePoint-hosted experience for viewing (and now editing) Excel spreadsheet, PivotTable and chart content, Access Services allows for SharePoint browser-hosted editing of Access data within the forms that are built in the Access client itself. To me this makes all kinds of sense.  Although it does beg the question of where to draw the line between Access, InfoPath, SharePoint list maintenance and SharePoint 2010’s new Business Connectivity Services.  Each of these tools provide overlapping data entry and data maintenance functionality. But if you do prefer Access, then you’ll like  things like templates and application parts that make it easier to get off the blank page.  These features help you quickly get tables, forms and reports built out.  To make things look nice, Access even gets its own version of Excel’s Conditional Formatting feature, letting you add data bars and data-driven text formatting.   Word As I said at the beginning of this post, upgrades to Office are about much more than enhancing the suite’s flagship word processing application. So are there any enhancements in Word worth mentioning?  I think so.  The most important one has to be the collaboration features.  Essentially, when a user opens a Word document that is in a SharePoint document library (or Windows Live SkyDrive folder), rather than the whole document being locked, Word has the ability to observe more granular locks on the individual paragraphs being edited.  Word also shows you who’s editing what and its Save function morphs into a sync feature that both saves your changes and loads those made by anyone editing the document concurrently. There’s also a new navigation pane that lets you manage sections in your document in much the same way as you manage slides in a PowerPoint deck.  Using the navigation pane, you can reorder sections, insert new ones, or promote and demote sections in the outline hierarchy.  Not earth shattering, but nice.   Other Apps and Summarized Findings What about InfoPath, Publisher, Visio and Project?  I haven’t looked at them yet.  And for this post, I think that’s fine.  While those apps (and, arguably, Access) cater to specific tasks, I think the apps we’ve looked at in this post service the general purpose needs of most users.  And the theme in those 2010 apps is clear: collaboration is key, the Web and productivity are indivisible, and making data and analytics into a self-service amenity is the way to go.  But perhaps most of all, features are still important, as long as they get you through your day faster, rather than adding complexity for its own sake.  I would argue that this is true for just about every product Microsoft makes: users want utility, not complexity.

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  • Tips for XNA WP7 Developers

    - by Michael B. McLaughlin
    There are several things any XNA developer should know/consider when coming to the Windows Phone 7 platform. This post assumes you are familiar with the XNA Framework and with the changes between XNA 3.1 and XNA 4.0. It’s not exhaustive; it’s simply a list of things I’ve gathered over time. I may come back and add to it over time, and I’m happy to add anything anyone else has experienced or learned as well. Display · The screen is either 800x480 or 480x800. · But you aren’t required to use only those resolutions. · The hardware scaler on the phone will scale up from 240x240. · One dimension will be capped at 800 and the other at 480; which depends on your code, but you cannot have, e.g., an 800x600 back buffer – that will be created as 800x480. · The hardware scaler will not normally change aspect ratio, though, so no unintended stretching. · Any dimension (width, height, or both) below 240 will be adjusted to 240 (without any aspect ratio adjustment such that, e.g. 200x240 will be treated as 240x240). · Dimensions below 240 will be honored in terms of calculating whether to use portrait or landscape. · If dimensions are exactly equal or if height is greater than width then game will be in portrait. · If width is greater than height, the game will be in landscape. · Landscape games will automatically flip if the user turns the phone 180°; no code required. · Default landscape is top = left. In other words a user holding a phone who starts a landscape game will see the first image presented so that the “top” of the screen is along the right edge of his/her phone, such that the natural behavior would be to turn the phone 90° so that the top of the phone will be held in the user’s left hand and the bottom would be held in the user’s right hand. · The status bar (where the clock, battery power, etc., are found) is hidden when the Game-derived class sets GraphicsDeviceManager.IsFullScreen = true. It is shown when IsFullScreen = false. The default value is false (i.e. the status bar is shown). · You should have a good reason for hiding the status bar. Users find it helpful to know what time it is, how much charge their battery has left, and whether or not their phone is in service range. This is especially true for casual games that you expect someone to play for a few minutes at a time, e.g. while waiting for some event to start, for a phone call to come in, or for a train, bus, or subway to arrive. · In portrait mode, the status bar occupies 32 pixels of space. This means that a game with a back buffer of 480x800 will be scaled down to occupy approximately 461x768 screen pixels. Setting the back buffer to 480x768 (or some resolution with the same 0.625 aspect ratio) will avoid this scaling. · In landscape mode, the status bar occupies 72 pixels of space. This means that a game with a back buffer of 800x480 will be scaled down to occupy approximately 728x437 screen pixels. Setting the back buffer to 728x480 (or some resolution with the same 1.51666667 aspect ratio) will avoid this scaling. Input · Touch input is scaled with screen size. · So if your back buffer is 600x360, a tap in the bottom right corner will come in as (599,359). You don’t need to do anything special to get this automatic scaling of touch behavior. · If you do not use full area of the screen, any touch input outside the area you use will still register as a touch input. For example, if you set a portrait resolution of 240x240, it would be scaled up to occupy a 480x480 area, centered in the screen. If you touch anywhere above this area, you will get a touch input of (X,0) where X is a number from 0 to 239 (in accordance with your 240 pixel wide back buffer). Any touch below this area will give a touch input of (X,239). · If you keep the status bar visible, touches within its area will not be passed to your game. · In general, a screen measurement is the diagonal. So a 3.5” screen is 3.5” long from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. With an aspect ratio of 0.6 (480/800 = 0.6), this means that a phone with a 3.5” screen is only approximately 1.8” wide by 3” tall. So there are approximately 267 pixels in an inch on a 3.5” screen. · Again, this time in metric! 3.5 inches is approximately 8.89 cm. So an 8.89 cm screen is 8.89 cm long from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. With an aspect ratio of 0.6, this means that a phone with an 8.89 cm screen is only approximately 4.57 cm wide by 7.62 cm tall. So there are approximately 105 pixels in a centimeter on an 8.89 cm screen. · Think about the size of your finger tip. If you do not have large hands, think about the size of the fingertip of someone with large hands. Consider that when you are sizing your touch input. Especially consider that when you are spacing two touch targets near one another. You need to judge it for yourself, but items that are next to each other and are each 100x100 should be fine when it comes to selecting items individually. Smaller targets than that are ok provided that you leave space between them. · You want your users to have a pleasant experience. Making touch controls too small or too close to one another will make them nervous about whether they will touch the right target. Take this into account when you plan out your game initially. If possible, do some quick size mockups on an actual phone using colored rectangles that you position and size where you plan to have your game controls. Adjust as necessary. · People do not have transparent hands! Nor are their hands the size of a mouse pointer icon. Consider leaving a dedicated space for input rather than forcing the user to cover up to one-third of the screen with a finger just to play the game. · Another benefit of designing your controls to use a dedicated area is that you’re less likely to have players moving their finger(s) so frantically that they accidentally hit the back button, start button, or search button (many phones have one or more of these on the screen itself – it’s easy to hit one by accident and really annoying if you hit, e.g., the search button and then quickly tap back only to find out that the game didn’t save your progress such that you just wasted all the time you spent playing). · People do not like doing somersaults in order to move something forward with accelerometer-based controls. Test your accelerometer-based controls extensively and get a lot of feedback. Very well-known games from noted publishers have created really bad accelerometer controls and been virtually unplayable as a result. Also be wary of exceptions and other possible failures that the documentation warns about. · When done properly, the accelerometer can add a nice touch to your game (see, e.g. ilomilo where the accelerometer was used to move the background; it added a nice touch without frustrating the user; I also think CarniVale does direct accelerometer controls very well). However, if done poorly, it will make your game an abomination unto the Marketplace. Days, weeks, perhaps even months of development time that you will never get back. I won’t name names; you can search the marketplace for games with terrible reviews and you’ll find them. Graphics · The maximum frame rate is 30 frames per second. This was set as a compromise between battery life and quality. · At least one model of phone is known to have a screen refresh rate that is between 59 and 60 hertz. Because of this, using a fixed time step with a target frame rate of 30 will cause a slight internal delay to build up as the framework is forced to wait slightly for the next refresh. Eventually the delay will get to the point where a draw is skipped in order to recover from the delay. (See Nick's comment below for clarification.) · To deal with that delay, you can either stay with a fixed time step and set the frame rate slightly lower or else you can go to a variable time step and make sure to adjust all of your update data (e.g. player movement distance) to take into account the elapsed time from the last update. A variable time step makes your update logic slightly more complicated but will avoid frame skips entirely. · Currently there are no custom shaders. This might change in the future (there is no hardware limitation preventing it; it simply wasn’t a feature that could be implemented in the time available before launch). · There are five built-in shaders. You can create a lot of nice effects with the built-in shaders. · There is more power on the CPU than there is on the GPU so things you might typically off-load to the GPU will instead make sense to do on the CPU side. · This is a phone. It is not a PC. It is not an Xbox 360. The emulator runs on a PC and uses the full power of your PC. It is very good for testing your code for bugs and doing early prototyping and layout. You should not use it to measure performance. Use actual phone hardware instead. · There are many phone models, each of which has slightly different performance levels for I/O, screen blitting, CPU performance, etc. Do not take your game right to the performance limit on your phone since for some other phones you might be crossing their limits and leaving players with a bad experience. Leave a cushion to account for hardware differences. · Smaller screened phones will have slightly more dots per inch (dpi). Larger screened phones will have slightly less. Either way, the dpi will be much higher than the typical 96 found on most computer screens. Make sure that whoever is doing art for your game takes this into account. · Screens are only required to have 16 bit color (65,536 colors). This is common among smart phones. Using gradients on a 16 bit display can produce an ugly artifact known as banding. Banding is when, rather than a smooth transition from one color to another, you instead see distinct lines. Be careful to avoid this when possible. Banding can be avoided through careful art creation. Its effects can be minimized and even unnoticeable when the texture in question is always moving. You should be careful not to rely on “looks good on my phone” since some phones do have 32-bit displays and thus you’ll find yourself wondering why you’re getting bad reviews that complain about the graphics. Avoid gradients; if you can’t, make sure they are 16-bit safe. Audio · Never rely on sounds as your sole signal to the player that something is happening in the game. They might have the sound off. They might be playing somewhere loud. Etc. · You have to provide controls to disable sound & music. These should be separate. · On at least one model of phone, the volume control API currently has no effect. Players can adjust sound with their hardware volume buttons, but in game selectors simply won’t work. As such, it may not be worth the effort of providing anything beyond on/off switches for sound and music. · MediaPlayer.GameHasControl will return true when a game is hooked up to a PC running Zune. When Zune is running, any attempts to do anything (beyond check GameHasControl) with MediaPlayer will cause an exception to be thrown. If this exception is thrown, catch it and disable music. Exceptions take time to propagate; you don’t want one popping up in every single run of your game’s Update method. · Remember that players can already be listening to music or using the FM radio. In this case GameHasControl will be false and you should handle this appropriately. You can, alternately, ask the player for permission to stop their current music and play your music instead, but the (current) requirement that you restore their music when done is very hard (if not impossible) to deal with. · You can still play sound effects even when the game doesn’t have control of the music, but don’t think this is a backdoor to playing music. Your game will fail certification if your “sound effect” seems to be more like music in scope and length.

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  • Why is Java EE 6 better than Spring ?

    - by arungupta
    Java EE 6 was released over 2 years ago and now there are 14 compliant application servers. In all my talks around the world, a question that is frequently asked is Why should I use Java EE 6 instead of Spring ? There are already several blogs covering that topic: Java EE wins over Spring by Bill Burke Why will I use Java EE instead of Spring in new Enterprise Java projects in 2012 ? by Kai Waehner (more discussion on TSS) Spring to Java EE migration (Part 1 and 2, 3 and 4 coming as well) by David Heffelfinger Spring to Java EE - A Migration Experience by Lincoln Baxter Migrating Spring to Java EE 6 by Bert Ertman and Paul Bakker at NLJUG Moving from Spring to Java EE 6 - The Age of Frameworks is Over at TSS Java EE vs Spring Shootout by Rohit Kelapure and Reza Rehman at JavaOne 2011 Java EE 6 and the Ewoks by Murat Yener Definite excuse to avoid Spring forever - Bert Ertman and Arun Gupta I will try to share my perspective in this blog. First of all, I'd like to start with a note: Thank you Spring framework for filling the interim gap and providing functionality that is now included in the mainstream Java EE 6 application servers. The Java EE platform has evolved over the years learning from frameworks like Spring and provides all the functionality to build an enterprise application. Thank you very much Spring framework! While Spring was revolutionary in its time and is still very popular and quite main stream in the same way Struts was circa 2003, it really is last generation's framework - some people are even calling it legacy. However my theory is "code is king". So my approach is to build/take a simple Hello World CRUD application in Java EE 6 and Spring and compare the deployable artifacts. I started looking at the official tutorial Developing a Spring Framework MVC Application Step-by-Step but it is using the older version 2.5. I wasn't able to find any updated version in the current 3.1 release. Next, I downloaded Spring Tool Suite and thought that would provide some template samples to get started. A least a quick search did not show any handy tutorials - either video or text-based. So I searched and found a link to their SVN repository at src.springframework.org/svn/spring-samples/. I tried the "mvc-basic" sample and the generated WAR file was 4.43 MB. While it was named a "basic" sample it seemed to come with 19 different libraries bundled but it was what I could find: ./WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-validator-4.1.0.Final.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jcl-over-slf4j-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/joda-time-1.6.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/joda-time-jsptags-1.0.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-1.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.16.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/validation-api-1.0.0.GA.jar And it is not even using any database! The app deployed fine on GlassFish 3.1.2 but the "@Controller Example" link did not work as it was missing the context root. With a bit of tweaking I could deploy the application and assume that the account got created because no error was displayed in the browser or server log. Next I generated the WAR for "mvc-ajax" and the 5.1 MB WAR had 20 JARs (1 removed, 2 added): ./WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-validator-4.1.0.Final.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jackson-core-asl-1.6.4.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jackson-mapper-asl-1.6.4.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jcl-over-slf4j-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/joda-time-1.6.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-1.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.16.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/validation-api-1.0.0.GA.jar 2 more JARs for just doing Ajax. Anyway, deploying this application gave the following error: Caused by: java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.codehaus.jackson.map.SerializationConfig.<init>(Lorg/codehaus/jackson/map/ClassIntrospector;Lorg/codehaus/jackson/map/AnnotationIntrospector;Lorg/codehaus/jackson/map/introspect/VisibilityChecker;Lorg/codehaus/jackson/map/jsontype/SubtypeResolver;)V    at org.springframework.samples.mvc.ajax.json.ConversionServiceAwareObjectMapper.<init>(ConversionServiceAwareObjectMapper.java:20)    at org.springframework.samples.mvc.ajax.json.JacksonConversionServiceConfigurer.postProcessAfterInitialization(JacksonConversionServiceConfigurer.java:40)    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.applyBeanPostProcessorsAfterInitialization(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:407) Seems like some incorrect repos in the "pom.xml". Next one is "mvc-showcase" and the 6.49 MB WAR now has 28 JARs as shown below: ./WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/aspectjrt-1.6.10.jar./WEB-INF/lib/commons-fileupload-1.2.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/commons-io-2.0.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/el-api-2.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-validator-4.1.0.Final.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jackson-core-asl-1.8.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jackson-mapper-asl-1.8.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/javax.inject-1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jcl-over-slf4j-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jdom-1.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/joda-time-1.6.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-api-1.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-impl-1.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.16.jar./WEB-INF/lib/rome-1.0.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/validation-api-1.0.0.GA.jar The app at least deployed and showed results this time. But still no database! Next I tried building "jpetstore" and got the error: [ERROR] Failed to execute goal on project org.springframework.samples.jpetstore:Could not resolve dependencies for project org.springframework.samples:org.springframework.samples.jpetstore:war:1.0.0-SNAPSHOT: Failed to collect dependencies for [commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload:jar:1.2.1 (compile), org.apache.struts:com.springsource.org.apache.struts:jar:1.2.9 (compile), javax.xml.rpc:com.springsource.javax.xml.rpc:jar:1.1.0 (compile), org.apache.commons:com.springsource.org.apache.commons.dbcp:jar:1.2.2.osgi (compile), commons-io:commons-io:jar:1.3.2 (compile), hsqldb:hsqldb:jar:1.8.0.7 (compile), org.apache.tiles:tiles-core:jar:2.2.0 (compile), org.apache.tiles:tiles-jsp:jar:2.2.0 (compile), org.tuckey:urlrewritefilter:jar:3.1.0 (compile), org.springframework:spring-webmvc:jar:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT (compile), org.springframework:spring-orm:jar:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT (compile), org.springframework:spring-context-support:jar:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT (compile), org.springframework.webflow:spring-js:jar:2.0.7.RELEASE (compile), org.apache.ibatis:com.springsource.com.ibatis:jar:2.3.4.726 (runtime), com.caucho:com.springsource.com.caucho:jar:3.2.1 (compile), org.apache.axis:com.springsource.org.apache.axis:jar:1.4.0 (compile), javax.wsdl:com.springsource.javax.wsdl:jar:1.6.1 (compile), javax.servlet:jstl:jar:1.2 (runtime), org.aspectj:aspectjweaver:jar:1.6.5 (compile), javax.servlet:servlet-api:jar:2.5 (provided), javax.servlet.jsp:jsp-api:jar:2.1 (provided), junit:junit:jar:4.6 (test)]: Failed to read artifact descriptor for org.springframework:spring-webmvc:jar:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT: Could not transfer artifact org.springframework:spring-webmvc:pom:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT from/to JBoss repository (http://repository.jboss.com/maven2): Access denied to: http://repository.jboss.com/maven2/org/springframework/spring-webmvc/3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT/spring-webmvc-3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT.pom It appears the sample is broken - maybe I was pulling from the wrong repository - would be great if someone were to point me at a good target to use here. With a 50% hit on samples in this repository, I started searching through numerous blogs, most of which have either outdated information (using XML-heavy Spring 2.5), some piece of configuration (which is a typical "feature" of Spring) is missing, or too much complexity in the sample. I finally found this blog that worked like a charm. This blog creates a trivial Spring MVC 3 application using Hibernate and MySQL. This application performs CRUD operations on a single table in a database using typical Spring technologies.  I downloaded the sample code from the blog, deployed it on GlassFish 3.1.2 and could CRUD the "person" entity. The source code for this application can be downloaded here. More details on the application statistics below. And then I built a similar CRUD application in Java EE 6 using NetBeans wizards in a couple of minutes. The source code for the application can be downloaded here and the WAR here. The Spring Source Tool Suite may also offer similar wizard-driven capabilities but this blog focus primarily on comparing the runtimes. The lack of STS tutorials was slightly disappointing as well. NetBeans however has tons of text-based and video tutorials and tons of material even by the community. One more bit on the download size of tools bundle ... NetBeans 7.1.1 "All" is 211 MB (which includes GlassFish and Tomcat) Spring Tool Suite  2.9.0 is 347 MB (~ 65% bigger) This blog is not about the tooling comparison so back to the Java EE 6 version of the application .... In order to run the Java EE version on GlassFish, copy the MySQL Connector/J to glassfish3/glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/ext directory and create a JDBC connection pool and JDBC resource as: ./bin/asadmin create-jdbc-connection-pool --datasourceclassname \\ com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlDataSource --restype \\ javax.sql.DataSource --property \\ portNumber=3306:user=mysql:password=mysql:databaseName=mydatabase \\ myConnectionPool ./bin/asadmin create-jdbc-resource --connectionpoolid myConnectionPool jdbc/myDataSource I generated WARs for the two projects and the table below highlights some differences between them: Java EE 6 Spring WAR File Size 0.021030 MB 10.87 MB (~516x) Number of files 20 53 (> 2.5x) Bundled libraries 0 36 Total size of libraries 0 12.1 MB XML files 3 5 LoC in XML files 50 (11 + 15 + 24) 129 (27 + 46 + 16 + 11 + 19) (~ 2.5x) Total .properties files 1 Bundle.properties 2 spring.properties, log4j.properties Cold Deploy 5,339 ms 11,724 ms Second Deploy 481 ms 6,261 ms Third Deploy 528 ms 5,484 ms Fourth Deploy 484 ms 5,576 ms Runtime memory ~73 MB ~101 MB Some points worth highlighting from the table ... 516x WAR file, 10x deployment time - With 12.1 MB of libraries (for a very basic application) bundled in your application, the WAR file size and the deployment time will naturally go higher. The WAR file for Spring-based application is 516x bigger and the deployment time is double during the first deployment and ~ 10x during subsequent deployments. The Java EE 6 application is fully portable and will run on any Java EE 6 compliant application server. 36 libraries in the WAR - There are 14 Java EE 6 compliant application servers today. Each of those servers provide all the functionality like transactions, dependency injection, security, persistence, etc typically required of an enterprise or web application. There is no need to bundle 36 libraries worth 12.1 MB for a trivial CRUD application. These 14 compliant application servers provide all the functionality baked in. Now you can also deploy these libraries in the container but then you don't get the "portability" offered by Spring in that case. Does your typical Spring deployment actually do that ? 3x LoC in XML - The number of XML files is about 1.6x and the LoC is ~ 2.5x. So much XML seems circa 2003 when the Java language had no annotations. The XML files can be further reduced, e.g. faces-config.xml can be replaced without providing i18n, but I just want to compare stock applications. Memory usage - Both the applications were deployed on default GlassFish 3.1.2 installation and any additional memory consumed as part of deployment/access was attributed to the application. This is by no means scientific but at least provides an initial ballpark. This area definitely needs more investigation. Another table that compares typical Java EE 6 compliant application servers and the custom-stack created for a Spring application ... Java EE 6 Spring Web Container ? 53 MB (tcServer 2.6.3 Developer Edition) Security ? 12 MB (Spring Security 3.1.0) Persistence ? 6.3 MB (Hibernate 4.1.0, required) Dependency Injection ? 5.3 MB (Framework) Web Services ? 796 KB (Spring WS 2.0.4) Messaging ? 3.4 MB (RabbitMQ Server 2.7.1) 936 KB (Java client 936) OSGi ? 1.3 MB (Spring OSGi 1.2.1) GlassFish and WebLogic (starting at 33 MB) 83.3 MB There are differentiating factors on both the stacks. But most of the functionality like security, persistence, and dependency injection is baked in a Java EE 6 compliant application server but needs to be individually managed and patched for a Spring application. This very quickly leads to a "stack explosion". The Java EE 6 servers are tested extensively on a variety of platforms in different combinations whereas a Spring application developer is responsible for testing with different JDKs, Operating Systems, Versions, Patches, etc. Oracle has both the leading OSS lightweight server with GlassFish and the leading enterprise Java server with WebLogic Server, both Java EE 6 and both with lightweight deployment options. The Web Container offered as part of a Java EE 6 application server not only deploys your enterprise Java applications but also provide operational management, diagnostics, and mission-critical capabilities required by your applications. The Java EE 6 platform also introduced the Web Profile which is a subset of the specifications from the entire platform. It is targeted at developers of modern web applications offering a reasonably complete stack, composed of standard APIs, and is capable out-of-the-box of addressing the needs of a large class of Web applications. As your applications grow, the stack can grow to the full Java EE 6 platform. The GlassFish Server Web Profile starting at 33MB (smaller than just the non-standard tcServer) provides most of the functionality typically required by a web application. WebLogic provides battle-tested functionality for a high throughput, low latency, and enterprise grade web application. No individual managing or patching, all tested and commercially supported for you! Note that VMWare does have a server, tcServer, but it is non-standard and not even certified to the level of the standard Web Profile most customers expect these days. Customers who choose this risk proprietary lock-in since VMWare does not seem to want to formally certify with either Java EE 6 Enterprise Platform or with Java EE 6 Web Profile but of course it would be great if they were to join the community and help their customers reduce the risk of deploying on VMWare software. Some more points to help you decide choose between Java EE 6 and Spring ... Freedom to choose container - There are 14 Java EE 6 compliant application servers today, with a variety of open source and commercial offerings. A Java EE 6 application can be deployed on any of those containers. So if you deployed your application on GlassFish today and would like to scale up with your demands then you can deploy the same application to WebLogic. And because of the portability of a Java EE 6 application, you can even take it a different vendor altogether. Spring requires a runtime which could be any of these app servers as well. But why use Spring when all the required functionality is already baked into the application server itself ? Spring also has a different definition of portability where they claim to bundle all the libraries in the WAR file and move to any application server. But we saw earlier how bloated that archive could be. The equivalent features in Spring runtime offerings (mainly tcServer) are not all open source, not as mature, and often require manual assembly.  Vendor choice - The Java EE 6 platform is created using the Java Community Process where all the big players like Oracle, IBM, RedHat, and Apache are conritbuting to make the platform successful. Each application server provides the basic Java EE 6 platform compliance and has its own competitive offerings. This allows you to choose an application server for deploying your Java EE 6 applications. If you are not happy with the support or feature of one vendor then you can move your application to a different vendor because of the portability promise offered by the platform. Spring is a set of products from a single company, one price book, one support organization, one sustaining organization, one sales organization, etc. If any of those cause a customer headache, where do you go ? Java EE, backed by multiple vendors, is a safer bet for those that are risk averse. Production support - With Spring, typically you need to get support from two vendors - VMWare and the container provider. With Java EE 6, all of this is typically provided by one vendor. For example, Oracle offers commercial support from systems, operating systems, JDK, application server, and applications on top of them. VMWare certainly offers complete production support but do you really want to put all your eggs in one basket ? Do you really use tcServer ? ;-) Maintainability - With Spring, you are likely building your own distribution with multiple JAR files, integrating, patching, versioning, etc of all those components. Spring's claim is that multiple JAR files allow you to go à la carte and pick the latest versions of different components. But who is responsible for testing whether all these versions work together ? Yep, you got it, its YOU! If something does not work, who patches and maintains the JARs ? Of course, you! Commercial support for such a configuration ? On your own! The Java EE application servers manage all of this for you and provide a well-tested and commercially supported bundle. While it is always good to realize that there is something new and improved that updates and replaces older frameworks like Spring, the good news is not only does a Java EE 6 container offer what is described here, most also will let you deploy and run your Spring applications on them while you go through an upgrade to a more modern architecture. End result, you get the best of both worlds - keeping your legacy investment but moving to a more agile, lightweight world of Java EE 6. A message to the Spring lovers ... The complexity in J2EE 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4 led to the genesis of Spring but that was in 2004. This is 2012 and the name has changed to "Java EE 6" :-) There are tons of improvements in the Java EE platform to make it easy-to-use and powerful. Some examples: Adding @Stateless on a POJO makes it an EJB EJBs can be packaged in a WAR with no special packaging or deployment descriptors "web.xml" and "faces-config.xml" are optional in most of the common cases Typesafe dependency injection is now part of the Java EE platform Add @Path on a POJO allows you to publish it as a RESTful resource EJBs can be used as backing beans for Facelets-driven JSF pages providing full MVC Java EE 6 WARs are known to be kilobytes in size and deployed in milliseconds Tons of other simplifications in the platform and application servers So if you moved away from J2EE to Spring many years ago and have not looked at Java EE 6 (which has been out since Dec 2009) then you should definitely try it out. Just be at least aware of what other alternatives are available instead of restricting yourself to one stack. Here are some workshops and screencasts worth trying: screencast #37 shows how to build an end-to-end application using NetBeans screencast #36 builds the same application using Eclipse javaee-lab-feb2012.pdf is a 3-4 hours self-paced hands-on workshop that guides you to build a comprehensive Java EE 6 application using NetBeans Each city generally has a "spring cleanup" program every year. It allows you to clean up the mess from your house. For your software projects, you don't need to wait for an annual event, just get started and reduce the technical debt now! Move away from your legacy Spring-based applications to a lighter and more modern approach of building enterprise Java applications using Java EE 6. Watch this beautiful presentation that explains how to migrate from Spring -> Java EE 6: List of files in the Java EE 6 project: ./index.xhtml./META-INF./person./person/Create.xhtml./person/Edit.xhtml./person/List.xhtml./person/View.xhtml./resources./resources/css./resources/css/jsfcrud.css./template.xhtml./WEB-INF./WEB-INF/classes./WEB-INF/classes/Bundle.properties./WEB-INF/classes/META-INF./WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/persistence.xml./WEB-INF/classes/org./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/AbstractFacade.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/Person.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/Person_.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/PersonController$1.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/PersonController$PersonControllerConverter.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/PersonController.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/PersonFacade.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/util./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/util/JsfUtil.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/util/PaginationHelper.class./WEB-INF/faces-config.xml./WEB-INF/web.xml List of files in the Spring 3.x project: ./META-INF ./META-INF/MANIFEST.MF./WEB-INF./WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml./WEB-INF/classes./WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties./WEB-INF/classes/org./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/controller ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/controller/MainController.class ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/domain ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/domain/Person.class ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/service ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/service/PersonService.class ./WEB-INF/hibernate-context.xml ./WEB-INF/hibernate.cfg.xml ./WEB-INF/jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/addedpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/addpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/deletedpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/editedpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/editpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/personspage.jsp ./WEB-INF/lib ./WEB-INF/lib/antlr-2.7.6.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/c3p0-0.9.1.2.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/cglib-nodep-2.2.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/commons-beanutils-1.8.3.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/commons-collections-3.2.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/commons-digester-2.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/commons-logging-1.1.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/dom4j-1.6.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/ejb3-persistence-1.0.2.GA.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-annotations-3.4.0.GA.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-commons-annotations-3.1.0.GA.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-core-3.3.2.GA.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/javassist-3.7.ga.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-1.1.2.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/jta-1.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/junit-4.8.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.14.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/mysql-connector-java-5.1.14.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/persistence-api-1.0.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-jdbc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-orm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-tx-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/standard-1.1.2.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/xml-apis-1.0.b2.jar ./WEB-INF/spring-servlet.xml ./WEB-INF/spring.properties ./WEB-INF/web.xml So, are you excited about Java EE 6 ? Want to get started now ? Here are some resources: Java EE 6 SDK (including runtime, samples, tutorials etc) GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 3.1.2 (Community) Oracle GlassFish Server 3.1.2 (Commercial) Java EE 6 using WebLogic 12c and NetBeans (Video) Java EE 6 with NetBeans and GlassFish (Video) Java EE with Eclipse and GlassFish (Video)

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  • VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE

    - by ScottGu
    Last month we released the Beta of VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1).  You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it.   You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here. Last week I blogged about the new Visual Studio support for IIS Express that we are adding with VS 2010 SP1. In today’s post I’m going to talk about the new VS 2010 SP1 tooling support for SQL CE, and walkthrough some of the cool scenarios it enables.  SQL CE – What is it and why should you care? SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it.  You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine.  No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded.  SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax.  This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE.  This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios.  With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET).  This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments.  Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE.  It is also totally free. Easy Migration to SQL Server SQL CE is an embedded database – which makes it ideal for development, testing, and light-usage scenarios.  For high-volume sites and applications you’ll probably want to migrate your database to use SQL Server Express (which is free), SQL Server or SQL Azure.  These servers enable much better scalability, more development features (including features like Stored Procedures – which aren’t supported with SQL CE), as well as more advanced data management capabilities. We’ll ship migration tools that enable you to optionally take SQL CE databases and easily upgrade them to use SQL Server Express, SQL Server, or SQL Azure.  You will not need to change your code when upgrading a SQL CE database to SQL Server or SQL Azure.  Our goal is to enable you to be able to simply change the database connection string in your web.config file and have your application just work. New Tooling Support for SQL CE in VS 2010 SP1 VS 2010 SP1 includes much improved tooling support for SQL CE, and adds support for using SQL CE within ASP.NET projects for the first time.  With VS 2010 SP1 you can now: Create new SQL CE Databases Edit and Modify SQL CE Database Schema and Indexes Populate SQL CE Databases within Data Use the Entity Framework (EF) designer to create model layers against SQL CE databases Use EF Code First to define model layers in code, then create a SQL CE database from them, and optionally edit the DB with VS Deploy SQL CE databases to remote servers using Web Deploy and optionally convert them to full SQL Server databases You can take advantage of all of the above features from within both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based projects. Download You can enable SQL CE tooling support within VS 2010 by first installing VS 2010 SP1 (beta). Once SP1 is installed, you’ll also then need to install the SQL CE Tools for Visual Studio download.  This is a separate download that enables the SQL CE tooling support for VS 2010 SP1. Walkthrough of Two Scenarios In this blog post I’m going to walkthrough how you can take advantage of SQL CE and VS 2010 SP1 using both an ASP.NET Web Forms and an ASP.NET MVC based application. Specifically, we’ll walkthrough: How to create a SQL CE database using VS 2010 SP1, then use the EF4 visual designers in Visual Studio to construct a model layer from it, and then display and edit the data using an ASP.NET GridView control. How to use an EF Code First approach to define a model layer using POCO classes and then have EF Code-First “auto-create” a SQL CE database for us based on our model classes.  We’ll then look at how we can use the new VS 2010 SP1 support for SQL CE to inspect the database that was created, populate it with data, and later make schema changes to it.  We’ll do all this within the context of an ASP.NET MVC based application. You can follow the two walkthroughs below on your own machine by installing VS 2010 SP1 (beta) and then installing the SQL CE Tools for Visual Studio download (which is a separate download that enables SQL CE tooling support for VS 2010 SP1). Walkthrough 1: Create a SQL CE Database, Create EF Model Classes, Edit the Data with a GridView This first walkthrough will demonstrate how to create and define a SQL CE database within an ASP.NET Web Form application.  We’ll then build an EF model layer for it and use that model layer to enable data editing scenarios with an <asp:GridView> control. Step 1: Create a new ASP.NET Web Forms Project We’ll begin by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET Web Forms project.  We’ll use the “ASP.NET Web Application” project template option so that it has a default UI skin implemented: Step 2: Create a SQL CE Database Right click on the “App_Data” folder within the created project and choose the “Add->New Item” menu command: This will bring up the “Add Item” dialog box.  Select the “SQL Server Compact 4.0 Local Database” item (new in VS 2010 SP1) and name the database file to create “Store.sdf”: Note that SQL CE database files have a .sdf filename extension. Place them within the /App_Data folder of your ASP.NET application to enable easy deployment. When we clicked the “Add” button above a Store.sdf file was added to our project: Step 3: Adding a “Products” Table Double-clicking the “Store.sdf” database file will open it up within the Server Explorer tab.  Since it is a new database there are no tables within it: Right click on the “Tables” icon and choose the “Create Table” menu command to create a new database table.  We’ll name the new table “Products” and add 4 columns to it.  We’ll mark the first column as a primary key (and make it an identify column so that its value will automatically increment with each new row): When we click “ok” our new Products table will be created in the SQL CE database. Step 4: Populate with Data Once our Products table is created it will show up within the Server Explorer.  We can right-click it and choose the “Show Table Data” menu command to edit its data: Let’s add a few sample rows of data to it: Step 5: Create an EF Model Layer We have a SQL CE database with some data in it – let’s now create an EF Model Layer that will provide a way for us to easily query and update data within it. Let’s right-click on our project and choose the “Add->New Item” menu command.  This will bring up the “Add New Item” dialog – select the “ADO.NET Entity Data Model” item within it and name it “Store.edmx” This will add a new Store.edmx item to our solution explorer and launch a wizard that allows us to quickly create an EF model: Select the “Generate From Database” option above and click next.  Choose to use the Store.sdf SQL CE database we just created and then click next again.  The wizard will then ask you what database objects you want to import into your model.  Let’s choose to import the “Products” table we created earlier: When we click the “Finish” button Visual Studio will open up the EF designer.  It will have a Product entity already on it that maps to the “Products” table within our SQL CE database: The VS 2010 SP1 EF designer works exactly the same with SQL CE as it does already with SQL Server and SQL Express.  The Product entity above will be persisted as a class (called “Product”) that we can programmatically work against within our ASP.NET application. Step 6: Compile the Project Before using your model layer you’ll need to build your project.  Do a Ctrl+Shift+B to compile the project, or use the Build->Build Solution menu command. Step 7: Create a Page that Uses our EF Model Layer Let’s now create a simple ASP.NET Web Form that contains a GridView control that we can use to display and edit the our Products data (via the EF Model Layer we just created). Right-click on the project and choose the Add->New Item command.  Select the “Web Form from Master Page” item template, and name the page you create “Products.aspx”.  Base the master page on the “Site.Master” template that is in the root of the project. Add an <h2>Products</h2> heading the new Page, and add an <asp:gridview> control within it: Then click the “Design” tab to switch into design-view. Select the GridView control, and then click the top-right corner to display the GridView’s “Smart Tasks” UI: Choose the “New data source…” drop down option above.  This will bring up the below dialog which allows you to pick your Data Source type: Select the “Entity” data source option – which will allow us to easily connect our GridView to the EF model layer we created earlier.  This will bring up another dialog that allows us to pick our model layer: Select the “StoreEntities” option in the dropdown – which is the EF model layer we created earlier.  Then click next – which will allow us to pick which entity within it we want to bind to: Select the “Products” entity in the above dialog – which indicates that we want to bind against the “Product” entity class we defined earlier.  Then click the “Enable automatic updates” checkbox to ensure that we can both query and update Products.  When you click “Finish” VS will wire-up an <asp:EntityDataSource> to your <asp:GridView> control: The last two steps we’ll do will be to click the “Enable Editing” checkbox on the Grid (which will cause the Grid to display an “Edit” link on each row) and (optionally) use the Auto Format dialog to pick a UI template for the Grid. Step 8: Run the Application Let’s now run our application and browse to the /Products.aspx page that contains our GridView.  When we do so we’ll see a Grid UI of the Products within our SQL CE database. Clicking the “Edit” link for any of the rows will allow us to edit their values: When we click “Update” the GridView will post back the values, persist them through our EF Model Layer, and ultimately save them within our SQL CE database. Learn More about using EF with ASP.NET Web Forms Read this tutorial series on the http://asp.net site to learn more about how to use EF with ASP.NET Web Forms.  The tutorial series uses SQL Express as the database – but the nice thing is that all of the same steps/concepts can also now also be done with SQL CE.   Walkthrough 2: Using EF Code-First with SQL CE and ASP.NET MVC 3 We used a database-first approach with the sample above – where we first created the database, and then used the EF designer to create model classes from the database.  In addition to supporting a designer-based development workflow, EF also enables a more code-centric option which we call “code first development”.  Code-First Development enables a pretty sweet development workflow.  It enables you to: Define your model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes or visual designer required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping Optionally auto-create a database based on the model classes you define – allowing you to start from code first I’ve done several blog posts about EF Code First in the past – I really think it is great.  The good news is that it also works very well with SQL CE. The combination of SQL CE, EF Code First, and the new VS tooling support for SQL CE, enables a pretty nice workflow.  Below is a simple example of how you can use them to build a simple ASP.NET MVC 3 application. Step 1: Create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 Project We’ll begin by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 project.  We’ll use the “Internet Project” template so that it has a default UI skin implemented: Step 2: Use NuGet to Install EFCodeFirst Next we’ll use the NuGet package manager (automatically installed by ASP.NET MVC 3) to add the EFCodeFirst library to our project.  We’ll use the Package Manager command shell to do this.  Bring up the package manager console within Visual Studio by selecting the View->Other Windows->Package Manager Console menu command.  Then type: install-package EFCodeFirst within the package manager console to download the EFCodeFirst library and have it be added to our project: When we enter the above command, the EFCodeFirst library will be downloaded and added to our application: Step 3: Build Some Model Classes Using a “code first” based development workflow, we will create our model classes first (even before we have a database).  We create these model classes by writing code. For this sample, we will right click on the “Models” folder of our project and add the below three classes to our project: The “Dinner” and “RSVP” model classes above are “plain old CLR objects” (aka POCO).  They do not need to derive from any base classes or implement any interfaces, and the properties they expose are standard .NET data-types.  No data persistence attributes or data code has been added to them.   The “NerdDinners” class derives from the DbContext class (which is supplied by EFCodeFirst) and handles the retrieval/persistence of our Dinner and RSVP instances from a database. Step 4: Listing Dinners We’ve written all of the code necessary to implement our model layer for this simple project.  Let’s now expose and implement the URL: /Dinners/Upcoming within our project.  We’ll use it to list upcoming dinners that happen in the future. We’ll do this by right-clicking on our “Controllers” folder and select the “Add->Controller” menu command.  We’ll name the Controller we want to create “DinnersController”.  We’ll then implement an “Upcoming” action method within it that lists upcoming dinners using our model layer above.  We will use a LINQ query to retrieve the data and pass it to a View to render with the code below: We’ll then right-click within our Upcoming method and choose the “Add-View” menu command to create an “Upcoming” view template that displays our dinners.  We’ll use the “empty” template option within the “Add View” dialog and write the below view template using Razor: Step 4: Configure our Project to use a SQL CE Database We have finished writing all of our code – our last step will be to configure a database connection-string to use. We will point our NerdDinners model class to a SQL CE database by adding the below <connectionString> to the web.config file at the top of our project: EF Code First uses a default convention where context classes will look for a connection-string that matches the DbContext class name.  Because we created a “NerdDinners” class earlier, we’ve also named our connectionstring “NerdDinners”.  Above we are configuring our connection-string to use SQL CE as the database, and telling it that our SQL CE database file will live within the \App_Data directory of our ASP.NET project. Step 5: Running our Application Now that we’ve built our application, let’s run it! We’ll browse to the /Dinners/Upcoming URL – doing so will display an empty list of upcoming dinners: You might ask – but where did it query to get the dinners from? We didn’t explicitly create a database?!? One of the cool features that EF Code-First supports is the ability to automatically create a database (based on the schema of our model classes) when the database we point it at doesn’t exist.  Above we configured  EF Code-First to point at a SQL CE database in the \App_Data\ directory of our project.  When we ran our application, EF Code-First saw that the SQL CE database didn’t exist and automatically created it for us. Step 6: Using VS 2010 SP1 to Explore our newly created SQL CE Database Click the “Show all Files” icon within the Solution Explorer and you’ll see the “NerdDinners.sdf” SQL CE database file that was automatically created for us by EF code-first within the \App_Data\ folder: We can optionally right-click on the file and “Include in Project" to add it to our solution: We can also double-click the file (regardless of whether it is added to the project) and VS 2010 SP1 will open it as a database we can edit within the “Server Explorer” tab of the IDE. Below is the view we get when we double-click our NerdDinners.sdf SQL CE file.  We can drill in to see the schema of the Dinners and RSVPs tables in the tree explorer.  Notice how two tables - Dinners and RSVPs – were automatically created for us within our SQL CE database.  This was done by EF Code First when we accessed the NerdDinners class by running our application above: We can right-click on a Table and use the “Show Table Data” command to enter some upcoming dinners in our database: We’ll use the built-in editor that VS 2010 SP1 supports to populate our table data below: And now when we hit “refresh” on the /Dinners/Upcoming URL within our browser we’ll see some upcoming dinners show up: Step 7: Changing our Model and Database Schema Let’s now modify the schema of our model layer and database, and walkthrough one way that the new VS 2010 SP1 Tooling support for SQL CE can make this easier.  With EF Code-First you typically start making database changes by modifying the model classes.  For example, let’s add an additional string property called “UrlLink” to our “Dinner” class.  We’ll use this to point to a link for more information about the event: Now when we re-run our project, and visit the /Dinners/Upcoming URL we’ll see an error thrown: We are seeing this error because EF Code-First automatically created our database, and by default when it does this it adds a table that helps tracks whether the schema of our database is in sync with our model classes.  EF Code-First helpfully throws an error when they become out of sync – making it easier to track down issues at development time that you might otherwise only find (via obscure errors) at runtime.  Note that if you do not want this feature you can turn it off by changing the default conventions of your DbContext class (in this case our NerdDinners class) to not track the schema version. Our model classes and database schema are out of sync in the above example – so how do we fix this?  There are two approaches you can use today: Delete the database and have EF Code First automatically re-create the database based on the new model class schema (losing the data within the existing DB) Modify the schema of the existing database to make it in sync with the model classes (keeping/migrating the data within the existing DB) There are a couple of ways you can do the second approach above.  Below I’m going to show how you can take advantage of the new VS 2010 SP1 Tooling support for SQL CE to use a database schema tool to modify our database structure.  We are also going to be supporting a “migrations” feature with EF in the future that will allow you to automate/script database schema migrations programmatically. Step 8: Modify our SQL CE Database Schema using VS 2010 SP1 The new SQL CE Tooling support within VS 2010 SP1 makes it easy to modify the schema of our existing SQL CE database.  To do this we’ll right-click on our “Dinners” table and choose the “Edit Table Schema” command: This will bring up the below “Edit Table” dialog.  We can rename, change or delete any of the existing columns in our table, or click at the bottom of the column listing and type to add a new column.  Below I’ve added a new “UrlLink” column of type “nvarchar” (since our property is a string): When we click ok our database will be updated to have the new column and our schema will now match our model classes. Because we are manually modifying our database schema, there is one additional step we need to take to let EF Code-First know that the database schema is in sync with our model classes.  As i mentioned earlier, when a database is automatically created by EF Code-First it adds a “EdmMetadata” table to the database to track schema versions (and hash our model classes against them to detect mismatches between our model classes and the database schema): Since we are manually updating and maintaining our database schema, we don’t need this table – and can just delete it: This will leave us with just the two tables that correspond to our model classes: And now when we re-run our /Dinners/Upcoming URL it will display the dinners correctly: One last touch we could do would be to update our view to check for the new UrlLink property and render a <a> link to it if an event has one: And now when we refresh our /Dinners/Upcoming we will see hyperlinks for the events that have a UrlLink stored in the database: Summary SQL CE provides a free, embedded, database engine that you can use to easily enable database storage.  With SQL CE 4 you can now take advantage of it within ASP.NET projects and applications (both Web Forms and MVC). VS 2010 SP1 provides tooling support that enables you to easily create, edit and modify SQL CE databases – as well as use the standard EF designer against them.  This allows you to re-use your existing skills and data knowledge while taking advantage of an embedded database option.  This is useful both for small applications (where you don’t need the scalability of a full SQL Server), as well as for development and testing scenarios – where you want to be able to rapidly develop/test your application without having a full database instance.  SQL CE makes it easy to later migrate your data to a full SQL Server or SQL Azure instance if you want to – without having to change any code in your application.  All we would need to change in the above two scenarios is the <connectionString> value within the web.config file in order to have our code run against a full SQL Server.  This provides the flexibility to scale up your application starting from a small embedded database solution as needed. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • Top things web developers should know about the Visual Studio 2013 release

    - by Jon Galloway
    ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesSummary for lazy readers: Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download on the Visual Studio site and on MSDN subscriber downloads) Visual Studio 2013 installs side by side with Visual Studio 2012 and supports round-tripping between Visual Studio versions, so you can try it out without committing to a switch Visual Studio 2013 ships with the new version of ASP.NET, which includes ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Web API 2, Razor 3, Entity Framework 6 and SignalR 2.0 The new releases ASP.NET focuses on One ASP.NET, so core features and web tools work the same across the platform (e.g. adding ASP.NET MVC controllers to a Web Forms application) New core features include new templates based on Bootstrap, a new scaffolding system, and a new identity system Visual Studio 2013 is an incredible editor for web files, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Markdown, LESS, Coffeescript, Handlebars, Angular, Ember, Knockdown, etc. Top links: Visual Studio 2013 content on the ASP.NET site are in the standard new releases area: http://www.asp.net/vnext ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release Notes Short intro videos on the new Visual Studio web editor features from Scott Hanselman and Mads Kristensen Announcing release of ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 post on the official .NET Web Development and Tools Blog Scott Guthrie's post: Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework Okay, for those of you who are still with me, let's dig in a bit. Quick web dev notes on downloading and installing Visual Studio 2013 I found Visual Studio 2013 to be a pretty fast install. According to Brian Harry's release post, installing over pre-release versions of Visual Studio is supported.  I've installed the release version over pre-release versions, and it worked fine. If you're only going to be doing web development, you can speed up the install if you just select Web Developer tools. Of course, as a good Microsoft employee, I'll mention that you might also want to install some of those other features, like the Store apps for Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, but they do download and install a lot of other stuff (e.g. the Windows Phone SDK sets up Hyper-V and downloads several GB's of VM's). So if you're planning just to do web development for now, you can pick just the Web Developer Tools and install the other stuff later. If you've got a fast internet connection, I recommend using the web installer instead of downloading the ISO. The ISO includes all the features, whereas the web installer just downloads what you're installing. Visual Studio 2013 development settings and color theme When you start up Visual Studio, it'll prompt you to pick some defaults. These are totally up to you -whatever suits your development style - and you can change them later. As I said, these are completely up to you. I recommend either the Web Development or Web Development (Code Only) settings. The only real difference is that Code Only hides the toolbars, and you can switch between them using Tools / Import and Export Settings / Reset. Web Development settings Web Development (code only) settings Usually I've just gone with Web Development (code only) in the past because I just want to focus on the code, although the Standard toolbar does make it easier to switch default web browsers. More on that later. Color theme Sigh. Okay, everyone's got their favorite colors. I alternate between Light and Dark depending on my mood, and I personally like how the low contrast on the window chrome in those themes puts the emphasis on my code rather than the tabs and toolbars. I know some people got pretty worked up over that, though, and wanted the blue theme back. I personally don't like it - it reminds me of ancient versions of Visual Studio that I don't want to think about anymore. So here's the thing: if you install Visual Studio Ultimate, it defaults to Blue. The other versions default to Light. If you use Blue, I won't criticize you - out loud, that is. You can change themes really easily - either Tools / Options / Environment / General, or the smart way: ctrl+q for quick launch, then type Theme and hit enter. Signing in During the first run, you'll be prompted to sign in. You don't have to - you can click the "Not now, maybe later" link at the bottom of that dialog. I recommend signing in, though. It's not hooked in with licensing or tracking the kind of code you write to sell you components. It is doing good things, like  syncing your Visual Studio settings between computers. More about that here. So, you don't have to, but I sure do. Overview of shiny new things in ASP.NET land There are a lot of good new things in ASP.NET. I'll list some of my favorite here, but you can read more on the ASP.NET site. One ASP.NET You've heard us talk about this for a while. The idea is that options are good, but choice can be a burden. When you start a new ASP.NET project, why should you have to make a tough decision - with long-term consequences - about how your application will work? If you want to use ASP.NET Web Forms, but have the option of adding in ASP.NET MVC later, why should that be hard? It's all ASP.NET, right? Ideally, you'd just decide that you want to use ASP.NET to build sites and services, and you could use the appropriate tools (the green blocks below) as you needed them. So, here it is. When you create a new ASP.NET application, you just create an ASP.NET application. Next, you can pick from some templates to get you started... but these are different. They're not "painful decision" templates, they're just some starting pieces. And, most importantly, you can mix and match. I can pick a "mostly" Web Forms template, but include MVC and Web API folders and core references. If you've tried to mix and match in the past, you're probably aware that it was possible, but not pleasant. ASP.NET MVC project files contained special project type GUIDs, so you'd only get controller scaffolding support in a Web Forms project if you manually edited the csproj file. Features in one stack didn't work in others. Project templates were painful choices. That's no longer the case. Hooray! I just did a demo in a presentation last week where I created a new Web Forms + MVC + Web API site, built a model, scaffolded MVC and Web API controllers with EF Code First, add data in the MVC view, viewed it in Web API, then added a GridView to the Web Forms Default.aspx page and bound it to the Model. In about 5 minutes. Sure, it's a simple example, but it's great to be able to share code and features across the whole ASP.NET family. Authentication In the past, authentication was built into the templates. So, for instance, there was an ASP.NET MVC 4 Intranet Project template which created a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application that was preconfigured for Windows Authentication. All of that authentication stuff was built into each template, so they varied between the stacks, and you couldn't reuse them. You didn't see a lot of changes to the authentication options, since they required big changes to a bunch of project templates. Now, the new project dialog includes a common authentication experience. When you hit the Change Authentication button, you get some common options that work the same way regardless of the template or reference settings you've made. These options work on all ASP.NET frameworks, and all hosting environments (IIS, IIS Express, or OWIN for self-host) The default is Individual User Accounts: This is the standard "create a local account, using username / password or OAuth" thing; however, it's all built on the new Identity system. More on that in a second. The one setting that has some configuration to it is Organizational Accounts, which lets you configure authentication using Active Directory, Windows Azure Active Directory, or Office 365. Identity There's a new identity system. We've taken the best parts of the previous ASP.NET Membership and Simple Identity systems, rolled in a lot of feedback and made big enhancements to support important developer concerns like unit testing and extensiblity. I've written long posts about ASP.NET identity, and I'll do it again. Soon. This is not that post. The short version is that I think we've finally got just the right Identity system. Some of my favorite features: There are simple, sensible defaults that work well - you can File / New / Run / Register / Login, and everything works. It supports standard username / password as well as external authentication (OAuth, etc.). It's easy to customize without having to re-implement an entire provider. It's built using pluggable pieces, rather than one large monolithic system. It's built using interfaces like IUser and IRole that allow for unit testing, dependency injection, etc. You can easily add user profile data (e.g. URL, twitter handle, birthday). You just add properties to your ApplicationUser model and they'll automatically be persisted. Complete control over how the identity data is persisted. By default, everything works with Entity Framework Code First, but it's built to support changes from small (modify the schema) to big (use another ORM, store your data in a document database or in the cloud or in XML or in the EXIF data of your desktop background or whatever). It's configured via OWIN. More on OWIN and Katana later, but the fact that it's built using OWIN means it's portable. You can find out more in the Authentication and Identity section of the ASP.NET site (and lots more content will be going up there soon). New Bootstrap based project templates The new project templates are built using Bootstrap 3. Bootstrap (formerly Twitter Bootstrap) is a front-end framework that brings a lot of nice benefits: It's responsive, so your projects will automatically scale to device width using CSS media queries. For example, menus are full size on a desktop browser, but on narrower screens you automatically get a mobile-friendly menu. The built-in Bootstrap styles make your standard page elements (headers, footers, buttons, form inputs, tables etc.) look nice and modern. Bootstrap is themeable, so you can reskin your whole site by dropping in a new Bootstrap theme. Since Bootstrap is pretty popular across the web development community, this gives you a large and rapidly growing variety of templates (free and paid) to choose from. Bootstrap also includes a lot of very useful things: components (like progress bars and badges), useful glyphicons, and some jQuery plugins for tooltips, dropdowns, carousels, etc.). Here's a look at how the responsive part works. When the page is full screen, the menu and header are optimized for a wide screen display: When I shrink the page down (this is all based on page width, not useragent sniffing) the menu turns into a nice mobile-friendly dropdown: For a quick example, I grabbed a new free theme off bootswatch.com. For simple themes, you just need to download the boostrap.css file and replace the /content/bootstrap.css file in your project. Now when I refresh the page, I've got a new theme: Scaffolding The big change in scaffolding is that it's one system that works across ASP.NET. You can create a new Empty Web project or Web Forms project and you'll get the Scaffold context menus. For release, we've got MVC 5 and Web API 2 controllers. We had a preview of Web Forms scaffolding in the preview releases, but they weren't fully baked for RTM. Look for them in a future update, expected pretty soon. This scaffolding system wasn't just changed to work across the ASP.NET frameworks, it's also built to enable future extensibility. That's not in this release, but should also hopefully be out soon. Project Readme page This is a small thing, but I really like it. When you create a new project, you get a Project_Readme.html page that's added to the root of your project and opens in the Visual Studio built-in browser. I love it. A long time ago, when you created a new project we just dumped it on you and left you scratching your head about what to do next. Not ideal. Then we started adding a bunch of Getting Started information to the new project templates. That told you what to do next, but you had to delete all of that stuff out of your website. It doesn't belong there. Not ideal. This is a simple HTML file that's not integrated into your project code at all. You can delete it if you want. But, it shows a lot of helpful links that are current for the project you just created. In the future, if we add new wacky project types, they can create readme docs with specific information on how to do appropriately wacky things. Side note: I really like that they used the internal browser in Visual Studio to show this content rather than popping open an HTML page in the default browser. I hate that. It's annoying. If you're doing that, I hope you'll stop. What if some unnamed person has 40 or 90 tabs saved in their browser session? When you pop open your "Thanks for installing my Visual Studio extension!" page, all eleventy billion tabs start up and I wish I'd never installed your thing. Be like these guys and pop stuff Visual Studio specific HTML docs in the Visual Studio browser. ASP.NET MVC 5 The biggest change with ASP.NET MVC 5 is that it's no longer a separate project type. It integrates well with the rest of ASP.NET. In addition to that and the other common features we've already looked at (Bootstrap templates, Identity, authentication), here's what's new for ASP.NET MVC. Attribute routing ASP.NET MVC now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your routes by annotating your actions and controllers. This supports some pretty complex, customized routing scenarios, and it allows you to keep your route information right with your controller actions if you'd like. Here's a controller that includes an action whose method name is Hiding, but I've used AttributeRouting to configure it to /spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo public class SampleController : Controller { [Route("spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo")] public string Hiding() { return "You found me!"; } } I enable that in my RouteConfig.cs, and I can use that in conjunction with my other MVC routes like this: public class RouteConfig { public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes(); routes.MapRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); } } You can read more about Attribute Routing in ASP.NET MVC 5 here. Filter enhancements There are two new additions to filters: Authentication Filters and Filter Overrides. Authentication filters are a new kind of filter in ASP.NET MVC that run prior to authorization filters in the ASP.NET MVC pipeline and allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller, or globally for all controllers. Authentication filters process credentials in the request and provide a corresponding principal. Authentication filters can also add authentication challenges in response to unauthorized requests. Override filters let you change which filters apply to a given action method or controller. Override filters specify a set of filter types that should not be run for a given scope (action or controller). This allows you to configure filters that apply globally but then exclude certain global filters from applying to specific actions or controllers. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 includes a lot of new features. Attribute Routing ASP.NET Web API supports the same attribute routing system that's in ASP.NET MVC 5. You can read more about the Attribute Routing features in Web API in this article. OAuth 2.0 ASP.NET Web API picks up OAuth 2.0 support, using security middleware running on OWIN (discussed below). This is great for features like authenticated Single Page Applications. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API now has full OData support. That required adding in some of the most powerful operators: $select, $expand, $batch and $value. You can read more about OData operator support in this article by Mike Wasson. Lots more There's a huge list of other features, including CORS (cross-origin request sharing), IHttpActionResult, IHttpRequestContext, and more. I think the best overview is in the release notes. OWIN and Katana I've written about OWIN and Katana recently. I'm a big fan. OWIN is the Open Web Interfaces for .NET. It's a spec, like HTML or HTTP, so you can't install OWIN. The benefit of OWIN is that it's a community specification, so anyone who implements it can plug into the ASP.NET stack, either as middleware or as a host. Katana is the Microsoft implementation of OWIN. It leverages OWIN to wire up things like authentication, handlers, modules, IIS hosting, etc., so ASP.NET can host OWIN components and Katana components can run in someone else's OWIN implementation. Howard Dierking just wrote a cool article in MSDN magazine describing Katana in depth: Getting Started with the Katana Project. He had an interesting example showing an OWIN based pipeline which leveraged SignalR, ASP.NET Web API and NancyFx components in the same stack. If this kind of thing makes sense to you, that's great. If it doesn't, don't worry, but keep an eye on it. You're going to see some cool things happen as a result of ASP.NET becoming more and more pluggable. Visual Studio Web Tools Okay, this stuff's just crazy. Visual Studio has been adding some nice web dev features over the past few years, but they've really cranked it up for this release. Visual Studio is by far my favorite code editor for all web files: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and lots of popular libraries. Stop thinking of Visual Studio as a big editor that you only use to write back-end code. Stop editing HTML and CSS in Notepad (or Sublime, Notepad++, etc.). Visual Studio starts up in under 2 seconds on a modern computer with an SSD. Misspelling HTML attributes or your CSS classes or jQuery or Angular syntax is stupid. It doesn't make you a better developer, it makes you a silly person who wastes time. Browser Link Browser Link is a real-time, two-way connection between Visual Studio and all connected browsers. It's only attached when you're running locally, in debug, but it applies to any and all connected browser, including emulators. You may have seen demos that showed the browsers refreshing based on changes in the editor, and I'll agree that's pretty cool. But it's really just the start. It's a two-way connection, and it's built for extensiblity. That means you can write extensions that push information from your running application (in IE, Chrome, a mobile emulator, etc.) back to Visual Studio. Mads and team have showed off some demonstrations where they enabled edit mode in the browser which updated the source HTML back on the browser. It's also possible to look at how the rendered HTML performs, check for compatibility issues, watch for unused CSS classes, the sky's the limit. New HTML editor The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Here's a 3 minute tour from Mads Kristensen. The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Lots more Visual Studio web dev features That's just a sampling - there's a ton of great features for JavaScript editing, CSS editing, publishing, and Page Inspector (which shows real-time rendering of your page inside Visual Studio). Here are some more short videos showing those features. Lots, lots more Okay, that's just a summary, and it's still quite a bit. Head on over to http://asp.net/vnext for more information, and download Visual Studio 2013 now to get started!

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  • Camera for 2.5D Game

    - by me--
    I'm hoping someone can explain this to me like I'm 5, because I've been struggling with this for hours and simply cannot understand what I'm doing wrong. I've written a Camera class for my 2.5D game. The intention is to support world and screen spaces like this: The camera is the black thing on the right. The +Z axis is upwards in that image, with -Z heading downwards. As you can see, both world space and screen space have (0, 0) at their top-left. I started writing some unit tests to prove that my camera was working as expected, and that's where things started getting...strange. My tests plot coordinates in world, view, and screen spaces. Eventually I will use image comparison to assert that they are correct, but for now my test just displays the result. The render logic uses Camera.ViewMatrix to transform world space to view space, and Camera.WorldPointToScreen to transform world space to screen space. Here is an example test: [Fact] public void foo() { var camera = new Camera(new Viewport(0, 0, 250, 100)); DrawingVisual worldRender; DrawingVisual viewRender; DrawingVisual screenRender; this.Render(camera, out worldRender, out viewRender, out screenRender, new Vector3(30, 0, 0), new Vector3(30, 40, 0)); this.ShowRenders(camera, worldRender, viewRender, screenRender); } And here's what pops up when I run this test: World space looks OK, although I suspect the z axis is going into the screen instead of towards the viewer. View space has me completely baffled. I was expecting the camera to be sitting above (0, 0) and looking towards the center of the scene. Instead, the z axis seems to be the wrong way around, and the camera is positioned in the opposite corner to what I expect! I suspect screen space will be another thing altogether, but can anyone explain what I'm doing wrong in my Camera class? UPDATE I made some progress in terms of getting things to look visually as I expect, but only through intuition: not an actual understanding of what I'm doing. Any enlightenment would be greatly appreciated. I realized that my view space was flipped both vertically and horizontally compared to what I expected, so I changed my view matrix to scale accordingly: this.viewMatrix = Matrix.CreateLookAt(this.location, this.target, this.up) * Matrix.CreateScale(this.zoom, this.zoom, 1) * Matrix.CreateScale(-1, -1, 1); I could combine the two CreateScale calls, but have left them separate for clarity. Again, I have no idea why this is necessary, but it fixed my view space: But now my screen space needs to be flipped vertically, so I modified my projection matrix accordingly: this.projectionMatrix = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(0.7853982f, viewport.AspectRatio, 1, 2) * Matrix.CreateScale(1, -1, 1); And this results in what I was expecting from my first attempt: I have also just tried using Camera to render sprites via a SpriteBatch to make sure everything works there too, and it does. But the question remains: why do I need to do all this flipping of axes to get the space coordinates the way I expect? UPDATE 2 I've since improved my rendering logic in my test suite so that it supports geometries and so that lines get lighter the further away they are from the camera. I wanted to do this to avoid optical illusions and to further prove to myself that I'm looking at what I think I am. Here is an example: In this case, I have 3 geometries: a cube, a sphere, and a polyline on the top face of the cube. Notice how the darkening and lightening of the lines correctly identifies those portions of the geometries closer to the camera. If I remove the negative scaling I had to put in, I see: So you can see I'm still in the same boat - I still need those vertical and horizontal flips in my matrices to get things to appear correctly. In the interests of giving people a repro to play with, here is the complete code needed to generate the above. If you want to run via the test harness, just install the xunit package: Camera.cs: using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using System.Diagnostics; public sealed class Camera { private readonly Viewport viewport; private readonly Matrix projectionMatrix; private Matrix? viewMatrix; private Vector3 location; private Vector3 target; private Vector3 up; private float zoom; public Camera(Viewport viewport) { this.viewport = viewport; // for an explanation of the negative scaling, see: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/63409/ this.projectionMatrix = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(0.7853982f, viewport.AspectRatio, 1, 2) * Matrix.CreateScale(1, -1, 1); // defaults this.location = new Vector3(this.viewport.Width / 2, this.viewport.Height, 100); this.target = new Vector3(this.viewport.Width / 2, this.viewport.Height / 2, 0); this.up = new Vector3(0, 0, 1); this.zoom = 1; } public Viewport Viewport { get { return this.viewport; } } public Vector3 Location { get { return this.location; } set { this.location = value; this.viewMatrix = null; } } public Vector3 Target { get { return this.target; } set { this.target = value; this.viewMatrix = null; } } public Vector3 Up { get { return this.up; } set { this.up = value; this.viewMatrix = null; } } public float Zoom { get { return this.zoom; } set { this.zoom = value; this.viewMatrix = null; } } public Matrix ProjectionMatrix { get { return this.projectionMatrix; } } public Matrix ViewMatrix { get { if (this.viewMatrix == null) { // for an explanation of the negative scaling, see: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/63409/ this.viewMatrix = Matrix.CreateLookAt(this.location, this.target, this.up) * Matrix.CreateScale(this.zoom) * Matrix.CreateScale(-1, -1, 1); } return this.viewMatrix.Value; } } public Vector2 WorldPointToScreen(Vector3 point) { var result = viewport.Project(point, this.ProjectionMatrix, this.ViewMatrix, Matrix.Identity); return new Vector2(result.X, result.Y); } public void WorldPointsToScreen(Vector3[] points, Vector2[] destination) { Debug.Assert(points != null); Debug.Assert(destination != null); Debug.Assert(points.Length == destination.Length); for (var i = 0; i < points.Length; ++i) { destination[i] = this.WorldPointToScreen(points[i]); } } } CameraFixture.cs: using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Media; using Xunit; using XNA = Microsoft.Xna.Framework; public sealed class CameraFixture { [Fact] public void foo() { var camera = new Camera(new Viewport(0, 0, 250, 100)); DrawingVisual worldRender; DrawingVisual viewRender; DrawingVisual screenRender; this.Render( camera, out worldRender, out viewRender, out screenRender, new Sphere(30, 15) { WorldMatrix = XNA.Matrix.CreateTranslation(155, 50, 0) }, new Cube(30) { WorldMatrix = XNA.Matrix.CreateTranslation(75, 60, 15) }, new PolyLine(new XNA.Vector3(0, 0, 0), new XNA.Vector3(10, 10, 0), new XNA.Vector3(20, 0, 0), new XNA.Vector3(0, 0, 0)) { WorldMatrix = XNA.Matrix.CreateTranslation(65, 55, 30) }); this.ShowRenders(worldRender, viewRender, screenRender); } #region Supporting Fields private static readonly Pen xAxisPen = new Pen(Brushes.Red, 2); private static readonly Pen yAxisPen = new Pen(Brushes.Green, 2); private static readonly Pen zAxisPen = new Pen(Brushes.Blue, 2); private static readonly Pen viewportPen = new Pen(Brushes.Gray, 1); private static readonly Pen nonScreenSpacePen = new Pen(Brushes.Black, 0.5); private static readonly Color geometryBaseColor = Colors.Black; #endregion #region Supporting Methods private void Render(Camera camera, out DrawingVisual worldRender, out DrawingVisual viewRender, out DrawingVisual screenRender, params Geometry[] geometries) { var worldDrawingVisual = new DrawingVisual(); var viewDrawingVisual = new DrawingVisual(); var screenDrawingVisual = new DrawingVisual(); const int axisLength = 15; using (var worldDrawingContext = worldDrawingVisual.RenderOpen()) using (var viewDrawingContext = viewDrawingVisual.RenderOpen()) using (var screenDrawingContext = screenDrawingVisual.RenderOpen()) { // draw lines around the camera's viewport var viewportBounds = camera.Viewport.Bounds; var viewportLines = new Tuple<int, int, int, int>[] { Tuple.Create(viewportBounds.Left, viewportBounds.Bottom, viewportBounds.Left, viewportBounds.Top), Tuple.Create(viewportBounds.Left, viewportBounds.Top, viewportBounds.Right, viewportBounds.Top), Tuple.Create(viewportBounds.Right, viewportBounds.Top, viewportBounds.Right, viewportBounds.Bottom), Tuple.Create(viewportBounds.Right, viewportBounds.Bottom, viewportBounds.Left, viewportBounds.Bottom) }; foreach (var viewportLine in viewportLines) { var viewStart = XNA.Vector3.Transform(new XNA.Vector3(viewportLine.Item1, viewportLine.Item2, 0), camera.ViewMatrix); var viewEnd = XNA.Vector3.Transform(new XNA.Vector3(viewportLine.Item3, viewportLine.Item4, 0), camera.ViewMatrix); var screenStart = camera.WorldPointToScreen(new XNA.Vector3(viewportLine.Item1, viewportLine.Item2, 0)); var screenEnd = camera.WorldPointToScreen(new XNA.Vector3(viewportLine.Item3, viewportLine.Item4, 0)); worldDrawingContext.DrawLine(viewportPen, new Point(viewportLine.Item1, viewportLine.Item2), new Point(viewportLine.Item3, viewportLine.Item4)); viewDrawingContext.DrawLine(viewportPen, new Point(viewStart.X, viewStart.Y), new Point(viewEnd.X, viewEnd.Y)); screenDrawingContext.DrawLine(viewportPen, new Point(screenStart.X, screenStart.Y), new Point(screenEnd.X, screenEnd.Y)); } // draw axes var axisLines = new Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, int, Pen>[] { Tuple.Create(0, 0, 0, axisLength, 0, 0, xAxisPen), Tuple.Create(0, 0, 0, 0, axisLength, 0, yAxisPen), Tuple.Create(0, 0, 0, 0, 0, axisLength, zAxisPen) }; foreach (var axisLine in axisLines) { var viewStart = XNA.Vector3.Transform(new XNA.Vector3(axisLine.Item1, axisLine.Item2, axisLine.Item3), camera.ViewMatrix); var viewEnd = XNA.Vector3.Transform(new XNA.Vector3(axisLine.Item4, axisLine.Item5, axisLine.Item6), camera.ViewMatrix); var screenStart = camera.WorldPointToScreen(new XNA.Vector3(axisLine.Item1, axisLine.Item2, axisLine.Item3)); var screenEnd = camera.WorldPointToScreen(new XNA.Vector3(axisLine.Item4, axisLine.Item5, axisLine.Item6)); worldDrawingContext.DrawLine(axisLine.Item7, new Point(axisLine.Item1, axisLine.Item2), new Point(axisLine.Item4, axisLine.Item5)); viewDrawingContext.DrawLine(axisLine.Item7, new Point(viewStart.X, viewStart.Y), new Point(viewEnd.X, viewEnd.Y)); screenDrawingContext.DrawLine(axisLine.Item7, new Point(screenStart.X, screenStart.Y), new Point(screenEnd.X, screenEnd.Y)); } // for all points in all geometries to be rendered, find the closest and furthest away from the camera so we can lighten lines that are further away var distancesToAllGeometrySections = from geometry in geometries let geometryViewMatrix = geometry.WorldMatrix * camera.ViewMatrix from section in geometry.Sections from point in new XNA.Vector3[] { section.Item1, section.Item2 } let viewPoint = XNA.Vector3.Transform(point, geometryViewMatrix) select viewPoint.Length(); var furthestDistance = distancesToAllGeometrySections.Max(); var closestDistance = distancesToAllGeometrySections.Min(); var deltaDistance = Math.Max(0.000001f, furthestDistance - closestDistance); // draw each geometry for (var i = 0; i < geometries.Length; ++i) { var geometry = geometries[i]; // there's probably a more correct name for this, but basically this gets the geometry relative to the camera so we can check how far away each point is from the camera var geometryViewMatrix = geometry.WorldMatrix * camera.ViewMatrix; // we order roughly by those sections furthest from the camera to those closest, so that the closer ones "overwrite" the ones further away var orderedSections = from section in geometry.Sections let startPointRelativeToCamera = XNA.Vector3.Transform(section.Item1, geometryViewMatrix) let endPointRelativeToCamera = XNA.Vector3.Transform(section.Item2, geometryViewMatrix) let startPointDistance = startPointRelativeToCamera.Length() let endPointDistance = endPointRelativeToCamera.Length() orderby (startPointDistance + endPointDistance) descending select new { Section = section, DistanceToStart = startPointDistance, DistanceToEnd = endPointDistance }; foreach (var orderedSection in orderedSections) { var start = XNA.Vector3.Transform(orderedSection.Section.Item1, geometry.WorldMatrix); var end = XNA.Vector3.Transform(orderedSection.Section.Item2, geometry.WorldMatrix); var viewStart = XNA.Vector3.Transform(start, camera.ViewMatrix); var viewEnd = XNA.Vector3.Transform(end, camera.ViewMatrix); worldDrawingContext.DrawLine(nonScreenSpacePen, new Point(start.X, start.Y), new Point(end.X, end.Y)); viewDrawingContext.DrawLine(nonScreenSpacePen, new Point(viewStart.X, viewStart.Y), new Point(viewEnd.X, viewEnd.Y)); // screen rendering is more complicated purely because I wanted geometry to fade the further away it is from the camera // otherwise, it's very hard to tell whether the rendering is actually correct or not var startDistanceRatio = (orderedSection.DistanceToStart - closestDistance) / deltaDistance; var endDistanceRatio = (orderedSection.DistanceToEnd - closestDistance) / deltaDistance; // lerp towards white based on distance from camera, but only to a maximum of 90% var startColor = Lerp(geometryBaseColor, Colors.White, startDistanceRatio * 0.9f); var endColor = Lerp(geometryBaseColor, Colors.White, endDistanceRatio * 0.9f); var screenStart = camera.WorldPointToScreen(start); var screenEnd = camera.WorldPointToScreen(end); var brush = new LinearGradientBrush { StartPoint = new Point(screenStart.X, screenStart.Y), EndPoint = new Point(screenEnd.X, screenEnd.Y), MappingMode = BrushMappingMode.Absolute }; brush.GradientStops.Add(new GradientStop(startColor, 0)); brush.GradientStops.Add(new GradientStop(endColor, 1)); var pen = new Pen(brush, 1); brush.Freeze(); pen.Freeze(); screenDrawingContext.DrawLine(pen, new Point(screenStart.X, screenStart.Y), new Point(screenEnd.X, screenEnd.Y)); } } } worldRender = worldDrawingVisual; viewRender = viewDrawingVisual; screenRender = screenDrawingVisual; } private static float Lerp(float start, float end, float amount) { var difference = end - start; var adjusted = difference * amount; return start + adjusted; } private static Color Lerp(Color color, Color to, float amount) { var sr = color.R; var sg = color.G; var sb = color.B; var er = to.R; var eg = to.G; var eb = to.B; var r = (byte)Lerp(sr, er, amount); var g = (byte)Lerp(sg, eg, amount); var b = (byte)Lerp(sb, eb, amount); return Color.FromArgb(255, r, g, b); } private void ShowRenders(DrawingVisual worldRender, DrawingVisual viewRender, DrawingVisual screenRender) { var itemsControl = new ItemsControl(); itemsControl.Items.Add(new HeaderedContentControl { Header = "World", Content = new DrawingVisualHost(worldRender)}); itemsControl.Items.Add(new HeaderedContentControl { Header = "View", Content = new DrawingVisualHost(viewRender) }); itemsControl.Items.Add(new HeaderedContentControl { Header = "Screen", Content = new DrawingVisualHost(screenRender) }); var window = new Window { Title = "Renders", Content = itemsControl, ShowInTaskbar = true, SizeToContent = SizeToContent.WidthAndHeight }; window.ShowDialog(); } #endregion #region Supporting Types // stupidly simple 3D geometry class, consisting of a series of sections that will be connected by lines private abstract class Geometry { public abstract IEnumerable<Tuple<XNA.Vector3, XNA.Vector3>> Sections { get; } public XNA.Matrix WorldMatrix { get; set; } } private sealed class Line : Geometry { private readonly XNA.Vector3 magnitude; public Line(XNA.Vector3 magnitude) { this.magnitude = magnitude; } public override IEnumerable<Tuple<XNA.Vector3, XNA.Vector3>> Sections { get { yield return Tuple.Create(XNA.Vector3.Zero, this.magnitude); } } } private sealed class PolyLine : Geometry { private readonly XNA.Vector3[] points; public PolyLine(params XNA.Vector3[] points) { this.points = points; } public override IEnumerable<Tuple<XNA.Vector3, XNA.Vector3>> Sections { get { if (this.points.Length < 2) { yield break; } var end = this.points[0]; for (var i = 1; i < this.points.Length; ++i) { var start = end; end = this.points[i]; yield return Tuple.Create(start, end); } } } } private sealed class Cube : Geometry { private readonly float size; public Cube(float size) { this.size = size; } public override IEnumerable<Tuple<XNA.Vector3, XNA.Vector3>> Sections { get { var halfSize = this.size / 2; var frontBottomLeft = new XNA.Vector3(-halfSize, halfSize, -halfSize); var frontBottomRight = new XNA.Vector3(halfSize, halfSize, -halfSize); var frontTopLeft = new XNA.Vector3(-halfSize, halfSize, halfSize); var frontTopRight = new XNA.Vector3(halfSize, halfSize, halfSize); var backBottomLeft = new XNA.Vector3(-halfSize, -halfSize, -halfSize); var backBottomRight = new XNA.Vector3(halfSize, -halfSize, -halfSize); var backTopLeft = new XNA.Vector3(-halfSize, -halfSize, halfSize); var backTopRight = new XNA.Vector3(halfSize, -halfSize, halfSize); // front face yield return Tuple.Create(frontBottomLeft, frontBottomRight); yield return Tuple.Create(frontBottomLeft, frontTopLeft); yield return Tuple.Create(frontTopLeft, frontTopRight); yield return Tuple.Create(frontTopRight, frontBottomRight); // left face yield return Tuple.Create(frontTopLeft, backTopLeft); yield return Tuple.Create(backTopLeft, backBottomLeft); yield return Tuple.Create(backBottomLeft, frontBottomLeft); // right face yield return Tuple.Create(frontTopRight, backTopRight); yield return Tuple.Create(backTopRight, backBottomRight); yield return Tuple.Create(backBottomRight, frontBottomRight); // back face yield return Tuple.Create(backBottomLeft, backBottomRight); yield return Tuple.Create(backTopLeft, backTopRight); } } } private sealed class Sphere : Geometry { private readonly float radius; private readonly int subsections; public Sphere(float radius, int subsections) { this.radius = radius; this.subsections = subsections; } public override IEnumerable<Tuple<XNA.Vector3, XNA.Vector3>> Sections { get { var latitudeLines = this.subsections; var longitudeLines = this.subsections; // see http://stackoverflow.com/a/4082020/5380 var results = from latitudeLine in Enumerable.Range(0, latitudeLines) from longitudeLine in Enumerable.Range(0, longitudeLines) let latitudeRatio = latitudeLine / (float)latitudeLines let longitudeRatio = longitudeLine / (float)longitudeLines let nextLatitudeRatio = (latitudeLine + 1) / (float)latitudeLines let nextLongitudeRatio = (longitudeLine + 1) / (float)longitudeLines let z1 = Math.Cos(Math.PI * latitudeRatio) let z2 = Math.Cos(Math.PI * nextLatitudeRatio) let x1 = Math.Sin(Math.PI * latitudeRatio) * Math.Cos(Math.PI * 2 * longitudeRatio) let y1 = Math.Sin(Math.PI * latitudeRatio) * Math.Sin(Math.PI * 2 * longitudeRatio) let x2 = Math.Sin(Math.PI * nextLatitudeRatio) * Math.Cos(Math.PI * 2 * longitudeRatio) let y2 = Math.Sin(Math.PI * nextLatitudeRatio) * Math.Sin(Math.PI * 2 * longitudeRatio) let x3 = Math.Sin(Math.PI * latitudeRatio) * Math.Cos(Math.PI * 2 * nextLongitudeRatio) let y3 = Math.Sin(Math.PI * latitudeRatio) * Math.Sin(Math.PI * 2 * nextLongitudeRatio) let start = new XNA.Vector3((float)x1 * radius, (float)y1 * radius, (float)z1 * radius) let firstEnd = new XNA.Vector3((float)x2 * radius, (float)y2 * radius, (float)z2 * radius) let secondEnd = new XNA.Vector3((float)x3 * radius, (float)y3 * radius, (float)z1 * radius) select new { First = Tuple.Create(start, firstEnd), Second = Tuple.Create(start, secondEnd) }; foreach (var result in results) { yield return result.First; yield return result.Second; } } } } #endregion }

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

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

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  • Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Classification design

    - by Simon Thorpe
    Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g indexThis is the final article in the quick guide to Oracle IRM. If you've followed everything prior you will now have a fully functional and tested Information Rights Management service. It doesn't matter if you've been following the 10g or 11g guide as this next article is common to both. ContentsWhy this is the most important part... Understanding the classification and standard rights model Identifying business use cases Creating an effective IRM classification modelOne single classification across the entire businessA context for each and every possible granular use caseWhat makes a good context? Deciding on the use of roles in the context Reviewing the features and security for context roles Summary Why this is the most important part...Now the real work begins, installing and getting an IRM system running is as simple as following instructions. However to actually have an IRM technology easily protecting your most sensitive information without interfering with your users existing daily work flows and be able to scale IRM across the entire business, requires thought into how confidential documents are created, used and distributed. This article is going to give you the information you need to ask the business the right questions so that you can deploy your IRM service successfully. The IRM team here at Oracle have over 10 years of experience in helping customers and it is important you understand the following to be successful in securing access to your most confidential information. Whatever you are trying to secure, be it mergers and acquisitions information, engineering intellectual property, health care documentation or financial reports. No matter what type of user is going to access the information, be they employees, contractors or customers, there are common goals you are always trying to achieve.Securing the content at the earliest point possible and do it automatically. Removing the dependency on the user to decide to secure the content reduces the risk of mistakes significantly and therefore results a more secure deployment. K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) Reduce complexity in the rights/classification model. Oracle IRM lets you make changes to access to documents even after they are secured which allows you to start with a simple model and then introduce complexity once you've understood how the technology is going to be used in the business. After an initial learning period you can review your implementation and start to make informed decisions based on user feedback and administration experience. Clearly communicate to the user, when appropriate, any changes to their existing work practice. You must make every effort to make the transition to sealed content as simple as possible. For external users you must help them understand why you are securing the documents and inform them the value of the technology to both your business and them. Before getting into the detail, I must pay homage to Martin White, Vice President of client services in SealedMedia, the company Oracle acquired and who created Oracle IRM. In the SealedMedia years Martin was involved with every single customer and was key to the design of certain aspects of the IRM technology, specifically the context model we will be discussing here. Listening carefully to customers and understanding the flexibility of the IRM technology, Martin taught me all the skills of helping customers build scalable, effective and simple to use IRM deployments. No matter how well the engineering department designed the software, badly designed and poorly executed projects can result in difficult to use and manage, and ultimately insecure solutions. The advice and information that follows was born with Martin and he's still delivering IRM consulting with customers and can be found at www.thinkers.co.uk. It is from Martin and others that Oracle not only has the most advanced, scalable and usable document security solution on the market, but Oracle and their partners have the most experience in delivering successful document security solutions. Understanding the classification and standard rights model The goal of any successful IRM deployment is to balance the increase in security the technology brings without over complicating the way people use secured content and avoid a significant increase in administration and maintenance. With Oracle it is possible to automate the protection of content, deploy the desktop software transparently and use authentication methods such that users can open newly secured content initially unaware the document is any different to an insecure one. That is until of course they attempt to do something for which they don't have any rights, such as copy and paste to an insecure application or try and print. Central to achieving this objective is creating a classification model that is simple to understand and use but also provides the right level of complexity to meet the business needs. In Oracle IRM the term used for each classification is a "context". A context defines the relationship between.A group of related documents The people that use the documents The roles that these people perform The rights that these people need to perform their role The context is the key to the success of Oracle IRM. It provides the separation of the role and rights of a user from the content itself. Documents are sealed to contexts but none of the rights, user or group information is stored within the content itself. Sealing only places information about the location of the IRM server that sealed it, the context applied to the document and a few other pieces of metadata that pertain only to the document. This important separation of rights from content means that millions of documents can be secured against a single classification and a user needs only one right assigned to be able to access all documents. If you have followed all the previous articles in this guide, you will be ready to start defining contexts to which your sensitive information will be protected. But before you even start with IRM, you need to understand how your own business uses and creates sensitive documents and emails. Identifying business use cases Oracle is able to support multiple classification systems, but usually there is one single initial need for the technology which drives a deployment. This need might be to protect sensitive mergers and acquisitions information, engineering intellectual property, financial documents. For this and every subsequent use case you must understand how users create and work with documents, to who they are distributed and how the recipients should interact with them. A successful IRM deployment should start with one well identified use case (we go through some examples towards the end of this article) and then after letting this use case play out in the business, you learn how your users work with content, how well your communication to the business worked and if the classification system you deployed delivered the right balance. It is at this point you can start rolling the technology out further. Creating an effective IRM classification model Once you have selected the initial use case you will address with IRM, you need to design a classification model that defines the access to secured documents within the use case. In Oracle IRM there is an inbuilt classification system called the "context" model. In Oracle IRM 11g it is possible to extend the server to support any rights classification model, but the majority of users who are not using an application integration (such as Oracle IRM within Oracle Beehive) are likely to be starting out with the built in context model. Before looking at creating a classification system with IRM, it is worth reviewing some recognized standards and methods for creating and implementing security policy. A very useful set of documents are the ISO 17799 guidelines and the SANS security policy templates. First task is to create a context against which documents are to be secured. A context consists of a group of related documents (all top secret engineering research), a list of roles (contributors and readers) which define how users can access documents and a list of users (research engineers) who have been given a role allowing them to interact with sealed content. Before even creating the first context it is wise to decide on a philosophy which will dictate the level of granularity, the question is, where do you start? At a department level? By project? By technology? First consider the two ends of the spectrum... One single classification across the entire business Imagine that instead of having separate contexts, one for engineering intellectual property, one for your financial data, one for human resources personally identifiable information, you create one context for all documents across the entire business. Whilst you may have immediate objections, there are some significant benefits in thinking about considering this. Document security classification decisions are simple. You only have one context to chose from! User provisioning is simple, just make sure everyone has a role in the only context in the business. Administration is very low, if you assign rights to groups from the business user repository you probably never have to touch IRM administration again. There are however some obvious downsides to this model.All users in have access to all IRM secured content. So potentially a sales person could access sensitive mergers and acquisition documents, if they can get their hands on a copy that is. You cannot delegate control of different documents to different parts of the business, this may not satisfy your regulatory requirements for the separation and delegation of duties. Changing a users role affects every single document ever secured. Even though it is very unlikely a business would ever use one single context to secure all their sensitive information, thinking about this scenario raises one very important point. Just having one single context and securing all confidential documents to it, whilst incurring some of the problems detailed above, has one huge value. Once secured, IRM protected content can ONLY be accessed by authorized users. Just think of all the sensitive documents in your business today, imagine if you could ensure that only everyone you trust could open them. Even if an employee lost a laptop or someone accidentally sent an email to the wrong recipient, only the right people could open that file. A context for each and every possible granular use case Now let's think about the total opposite of a single context design. What if you created a context for each and every single defined business need and created multiple contexts within this for each level of granularity? Let's take a use case where we need to protect engineering intellectual property. Imagine we have 6 different engineering groups, and in each we have a research department, a design department and manufacturing. The company information security policy defines 3 levels of information sensitivity... restricted, confidential and top secret. Then let's say that each group and department needs to define access to information from both internal and external users. Finally add into the mix that they want to review the rights model for each context every financial quarter. This would result in a huge amount of contexts. For example, lets just look at the resulting contexts for one engineering group. Q1FY2010 Restricted Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Research Q1FY2010 Restricted Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Design Q1FY2010 Restricted Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Manufacturing Q1FY2010 Restricted External- Engineering Group 1 - Research Q1FY2010 Restricted External - Engineering Group 1 - Design Q1FY2010 Restricted External - Engineering Group 1 - Manufacturing Q1FY2010 Confidential Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Research Q1FY2010 Confidential Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Design Q1FY2010 Confidential Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Manufacturing Q1FY2010 Confidential External - Engineering Group 1 - Research Q1FY2010 Confidential External - Engineering Group 1 - Design Q1FY2010 Confidential External - Engineering Group 1 - Manufacturing Q1FY2010 Top Secret Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Research Q1FY2010 Top Secret Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Design Q1FY2010 Top Secret Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Manufacturing Q1FY2010 Top Secret External - Engineering Group 1 - Research Q1FY2010 Top Secret External - Engineering Group 1 - Design Q1FY2010 Top Secret External - Engineering Group 1 - Manufacturing Now multiply the above by 6 for each engineering group, 18 contexts. You are then creating/reviewing another 18 every 3 months. After a year you've got 72 contexts. What would be the advantages of such a complex classification model? You can satisfy very granular rights requirements, for example only an authorized engineering group 1 researcher can create a top secret report for access internally, and his role will be reviewed on a very frequent basis. Your business may have very complex rights requirements and mapping this directly to IRM may be an obvious exercise. The disadvantages of such a classification model are significant...Huge administrative overhead. Someone in the business must manage, review and administrate each of these contexts. If the engineering group had a single administrator, they would have 72 classifications to reside over each year. From an end users perspective life will be very confusing. Imagine if a user has rights in just 6 of these contexts. They may be able to print content from one but not another, be able to edit content in 2 contexts but not the other 4. Such confusion at the end user level causes frustration and resistance to the use of the technology. Increased synchronization complexity. Imagine a user who after 3 years in the company ends up with over 300 rights in many different contexts across the business. This would result in long synchronization times as the client software updates all your offline rights. Hard to understand who can do what with what. Imagine being the VP of engineering and as part of an internal security audit you are asked the question, "What rights to researchers have to our top secret information?". In this complex model the answer is not simple, it would depend on many roles in many contexts. Of course this example is extreme, but it highlights that trying to build many barriers in your business can result in a nightmare of administration and confusion amongst users. In the real world what we need is a balance of the two. We need to seek an optimum number of contexts. Too many contexts are unmanageable and too few contexts does not give fine enough granularity. What makes a good context? Good context design derives mainly from how well you understand your business requirements to secure access to confidential information. Some customers I have worked with can tell me exactly the documents they wish to secure and know exactly who should be opening them. However there are some customers who know only of the government regulation that requires them to control access to certain types of information, they don't actually know where the documents are, how they are created or understand exactly who should have access. Therefore you need to know how to ask the business the right questions that lead to information which help you define a context. First ask these questions about a set of documentsWhat is the topic? Who are legitimate contributors on this topic? Who are the authorized readership? If the answer to any one of these is significantly different, then it probably merits a separate context. Remember that sealed documents are inherently secure and as such they cannot leak to your competitors, therefore it is better sealed to a broad context than not sealed at all. Simplicity is key here. Always revert to the first extreme example of a single classification, then work towards essential complexity. If there is any doubt, always prefer fewer contexts. Remember, Oracle IRM allows you to change your mind later on. You can implement a design now and continue to change and refine as you learn how the technology is used. It is easy to go from a simple model to a more complex one, it is much harder to take a complex model that is already embedded in the work practice of users and try to simplify it. It is also wise to take a single use case and address this first with the business. Don't try and tackle many different problems from the outset. Do one, learn from the process, refine it and then take what you have learned into the next use case, refine and continue. Once you have a good grasp of the technology and understand how your business will use it, you can then start rolling out the technology wider across the business. Deciding on the use of roles in the context Once you have decided on that first initial use case and a context to create let's look at the details you need to decide upon. For each context, identify; Administrative rolesBusiness owner, the person who makes decisions about who may or may not see content in this context. This is often the person who wanted to use IRM and drove the business purchase. They are the usually the person with the most at risk when sensitive information is lost. Point of contact, the person who will handle requests for access to content. Sometimes the same as the business owner, sometimes a trusted secretary or administrator. Context administrator, the person who will enact the decisions of the Business Owner. Sometimes the point of contact, sometimes a trusted IT person. Document related rolesContributors, the people who create and edit documents in this context. Reviewers, the people who are involved in reviewing documents but are not trusted to secure information to this classification. This role is not always necessary. (See later discussion on Published-work and Work-in-Progress) Readers, the people who read documents from this context. Some people may have several of the roles above, which is fine. What you are trying to do is understand and define how the business interacts with your sensitive information. These roles obviously map directly to roles available in Oracle IRM. Reviewing the features and security for context roles At this point we have decided on a classification of information, understand what roles people in the business will play when administrating this classification and how they will interact with content. The final piece of the puzzle in getting the information for our first context is to look at the permissions people will have to sealed documents. First think why are you protecting the documents in the first place? It is to prevent the loss of leaking of information to the wrong people. To control the information, making sure that people only access the latest versions of documents. You are not using Oracle IRM to prevent unauthorized people from doing legitimate work. This is an important point, with IRM you can erect many barriers to prevent access to content yet too many restrictions and authorized users will often find ways to circumvent using the technology and end up distributing unprotected originals. Because IRM is a security technology, it is easy to get carried away restricting different groups. However I would highly recommend starting with a simple solution with few restrictions. Ensure that everyone who reasonably needs to read documents can do so from the outset. Remember that with Oracle IRM you can change rights to content whenever you wish and tighten security. Always return to the fact that the greatest value IRM brings is that ONLY authorized users can access secured content, remember that simple "one context for the entire business" model. At the start of the deployment you really need to aim for user acceptance and therefore a simple model is more likely to succeed. As time passes and users understand how IRM works you can start to introduce more restrictions and complexity. Another key aspect to focus on is handling exceptions. If you decide on a context model where engineering can only access engineering information, and sales can only access sales data. Act quickly when a sales manager needs legitimate access to a set of engineering documents. Having a quick and effective process for permitting other people with legitimate needs to obtain appropriate access will be rewarded with acceptance from the user community. These use cases can often be satisfied by integrating IRM with a good Identity & Access Management technology which simplifies the process of assigning users the correct business roles. The big print issue... Printing is often an issue of contention, users love to print but the business wants to ensure sensitive information remains in the controlled digital world. There are many cases of physical document loss causing a business pain, it is often overlooked that IRM can help with this issue by limiting the ability to generate physical copies of digital content. However it can be hard to maintain a balance between security and usability when it comes to printing. Consider the following points when deciding about whether to give print rights. Oracle IRM sealed documents can contain watermarks that expose information about the user, time and location of access and the classification of the document. This information would reside in the printed copy making it easier to trace who printed it. Printed documents are slower to distribute in comparison to their digital counterparts, so time sensitive information in printed format may present a lower risk. Print activity is audited, therefore you can monitor and react to users abusing print rights. Summary In summary it is important to think carefully about the way you create your context model. As you ask the business these questions you may get a variety of different requirements. There may be special projects that require a context just for sensitive information created during the lifetime of the project. There may be a department that requires all information in the group is secured and you might have a few senior executives who wish to use IRM to exchange a small number of highly sensitive documents with a very small number of people. Oracle IRM, with its very flexible context classification system, can support all of these use cases. The trick is to introducing the complexity to deliver them at the right level. In another article i'm working on I will go through some examples of how Oracle IRM might map to existing business use cases. But for now, this article covers all the important questions you need to get your IRM service deployed and successfully protecting your most sensitive information.

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  • Ancillary Objects: Separate Debug ELF Files For Solaris

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

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  • Alert visualization recipe: Get out your blender, drop in some sp_send_dbmail, Google Charts API, add your favorite colors and sprinkle with html. Blend till it’s smooth and looks pretty enough to taste.

    - by Maria Zakourdaev
      I really like database monitoring. My email inbox have a constant flow of different types of alerts coming from our production servers with all kinds of information, sometimes more useful and sometimes less useful. Usually database alerts look really simple, it’s usually a plain text email saying “Prod1 Database data file on Server X is 80% used. You’d better grow it manually before some query triggers the AutoGrowth process”. Imagine you could have received email like the one below.  In addition to the alert description it could have also included the the database file growth chart over the past 6 months. Wouldn’t it give you much more information whether the data growth is natural or extreme? That’s truly what data visualization is for. Believe it or not, I have sent the graph below from SQL Server stored procedure without buying any additional data monitoring/visualization tool.   Would you like to visualize your database alerts like I do? Then like myself, you’d love the Google Charts. All you need to know is a little HTML and have a mail profile configured on your SQL Server instance regardless of the SQL Server version. First of all, I hope you know that the sp_send_dbmail procedure has a great parameter @body_format = ‘HTML’, which allows us to send rich and colorful messages instead of boring black and white ones. All that we need is to dynamically create HTML code. This is how, for instance, you can create a table and populate it with some data: DECLARE @html varchar(max) SET @html = '<html>' + '<H3><font id="Text" style='color: Green;'>Top Databases: </H3>' + '<table border="1" bordercolor="#3300FF" style='background-color:#DDF8CC' width='70%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='3'>' + '<tr><font color="Green"><th>Database Name</th><th>Size</th><th>Physical Name</th></tr>' + CAST( (SELECT TOP 10                             td = name,'',                             td = size * 8/1024 ,'',                             td = physical_name              FROM sys.master_files               ORDER BY size DESC             FOR XML PATH ('tr'),TYPE ) AS VARCHAR(MAX)) + '</table>' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients = '[email protected]', @subject ='Top databases', @body = @html, @body_format = 'HTML' This is the result:   If you want to add more visualization effects, you can use Google Charts Tools https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/interactive/docs/index which is a free and rich library of data visualization charts, they’re also easy to populate and embed. There are two versions of the Google Charts Image based charts: https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/image/docs/gallery/chart_gall This is an old version, it’s officially deprecated although it will be up for a next few years or so. I really enjoy using this one because it can be viewed within the email body. For mobile devices you need to change the “Load remote images” property in your email application configuration.           Charts based on JavaScript classes: https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery This API is newer, with rich and highly interactive charts, and it’s much more easier to understand and configure. The only downside of it is that they cannot be viewed within the email body. Outlook, Gmail and many other email clients, as part of their security policy, do not run any JavaScript that’s placed within the email body. However, you can still enjoy this API by sending the report as an email attachment. Here is an example of the old version of Google Charts API, sending the same top databases report as in the previous example but instead of a simple table, this script is using a pie chart right from  the T-SQL code DECLARE @html  varchar(8000) DECLARE @Series  varchar(800),@Labels  varchar(8000),@Legend  varchar(8000);     SET @Series = ''; SET @Labels = ''; SET @Legend = ''; SELECT TOP 5 @Series = @Series + CAST(size * 8/1024 as varchar) + ',',                         @Labels = @Labels +CAST(size * 8/1024 as varchar) + 'MB'+'|',                         @Legend = @Legend + name + '|' FROM sys.master_files ORDER BY size DESC SELECT @Series = SUBSTRING(@Series,1,LEN(@Series)-1),         @Labels = SUBSTRING(@Labels,1,LEN(@Labels)-1),         @Legend = SUBSTRING(@Legend,1,LEN(@Legend)-1) SET @html =   '<H3><font color="Green"> '+@@ServerName+' top 5 databases : </H3>'+    '<br>'+    '<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?'+    'chf=bg,s,DDF8CC&'+    'cht=p&'+    'chs=400x200&'+    'chco=3072F3|7777CC|FF9900|FF0000|4A8C26&'+    'chd=t:'+@Series+'&'+    'chl='+@Labels+'&'+    'chma=0,0,0,0&'+    'chdl='+@Legend+'&'+    'chdlp=b"'+    'alt="'+@@ServerName+' top 5 databases" />'              EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients = '[email protected]',                             @subject = 'Top databases',                             @body = @html,                             @body_format = 'HTML' This is what you get. Isn’t it great? Chart parameters reference: chf     Gradient fill  bg - backgroud ; s- solid cht     chart type  ( p - pie) chs        chart size width/height chco    series colors chd        chart data string        1,2,3,2 chl        pir chart labels        a|b|c|d chma    chart margins chdl    chart legend            a|b|c|d chdlp    chart legend text        b - bottom of chart   Line graph implementation is also really easy and powerful DECLARE @html varchar(max) DECLARE @Series varchar(max) DECLARE @HourList varchar(max) SET @Series = ''; SET @HourList = ''; SELECT @HourList = @HourList + SUBSTRING(CONVERT(varchar(13),last_execution_time,121), 12,2)  + '|' ,              @Series = @Series + CAST( COUNT(1) as varchar) + ',' FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats s     CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(plan_handle) t WHERE last_execution_time > = getdate()-1 GROUP BY CONVERT(varchar(13),last_execution_time,121) ORDER BY CONVERT(varchar(13),last_execution_time,121) SET @Series = SUBSTRING(@Series,1,LEN(@Series)-1) SET @html = '<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?'+ 'chco=CA3D05,87CEEB&'+ 'chd=t:'+@Series+'&'+ 'chds=1,350&'+ 'chdl= Proc executions from cache&'+ 'chf=bg,s,1F1D1D|c,lg,0,363433,1.0,2E2B2A,0.0&'+ 'chg=25.0,25.0,3,2&'+ 'chls=3|3&'+ 'chm=d,CA3D05,0,-1,12,0|d,FFFFFF,0,-1,8,0|d,87CEEB,1,-1,12,0|d,FFFFFF,1,-1,8,0&'+ 'chs=600x450&'+ 'cht=lc&'+ 'chts=FFFFFF,14&'+ 'chtt=Executions for from' +(SELECT CONVERT(varchar(16),min(last_execution_time),121)          FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats          WHERE last_execution_time > = getdate()-1) +' till '+ +(SELECT CONVERT(varchar(16),max(last_execution_time),121)     FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats) + '&'+ 'chxp=1,50.0|4,50.0&'+ 'chxs=0,FFFFFF,12,0|1,FFFFFF,12,0|2,FFFFFF,12,0|3,FFFFFF,12,0|4,FFFFFF,14,0&'+ 'chxt=y,y,x,x,x&'+ 'chxl=0:|1|350|1:|N|2:|'+@HourList+'3:|Hour&'+ 'chma=55,120,0,0" alt="" />' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients = '[email protected]', @subject ='Daily number of executions', @body = @html, @body_format = 'HTML' Chart parameters reference: chco    series colors chd        series data chds    scale format chdl    chart legend chf        background fills chg        grid line chls    line style chm        line fill chs        chart size cht        chart type chts    chart style chtt    chart title chxp    axis label positions chxs    axis label styles chxt    axis tick mark styles chxl    axis labels chma    chart margins If you don’t mind to get your charts as an email attachment, you can enjoy the Java based Google Charts which are even easier to configure, and have much more advanced graphics. In the example below, the sp_send_email procedure uses the parameter @query which will be executed at the time that sp_send_dbemail is executed and the HTML result of this execution will be attached to the email. DECLARE @html varchar(max),@query varchar(max) DECLARE @SeriesDBusers  varchar(800);     SET @SeriesDBusers = ''; SELECT @SeriesDBusers = @SeriesDBusers +  ' ["'+DB_NAME(r.database_id) +'", ' +cast(count(1) as varchar)+'],' FROM sys.dm_exec_requests r GROUP BY DB_NAME(database_id) ORDER BY count(1) desc; SET @SeriesDBusers = SUBSTRING(@SeriesDBusers,1,LEN(@SeriesDBusers)-1) SET @query = ' PRINT '' <html>   <head>     <script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>     <script type="text/javascript">       google.load("visualization", "1", {packages:["corechart"]});        google.setOnLoadCallback(drawChart);       function drawChart() {                      var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable([                        ["Database Name", "Active users"],                        '+@SeriesDBusers+'                      ]);                        var options = {                        title: "Active users",                        pieSliceText: "value"                      };                        var chart = new google.visualization.PieChart(document.getElementById("chart_div"));                      chart.draw(data, options);       };     </script>   </head>   <body>     <table>     <tr><td>         <div id="chart_div" style='width: 800px; height: 300px;'></div>         </td></tr>     </table>   </body> </html> ''' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail    @recipients = '[email protected]',    @subject ='Active users',    @body = @html,    @body_format = 'HTML',    @query = @Query,     @attach_query_result_as_file = 1,     @query_attachment_filename = 'Results.htm' After opening the email attachment in the browser you are getting this kind of report: In fact, the above is not only for database alerts. It can be used for applicative reports if you need high levels of customization that you cannot achieve using standard methods like SSRS. If you need more information on how to customize the charts, you can try the following: Image Based Charts wizard https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/image/docs/chart_wizard  Live Image Charts Playground https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/image/docs/chart_playground Image Based Charts Parameters List https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/image/docs/chart_params Java Script Charts Playground https://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/?type=visualization Use the above examples as a starting point for your procedures and I’d be more than happy to hear of your implementations of the above techniques. Yours, Maria

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  • ANTS CLR and Memory Profiler In Depth Review (Part 1 of 2 &ndash; CLR Profiler)

    - by ToStringTheory
    One of the things that people might not know about me, is my obsession to make my code as efficient as possible.  Many people might not realize how much of a task or undertaking that this might be, but it is surely a task as monumental as climbing Mount Everest, except this time it is a challenge for the mind…  In trying to make code efficient, there are many different factors that play a part – size of project or solution, tiers, language used, experience and training of the programmer, technologies used, maintainability of the code – the list can go on for quite some time. I spend quite a bit of time when developing trying to determine what is the best way to implement a feature to accomplish the efficiency that I look to achieve.  One program that I have recently come to learn about – Red Gate ANTS Performance (CLR) and Memory profiler gives me tools to accomplish that job more efficiently as well.  In this review, I am going to cover some of the features of the ANTS profiler set by compiling some hideous example code to test against. Notice As a member of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program, one of the perks is the ability to review products, in exchange for a free license to the program.  I have not let this affect my opinions of the product in any way, and Red Gate nor Geeks With Blogs has tried to influence my opinion regarding this product in any way. Introduction The ANTS Profiler pack provided by Red Gate was something that I had not heard of before receiving an email regarding an offer to review it for a license.  Since I look to make my code efficient, it was a no brainer for me to try it out!  One thing that I have to say took me by surprise is that upon downloading the program and installing it you fill out a form for your usual contact information.  Sure enough within 2 hours, I received an email from a sales representative at Red Gate asking if she could help me to achieve the most out of my trial time so it wouldn’t go to waste.  After replying to her and explaining that I was looking to review its feature set, she put me in contact with someone that setup a demo session to give me a quick rundown of its features via an online meeting.  After having dealt with a massive ordeal with one of my utility companies and their complete lack of customer service, Red Gates friendly and helpful representatives were a breath of fresh air, and something I was thankful for. ANTS CLR Profiler The ANTS CLR profiler is the thing I want to focus on the most in this post, so I am going to dive right in now. Install was simple and took no time at all.  It installed both the profiler for the CLR and Memory, but also visual studio extensions to facilitate the usage of the profilers (click any images for full size images): The Visual Studio menu options (under ANTS menu) Starting the CLR Performance Profiler from the start menu yields this window If you follow the instructions after launching the program from the start menu (Click File > New Profiling Session to start a new project), you are given a dialog with plenty of options for profiling: The New Session dialog.  Lots of options.  One thing I noticed is that the buttons in the lower right were half-covered by the panel of the application.  If I had to guess, I would imagine that this is caused by my DPI settings being set to 125%.  This is a problem I have seen in other applications as well that don’t scale well to different dpi scales. The profiler options give you the ability to profile: .NET Executable ASP.NET web application (hosted in IIS) ASP.NET web application (hosted in IIS express) ASP.NET web application (hosted in Cassini Web Development Server) SharePoint web application (hosted in IIS) Silverlight 4+ application Windows Service COM+ server XBAP (local XAML browser application) Attach to an already running .NET 4 process Choosing each option provides a varying set of other variables/options that one can set including options such as application arguments, operating path, record I/O performance performance counters to record (43 counters in all!), etc…  All in all, they give you the ability to profile many different .Net project types, and make it simple to do so.  In most cases of my using this application, I would be using the built in Visual Studio extensions, as they automatically start a new profiling project in ANTS with the options setup, and start your program, however RedGate has made it easy enough to profile outside of Visual Studio as well. On the flip side of this, as someone who lives most of their work life in Visual Studio, one thing I do wish is that instead of opening an entirely separate application/gui to perform profiling after launching, that instead they would provide a Visual Studio panel with the information, and integrate more of the profiling project information into Visual Studio.  So, now that we have an idea of what options that the profiler gives us, its time to test its abilities and features. Horrendous Example Code – Prime Number Generator One of my interests besides development, is Physics and Math – what I went to college for.  I have especially always been interested in prime numbers, as they are something of a mystery…  So, I decided that I would go ahead and to test the abilities of the profiler, I would write a small program, website, and library to generate prime numbers in the quantity that you ask for.  I am going to start off with some terrible code, and show how I would see the profiler being used as a development tool. First off, the IPrimes interface (all code is downloadable at the end of the post): interface IPrimes { IEnumerable<int> GetPrimes(int retrieve); } Simple enough, right?  Anything that implements the interface will (hopefully) provide an IEnumerable of int, with the quantity specified in the parameter argument.  Next, I am going to implement this interface in the most basic way: public class DumbPrimes : IPrimes { public IEnumerable<int> GetPrimes(int retrieve) { //store a list of primes already found var _foundPrimes = new List<int>() { 2, 3 }; //if i ask for 1 or two primes, return what asked for if (retrieve <= _foundPrimes.Count()) return _foundPrimes.Take(retrieve); //the next number to look at int _analyzing = 4; //since I already determined I don't have enough //execute at least once, and until quantity is sufficed do { //assume prime until otherwise determined bool isPrime = true; //start dividing at 2 //divide until number is reached, or determined not prime for (int i = 2; i < _analyzing && isPrime; i++) { //if (i) goes into _analyzing without a remainder, //_analyzing is NOT prime if (_analyzing % i == 0) isPrime = false; } //if it is prime, add to found list if (isPrime) _foundPrimes.Add(_analyzing); //increment number to analyze next _analyzing++; } while (_foundPrimes.Count() < retrieve); return _foundPrimes; } } This is the simplest way to get primes in my opinion.  Checking each number by the straight definition of a prime – is it divisible by anything besides 1 and itself. I have included this code in a base class library for my solution, as I am going to use it to demonstrate a couple of features of ANTS.  This class library is consumed by a simple non-MVVM WPF application, and a simple MVC4 website.  I will not post the WPF code here inline, as it is simply an ObservableCollection<int>, a label, two textbox’s, and a button. Starting a new Profiling Session So, in Visual Studio, I have just completed my first stint developing the GUI and DumbPrimes IPrimes class, so now I want to check my codes efficiency by profiling it.  All I have to do is build the solution (surprised initiating a profiling session doesn’t do this, but I suppose I can understand it), and then click the ANTS menu, followed by Profile Performance.  I am then greeted by the profiler starting up and already monitoring my program live: You are provided with a realtime graph at the top, and a pane at the bottom giving you information on how to proceed.  I am going to start by asking my program to show me the first 15000 primes: After the program finally began responding again (I did all the work on the main UI thread – how bad!), I stopped the profiler, which did kill the process of my program too.  One important thing to note, is that the profiler by default wants to give you a lot of detail about the operation – line hit counts, time per line, percent time per line, etc…  The important thing to remember is that this itself takes a lot of time.  When running my program without the profiler attached, it can generate the 15000 primes in 5.18 seconds, compared to 74.5 seconds – almost a 1500 percent increase.  While this may seem like a lot, remember that there is a trade off.  It may be WAY more inefficient, however, I am able to drill down and make improvements to specific problem areas, and then decrease execution time all around. Analyzing the Profiling Session After clicking ‘Stop Profiling’, the process running my application stopped, and the entire execution time was automatically selected by ANTS, and the results shown below: Now there are a number of interesting things going on here, I am going to cover each in a section of its own: Real Time Performance Counter Bar (top of screen) At the top of the screen, is the real time performance bar.  As your application is running, this will constantly update with the currently selected performance counters status.  A couple of cool things to note are the fact that you can drag a selection around specific time periods to drill down the detail views in the lower 2 panels to information pertaining to only that period. After selecting a time period, you can bookmark a section and name it, so that it is easy to find later, or after reloaded at a later time.  You can also zoom in, out, or fit the graph to the space provided – useful for drilling down. It may be hard to see, but at the top of the processor time graph below the time ticks, but above the red usage graph, there is a green bar. This bar shows at what times a method that is selected in the ‘Call tree’ panel is called. Very cool to be able to click on a method and see at what times it made an impact. As I said before, ANTS provides 43 different performance counters you can hook into.  Click the arrow next to the Performance tab at the top will allow you to change between different counters if you have them selected: Method Call Tree, ADO.Net Database Calls, File IO – Detail Panel Red Gate really hit the mark here I think. When you select a section of the run with the graph, the call tree populates to fill a hierarchical tree of method calls, with information regarding each of the methods.   By default, methods are hidden where the source is not provided (framework type code), however, Red Gate has integrated Reflector into ANTS, so even if you don’t have source for something, you can select a method and get the source if you want.  Methods are also hidden where the impact is seen as insignificant – methods that are only executed for 1% of the time of the overall calling methods time; in other words, working on making them better is not where your efforts should be focused. – Smart! Source Panel – Detail Panel The source panel is where you can see line level information on your code, showing the code for the currently selected method from the Method Call Tree.  If the code is not available, Reflector takes care of it and shows the code anyways! As you can notice, there does seem to be a problem with how ANTS determines what line is the actual line that a call is completed on.  I have suspicions that this may be due to some of the inline code optimizations that the CLR applies upon compilation of the assembly.  In a method with comments, the problem is much more severe: As you can see here, apparently the most offending code in my base library was a comment – *gasp*!  Removing the comments does help quite a bit, however I hope that Red Gate works on their counter algorithm soon to improve the logic on positioning for statistics: I did a small test just to demonstrate the lines are correct without comments. For me, it isn’t a deal breaker, as I can usually determine the correct placements by looking at the application code in the region and determining what makes sense, but it is something that would probably build up some irritation with time. Feature – Suggest Method for Optimization A neat feature to really help those in need of a pointer, is the menu option under tools to automatically suggest methods to optimize/improve: Nice feature – clicking it filters the call tree and stars methods that it thinks are good candidates for optimization.  I do wish that they would have made it more visible for those of use who aren’t great on sight: Process Integration I do think that this could have a place in my process.  After experimenting with the profiler, I do think it would be a great benefit to do some development, testing, and then after all the bugs are worked out, use the profiler to check on things to make sure nothing seems like it is hogging more than its fair share.  For example, with this program, I would have developed it, ran it, tested it – it works, but slowly. After looking at the profiler, and seeing the massive amount of time spent in 1 method, I might go ahead and try to re-implement IPrimes (I actually would probably rewrite the offending code, but so that I can distribute both sets of code easily, I’m just going to make another implementation of IPrimes).  Using two pieces of knowledge about prime numbers can make this method MUCH more efficient – prime numbers fall into two buckets 6k+/-1 , and a number is prime if it is not divisible by any other primes before it: public class SmartPrimes : IPrimes { public IEnumerable<int> GetPrimes(int retrieve) { //store a list of primes already found var _foundPrimes = new List<int>() { 2, 3 }; //if i ask for 1 or two primes, return what asked for if (retrieve <= _foundPrimes.Count()) return _foundPrimes.Take(retrieve); //the next number to look at int _k = 1; //since I already determined I don't have enough //execute at least once, and until quantity is sufficed do { //assume prime until otherwise determined bool isPrime = true; int potentialPrime; //analyze 6k-1 //assign the value to potential potentialPrime = 6 * _k - 1; //if there are any primes that divise this, it is NOT a prime number //using PLINQ for quick boost isPrime = !_foundPrimes.AsParallel() .Any(prime => potentialPrime % prime == 0); //if it is prime, add to found list if (isPrime) _foundPrimes.Add(potentialPrime); if (_foundPrimes.Count() == retrieve) break; //analyze 6k+1 //assign the value to potential potentialPrime = 6 * _k + 1; //if there are any primes that divise this, it is NOT a prime number //using PLINQ for quick boost isPrime = !_foundPrimes.AsParallel() .Any(prime => potentialPrime % prime == 0); //if it is prime, add to found list if (isPrime) _foundPrimes.Add(potentialPrime); //increment k to analyze next _k++; } while (_foundPrimes.Count() < retrieve); return _foundPrimes; } } Now there are definitely more things I can do to help make this more efficient, but for the scope of this example, I think this is fine (but still hideous)! Profiling this now yields a happy surprise 27 seconds to generate the 15000 primes with the profiler attached, and only 1.43 seconds without.  One important thing I wanted to call out though was the performance graph now: Notice anything odd?  The %Processor time is above 100%.  This is because there is now more than 1 core in the operation.  A better label for the chart in my mind would have been %Core time, but to each their own. Another odd thing I noticed was that the profiler seemed to be spot on this time in my DumbPrimes class with line details in source, even with comments..  Odd. Profiling Web Applications The last thing that I wanted to cover, that means a lot to me as a web developer, is the great amount of work that Red Gate put into the profiler when profiling web applications.  In my solution, I have a simple MVC4 application setup with 1 page, a single input form, that will output prime values as my WPF app did.  Launching the profiler from Visual Studio as before, nothing is really different in the profiler window, however I did receive a UAC prompt for a Red Gate helper app to integrate with the web server without notification. After requesting 500, 1000, 2000, and 5000 primes, and looking at the profiler session, things are slightly different from before: As you can see, there are 4 spikes of activity in the processor time graph, but there is also something new in the call tree: That’s right – ANTS will actually group method calls by get/post operations, so it is easier to find out what action/page is giving the largest problems…  Pretty cool in my mind! Overview Overall, I think that Red Gate ANTS CLR Profiler has a lot to offer, however I think it also has a long ways to go.  3 Biggest Pros: Ability to easily drill down from time graph, to method calls, to source code Wide variety of counters to choose from when profiling your application Excellent integration/grouping of methods being called from web applications by request – BRILLIANT! 3 Biggest Cons: Issue regarding line details in source view Nit pick – Processor time vs. Core time Nit pick – Lack of full integration with Visual Studio Ratings Ease of Use (7/10) – I marked down here because of the problems with the line level details and the extra work that that entails, and the lack of better integration with Visual Studio. Effectiveness (10/10) – I believe that the profiler does EXACTLY what it purports to do.  Especially with its large variety of performance counters, a definite plus! Features (9/10) – Besides the real time performance monitoring, and the drill downs that I’ve shown here, ANTS also has great integration with ADO.Net, with the ability to show database queries run by your application in the profiler.  This, with the line level details, the web request grouping, reflector integration, and various options to customize your profiling session I think create a great set of features! Customer Service (10/10) – My entire experience with Red Gate personnel has been nothing but good.  their people are friendly, helpful, and happy! UI / UX (8/10) – The interface is very easy to get around, and all of the options are easy to find.  With a little bit of poking around, you’ll be optimizing Hello World in no time flat! Overall (8/10) – Overall, I am happy with the Performance Profiler and its features, as well as with the service I received when working with the Red Gate personnel.  I WOULD recommend you trying the application and seeing if it would fit into your process, BUT, remember there are still some kinks in it to hopefully be worked out. My next post will definitely be shorter (hopefully), but thank you for reading up to here, or skipping ahead!  Please, if you do try the product, drop me a message and let me know what you think!  I would love to hear any opinions you may have on the product. Code Feel free to download the code I used above – download via DropBox

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  • Scaling-out Your Services by Message Bus based WCF Transport Extension &ndash; Part 1 &ndash; Background

    - by Shaun
    Cloud computing gives us more flexibility on the computing resource, we can provision and deploy an application or service with multiple instances over multiple machines. With the increment of the service instances, how to balance the incoming message and workload would become a new challenge. Currently there are two approaches we can use to pass the incoming messages to the service instances, I would like call them dispatcher mode and pulling mode.   Dispatcher Mode The dispatcher mode introduces a role which takes the responsible to find the best service instance to process the request. The image below describes the sharp of this mode. There are four clients communicate with the service through the underlying transportation. For example, if we are using HTTP the clients might be connecting to the same service URL. On the server side there’s a dispatcher listening on this URL and try to retrieve all messages. When a message came in, the dispatcher will find a proper service instance to process it. There are three mechanism to find the instance: Round-robin: Dispatcher will always send the message to the next instance. For example, if the dispatcher sent the message to instance 2, then the next message will be sent to instance 3, regardless if instance 3 is busy or not at that moment. Random: Dispatcher will find a service instance randomly, and same as the round-robin mode it regardless if the instance is busy or not. Sticky: Dispatcher will send all related messages to the same service instance. This approach always being used if the service methods are state-ful or session-ful. But as you can see, all of these approaches are not really load balanced. The clients will send messages at any time, and each message might take different process duration on the server side. This means in some cases, some of the service instances are very busy while others are almost idle. For example, if we were using round-robin mode, it could be happened that most of the simple task messages were passed to instance 1 while the complex ones were sent to instance 3, even though instance 1 should be idle. This brings some problem in our architecture. The first one is that, the response to the clients might be longer than it should be. As it’s shown in the figure above, message 6 and 9 can be processed by instance 1 or instance 2, but in reality they were dispatched to the busy instance 3 since the dispatcher and round-robin mode. Secondly, if there are many requests came from the clients in a very short period, service instances might be filled by tons of pending tasks and some instances might be crashed. Third, if we are using some cloud platform to host our service instances, for example the Windows Azure, the computing resource is billed by service deployment period instead of the actual CPU usage. This means if any service instance is idle it is wasting our money! Last one, the dispatcher would be the bottleneck of our system since all incoming messages must be routed by the dispatcher. If we are using HTTP or TCP as the transport, the dispatcher would be a network load balance. If we wants more capacity, we have to scale-up, or buy a hardware load balance which is very expensive, as well as scaling-out the service instances. Pulling Mode Pulling mode doesn’t need a dispatcher to route the messages. All service instances are listening to the same transport and try to retrieve the next proper message to process if they are idle. Since there is no dispatcher in pulling mode, it requires some features on the transportation. The transportation must support multiple client connection and server listening. HTTP and TCP doesn’t allow multiple clients are listening on the same address and port, so it cannot be used in pulling mode directly. All messages in the transportation must be FIFO, which means the old message must be received before the new one. Message selection would be a plus on the transportation. This means both service and client can specify some selection criteria and just receive some specified kinds of messages. This feature is not mandatory but would be very useful when implementing the request reply and duplex WCF channel modes. Otherwise we must have a memory dictionary to store the reply messages. I will explain more about this in the following articles. Message bus, or the message queue would be best candidate as the transportation when using the pulling mode. First, it allows multiple application to listen on the same queue, and it’s FIFO. Some of the message bus also support the message selection, such as TIBCO EMS, RabbitMQ. Some others provide in memory dictionary which can store the reply messages, for example the Redis. The principle of pulling mode is to let the service instances self-managed. This means each instance will try to retrieve the next pending incoming message if they finished the current task. This gives us more benefit and can solve the problems we met with in the dispatcher mode. The incoming message will be received to the best instance to process, which means this will be very balanced. And it will not happen that some instances are busy while other are idle, since the idle one will retrieve more tasks to make them busy. Since all instances are try their best to be busy we can use less instances than dispatcher mode, which more cost effective. Since there’s no dispatcher in the system, there is no bottleneck. When we introduced more service instances, in dispatcher mode we have to change something to let the dispatcher know the new instances. But in pulling mode since all service instance are self-managed, there no extra change at all. If there are many incoming messages, since the message bus can queue them in the transportation, service instances would not be crashed. All above are the benefits using the pulling mode, but it will introduce some problem as well. The process tracking and debugging become more difficult. Since the service instances are self-managed, we cannot know which instance will process the message. So we need more information to support debug and track. Real-time response may not be supported. All service instances will process the next message after the current one has done, if we have some real-time request this may not be a good solution. Compare with the Pros and Cons above, the pulling mode would a better solution for the distributed system architecture. Because what we need more is the scalability, cost-effect and the self-management.   WCF and WCF Transport Extensibility Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for building service-oriented applications. In the .NET world WCF is the best way to implement the service. In this series I’m going to demonstrate how to implement the pulling mode on top of a message bus by extending the WCF. I don’t want to deep into every related field in WCF but will highlight its transport extensibility. When we implemented an RPC foundation there are many aspects we need to deal with, for example the message encoding, encryption, authentication and message sending and receiving. In WCF, each aspect is represented by a channel. A message will be passed through all necessary channels and finally send to the underlying transportation. And on the other side the message will be received from the transport and though the same channels until the business logic. This mode is called “Channel Stack” in WCF, and the last channel in the channel stack must always be a transport channel, which takes the responsible for sending and receiving the messages. As we are going to implement the WCF over message bus and implement the pulling mode scaling-out solution, we need to create our own transport channel so that the client and service can exchange messages over our bus. Before we deep into the transport channel, let’s have a look on the message exchange patterns that WCF defines. Message exchange pattern (MEP) defines how client and service exchange the messages over the transportation. WCF defines 3 basic MEPs which are datagram, Request-Reply and Duplex. Datagram: Also known as one-way, or fire-forgot mode. The message sent from the client to the service, and no need any reply from the service. The client doesn’t care about the message result at all. Request-Reply: Very common used pattern. The client send the request message to the service and wait until the reply message comes from the service. Duplex: The client sent message to the service, when the service processing the message it can callback to the client. When callback the service would be like a client while the client would be like a service. In WCF, each MEP represent some channels associated. MEP Channels Datagram IInputChannel, IOutputChannel Request-Reply IRequestChannel, IReplyChannel Duplex IDuplexChannel And the channels are created by ChannelListener on the server side, and ChannelFactory on the client side. The ChannelListener and ChannelFactory are created by the TransportBindingElement. The TransportBindingElement is created by the Binding, which can be defined as a new binding or from a custom binding. For more information about the transport channel mode, please refer to the MSDN document. The figure below shows the transport channel objects when using the request-reply MEP. And this is the datagram MEP. And this is the duplex MEP. After investigated the WCF transport architecture, channel mode and MEP, we finally identified what we should do to extend our message bus based transport layer. They are: Binding: (Optional) Defines the channel elements in the channel stack and added our transport binding element at the bottom of the stack. But we can use the build-in CustomBinding as well. TransportBindingElement: Defines which MEP is supported in our transport and create the related ChannelListener and ChannelFactory. This also defines the scheme of the endpoint if using this transport. ChannelListener: Create the server side channel based on the MEP it’s. We can have one ChannelListener to create channels for all supported MEPs, or we can have ChannelListener for each MEP. In this series I will use the second approach. ChannelFactory: Create the client side channel based on the MEP it’s. We can have one ChannelFactory to create channels for all supported MEPs, or we can have ChannelFactory for each MEP. In this series I will use the second approach. Channels: Based on the MEPs we want to support, we need to implement the channels accordingly. For example, if we want our transport support Request-Reply mode we should implement IRequestChannel and IReplyChannel. In this series I will implement all 3 MEPs listed above one by one. Scaffold: In order to make our transport extension works we also need to implement some scaffold stuff. For example we need some classes to send and receive message though out message bus. We also need some codes to read and write the WCF message, etc.. These are not necessary but would be very useful in our example.   Message Bus There is only one thing remained before we can begin to implement our scaling-out support WCF transport, which is the message bus. As I mentioned above, the message bus must have some features to fulfill all the WCF MEPs. In my company we will be using TIBCO EMS, which is an enterprise message bus product. And I have said before we can use any message bus production if it’s satisfied with our requests. Here I would like to introduce an interface to separate the message bus from the WCF. This allows us to implement the bus operations by any kinds bus we are going to use. The interface would be like this. 1: public interface IBus : IDisposable 2: { 3: string SendRequest(string message, bool fromClient, string from, string to = null); 4:  5: void SendReply(string message, bool fromClient, string replyTo); 6:  7: BusMessage Receive(bool fromClient, string replyTo); 8: } There are only three methods for the bus interface. Let me explain one by one. The SendRequest method takes the responsible for sending the request message into the bus. The parameters description are: message: The WCF message content. fromClient: Indicates if this message was came from the client. from: The channel ID that this message was sent from. The channel ID will be generated when any kinds of channel was created, which will be explained in the following articles. to: The channel ID that this message should be received. In Request-Reply and Duplex MEP this is necessary since the reply message must be received by the channel which sent the related request message. The SendReply method takes the responsible for sending the reply message. It’s very similar as the previous one but no “from” parameter. This is because it’s no need to reply a reply message again in any MEPs. The Receive method takes the responsible for waiting for a incoming message, includes the request message and specified reply message. It returned a BusMessage object, which contains some information about the channel information. The code of the BusMessage class is 1: public class BusMessage 2: { 3: public string MessageID { get; private set; } 4: public string From { get; private set; } 5: public string ReplyTo { get; private set; } 6: public string Content { get; private set; } 7:  8: public BusMessage(string messageId, string fromChannelId, string replyToChannelId, string content) 9: { 10: MessageID = messageId; 11: From = fromChannelId; 12: ReplyTo = replyToChannelId; 13: Content = content; 14: } 15: } Now let’s implement a message bus based on the IBus interface. Since I don’t want you to buy and install the TIBCO EMS or any other message bus products, I will implement an in process memory bus. This bus is only for test and sample purpose. It can only be used if the service and client are in the same process. Very straightforward. 1: public class InProcMessageBus : IBus 2: { 3: private readonly ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, InProcMessageEntity> _queue; 4: private readonly object _lock; 5:  6: public InProcMessageBus() 7: { 8: _queue = new ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, InProcMessageEntity>(); 9: _lock = new object(); 10: } 11:  12: public string SendRequest(string message, bool fromClient, string from, string to = null) 13: { 14: var entity = new InProcMessageEntity(message, fromClient, from, to); 15: _queue.TryAdd(entity.ID, entity); 16: return entity.ID.ToString(); 17: } 18:  19: public void SendReply(string message, bool fromClient, string replyTo) 20: { 21: var entity = new InProcMessageEntity(message, fromClient, null, replyTo); 22: _queue.TryAdd(entity.ID, entity); 23: } 24:  25: public BusMessage Receive(bool fromClient, string replyTo) 26: { 27: InProcMessageEntity e = null; 28: while (true) 29: { 30: lock (_lock) 31: { 32: var entity = _queue 33: .Where(kvp => kvp.Value.FromClient == fromClient && (kvp.Value.To == replyTo || string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(kvp.Value.To))) 34: .FirstOrDefault(); 35: if (entity.Key != Guid.Empty && entity.Value != null) 36: { 37: _queue.TryRemove(entity.Key, out e); 38: } 39: } 40: if (e == null) 41: { 42: Thread.Sleep(100); 43: } 44: else 45: { 46: return new BusMessage(e.ID.ToString(), e.From, e.To, e.Content); 47: } 48: } 49: } 50:  51: public void Dispose() 52: { 53: } 54: } The InProcMessageBus stores the messages in the objects of InProcMessageEntity, which can take some extra information beside the WCF message itself. 1: public class InProcMessageEntity 2: { 3: public Guid ID { get; set; } 4: public string Content { get; set; } 5: public bool FromClient { get; set; } 6: public string From { get; set; } 7: public string To { get; set; } 8:  9: public InProcMessageEntity() 10: : this(string.Empty, false, string.Empty, string.Empty) 11: { 12: } 13:  14: public InProcMessageEntity(string content, bool fromClient, string from, string to) 15: { 16: ID = Guid.NewGuid(); 17: Content = content; 18: FromClient = fromClient; 19: From = from; 20: To = to; 21: } 22: }   Summary OK, now I have all necessary stuff ready. The next step would be implementing our WCF message bus transport extension. In this post I described two scaling-out approaches on the service side especially if we are using the cloud platform: dispatcher mode and pulling mode. And I compared the Pros and Cons of them. Then I introduced the WCF channel stack, channel mode and the transport extension part, and identified what we should do to create our own WCF transport extension, to let our WCF services using pulling mode based on a message bus. And finally I provided some classes that need to be used in the future posts that working against an in process memory message bus, for the demonstration purpose only. In the next post I will begin to implement the transport extension step by step.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Towards Database Continuous Delivery – What Next after Continuous Integration? A Checklist

    - by Ben Rees
    .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database delivery patterns & practices STAGE 4 AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT If you’ve been fortunate enough to get to the stage where you’ve implemented some sort of continuous integration process for your database updates, then hopefully you’re seeing the benefits of that investment – constant feedback on changes your devs are making, advanced warning of data loss (prior to the production release on Saturday night!), a nice suite of automated tests to check business logic, so you know it’s going to work when it goes live, and so on. But what next? What can you do to improve your delivery process further, moving towards a full continuous delivery process for your database? In this article I describe some of the issues you might need to tackle on the next stage of this journey, and how to plan to overcome those obstacles before they appear. Our Database Delivery Learning Program consists of four stages, really three – source controlling a database, running continuous integration processes, then how to set up automated deployment (the middle stage is split in two – basic and advanced continuous integration, making four stages in total). If you’ve managed to work through the first three of these stages – source control, basic, then advanced CI, then you should have a solid change management process set up where, every time one of your team checks in a change to your database (whether schema or static reference data), this change gets fully tested automatically by your CI server. But this is only part of the story. Great, we know that our updates work, that the upgrade process works, that the upgrade isn’t going to wipe our 4Tb of production data with a single DROP TABLE. But – how do you get this (fully tested) release live? Continuous delivery means being always ready to release your software at any point in time. There’s a significant gap between your latest version being tested, and it being easily releasable. Just a quick note on terminology – there’s a nice piece here from Atlassian on the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This piece also gives a nice description of the benefits of continuous delivery. These benefits have been summed up by Jez Humble at Thoughtworks as: “Continuous delivery is a set of principles and practices to reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering incremental changes to users” There’s another really useful piece here on Simple-Talk about the need for continuous delivery and how it applies to the database written by Phil Factor – specifically the extra needs and complexities of implementing a full CD solution for the database (compared to just implementing CD for, say, a web app). So, hopefully you’re convinced of moving on the the next stage! The next step after CI is to get some sort of automated deployment (or “release management”) process set up. But what should I do next? What do I need to plan and think about for getting my automated database deployment process set up? Can’t I just install one of the many release management tools available and hey presto, I’m ready! If only it were that simple. Below I list some of the areas that it’s worth spending a little time on, where a little planning and prep could go a long way. It’s also worth pointing out, that this should really be an evolving process. Depending on your starting point of course, it can be a long journey from your current setup to a full continuous delivery pipeline. If you’ve got a CI mechanism in place, you’re certainly a long way down that path. Nevertheless, we’d recommend evolving your process incrementally. Pages 157 and 129-141 of the book on Continuous Delivery (by Jez Humble and Dave Farley) have some great guidance on building up a pipeline incrementally: http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912 For now, in this post, we’ll look at the following areas for your checklist: You and Your Team Environments The Deployment Process Rollback and Recovery Development Practices You and Your Team It’s a cliché in the DevOps community that “It’s not all about processes and tools, really it’s all about a culture”. As stated in this DevOps report from Puppet Labs: “DevOps processes and tooling contribute to high performance, but these practices alone aren’t enough to achieve organizational success. The most common barriers to DevOps adoption are cultural: lack of manager or team buy-in, or the value of DevOps isn’t understood outside of a specific group”. Like most clichés, there’s truth in there – if you want to set up a database continuous delivery process, you need to get your boss, your department, your company (if relevant) onside. Why? Because it’s an investment with the benefits coming way down the line. But the benefits are huge – for HP, in the book A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware, these are summarized as: -2008 to present: overall development costs reduced by 40% -Number of programs under development increased by 140% -Development costs per program down 78% -Firmware resources now driving innovation increased by a factor of 8 (from 5% working on new features to 40% But what does this mean? It means that, when moving to the next stage, to make that extra investment in automating your deployment process, it helps a lot if everyone is convinced that this is a good thing. That they understand the benefits of automated deployment and are willing to make the effort to transform to a new way of working. Incidentally, if you’re ever struggling to convince someone of the value I’d strongly recommend just buying them a copy of this book – a great read, and a very practical guide to how it can really work at a large org. I’ve spoken to many customers who have implemented database CI who describe their deployment process as “The point where automation breaks down. Up to that point, the CI process runs, untouched by human hand, but as soon as that’s finished we revert to manual.” This deployment process can involve, for example, a DBA manually comparing an environment (say, QA) to production, creating the upgrade scripts, reading through them, checking them against an Excel document emailed to him/her the night before, turning to page 29 in his/her notebook to double-check how replication is switched off and on for deployments, and so on and so on. Painful, error-prone and lengthy. But the point is, if this is something like your deployment process, telling your DBA “We’re changing everything you do and your toolset next week, to automate most of your role – that’s okay isn’t it?” isn’t likely to go down well. There’s some work here to bring him/her onside – to explain what you’re doing, why there will still be control of the deployment process and so on. Or of course, if you’re the DBA looking after this process, you have to do a similar job in reverse. You may have researched and worked out how you’d like to change your methodology to start automating your painful release process, but do the dev team know this? What if they have to start producing different artifacts for you? Will they be happy with this? Worth talking to them, to find out. As well as talking to your DBA/dev team, the other group to get involved before implementation is your manager. And possibly your manager’s manager too. As mentioned, unless there’s buy-in “from the top”, you’re going to hit problems when the implementation starts to get rocky (and what tool/process implementations don’t get rocky?!). You need to have support from someone senior in your organisation – someone you can turn to when you need help with a delayed implementation, lack of resources or lack of progress. Actions: Get your DBA involved (or whoever looks after live deployments) and discuss what you’re planning to do or, if you’re the DBA yourself, get the dev team up-to-speed with your plans, Get your boss involved too and make sure he/she is bought in to the investment. Environments Where are you going to deploy to? And really this question is – what environments do you want set up for your deployment pipeline? Assume everyone has “Production”, but do you have a QA environment? Dedicated development environments for each dev? Proper pre-production? I’ve seen every setup under the sun, and there is often a big difference between “What we want, to do continuous delivery properly” and “What we’re currently stuck with”. Some of these differences are: What we want What we’ve got Each developer with their own dedicated database environment A single shared “development” environment, used by everyone at once An Integration box used to test the integration of all check-ins via the CI process, along with a full suite of unit-tests running on that machine In fact if you have a CI process running, you’re likely to have some sort of integration server running (even if you don’t call it that!). Whether you have a full suite of unit tests running is a different question… Separate QA environment used explicitly for manual testing prior to release “We just test on the dev environments, or maybe pre-production” A proper pre-production (or “staging”) box that matches production as closely as possible Hopefully a pre-production box of some sort. But does it match production closely!? A production environment reproducible from source control A production box which has drifted significantly from anything in source control The big question is – how much time and effort are you going to invest in fixing these issues? In reality this just involves figuring out which new databases you’re going to create and where they’ll be hosted – VMs? Cloud-based? What about size/data issues – what data are you going to include on dev environments? Does it need to be masked to protect access to production data? And often the amount of work here really depends on whether you’re working on a new, greenfield project, or trying to update an existing, brownfield application. There’s a world if difference between starting from scratch with 4 or 5 clean environments (reproducible from source control of course!), and trying to re-purpose and tweak a set of existing databases, with all of their surrounding processes and quirks. But for a proper release management process, ideally you have: Dedicated development databases, An Integration server used for testing continuous integration and running unit tests. [NB: This is the point at which deployments are automatic, without human intervention. Each deployment after this point is a one-click (but human) action], QA – QA engineers use a one-click deployment process to automatically* deploy chosen releases to QA for testing, Pre-production. The environment you use to test the production release process, Production. * A note on the use of the word “automatic” – when carrying out automated deployments this does not mean that the deployment is happening without human intervention (i.e. that something is just deploying over and over again). It means that the process of carrying out the deployment is automatic in that it’s not a person manually running through a checklist or set of actions. The deployment still requires a single-click from a user. Actions: Get your environments set up and ready, Set access permissions appropriately, Make sure everyone understands what the environments will be used for (it’s not a “free-for-all” with all environments to be accessed, played with and changed by development). The Deployment Process As described earlier, most existing database deployment processes are pretty manual. The following is a description of a process we hear very often when we ask customers “How do your database changes get live? How does your manual process work?” Check pre-production matches production (use a schema compare tool, like SQL Compare). Sometimes done by taking a backup from production and restoring in to pre-prod, Again, use a schema compare tool to find the differences between the latest version of the database ready to go live (i.e. what the team have been developing). This generates a script, User (generally, the DBA), reviews the script. This often involves manually checking updates against a spreadsheet or similar, Run the script on pre-production, and check there are no errors (i.e. it upgrades pre-production to what you hoped), If all working, run the script on production.* * this assumes there’s no problem with production drifting away from pre-production in the interim time period (i.e. someone has hacked something in to the production box without going through the proper change management process). This difference could undermine the validity of your pre-production deployment test. Red Gate is currently working on a free tool to detect this problem – sign up here at www.sqllighthouse.com, if you’re interested in testing early versions. There are several variations on this process – some better, some much worse! How do you automate this? In particular, step 3 – surely you can’t automate a DBA checking through a script, that everything is in order!? The key point here is to plan what you want in your new deployment process. There are so many options. At one extreme, pure continuous deployment – whenever a dev checks something in to source control, the CI process runs (including extensive and thorough testing!), before the deployment process keys in and automatically deploys that change to the live box. Not for the faint hearted – and really not something we recommend. At the other extreme, you might be more comfortable with a semi-automated process – the pre-production/production matching process is automated (with an error thrown if these environments don’t match), followed by a manual intervention, allowing for script approval by the DBA. One he/she clicks “Okay, I’m happy for that to go live”, the latter stages automatically take the script through to live. And anything in between of course – and other variations. But we’d strongly recommended sitting down with a whiteboard and your team, and spending a couple of hours mapping out “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” NB: Most of what we’re discussing here is about production deployments. It’s important to note that you will also need to map out a deployment process for earlier environments (for example QA). However, these are likely to be less onerous, and many customers opt for a much more automated process for these boxes. Actions: Sit down with your team and a whiteboard, and draw out the answers to the questions above for your production deployments – “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” Repeat for earlier environments (QA and so on). Rollback and Recovery If only every deployment went according to plan! Unfortunately they don’t – and when things go wrong, you need a rollback or recovery plan for what you’re going to do in that situation. Once you move in to a more automated database deployment process, you’re far more likely to be deploying more frequently than before. No longer once every 6 months, maybe now once per week, or even daily. Hence the need for a quick rollback or recovery process becomes paramount, and should be planned for. NB: These are mainly scenarios for handling rollbacks after the transaction has been committed. If a failure is detected during the transaction, the whole transaction can just be rolled back, no problem. There are various options, which we’ll explore in subsequent articles, things like: Immediately restore from backup, Have a pre-tested rollback script (remembering that really this is a “roll-forward” script – there’s not really such a thing as a rollback script for a database!) Have fallback environments – for example, using a blue-green deployment pattern. Different options have pros and cons – some are easier to set up, some require more investment in infrastructure; and of course some work better than others (the key issue with using backups, is loss of the interim transaction data that has been added between the failed deployment and the restore). The best mechanism will be primarily dependent on how your application works and how much you need a cast-iron failsafe mechanism. Actions: Work out an appropriate rollback strategy based on how your application and business works, your appetite for investment and requirements for a completely failsafe process. Development Practices This is perhaps the more difficult area for people to tackle. The process by which you can deploy database updates is actually intrinsically linked with the patterns and practices used to develop that database and linked application. So you need to decide whether you want to implement some changes to the way your developers actually develop the database (particularly schema changes) to make the deployment process easier. A good example is the pattern “Branch by abstraction”. Explained nicely here, by Martin Fowler, this is a process that can be used to make significant database changes (e.g. splitting a table) in a step-wise manner so that you can always roll back, without data loss – by making incremental updates to the database backward compatible. Slides 103-108 of the following slidedeck, from Niek Bartholomeus explain the process: https://speakerdeck.com/niekbartho/orchestration-in-meatspace As these slides show, by making a significant schema change in multiple steps – where each step can be rolled back without any loss of new data – this affords the release team the opportunity to have zero-downtime deployments with considerably less stress (because if an increment goes wrong, they can roll back easily). There are plenty more great patterns that can be implemented – the book Refactoring Databases, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage is a great read, if this is a direction you want to go in: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Databases-Evolutionary-paperback-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321774515 But the question is – how much of this investment are you willing to make? How often are you making significant schema changes that would require these best practices? Again, there’s a difference here between migrating old projects and starting afresh – with the latter it’s much easier to instigate best practice from the start. Actions: For your business, work out how far down the path you want to go, amending your database development patterns to “best practice”. It’s a trade-off between implementing quality processes, and the necessity to do so (depending on how often you make complex changes). Socialise these changes with your development group. No-one likes having “best practice” changes imposed on them, so good to introduce these ideas and the rationale behind them early.   Summary The next stages of implementing a continuous delivery pipeline for your database changes (once you have CI up and running) require a little pre-planning, if you want to get the most out of the work, and for the implementation to go smoothly. We’ve covered some of the checklist of areas to consider – mainly in the areas of “Getting the team ready for the changes that are coming” and “Planning our your pipeline, environments, patterns and practices for development”, though there will be more detail, depending on where you’re coming from – and where you want to get to. This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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  • Responsive Design for your ADF Faces Web Applications

    - by Shay Shmeltzer
    Responsive web applications are a common pattern for designing web pages that adjust their UI based on the device that access them. With the increase in the number of ADF applications that are being accessed from mobile phones and tablet we are getting more and more questions around this topic. Steven Davelaar wrote a comprehensive article covering key concepts in this area that you can find here. The article focuses on what I would refer to as server adaptive application, where the server adapts the UI it generates based on the device that is accessing the server. However there is one more technique that is not covered in that article and can be used with Oracle ADF - it is CSS manipulation on the client that can achieve responsive design. I'll cover this technique in this blog entry. The main advantage of this technique is that the UI manipulation does not require the server to send over a new UI when a change is needed. This for example allows your page to change immediately when you change the orientation of your device. (By the way this example was developed for one of the seminars in the upcoming Oracle ADF OTN Virtual Developer Day). In the demo that you'll see below you'll see a single page that changes the way it is displayed based on the orientation of the device. Here is the page with the tablet in landscape and portrait: To achieve this I'm using a CSS media query in my page template that changes the display property of a couple of style classes that are used in my page. The media query has this format: @media screen and (max-width:700px) {            .narrow {                display: inline;            }            .wide {                display: none;            }            .adjustFont {                font-size: small;            }            .icon-home {                font-size: 24px;            }        } This changes the properties of the same styleClasses that are defined in my application's skin. Here is a quick demo video that shows you the full application and explains how it works. For those looking to replicate this, here are the basic files: skin1.css @charset "UTF-8";/**ADFFaces_Skin_File / DO NOT REMOVE**/@namespace af "http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich";@namespace dvt "http://xmlns.oracle.com/dss/adf/faces";.wide {    display: inline;}.narrow {    display: none;}.adjustFont {    font-size: large;}.icon-home {        font-family: 'UIShellUGH';    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;        font-size: 36px;        color: #ffa000;} pageTemplate: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><af:pageTemplateDef xmlns:af="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich" var="attrs" definition="private"                    xmlns:afc="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich/component">    <af:xmlContent>        <afc:component>            <afc:description>A template that will work on phones and desktop</afc:description>            <afc:display-name>ResponsiveTemplate</afc:display-name>            <afc:facet>                <afc:facet-name>main</afc:facet-name>            </afc:facet>        </afc:component>    </af:xmlContent>    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"/>    <af:resource type="css">@media screen and (max-width:700px) {            .narrow {                display: inline;            }            .wide {                display: none;            }            .adjustFont {                font-size: small;            }            .icon-home {                font-size: 24px;            }        }@font-face {            font-family: 'UIShellUGH';            src: url(data:application/x-font-woff;charset=utf-8;base64,d09GRk9UVE8AA..removed code here...AzV6b1g==)format('truetype');            font-weight: normal;            font-style: normal;        }    </af:resource>    <af:panelGroupLayout id="pt_pgl4" layout="vertical" styleClass="sizeStyle">        <af:panelGridLayout id="pt_pgl1">            <af:gridRow marginTop="5px" height="40px" id="pt_gr1">                <af:gridCell marginStart="5px" width="100%" marginEnd="5px" id="pt_gc1">                    <af:panelGroupLayout id="pt_pgl3" halign="center" layout="horizontal">                        <af:outputText value="h" id="ot2" styleClass="icon-home"/>                        <af:outputText value="HR System" id="ot3" styleClass="adjustFont"/>                    </af:panelGroupLayout>                </af:gridCell>            </af:gridRow>            <af:gridRow marginTop="5px" height="auto" id="pt_gr2">                <af:gridCell marginStart="5px" width="100%" marginEnd="5px" id="pt_gc2" halign="stretch">                    <af:panelGroupLayout id="pt_pgl2" layout="scroll">                        <af:facetRef facetName="main"/>                    </af:panelGroupLayout>                </af:gridCell>            </af:gridRow>            <af:gridRow marginTop="5px" height="20px" marginBottom="5px" id="pt_gr3">                <af:gridCell marginStart="5px" width="100%" marginEnd="5px" id="pt_gc3">                    <af:panelGroupLayout id="pt_pgl5" layout="vertical" halign="center">                        <af:separator id="pt_s1"/>                        <af:outputText value="Copyright Oracle Corp. 2013" id="pt_ot1" styleClass="adjustFont"/>                    </af:panelGroupLayout>                </af:gridCell>            </af:gridRow>        </af:panelGridLayout>    </af:panelGroupLayout></af:pageTemplateDef> Example from the page:                         <af:gridRow id="gr3">                            <af:gridCell id="gc7" columnSpan="2">                                <af:panelGroupLayout id="pgl8" styleClass="narrow">                                    <af:link text="Menu" id="l1">                                        <af:showPopupBehavior triggerType="action" popupId="p1" align="afterEnd"/>                                    </af:link>                                </af:panelGroupLayout>                                <af:panelGroupLayout id="pgl7" styleClass="wide">                                    <af:navigationPane id="np1" hint="buttons">                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Departments" id="cni1"/>                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Employees" id="cni2"/>                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Salaries" id="cni3"/>                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Jobs" id="cni4"/>                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Services" id="cni5"/>                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Support" id="cni6"/>                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Help" id="cni7"/>                                    </af:navigationPane>                                </af:panelGroupLayout>                            </af:gridCell>                        </af:gridRow>

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  • Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - The Gotchas, The Do's and Don'ts for IDM Implementations

    - by Tanu Sood
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6 {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:1; mso-tstyle-colband-size:1; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; border-top:solid #E0301E 1.0pt; mso-border-top-themecolor:accent6; border-left:none; border-bottom:solid #E0301E 1.0pt; mso-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; border-right:none; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Georgia","serif"; color:black; mso-themecolor:text1; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Georgia; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Georgia; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; color:#968C6D; mso-themecolor:text2; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6 {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:1; mso-tstyle-colband-size:1; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; border-top:solid #E0301E 1.0pt; mso-border-top-themecolor:accent6; border-left:none; border-bottom:solid #E0301E 1.0pt; mso-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; border-right:none; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Georgia","serif"; color:black; mso-themecolor:text1; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; font-family:"Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Georgia; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Georgia; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; color:#968C6D; mso-themecolor:text2; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} It is generally accepted among business communities that technology by itself is not a silver bullet to all problems, but when it is combined with leading practices, strategy, careful planning and execution, it can create a recipe for success. This post attempts to highlight some of the best practices along with dos & don’ts that our practice has accumulated over the years in the identity & access management space in general, and also in the context of R2, in particular. Best Practices The following section illustrates the leading practices in “How” to plan, implement and sustain a successful OIM deployment, based on our collective experience. Planning is critical, but often overlooked A common approach to planning an IAM program that we identify with our clients is the three step process involving a current state assessment, a future state roadmap and an executable strategy to get there. It is extremely beneficial for clients to assess their current IAM state, perform gap analysis, document the recommended controls to address the gaps, align future state roadmap to business initiatives and get buy in from all stakeholders involved to improve the chances of success. When designing an enterprise-wide solution, the scalability of the technology must accommodate the future growth of the enterprise and the projected identity transactions over several years. Aligning the implementation schedule of OIM to related information technology projects increases the chances of success. As a baseline, it is recommended to match hardware specifications to the sizing guide for R2 published by Oracle. Adherence to this will help ensure that the hardware used to support OIM will not become a bottleneck as the adoption of new services increases. If your Organization has numerous connected applications that rely on reconciliation to synchronize the access data into OIM, consider hosting dedicated instances to handle reconciliation. Finally, ensure the use of clustered environment for development and have at least three total environments to help facilitate a controlled migration to production. If your Organization is planning to implement role based access control, we recommend performing a role mining exercise and consolidate your enterprise roles to keep them manageable. In addition, many Organizations have multiple approval flows to control access to critical roles, applications and entitlements. If your Organization falls into this category, we highly recommend that you limit the number of approval workflows to a small set. Most Organizations have operations managed across data centers with backend database synchronization, if your Organization falls into this category, ensure that the overall latency between the datacenters when replicating the databases is less than ten milliseconds to ensure that there are no front office performance impacts. Ingredients for a successful implementation During the development phase of your project, there are a number of guidelines that can be followed to help increase the chances for success. Most implementations cannot be completed without the use of customizations. If your implementation requires this, it’s a good practice to perform code reviews to help ensure quality and reduce code bottlenecks related to performance. We have observed at our clients that the development process works best when team members adhere to coding leading practices. Plan for time to correct coding defects and ensure developers are empowered to report their own bugs for maximum transparency. Many organizations struggle with defining a consistent approach to managing logs. This is particularly important due to the amount of information that can be logged by OIM. We recommend Oracle Diagnostics Logging (ODL) as an alternative to be used for logging. ODL allows log files to be formatted in XML for easy parsing and does not require a server restart when the log levels are changed during troubleshooting. Testing is a vital part of any large project, and an OIM R2 implementation is no exception. We suggest that at least one lower environment should use production-like data and connectors. Configurations should match as closely as possible. For example, use secure channels between OIM and target platforms in pre-production environments to test the configurations, the migration processes of certificates, and the additional overhead that encryption could impose. Finally, we ask our clients to perform database backups regularly and before any major change event, such as a patch or migration between environments. In the lowest environments, we recommend to have at least a weekly backup in order to prevent significant loss of time and effort. Similarly, if your organization is using virtual machines for one or more of the environments, it is recommended to take frequent snapshots so that rollbacks can occur in the event of improper configuration. Operate & sustain the solution to derive maximum benefits When migrating OIM R2 to production, it is important to perform certain activities that will help achieve a smoother transition. At our clients, we have seen that splitting the OIM tables into their own tablespaces by categories (physical tables, indexes, etc.) can help manage database growth effectively. If we notice that a client hasn’t enabled the Oracle-recommended indexing in the applicable database, we strongly suggest doing so to improve performance. Additionally, we work with our clients to make sure that the audit level is set to fit the organization’s auditing needs and sometimes even allocate UPA tables and indexes into their own table-space for better maintenance. Finally, many of our clients have set up schedules for reconciliation tables to be archived at regular intervals in order to keep the size of the database(s) reasonable and result in optimal database performance. For our clients that anticipate availability issues with target applications, we strongly encourage the use of the offline provisioning capabilities of OIM R2. This reduces the provisioning process for a given target application dependency on target availability and help avoid broken workflows. To account for this and other abnormalities, we also advocate that OIM’s monitoring controls be configured to alert administrators on any abnormal situations. Within OIM R2, we have begun advising our clients to utilize the ‘profile’ feature to encapsulate multiple commonly requested accounts, roles, and/or entitlements into a single item. By setting up a number of profiles that can be searched for and used, users will spend less time performing the same exact steps for common tasks. We advise our clients to follow the Oracle recommended guides for database and application server tuning which provides a good baseline configuration. It offers guidance on database connection pools, connection timeouts, user interface threads and proper handling of adapters/plug-ins. All of these can be important configurations that will allow faster provisioning and web page response times. Many of our clients have begun to recognize the value of data mining and a remediation process during the initial phases of an implementation (to help ensure high quality data gets loaded) and beyond (to support ongoing maintenance and business-as-usual processes). A successful program always begins with identifying the data elements and assigning a classification level based on criticality, risk, and availability. It should finish by following through with a remediation process. Dos & Don’ts Here are the most common dos and don'ts that we socialize with our clients, derived from our experience implementing the solution. Dos Don’ts Scope the project into phases with realistic goals. Look for quick wins to show success and value to the stake holders. Avoid “boiling the ocean” and trying to integrate all enterprise applications in the first phase. Establish an enterprise ID (universal unique ID across the enterprise) earlier in the program. Avoid major UI customizations that require code changes. Have a plan in place to patch during the project, which helps alleviate any major issues or roadblocks (product and database). Avoid publishing all the target entitlements if you don't anticipate their usage during access request. Assess your current state and prepare a roadmap to address your operations, tactical and strategic goals, align it with your business priorities. Avoid integrating non-production environments with your production target systems. Defer complex integrations to the later phases and take advantage of lessons learned from previous phases Avoid creating multiple accounts for the same user on the same system, if there is an opportunity to do so. Have an identity and access data quality initiative built into your plan to identify and remediate data related issues early on. Avoid creating complex approval workflows that would negative impact productivity and SLAs. Identify the owner of the identity systems with fair IdM knowledge and empower them with authority to make product related decisions. This will help ensure overcome any design hurdles. Avoid creating complex designs that are not sustainable long term and would need major overhaul during upgrades. Shadow your internal or external consulting resources during the implementation to build the necessary product skills needed to operate and sustain the solution. Avoid treating IAM as a point solution and have appropriate level of communication and training plan for the IT and business users alike. Conclusion In our experience, Identity programs will struggle with scope, proper resourcing, and more. We suggest that companies consider the suggestions discussed in this post and leverage them to help enable their identity and access program. This concludes PwC blog series on R2 for the month and we sincerely hope that the information we have shared thus far has been beneficial. For more information or if you have questions, you can reach out to Rex Thexton, Senior Managing Director, PwC and or Dharma Padala, Director, PwC. We look forward to hearing from you. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Meet the Writers: Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL).

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  • ?????create or replace???PL/SQL??

    - by Liu Maclean(???)
    ????T.Askmaclean.com?????10gR2??????procedure,?????????create or replace ??????????????????,????Oracle???????????????????procedure? ??Maclean ??2?10gR2???????????PL/SQL?????: ??1: ??Flashback Query ????,?????????????flashback database,??????????create or replace???SQL??source$??????????undo data,????????????: SQL> select * from V$version; BANNER ---------------------------------------------------------------- Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.5.0 - 64bi PL/SQL Release 10.2.0.5.0 - Production CORE 10.2.0.5.0 Production TNS for Linux: Version 10.2.0.5.0 - Production NLSRTL Version 10.2.0.5.0 - Production SQL> select * from global_name; GLOBAL_NAME -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- www.oracledatabase12g.com SQL> create or replace procedure maclean_proc as   2  begin   3  execute immediate 'select 1 from dual';   4  end;   5  / Procedure created. SQL> select * from dba_source where name='MACLEAN_PROC'; OWNER      NAME                           TYPE               LINE TEXT ---------- ------------------------------ ------------ ---------- -------------------------------------------------- SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             1 procedure maclean_proc as SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             2 begin SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             3 execute immediate 'select 1 from dual'; SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             4 end; SQL> select current_scn from v$database; CURRENT_SCN -----------     2660057 create or replace procedure maclean_proc as begin -- I am new procedure execute immediate 'select 2 from dual'; end; / Procedure created. SQL> select current_scn from v$database; CURRENT_SCN -----------     2660113 SQL> select * from dba_source where name='MACLEAN_PROC'; OWNER      NAME                           TYPE               LINE TEXT ---------- ------------------------------ ------------ ---------- -------------------------------------------------- SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             1 procedure maclean_proc as SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             2 begin SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             3 -- I am new procedure SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             4 execute immediate 'select 2 from dual'; SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             5 end; SQL> create table old_source as select * from dba_source as of scn 2660057 where name='MACLEAN_PROC'; Table created. SQL> select * from old_source where name='MACLEAN_PROC'; OWNER      NAME                           TYPE               LINE TEXT ---------- ------------------------------ ------------ ---------- -------------------------------------------------- SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             1 procedure maclean_proc as SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             2 begin SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             3 execute immediate 'select 1 from dual'; SYS        MACLEAN_PROC                   PROCEDURE             4 end; ?????????scn??flashback query????,????????as of timestamp??????????,????PL/SQL????????????????undo??????????,????????????replace/drop ??????PL/SQL??? ??2 ??logminer??replace/drop PL/SQL?????SQL???DELETE??,??logminer?UNDO SQL???PL/SQL?????? ????????????????archivelog????,??????????????? minimal supplemental logging,??????????Unsupported SQLREDO???: create or replace?? ?? procedure???????SQL??????, ??????procedure????????????????, source$??????????????: SQL> ALTER DATABASE ADD SUPPLEMENTAL LOG DATA; Database altered. SQL> create or replace procedure maclean_proc as   2  begin   3  execute immediate 'select 1 from dual';   4  end;   5  / Procedure created. SQL> SQL> oradebug setmypid; Statement processed. SQL> SQL> oradebug event 10046 trace name context forever,level 12; Statement processed. SQL> SQL> create or replace procedure maclean_proc as   2  begin   3  execute immediate 'select 2 from dual';   4  end;   5  / Procedure created. SQL> oradebug tracefile_name /s01/admin/G10R25/udump/g10r25_ora_4305.trc [oracle@vrh8 ~]$ egrep  "update|insert|delete|merge"  /s01/admin/G10R25/udump/g10r25_ora_4305.trc delete from procedureinfo$ where obj#=:1 delete from argument$ where obj#=:1 delete from procedurec$ where obj#=:1 delete from procedureplsql$ where obj#=:1 delete from procedurejava$ where obj#=:1 delete from vtable$ where obj#=:1 insert into procedureinfo$(obj#,procedure#,overload#,procedurename,properties,itypeobj#) values (:1,:2,:3,:4,:5,:6) insert into argument$( obj#,procedure$,procedure#,overload#,position#,sequence#,level#,argument,type#,default#,in_out,length,precision#,scale,radix,charsetid,charsetform,properties,type_owner,type_name,type_subname,type_linkname,pls_type) values (:1,:2,:3,:4,:5,:6,:7,:8,:9,:10,:11,:12,:13,:14,:15,:16,:17,:18,:19,:20,:21,:22,:23) insert into procedureplsql$(obj#,procedure#,entrypoint#) values (:1,:2,:3) update procedure$ set audit$=:2,options=:3 where obj#=:1 delete from source$ where obj#=:1 insert into source$(obj#,line,source) values (:1,:2,:3) delete from idl_ub1$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and version<>:3 delete from idl_char$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and version<>:3 delete from idl_ub2$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and version<>:3 delete from idl_sb4$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and version<>:3 delete from ncomp_dll$ where obj#=:1 returning dllname into :2 update idl_sb4$ set piece#=:1 ,length=:2 , piece=:3 where obj#=:4 and part=:5 and piece#=:6 and version=:7 update idl_ub1$ set piece#=:1 ,length=:2 , piece=:3 where obj#=:4 and part=:5 and piece#=:6 and version=:7 update idl_char$ set piece#=:1 ,length=:2 , piece=:3 where obj#=:4 and part=:5 and piece#=:6 and version=:7 update idl_ub2$ set piece#=:1 ,length=:2 , piece=:3 where obj#=:4 and part=:5 and piece#=:6 and version=:7 delete from idl_ub1$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and version<>:3 delete from idl_char$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and version<>:3 delete from idl_ub2$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and version<>:3 delete from idl_sb4$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and version<>:3 delete from ncomp_dll$ where obj#=:1 returning dllname into :2 delete from idl_ub1$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and (piece#<:3 or piece#>:4) and version=:5 delete from idl_char$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and (piece#<:3 or piece#>:4) and version=:5 delete from idl_ub2$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and (piece#<:3 or piece#>:4) and version=:5 delete from idl_sb4$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and (piece#<:3 or piece#>:4) and version=:5 delete from idl_ub1$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and version<>:3 delete from idl_char$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and version<>:3 delete from idl_ub2$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and version<>:3 delete from idl_sb4$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and version<>:3 delete from ncomp_dll$ where obj#=:1 returning dllname into :2 update idl_sb4$ set piece#=:1 ,length=:2 , piece=:3 where obj#=:4 and part=:5 and piece#=:6 and version=:7 update idl_ub1$ set piece#=:1 ,length=:2 , piece=:3 where obj#=:4 and part=:5 and piece#=:6 and version=:7 delete from idl_char$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and (piece#<:3 or piece#>:4) and version=:5 delete from idl_ub2$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 and (piece#<:3 or piece#>:4) and version=:5 delete from error$ where obj#=:1 delete from settings$ where obj# = :1 insert into settings$(obj#, param, value) values (:1, :2, :3) delete from warning_settings$ where obj# = :1 insert into warning_settings$(obj#, warning_num, global_mod, property) values (:1, :2, :3, :4) delete from dependency$ where d_obj#=:1 delete from access$ where d_obj#=:1 insert into dependency$(d_obj#,d_timestamp,order#,p_obj#,p_timestamp, property, d_attrs)values (:1,:2,:3,:4,:5,:6, :7) insert into access$(d_obj#,order#,columns,types) values (:1,:2,:3,:4) update obj$ set obj#=:6,type#=:7,ctime=:8,mtime=:9,stime=:10,status=:11,dataobj#=:13,flags=:14,oid$=:15,spare1=:16, spare2=:17 where owner#=:1 and name=:2 and namespace=:3 and(remoteowner=:4 or remoteowner is null and :4 is null)and(linkname=:5 or linkname is null and :5 is null)and(subname=:12 or subname is null and :12 is null) ?drop procedure??????source$???PL/SQL?????: SQL> oradebug setmypid; Statement processed. SQL> oradebug event 10046 trace name context forever,level 12; Statement processed. SQL> drop procedure maclean_proc; Procedure dropped. SQL> oradebug tracefile_name /s01/admin/G10R25/udump/g10r25_ora_4331.trc delete from context$ where obj#=:1 delete from dir$ where obj#=:1 delete from type_misc$ where obj#=:1 delete from library$ where obj#=:1 delete from procedure$ where obj#=:1 delete from javaobj$ where obj#=:1 delete from operator$ where obj#=:1 delete from opbinding$ where obj#=:1 delete from opancillary$ where obj#=:1 delete from oparg$ where obj# = :1 delete from com$ where obj#=:1 delete from source$ where obj#=:1 delete from idl_ub1$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 delete from idl_char$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 delete from idl_ub2$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 delete from idl_sb4$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 delete from ncomp_dll$ where obj#=:1 returning dllname into :2 delete from idl_ub1$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 delete from idl_char$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 delete from idl_ub2$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 delete from idl_sb4$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 delete from ncomp_dll$ where obj#=:1 returning dllname into :2 delete from idl_ub1$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 delete from idl_char$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 delete from idl_ub2$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 delete from idl_sb4$ where obj#=:1 and part=:2 delete from ncomp_dll$ where obj#=:1 returning dllname into :2 delete from error$ where obj#=:1 delete from settings$ where obj# = :1 delete from procedureinfo$ where obj#=:1 delete from argument$ where obj#=:1 delete from procedurec$ where obj#=:1 delete from procedureplsql$ where obj#=:1 delete from procedurejava$ where obj#=:1 delete from vtable$ where obj#=:1 delete from dependency$ where d_obj#=:1 delete from access$ where d_obj#=:1 delete from objauth$ where obj#=:1 update obj$ set obj#=:6,type#=:7,ctime=:8,mtime=:9,stime=:10,status=:11,dataobj#=:13,flags=:14,oid$=:15,spare1=:16, spare2=:17 where owner#=:1 and name=:2 and namespace=:3 and(remoteowner=:4 or remoteowner is null and :4 is null)and(linkname=:5 or linkname is null and :5 is null)and(subname=:12 or subname is null and :12 is null) ??????????source$???redo: SQL> alter system switch logfile; System altered. SQL> select sequence#,name from v$archived_log where sequence#=(select max(sequence#) from v$archived_log);  SEQUENCE# ---------- NAME --------------------------------------------------------------------------------        242 /s01/flash_recovery_area/G10R25/archivelog/2012_05_21/o1_mf_1_242_7vnm13k6_.arc SQL> exec dbms_logmnr.add_logfile ('/s01/flash_recovery_area/G10R25/archivelog/2012_05_21/o1_mf_1_242_7vnm13k6_.arc',options => dbms_logmnr.new); PL/SQL procedure successfully completed. SQL> exec dbms_logmnr.start_logmnr(options => dbms_logmnr.dict_from_online_catalog); PL/SQL procedure successfully completed. SQL> select sql_redo,sql_undo from v$logmnr_contents where seg_name = 'SOURCE$' and operation='DELETE'; delete from "SYS"."SOURCE$" where "OBJ#" = '56059' and "LINE" = '1' and "SOURCE" = 'procedure maclean_proc as ' and ROWID = 'AAAABIAABAAALpyAAN'; insert into "SYS"."SOURCE$"("OBJ#","LINE","SOURCE") values ('56059','1','procedure maclean_proc as '); delete from "SYS"."SOURCE$" where "OBJ#" = '56059' and "LINE" = '2' and "SOURCE" = 'begin ' and ROWID = 'AAAABIAABAAALpyAAO'; insert into "SYS"."SOURCE$"("OBJ#","LINE","SOURCE") values ('56059','2','begin '); delete from "SYS"."SOURCE$" where "OBJ#" = '56059' and "LINE" = '3' and "SOURCE" = 'execute immediate ''select 1 from dual''; ' and ROWID = 'AAAABIAABAAALpyAAP'; insert into "SYS"."SOURCE$"("OBJ#","LINE","SOURCE") values ('56059','3','execute immediate ''select 1 from dual''; '); delete from "SYS"."SOURCE$" where "OBJ#" = '56059' and "LINE" = '4' and "SOURCE" = 'end;' and ROWID = 'AAAABIAABAAALpyAAQ'; insert into "SYS"."SOURCE$"("OBJ#","LINE","SOURCE") values ('56059','4','end;'); delete from "SYS"."SOURCE$" where "OBJ#" = '56059' and "LINE" = '1' and "SOURCE" = 'procedure maclean_proc as ' and ROWID = 'AAAABIAABAAALpyAAJ'; insert into "SYS"."SOURCE$"("OBJ#","LINE","SOURCE") values ('56059','1','procedure maclean_proc as '); delete from "SYS"."SOURCE$" where "OBJ#" = '56059' and "LINE" = '2' and "SOURCE" = 'begin ' and ROWID = 'AAAABIAABAAALpyAAK'; insert into "SYS"."SOURCE$"("OBJ#","LINE","SOURCE") values ('56059','2','begin '); delete from "SYS"."SOURCE$" where "OBJ#" = '56059' and "LINE" = '3' and "SOURCE" = 'execute immediate ''select 2 from dual''; ' and ROWID = 'AAAABIAABAAALpyAAL'; insert into "SYS"."SOURCE$"("OBJ#","LINE","SOURCE") values ('56059','3','execute immediate ''select 2 from dual''; '); delete from "SYS"."SOURCE$" where "OBJ#" = '56059' and "LINE" = '4' and "SOURCE" = 'end;' and ROWID = 'AAAABIAABAAALpyAAM'; insert into "SYS"."SOURCE$"("OBJ#","LINE","SOURCE") values ('56059','4','end;'); ???? logminer???UNDO SQL???????source$????,?DELETE????????????,????SOURCE????????????PL/SQL???DDL???

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  • Compare images after canny edge detection in OpenCV (C++)

    - by typoknig
    Hi all, I am working on an OpenCV project and I need to compare some images after canny has been applied to both of them. Before the canny was applied I had the gray scale images populating a histogram and then I compared the histograms, but when canny is added to the images the histogram does not populate. I have read that a canny image can populate a histogram, but have not found a way to make it happen. I do not necessairly need to keep using the histograms, I just want to know the best way to compare two canny images. SSCCE below for you to chew on. I have poached and patched about 75% of this code from books and various sites on the internet, so props to those guys... // SLC (Histogram).cpp : Defines the entry point for the console application. #include "stdafx.h" #include <cxcore.h> #include <cv.h> #include <cvaux.h> #include <highgui.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <sstream> #include <iostream> using namespace std; IplImage* image1= 0; IplImage* imgHistogram1 = 0; IplImage* gray1= 0; CvHistogram* hist1; int main(){ CvCapture* capture = cvCaptureFromCAM(0); if(!cvQueryFrame(capture)){ cout<<"Video capture failed, please check the camera."<<endl; } else{ cout<<"Video camera capture successful!"<<endl; }; CvSize sz = cvGetSize(cvQueryFrame(capture)); IplImage* image = cvCreateImage(sz, 8, 3); IplImage* imgHistogram = 0; IplImage* gray = 0; CvHistogram* hist; cvNamedWindow("Image Source",1); cvNamedWindow("gray", 1); cvNamedWindow("Histogram",1); cvNamedWindow("BG", 1); cvNamedWindow("FG", 1); cvNamedWindow("Canny",1); cvNamedWindow("Canny1", 1); image1 = cvLoadImage("image bin/use this image.jpg");// an image has to load here or the program will not run //size of the histogram -1D histogram int bins1 = 256; int hsize1[] = {bins1}; //max and min value of the histogram float max_value1 = 0, min_value1 = 0; //value and normalized value float value1; int normalized1; //ranges - grayscale 0 to 256 float xranges1[] = { 0, 256 }; float* ranges1[] = { xranges1 }; //create an 8 bit single channel image to hold a //grayscale version of the original picture gray1 = cvCreateImage( cvGetSize(image1), 8, 1 ); cvCvtColor( image1, gray1, CV_BGR2GRAY ); IplImage* canny1 = cvCreateImage(cvGetSize(gray1), 8, 1 ); cvCanny( gray1, canny1, 55, 175, 3 ); //Create 3 windows to show the results cvNamedWindow("original1",1); cvNamedWindow("gray1",1); cvNamedWindow("histogram1",1); //planes to obtain the histogram, in this case just one IplImage* planes1[] = { canny1 }; //get the histogram and some info about it hist1 = cvCreateHist( 1, hsize1, CV_HIST_ARRAY, ranges1,1); cvCalcHist( planes1, hist1, 0, NULL); cvGetMinMaxHistValue( hist1, &min_value1, &max_value1); printf("min: %f, max: %f\n", min_value1, max_value1); //create an 8 bits single channel image to hold the histogram //paint it white imgHistogram1 = cvCreateImage(cvSize(bins1, 50),8,1); cvRectangle(imgHistogram1, cvPoint(0,0), cvPoint(256,50), CV_RGB(255,255,255),-1); //draw the histogram :P for(int i=0; i < bins1; i++){ value1 = cvQueryHistValue_1D( hist1, i); normalized1 = cvRound(value1*50/max_value1); cvLine(imgHistogram1,cvPoint(i,50), cvPoint(i,50-normalized1), CV_RGB(0,0,0)); } //show the image results cvShowImage( "original1", image1 ); cvShowImage( "gray1", gray1 ); cvShowImage( "histogram1", imgHistogram1 ); cvShowImage( "Canny1", canny1); CvBGStatModel* bg_model = cvCreateFGDStatModel( image ); for(;;){ image = cvQueryFrame(capture); cvUpdateBGStatModel( image, bg_model ); //Size of the histogram -1D histogram int bins = 256; int hsize[] = {bins}; //Max and min value of the histogram float max_value = 0, min_value = 0; //Value and normalized value float value; int normalized; //Ranges - grayscale 0 to 256 float xranges[] = {0, 256}; float* ranges[] = {xranges}; //Create an 8 bit single channel image to hold a grayscale version of the original picture gray = cvCreateImage(cvGetSize(image), 8, 1); cvCvtColor(image, gray, CV_BGR2GRAY); IplImage* canny = cvCreateImage(cvGetSize(gray), 8, 1 ); cvCanny( gray, canny, 55, 175, 3 );//55, 175, 3 with direct light //Planes to obtain the histogram, in this case just one IplImage* planes[] = {canny}; //Get the histogram and some info about it hist = cvCreateHist(1, hsize, CV_HIST_ARRAY, ranges,1); cvCalcHist(planes, hist, 0, NULL); cvGetMinMaxHistValue(hist, &min_value, &max_value); //printf("Minimum Histogram Value: %f, Maximum Histogram Value: %f\n", min_value, max_value); //Create an 8 bits single channel image to hold the histogram and paint it white imgHistogram = cvCreateImage(cvSize(bins, 50),8,3); cvRectangle(imgHistogram, cvPoint(0,0), cvPoint(256,50), CV_RGB(255,255,255),-1); //Draw the histogram for(int i=0; i < bins; i++){ value = cvQueryHistValue_1D(hist, i); normalized = cvRound(value*50/max_value); cvLine(imgHistogram,cvPoint(i,50), cvPoint(i,50-normalized), CV_RGB(0,0,0)); } double correlation = cvCompareHist (hist1, hist, CV_COMP_CORREL); double chisquare = cvCompareHist (hist1, hist, CV_COMP_CHISQR); double intersection = cvCompareHist (hist1, hist, CV_COMP_INTERSECT); double bhattacharyya = cvCompareHist (hist1, hist, CV_COMP_BHATTACHARYYA); double difference = (1 - correlation) + chisquare + (1 - intersection) + bhattacharyya; printf("correlation: %f\n", correlation); printf("chi-square: %f\n", chisquare); printf("intersection: %f\n", intersection); printf("bhattacharyya: %f\n", bhattacharyya); printf("difference: %f\n", difference); cvShowImage("Image Source", image); cvShowImage("gray", gray); cvShowImage("Histogram", imgHistogram); cvShowImage( "Canny", canny); cvShowImage("BG", bg_model->background); cvShowImage("FG", bg_model->foreground); //Page 19 paragraph 3 of "Learning OpenCV" tells us why we DO NOT use "cvReleaseImage(&image)" in this section cvReleaseImage(&imgHistogram); cvReleaseImage(&gray); cvReleaseHist(&hist); cvReleaseImage(&canny); char c = cvWaitKey(10); //if ASCII key 27 (esc) is pressed then loop breaks if(c==27) break; } cvReleaseBGStatModel( &bg_model ); cvReleaseImage(&image); cvReleaseCapture(&capture); cvDestroyAllWindows(); }

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  • How do I implement AABB ray cast hit checking for opengl es on the iPhone

    - by Big Fizzy
    Basically, I draw a 3D cube, I can spin it around but I want to be able to touch it and know where on my cube's surface the user touched. I'm using for setting up, generating and spinning. Its based on the Molecules code and NeHe tutorial #5. Any help, links, tutorials and code would be greatly appreciated. I have lots of development experience but nothing much in the way of openGL and 3d. // // GLViewController.h // NeHe Lesson 05 // // Created by Jeff LaMarche on 12/12/08. // Copyright Jeff LaMarche Consulting 2008. All rights reserved. // #import "GLViewController.h" #import "GLView.h" @implementation GLViewController - (void)drawBox { static const GLfloat cubeVertices[] = { -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f }; static const GLubyte cubeNumberOfIndices = 36; const GLubyte cubeVertexFaces[] = { 0, 1, 5, // Half of top face 0, 5, 4, // Other half of top face 4, 6, 5, // Half of front face 4, 6, 7, // Other half of front face 0, 1, 2, // Half of back face 0, 3, 2, // Other half of back face 1, 2, 5, // Half of right face 2, 5, 6, // Other half of right face 0, 3, 4, // Half of left face 7, 4, 3, // Other half of left face 3, 6, 2, // Half of bottom face 6, 7, 3, // Other half of bottom face }; const GLubyte cubeFaceColors[] = { 0, 255, 0, 255, 255, 125, 0, 255, 255, 0, 0, 255, 255, 255, 0, 255, 0, 0, 255, 255, 255, 0, 255, 255 }; glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, cubeVertices); int colorIndex = 0; for(int i = 0; i < cubeNumberOfIndices; i += 3) { glColor4ub(cubeFaceColors[colorIndex], cubeFaceColors[colorIndex+1], cubeFaceColors[colorIndex+2], cubeFaceColors[colorIndex+3]); int face = (i / 3.0); if (face%2 != 0.0) colorIndex+=4; glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, 3, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, &cubeVertexFaces[i]); } glDisableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); } //move this to a data model later! - (GLfixed)floatToFixed:(GLfloat)aValue; { return (GLfixed) (aValue * 65536.0f); } - (void)drawViewByRotatingAroundX:(float)xRotation rotatingAroundY:(float)yRotation scaling:(float)scaleFactor translationInX:(float)xTranslation translationInY:(float)yTranslation view:(GLView*)view; { glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); GLfixed currentModelViewMatrix[16] = { 45146, 47441, 2485, 0, -25149, 26775,-54274, 0, -40303, 36435, 36650, 0, 0, 0, 0, 65536 }; /* GLfixed currentModelViewMatrix[16] = { 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 65536 }; */ //glLoadIdentity(); //glOrthof(-1.0f, 1.0f, -1.5f, 1.5f, -10.0f, 4.0f); // Reset rotation system if (isFirstDrawing) { //glLoadIdentity(); glMultMatrixx(currentModelViewMatrix); [self configureLighting]; isFirstDrawing = NO; } // Scale the view to fit current multitouch scaling GLfixed fixedPointScaleFactor = [self floatToFixed:scaleFactor]; glScalex(fixedPointScaleFactor, fixedPointScaleFactor, fixedPointScaleFactor); // Perform incremental rotation based on current angles in X and Y glGetFixedv(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, currentModelViewMatrix); GLfloat totalRotation = sqrt(xRotation*xRotation + yRotation*yRotation); glRotatex([self floatToFixed:totalRotation], (GLfixed)((xRotation/totalRotation) * (GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[1] + (yRotation/totalRotation) * (GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[0]), (GLfixed)((xRotation/totalRotation) * (GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[5] + (yRotation/totalRotation) * (GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[4]), (GLfixed)((xRotation/totalRotation) * (GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[9] + (yRotation/totalRotation) * (GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[8]) ); // Translate the model by the accumulated amount glGetFixedv(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, currentModelViewMatrix); float currentScaleFactor = sqrt(pow((GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[0] / 65536.0f, 2.0f) + pow((GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[1] / 65536.0f, 2.0f) + pow((GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[2] / 65536.0f, 2.0f)); xTranslation = xTranslation / (currentScaleFactor * currentScaleFactor); yTranslation = yTranslation / (currentScaleFactor * currentScaleFactor); // Grab the current model matrix, and use the (0,4,8) components to figure the eye's X axis in the model coordinate system, translate along that glTranslatef(xTranslation * (GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[0] / 65536.0f, xTranslation * (GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[4] / 65536.0f, xTranslation * (GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[8] / 65536.0f); // Grab the current model matrix, and use the (1,5,9) components to figure the eye's Y axis in the model coordinate system, translate along that glTranslatef(yTranslation * (GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[1] / 65536.0f, yTranslation * (GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[5] / 65536.0f, yTranslation * (GLfloat)currentModelViewMatrix[9] / 65536.0f); // Black background, with depth buffer enabled glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); [self drawBox]; } - (void)configureLighting; { const GLfixed lightAmbient[] = {13107, 13107, 13107, 65535}; const GLfixed lightDiffuse[] = {65535, 65535, 65535, 65535}; const GLfixed matAmbient[] = {65535, 65535, 65535, 65535}; const GLfixed matDiffuse[] = {65535, 65535, 65535, 65535}; const GLfixed lightPosition[] = {30535, -30535, 0, 0}; const GLfixed lightShininess = 20; glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); glEnable(GL_LIGHT0); glEnable(GL_COLOR_MATERIAL); glMaterialxv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_AMBIENT, matAmbient); glMaterialxv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_DIFFUSE, matDiffuse); glMaterialx(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_SHININESS, lightShininess); glLightxv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_AMBIENT, lightAmbient); glLightxv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_DIFFUSE, lightDiffuse); glLightxv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_POSITION, lightPosition); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH); glEnable(GL_NORMALIZE); } -(void)setupView:(GLView*)view { const GLfloat zNear = 0.1, zFar = 1000.0, fieldOfView = 60.0; GLfloat size; glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); size = zNear * tanf(DEGREES_TO_RADIANS(fieldOfView) / 2.0); CGRect rect = view.bounds; glFrustumf(-size, size, -size / (rect.size.width / rect.size.height), size / (rect.size.width / rect.size.height), zNear, zFar); glViewport(0, 0, rect.size.width, rect.size.height); glScissor(0, 0, rect.size.width, rect.size.height); glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glTranslatef(0.0f, 0.0f, -6.0f); isFirstDrawing = YES; } - (void)didReceiveMemoryWarning { [super didReceiveMemoryWarning]; } - (void)dealloc { [super dealloc]; } @end

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  • header confusion. Compiler not recognizing datatypes

    - by numerical25
    I am getting confused on why the compiler is not recognizing my classes. So I am just going to show you my code and let you guys decide. My error is this error C2653: 'RenderEngine' : is not a class or namespace name and it's pointing to this line std::vector<RenderEngine::rDefaultVertex> m_verts; Here is the code for rModel, in its entirety. It contains the varible. the class that holds it is further down. #ifndef _MODEL_H #define _MODEL_H #include "stdafx.h" #include <vector> #include <string> //#include "RenderEngine.h" #include "rTri.h" class rModel { public: typedef tri<WORD> sTri; std::vector<sTri> m_tris; std::vector<RenderEngine::rDefaultVertex> m_verts; std::wstring m_name; ID3D10Buffer *m_pVertexBuffer; ID3D10Buffer *m_pIndexBuffer; rModel( const TCHAR *filename ); rModel( const TCHAR *name, int nVerts, int nTris ); ~rModel(); float GenRadius(); void Scale( float amt ); void Draw(); //------------------------------------ Access functions. int NumVerts(){ return m_verts.size(); } int NumTris(){ return m_tris.size(); } const TCHAR *Name(){ return m_name.c_str(); } RenderEngine::cDefaultVertex *VertData(){ return &m_verts[0]; } sTri *TriData(){ return &m_tris[0]; } }; #endif at the very top of the code there is a header file #include "stdafx.h" that includes this // stdafx.h : include file for standard system include files, // or project specific include files that are used frequently, but // are changed infrequently // #include "targetver.h" #define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN // Exclude rarely-used stuff from Windows headers // Windows Header Files: #include <windows.h> // C RunTime Header Files #include <stdlib.h> #include <malloc.h> #include <memory.h> #include <tchar.h> #include "resource.h" #include "d3d10.h" #include "d3dx10.h" #include "dinput.h" #include "RenderEngine.h" #include "rModel.h" // TODO: reference additional headers your program requires here as you can see, RenderEngine.h comes before rModel.h #include "RenderEngine.h" #include "rModel.h" According to my knowledge, it should recognize it. But on the other hand, I am not really that great with organizing headers. Here my my RenderEngine Declaration. #pragma once #include "stdafx.h" #define MAX_LOADSTRING 100 #define MAX_LIGHTS 10 class RenderEngine { public: class rDefaultVertex { public: D3DXVECTOR3 m_vPosition; D3DXVECTOR3 m_vNormal; D3DXCOLOR m_vColor; D3DXVECTOR2 m_TexCoords; }; class rLight { public: rLight() { } D3DXCOLOR m_vColor; D3DXVECTOR3 m_vDirection; }; static HINSTANCE m_hInst; HWND m_hWnd; int m_nCmdShow; TCHAR m_szTitle[MAX_LOADSTRING]; // The title bar text TCHAR m_szWindowClass[MAX_LOADSTRING]; // the main window class name void DrawTextString(int x, int y, D3DXCOLOR color, const TCHAR *strOutput); //static functions static LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND hWnd, UINT message, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam); static INT_PTR CALLBACK About(HWND hDlg, UINT message, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam); bool InitWindow(); bool InitDirectX(); bool InitInstance(); int Run(); void ShutDown(); void AddLight(D3DCOLOR color, D3DXVECTOR3 pos); RenderEngine() { m_screenRect.right = 800; m_screenRect.bottom = 600; m_iNumLights = 0; } protected: RECT m_screenRect; //direct3d Members ID3D10Device *m_pDevice; // The IDirect3DDevice10 // interface ID3D10Texture2D *m_pBackBuffer; // Pointer to the back buffer ID3D10RenderTargetView *m_pRenderTargetView; // Pointer to render target view IDXGISwapChain *m_pSwapChain; // Pointer to the swap chain RECT m_rcScreenRect; // The dimensions of the screen ID3D10Texture2D *m_pDepthStencilBuffer; ID3D10DepthStencilState *m_pDepthStencilState; ID3D10DepthStencilView *m_pDepthStencilView; //transformation matrixs system D3DXMATRIX m_mtxWorld; D3DXMATRIX m_mtxView; D3DXMATRIX m_mtxProj; //pointers to shaders matrix varibles ID3D10EffectMatrixVariable* m_pmtxWorldVar; ID3D10EffectMatrixVariable* m_pmtxViewVar; ID3D10EffectMatrixVariable* m_pmtxProjVar; //Application Lights rLight m_aLights[MAX_LIGHTS]; // Light array int m_iNumLights; // Number of active lights //light pointers from shader ID3D10EffectVectorVariable* m_pLightDirVar; ID3D10EffectVectorVariable* m_pLightColorVar; ID3D10EffectVectorVariable* m_pNumLightsVar; //Effect members ID3D10Effect *m_pDefaultEffect; ID3D10EffectTechnique *m_pDefaultTechnique; ID3D10InputLayout* m_pDefaultInputLayout; ID3DX10Font *m_pFont; // The font used for rendering text // Sprites used to hold font characters ID3DX10Sprite *m_pFontSprite; ATOM RegisterEngineClass(); void DoFrame(float); bool LoadEffects(); void UpdateMatrices(); void UpdateLights(); }; The classes are defined within the class class rDefaultVertex { public: D3DXVECTOR3 m_vPosition; D3DXVECTOR3 m_vNormal; D3DXCOLOR m_vColor; D3DXVECTOR2 m_TexCoords; }; class rLight { public: rLight() { } D3DXCOLOR m_vColor; D3DXVECTOR3 m_vDirection; }; Not sure if thats good practice, but I am just going by the book. In the end, I just need a good way to organize it so that rModel recognizes RenderEngine. and if possible, the other way around.

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  • Criticize my code, please

    - by Micky
    Hey, I was applying for a position, and they asked me to complete a coding problem for them. I did so and submitted it, but I later found out I was rejected from the position. Anyways, I have an eclectic programming background so I'm not sure if my code is grossly wrong or if I just didn't have the best solution out there. I would like to post my code and get some feedback about it. Before I do, here's a description of a problem: You are given a sorted array of integers, say, {1, 2, 4, 4, 5, 8, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10, 11, 13 }. Now you are supposed to write a program (in C or C++, but I chose C) that prompts the user for an element to search for. The program will then search for the element. If it is found, then it should return the first index the entry was found at and the number of instances of that element. If the element is not found, then it should return "not found" or something similar. Here's a simple run of it (with the array I just put up): Enter a number to search for: 4 4 was found at index 2. There are 2 instances for 4 in the array. Enter a number to search for: -4. -4 is not in the array. They made a comment that my code should scale well with large arrays (so I wrote up a binary search). Anyways, my code basically runs as follows: Prompts user for input. Then it checks if it is within bounds (bigger than a[0] in the array and smaller than the largest element of the array). If so, then I perform a binary search. If the element is found, then I wrote two while loops. One while loop will count to the left of the element found, and the second while loop will count to the right of the element found. The loops terminate when the adjacent elements do not match with the desired value. EX: 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 The bold 4 is the value the binary search landed on. One loop will check to the left of it, and another loop will check to the right of it. Their sum will be the total number of instances of the the number four. Anyways, I don't know if there are any advanced techniques that I am missing or if I just don't have the CS background and made a big error. Any constructive critiques would be appreciated! #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <stddef.h> /* function prototype */ int get_num_of_ints( const int* arr, size_t r, int N, size_t* first, size_t* count ); int main() { int N; /* input variable */ int arr[]={1,1,2,3,3,4,4,4,4,5,5,7,7,7,7,8,8,8,9,11,12,12}; /* array of sorted integers */ size_t r = sizeof(arr)/sizeof(arr[0]); /* right bound */ size_t first; /* first match index */ size_t count; /* total number of matches */ /* prompts the user to enter input */ printf( "\nPlease input the integer you would like to find.\n" ); scanf( "%d", &N ); int a = get_num_of_ints( arr, r, N, &first, &count ); /* If the function returns -1 then the value is not found. Else it is returned */ if( a == -1) printf( "%d has not been found.\n", N ); else if(a >= 0){ printf( "The first matching index is %d.\n", first ); printf( "The total number of instances is %d.\n", count ); } return 0; } /* function definition */ int get_num_of_ints( const int* arr, size_t r, int N, size_t* first, size_t* count ) { int lo=0; /* lower bound for search */ int m=0; /* middle value obtained */ int hi=r-1; /* upper bound for search */ int w=r-1; /* used as a fixed upper bound to calculate the number of right instances of a particular value. */ /* binary search to find if a value exists */ /* first check if the element is out of bounds */ if( N < arr[0] || arr[hi] < N ){ m = -1; } else{ /* binary search to find a value, if it exists, within given parameters */ while(lo <= hi){ m = (hi + lo)/2; if(arr[m] < N) lo = m+1; else if(arr[m] > N) hi = m-1; else if(arr[m]==N){ m=m; break; } } if (lo > hi) /* if it doesn't we assign it -1 */ m = -1; } /* If the value is found, then we compute the left and right instances of it */ if( m >= 0 ){ int j = m-1; /* starting with the first term to the left */ int L = 0; /* total number of left instances */ /* while loop computes total number of left instances */ while( j >= 0 && arr[j] == arr[m] ){ L++; j--; } /* There are six possible outcomes of this. Depending on the outcome, we must assign the first index variable accordingly */ if( j > 0 && L > 0 ) *first=j+1; else if( j==0 && L==0) *first=m; else if( j > 0 && L==0 ) *first=m; else if(j < 0 && L==0 ) *first=m; else if( j < 0 && L > 0 ) *first=0; else if( j=0 && L > 0 ) *first=j+1; int h = m + 1; /* starting with the first term to the right */ int R = 0; /* total number of right instances */ /* while loop computes total number of right instances */ /* we fixed w earlier so that it's value does not change */ while( arr[h]==arr[m] && h <= w ){ R++; h++; } *count = (R + L + 1); /* total number of instances stored as value of count */ return *first; /* first instance index stored here */ } /* if value does not exist, then we return a negative value */ else if( m==-1) return -1; }

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