Search Results

Search found 2895 results on 116 pages for 'wes weeks'.

Page 115/116 | < Previous Page | 111 112 113 114 115 116  | Next Page >

• MSCC: Global Windows Azure Bootcamp

  Mauritius participated and contributed to the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2014 (GWAB). Again! And this time stronger than ever, and together with 137 other locations in 56 countries world-wide. We had 62 named registrations, 7 guest additions and approximately 10 offline participants prior to the event day. Most interestingly the organisation of the GWAB through the MSCC helped to increased the number of craftsmen. The Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community has currently 138 registered members - in less than one year! Only with those numbers we can proudly say that all the preparations and hard work towards this event already paid off. Personally, I'm really grateful that we had this kind of response and the feedback from some attendees confirmed that the MSCC is on the right track here on Cyber Island Mauritius. Inspired and motivated by the success of this event, rest assured that there will be more public events like the GWAB. This time it took some time to reflect on our meetup, following my first impression right on spot: "Wow, what an experience to organise and participate in this global event. Overall, I've been very pleased with the preparations and the event itself. Surely, there have been some nicks that we have to address and to improve for future activities like this. Quite frankly, we are not professional event organisers (not yet) but we learned a lot over the past couple of days. A big Thank You to our event sponsors, namely Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands & French Pacific, Ceridian Mauritius and Emtel. Without them this event wouldn't have happened - Thank You! And to the cool team members of Microsoft Student Partners (MSPs). You geeks did a great job! Thanks!" So, how many attendees did we actually have? 61! - Awesome - 61 cloud computing instances to help on the research of diabetes. During Saturday afternoon there was even an online publication on L'Express: Les développeurs mauriciens se joignent au combat contre le diabète Reactions of other attendees Don't take my word for granted... Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Awesome event, really appreciated the presentations :-)" -- Kevin on event comments "very interesting and enriching." -- Diana on event comments "#gwab #gwabmru 2014 great success. Looking forward for gwab 2015" -- Wasiim on Twitter "Was there till the end. Awesome Event. I'll surely join upcoming meetup sessions :)" -- Luchmun on event comments "#gwabmru was not that cool. left early" -- Mohammad on Twitter The overall feedback is positive but we are absolutely aware that there quite a number of problems we had to face. We are already looking into that and ideas / action plans on how we will be able to improve it for future events. The sessions We started the day with welcoming speeches by Thierry Coret, Sr. Marketing Manager of Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands & French Pacific and Vidia Mooneegan, Managing Director and Sr. Vice President of Ceridian Mauritius. The clear emphasis was on the endless possibilities of cloud computing and how it can enable any kind of sectors here in the country. Then it was about time to set up the cloud computing services in order to contribute each attendees cloud computing resources to the global research of diabetes, a step by step guide presented by Arnaud Meslier, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. Given a rendering package and a configuration file it was very interesting to follow the single steps in Windows Azure. Also, during the day we were not sure whether the set up had been correctly, as Mauritius didn't show up on the results board - which should have been the case after approximately 20 to 30 minutes. Anyways, let the minions work... Next, Arnaud gave a brief overview of the variety of services Windows Azure has to offer. Whether you need a development environment for your websites or mobiles app, running a virtual machine with your existing applications or simply putting a SQL database online. No worries, Windows Azure has the right packages available and the online management portal is really easy t handle. After this, we got a little bit more business oriented while Wasiim Hosenbocus, employee at Ceridian, took the attendees through the inerts of a real-life application, and demoed a couple of the existing features. He did a great job by showing how the different services of Windows Azure can be created and pulled together. After the lunch break it is always tough to keep the audience awake... And it was my turn. I gave a brief overview on operating and managing a SQL database on Windows Azure. Well, there are actually two options available and depending on your individual requirements you should be aware of both. The simpler version is called SQL Database and while provisioning only takes a couple of seconds, you should take into consideration that SQL Database has a number of constraints, like limitations on the actual database size - up to 5 GB as web edition and up to 150 GB maximum as business edition -, among others. Next, it was Chervine Bhiwoo's session on Windows Azure Mobile Services. It was absolutely amazing to see that the mobiles services directly offers you various project templates, like Windows 8 Store App, Android app, iOS app, and even Xamarin cross-platform app development. So, within a couple of minutes you can have your first mobile app active and running on Windows Azure. Furthermore, Chervine showed the attendees that adding another user interface, like Web Sites running on ASP.NET MVC 4 only takes a couple of minutes, too. And last but not least, we rounded up the day with Windows Azure Websites and hosting of Virtual Machines presented by some members of the local Microsoft Students Partners programme. Surely, one of the big advantages using Windows Azure is the availability of pre-defined installation packages of known web applications, like WordPress, Joomla!, or Ghost. Compared to running your own web site with a traditional web hoster it is surely en par, and depending on your personal level of expertise, Windows Azure provides you more liberty in terms of configuration than maybe a shared hosting environment. Running a pre-defined web application is one thing but in case that you would like to have more control over your hosting environment it is highly advised to opt for a virtual machine. Provisioning of an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS system was very simple to do but it takes some more minutes than you might expect. So, please be patient and take your time while Windows Azure gets everything in place for you. Afterwards, you can use a SecureShell (ssh) client like Putty in case of a Linux-based machine, or Remote Desktop Services when operating a Windows Server system to log in into your virtual machine. At the end of the day we had a great Q&A session and we finalised the event with our raffle of goodies. Participation in the raffle was bound to submission of the session survey and most gratefully we had a give-away for everyone. What a nice coincidence to finish of the day. Note: All session slides (and demo codes) will be made available on the MSCC event page. Please, check the Files section over there. (Some) Visual impressions from the event Just to give you an idea about what has happened during the GWAB 2014 at Ebene... Speakers and Microsoft Student Partners are getting ready for the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2014 GWAB 2014 attendees are fully integrated into the hands-on-labs and setting up their individuals cloud computing services 60 attendees at the GWAB 2014. Despite some technical difficulties we had a great time running the event GWAB 2014: Using the lunch break for networking and exchange of ideas - Great conversations and topics amongst attendees There are more pictures on the original event page: Questions & Answers Following are a couple of questions which have been asked and didn't get an answer during the event: Q: Is it possible to upload static pages via FTP? A: Yes, you can. Have a look at the right side column on the dashboard of your website. There you'll find information about the FTP and SFTP host names. You can use any FTP client, like ie. FileZilla to log in. FTP also gives you access to your log files. Q: What are the size limitations on SQL Database? A: 5 GB on the Web Edition, and 150 GB on the business edition. A maximum 150 databases (inclusing 'master') per SQL Database server. More details here: General Guidelines and Limitations (Azure SQL Database) Q: What's the maximum size of a SQL Server running in a Virtual Machine? A: The maximum Windows Azure VM has currently 8 CPU cores, 14 or 56 GB of RAM and 16x 1 TB hard drives. More details here: Virtual Machine and Cloud Service Sizes for Azure Q: How can we register for Windows Azure? A: Mauritius is currently not listed for phone verification. Please get in touch with Arnaud Meslier at Microsoft IOI & FP Q: Can I use my own domain name for Windows Azure websites? A: Yes, you can. But this might require to upscale your account to Standard. In case that I missed a question and answer, please use the comment section at the end of the article. Thanks! Final results Every participant was instructed during the hands-on-lab session on how to set up a cloud computing service in their account. Of course, I won't keep the results from you... Global Azure Lab GWAB 2014: Our cloud computing contribution to the research of diabetes And I would say Mauritius did a good job! Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Launch of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 (15.4.2014) Corsair Hackers Reboot (19.4.2014) WebCup (TBA ~ June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! Networking and job/project opportunities Despite having technical presentations on Windows Azure an event like this always offers a great bunch of possibilities and opportunities to get in touch with new people in IT, have an exchange of experience with other like-minded people. As I already wrote about Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion - I had a great conversation with representatives of the University des Mascareignes which are currently embracing cloud infrastructure and cloud computing for their various campuses in the Indian Ocean. As for the MSCC it would be a great experience to stay in touch with them, and to work on upcoming, common activities. Furthermore, I had a very good conversation with Thierry and Ludovic of Microsoft IOI & FP on the necessity of user groups and IT communities here on the island. It's great to see that the MSCC is currently on a run and that local companies are sharing our thoughts on promoting IT careers and exchange of IT knowledge in such an open way. I'm also looking forward to be able to participate and to contribute on more events in the near future. My resume of the day We learned a lot today and there is always room for improvement! It was an awesome event and quite frankly it was a pleasure to spend the day with so many enthuastic IT people in the same room. It was a great experience to organise such event locally and participate on a global scale to support the GlyQ-IQ Technology in their research on diabetes. I was so pleased to see the involvement of new MSCC members in taking the opportunity to share and learn about the power of cloud computing. The Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is on the right way and this year's bootcamp on Windows Azure only marked the beginning of our journey. Thank you to our sponsors and my kudos to the MSPs! Update: Media coverage The event has been reported in local media, too. Following are some resources: Orange - Local - Business: Le cloud, pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète Maurice Info.mu: Le cloud, pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète Le Quotidien Pg 2: Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2014 - Le cloud pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète The Observer Pg 12: Le cloud, pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète

  Read the article

• 7u10: JavaFX packaging tools update

  - by igor

  Last weeks were very busy here in Oracle. JavaOne 2012 is next week. Come to see us there! Meanwhile i'd like to quickly update you on recent developments in the area of packaging tools. This is an area of ongoing development for the team, and we are  continuing to refine and improve both the tools and the process. Thanks to everyone who shared experiences and suggestions with us. We are listening and fixed many of reported issues. Please keep them coming as comments on the blog or (even better) file issues directly to the JIRA. In this post i'll focus on several new packaging features added in JDK 7 update 10: Self-Contained Applications: Select Java Runtime to bundle Self-Contained Applications: Create Package without Java Runtime Self-Contained Applications: Package non-JavaFX application Option to disable proxy setup in the JavaFX launcher Ability to specify codebase for WebStart application Option to update existing jar file Self-Contained Applications: Specify application icon Self-Contained Applications: Pass parameters on the command line All these features and number of other important bug fixes are available in the developer preview builds of JDK 7 update 10 (build 8 or later). Please give them a try and share your feedback! Self-Contained Applications: Select Java Runtime to bundle Packager tools in 7u6 assume current JDK (based on java.home property) is the source for embedded runtime. This is useful simplification for many scenarios but there are cases where ability to specify what to embed explicitly is handy. For example IDE may be using fixed JDK to build the project and this is not the version you want to bundle into your application. To make it more flexible we now allow to specify location of base JDK explicitly. It is optional and if you do not specify it then current JDK will be used (i.e. this change is fully backward compatible). New 'basedir' attribute was added to <fx:platform> tag. Its value is location of JDK to be used. It is ok to point to either JRE inside the JDK or JDK top level folder. However, it must be JDK and not JRE as we need other JDK tools for proper packaging and it must be recent version of JDK that is bundled with JavaFX (i.e. Java 7 update 6 or later). Here are examples (<fx:platform> is part of <fx:deploy> task): <fx:platform basedir="${java.home}"/> <fx:platform basedir="c:\tools\jdk7"/> Hint: this feature enables you to use packaging tools from JDK 7 update 10 (and benefit from bug fixes and other features described below) to create application package with bundled FCS version of JRE 7 update 6. Self-Contained Applications: Create Package without Java Runtime This may sound a bit puzzling at first glance. Package without embedded Java Runtime is not really self-contained and obviously will not help with: Deployment on fresh systems. JRE need to be installed separately (and this step will require admin permissions). Possible compatibility issues due to updates of system runtime. However, these packages are much much smaller in size. If download size matters and you are confident that user have recommended system JRE installed then this may be good option to consider if you want to improve user experience for install and launch. Technically, this is implemented as an extension of previous feature. Pass empty string as value for 'basedir' attribute and this will be treated as request to not bundle Java runtime, e.g. <fx:platform basedir=""/> Self-Contained Applications: Package non-JavaFX application One of popular questions people ask about self-contained applications - can i package my Java application as self-contained application? Absolutely. This is true even for tools shipped with JDK 7 update 6. Simply follow steps for creating package for Swing application with integrated JavaFX content and they will work even if your application does not use JavaFX. What's wrong with it? Well, there are few caveats: bundle size is larger because JavaFX is bundled whilst it is not really needed main application jar needs to be packaged to comply to JavaFX packaging requirements(and this may be not trivial to achieve in your existing build scripts) javafx application launcher may not work well with startup logic of your application (for example launcher will initialize networking stack and this may void custom networking settings in your application code) In JDK 7 update 6 <fx:deploy> was updated to accept arbitrary executable jar as an input. Self-contained application package will be created preserving input jar as-is, i.e. no JavaFX launcher will be embedded. This does not help with first point above but resolves other two. More formally following assertions must be true for packaging to succeed: application can be launched as "java -jar YourApp.jar" from the command line  mainClass attribute of <fx:application> refers to application main class <fx:resources> lists all resources needed for the application To give you an example lets assume we need to create a bundle for application consisting of 3 jars:     dist/javamain.jar     dist/lib/somelib.jar    dist/morelibs/anotherlib.jar where javamain.jar has manifest with      Main-Class: app.Main     Class-Path: lib/somelib.jar morelibs/anotherlib.jar Here is sample ant code to package it: <target name="package-bundle"> <taskdef resource="com/sun/javafx/tools/ant/antlib.xml" uri="javafx:com.sun.javafx.tools.ant" classpath="${javafx.tools.ant.jar}"/> <fx:deploy nativeBundles="all" width="100" height="100" outdir="native-packages/" outfile="MyJavaApp"> <info title="Sample project" vendor="Me" description="Test built from Java executable jar"/> <fx:application id="myapp" version="1.0" mainClass="app.Main" name="MyJavaApp"/> <fx:resources> <fx:fileset dir="dist"> <include name="javamain.jar"/> <include name="lib/somelib.jar"/> <include name="morelibs/anotherlib.jar"/> </fx:fileset> </fx:resources> </fx:deploy> </target> Option to disable proxy setup in the JavaFX launcher Since JavaFX 2.2 (part of JDK 7u6) properly packaged JavaFX applications  have proxy settings initialized according to Java Runtime configuration settings. This is handy for most of the application accessing network with one exception. If your application explicitly sets networking properties (e.g. socksProxyHost) then they must be set before networking stack is initialized. Proxy detection will initialize networking stack and therefore your custom settings will be ignored. One way to disable proxy setup by the embedded JavaFX launcher is to pass "-Djavafx.autoproxy.disable=true" on the command line. This is good for troubleshooting (proxy detection may cause significant startup time increases if network is misconfigured) but not really user friendly. Now proxy setup will be disabled if manifest of main application jar has "JavaFX-Feature-Proxy" entry with value "None". Here is simple example of adding this entry using <fx:jar> task: <fx:jar destfile="dist/sampleapp.jar"> <fx:application refid="myapp"/> <fx:resources refid="myresources"/> <fileset dir="build/classes"/> <manifest> <attribute name="JavaFX-Feature-Proxy" value="None"/> </manifest> </fx:jar> Ability to specify codebase for WebStart application JavaFX applications do not need to specify codebase (i.e. absolute location where application code will be deployed) for most of real world deployment scenarios. This is convenient as application does not need to be modified when it is moved from development to deployment environment. However, some developers want to ensure copies of their application JNLP file will redirect to master location. This is where codebase is needed. To avoid need to edit JNLP file manually <fx:deploy> task now accepts optional codebase attribute. If attribute is not specified packager will generate same no-codebase files as before. If codebase value is explicitly specified then generated JNLP files (including JNLP content embedded into web page) will use it.  Here is an example: <fx:deploy width="600" height="400" outdir="Samples" codebase="http://localhost/codebaseTest" outfile="TestApp"> .... </fx:deploy> Option to update existing jar file JavaFX packaging procedures are optimized for new application that can use ant or command line javafxpackager utility. This may lead to some redundant steps when you add it to your existing build process. One typical situation is that you might already have a build procedure that produces executable jar file with custom manifest. To properly package it as JavaFX executable jar you would need to unpack it and then use javafxpackager or <fx:jar> to create jar again (and you need to make sure you pass all important details from your custom manifest). We added option to pass jar file as an input to javafxpackager and <fx:jar>. This simplifies integration of JavaFX packaging tools into existing build  process as postprocessing step. By the way, we are looking for ways to simplify this further. Please share your suggestions! On the technical side this works as follows. Both <fx:jar> and javafxpackager will attempt to update existing jar file if this is the only input file. Update process will add JavaFX launcher classes and update the jar manifest with JavaFX attributes. Your custom attributes will be preserved. Update could be performed in place or result may be saved to a different file. Main-Class and Class-Path elements (if present) of manifest of input jar file will be used for JavaFX application  unless they are explicitly overriden in the packaging command you use. E.g. attribute mainClass of <fx:application> (or -appclass in the javafxpackager case) overrides existing Main-Class in the jar manifest. Note that class specified in the Main-Class attribute could either extend JavaFX Application or provide static main() method. Here are examples of updating jar file using javafxpackager: Create new JavaFX executable jar as a copy of given jar file javafxpackager -createjar -srcdir dist -srcfiles fish_proto.jar -outdir dist -outfile fish.jar  Update existing jar file to be JavaFX executable jar and use test.Fish as main application class javafxpackager -createjar -srcdir dist -appclass test.Fish -srcfiles fish.jar -outdir dist -outfile fish.jar  And here is example of using <fx:jar> to create new JavaFX executable jar from the existing fish_proto.jar: <fx:jar destfile="dist/fish.jar"> <fileset dir="dist"> <include name="fish_proto.jar"/> </fileset> </fx:jar> Self-Contained Applications: Specify application icon The only way to specify application icon for self-contained application using tools in JDK 7 update 6 is to use drop-in resources. Now this bug is resolved and you can also specify icon using <fx:icon> tag. Here is an example: <fx:deploy ...> <fx:info> <fx:icon href="default.png"/> </fx:info> ... </fx:deploy> Few things to keep in mind: Only default kind of icon is applicable to self-contained applications (as of now) Icon should follow platform specific rules for sizes and image format (e.g. .ico on Windows and .icns on Mac) Self-Contained Applications: Pass parameters on the command line JavaFX applications support two types of application parameters: named and unnamed (see the API for Application.Parameters). Static named parameters can be added to the application package using <fx:param> and unnamed parameters can be added using <fx:argument>. They are applicable to all execution modes including standalone applications. It is also possible to pass parameters to a JavaFX application from a Web page that hosts it, using <fx:htmlParam>.  Prior to JavaFX 2.2, this was only supported for embedded applications. Starting from JavaFX 2.2, <fx:htmlParam> is applicable to Web Start applications also. See JavaFX deployment guide for more details on this. However, there was no way to pass dynamic parameters to the self-contained application. This has been improved and now native launchers will  delegate parameters from command line to the application code. I.e. to pass parameter to the application you simply need to run it as "myapp.exe somevalue" and then use getParameters().getUnnamed().get(0) to get "somevalue".

  Read the article

• Windows Azure Service Bus Splitter and Aggregator

  - by Alan Smith

  This article will cover basic implementations of the Splitter and Aggregator patterns using the Windows Azure Service Bus. The content will be included in the next release of the “Windows Azure Service Bus Developer Guide”, along with some other patterns I am working on. I’ve taken the pattern descriptions from the book “Enterprise Integration Patterns” by Gregor Hohpe. I bought a copy of the book in 2004, and recently dusted it off when I started to look at implementing the patterns on the Windows Azure Service Bus. Gregor has also presented an session in 2011 “Enterprise Integration Patterns: Past, Present and Future” which is well worth a look. I’ll be covering more patterns in the coming weeks, I’m currently working on Wire-Tap and Scatter-Gather. There will no doubt be a section on implementing these patterns in my “SOA, Connectivity and Integration using the Windows Azure Service Bus” course. There are a number of scenarios where a message needs to be divided into a number of sub messages, and also where a number of sub messages need to be combined to form one message. The splitter and aggregator patterns provide a definition of how this can be achieved. This section will focus on the implementation of basic splitter and aggregator patens using the Windows Azure Service Bus direct programming model. In BizTalk Server receive pipelines are typically used to implement the splitter patterns, with sequential convoy orchestrations often used to aggregate messages. In the current release of the Service Bus, there is no functionality in the direct programming model that implements these patterns, so it is up to the developer to implement them in the applications that send and receive messages. Splitter A message splitter takes a message and spits the message into a number of sub messages. As there are different scenarios for how a message can be split into sub messages, message splitters are implemented using different algorithms. The Enterprise Integration Patterns book describes the splatter pattern as follows: How can we process a message if it contains multiple elements, each of which may have to be processed in a different way? Use a Splitter to break out the composite message into a series of individual messages, each containing data related to one item. The Enterprise Integration Patterns website provides a description of the Splitter pattern here. In some scenarios a batch message could be split into the sub messages that are contained in the batch. The splitting of a message could be based on the message type of sub-message, or the trading partner that the sub message is to be sent to. Aggregator An aggregator takes a stream or related messages and combines them together to form one message. The Enterprise Integration Patterns book describes the aggregator pattern as follows: How do we combine the results of individual, but related messages so that they can be processed as a whole? Use a stateful filter, an Aggregator, to collect and store individual messages until a complete set of related messages has been received. Then, the Aggregator publishes a single message distilled from the individual messages. The Enterprise Integration Patterns website provides a description of the Aggregator pattern here. A common example of the need for an aggregator is in scenarios where a stream of messages needs to be combined into a daily batch to be sent to a legacy line-of-business application. The BizTalk Server EDI functionality provides support for batching messages in this way using a sequential convoy orchestration. Scenario The scenario for this implementation of the splitter and aggregator patterns is the sending and receiving of large messages using a Service Bus queue. In the current release, the Windows Azure Service Bus currently supports a maximum message size of 256 KB, with a maximum header size of 64 KB. This leaves a safe maximum body size of 192 KB. The BrokeredMessage class will support messages larger than 256 KB; in fact the Size property is of type long, implying that very large messages may be supported at some point in the future. The 256 KB size restriction is set in the service bus components that are deployed in the Windows Azure data centers. One of the ways of working around this size restriction is to split large messages into a sequence of smaller sub messages in the sending application, send them via a queue, and then reassemble them in the receiving application. This scenario will be used to demonstrate the pattern implementations. Implementation The splitter and aggregator will be used to provide functionality to send and receive large messages over the Windows Azure Service Bus. In order to make the implementations generic and reusable they will be implemented as a class library. The splitter will be implemented in the LargeMessageSender class and the aggregator in the LargeMessageReceiver class. A class diagram showing the two classes is shown below. Implementing the Splitter The splitter will take a large brokered message, and split the messages into a sequence of smaller sub-messages that can be transmitted over the service bus messaging entities. The LargeMessageSender class provides a Send method that takes a large brokered message as a parameter. The implementation of the class is shown below; console output has been added to provide details of the splitting operation. public class LargeMessageSender {     private static int SubMessageBodySize = 192 * 1024;     private QueueClient m_QueueClient;       public LargeMessageSender(QueueClient queueClient)     {         m_QueueClient = queueClient;     }       public void Send(BrokeredMessage message)     {         // Calculate the number of sub messages required.         long messageBodySize = message.Size;         int nrSubMessages = (int)(messageBodySize / SubMessageBodySize);         if (messageBodySize % SubMessageBodySize != 0)         {             nrSubMessages++;         }           // Create a unique session Id.         string sessionId = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();         Console.WriteLine("Message session Id: " + sessionId);         Console.Write("Sending {0} sub-messages", nrSubMessages);           Stream bodyStream = message.GetBody<Stream>();         for (int streamOffest = 0; streamOffest < messageBodySize;             streamOffest += SubMessageBodySize)         {                                     // Get the stream chunk from the large message             long arraySize = (messageBodySize - streamOffest) > SubMessageBodySize                 ? SubMessageBodySize : messageBodySize - streamOffest;             byte[] subMessageBytes = new byte[arraySize];             int result = bodyStream.Read(subMessageBytes, 0, (int)arraySize);             MemoryStream subMessageStream = new MemoryStream(subMessageBytes);               // Create a new message             BrokeredMessage subMessage = new BrokeredMessage(subMessageStream, true);             subMessage.SessionId = sessionId;               // Send the message             m_QueueClient.Send(subMessage);             Console.Write(".");         }         Console.WriteLine("Done!");     }} The LargeMessageSender class is initialized with a QueueClient that is created by the sending application. When the large message is sent, the number of sub messages is calculated based on the size of the body of the large message. A unique session Id is created to allow the sub messages to be sent as a message session, this session Id will be used for correlation in the aggregator. A for loop in then used to create the sequence of sub messages by creating chunks of data from the stream of the large message. The sub messages are then sent to the queue using the QueueClient. As sessions are used to correlate the messages, the queue used for message exchange must be created with the RequiresSession property set to true. Implementing the Aggregator The aggregator will receive the sub messages in the message session that was created by the splitter, and combine them to form a single, large message. The aggregator is implemented in the LargeMessageReceiver class, with a Receive method that returns a BrokeredMessage. The implementation of the class is shown below; console output has been added to provide details of the splitting operation.   public class LargeMessageReceiver {     private QueueClient m_QueueClient;       public LargeMessageReceiver(QueueClient queueClient)     {         m_QueueClient = queueClient;     }       public BrokeredMessage Receive()     {         // Create a memory stream to store the large message body.         MemoryStream largeMessageStream = new MemoryStream();           // Accept a message session from the queue.         MessageSession session = m_QueueClient.AcceptMessageSession();         Console.WriteLine("Message session Id: " + session.SessionId);         Console.Write("Receiving sub messages");           while (true)         {             // Receive a sub message             BrokeredMessage subMessage = session.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5));               if (subMessage != null)             {                 // Copy the sub message body to the large message stream.                 Stream subMessageStream = subMessage.GetBody<Stream>();                 subMessageStream.CopyTo(largeMessageStream);                   // Mark the message as complete.                 subMessage.Complete();                 Console.Write(".");             }             else             {                 // The last message in the sequence is our completeness criteria.                 Console.WriteLine("Done!");                 break;             }         }                     // Create an aggregated message from the large message stream.         BrokeredMessage largeMessage = new BrokeredMessage(largeMessageStream, true);         return largeMessage;     } }   The LargeMessageReceiver initialized using a QueueClient that is created by the receiving application. The receive method creates a memory stream that will be used to aggregate the large message body. The AcceptMessageSession method on the QueueClient is then called, which will wait for the first message in a message session to become available on the queue. As the AcceptMessageSession can throw a timeout exception if no message is available on the queue after 60 seconds, a real-world implementation should handle this accordingly. Once the message session as accepted, the sub messages in the session are received, and their message body streams copied to the memory stream. Once all the messages have been received, the memory stream is used to create a large message, that is then returned to the receiving application. Testing the Implementation The splitter and aggregator are tested by creating a message sender and message receiver application. The payload for the large message will be one of the webcast video files from http://www.cloudcasts.net/, the file size is 9,697 KB, well over the 256 KB threshold imposed by the Service Bus. As the splitter and aggregator are implemented in a separate class library, the code used in the sender and receiver console is fairly basic. The implementation of the main method of the sending application is shown below.   static void Main(string[] args) {     // Create a token provider with the relevant credentials.     TokenProvider credentials =         TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider         (AccountDetails.Name, AccountDetails.Key);       // Create a URI for the serivce bus.     Uri serviceBusUri = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri         ("sb", AccountDetails.Namespace, string.Empty);       // Create the MessagingFactory     MessagingFactory factory = MessagingFactory.Create(serviceBusUri, credentials);       // Use the MessagingFactory to create a queue client     QueueClient queueClient = factory.CreateQueueClient(AccountDetails.QueueName);       // Open the input file.     FileStream fileStream = new FileStream(AccountDetails.TestFile, FileMode.Open);       // Create a BrokeredMessage for the file.     BrokeredMessage largeMessage = new BrokeredMessage(fileStream, true);       Console.WriteLine("Sending: " + AccountDetails.TestFile);     Console.WriteLine("Message body size: " + largeMessage.Size);     Console.WriteLine();         // Send the message with a LargeMessageSender     LargeMessageSender sender = new LargeMessageSender(queueClient);     sender.Send(largeMessage);       // Close the messaging facory.     factory.Close();  } The implementation of the main method of the receiving application is shown below. static void Main(string[] args) {       // Create a token provider with the relevant credentials.     TokenProvider credentials =         TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider         (AccountDetails.Name, AccountDetails.Key);       // Create a URI for the serivce bus.     Uri serviceBusUri = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri         ("sb", AccountDetails.Namespace, string.Empty);       // Create the MessagingFactory     MessagingFactory factory = MessagingFactory.Create(serviceBusUri, credentials);       // Use the MessagingFactory to create a queue client     QueueClient queueClient = factory.CreateQueueClient(AccountDetails.QueueName);       // Create a LargeMessageReceiver and receive the message.     LargeMessageReceiver receiver = new LargeMessageReceiver(queueClient);     BrokeredMessage largeMessage = receiver.Receive();       Console.WriteLine("Received message");     Console.WriteLine("Message body size: " + largeMessage.Size);       string testFile = AccountDetails.TestFile.Replace(@"\In\", @"\Out\");     Console.WriteLine("Saving file: " + testFile);       // Save the message body as a file.     Stream largeMessageStream = largeMessage.GetBody<Stream>();     largeMessageStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);     FileStream fileOut = new FileStream(testFile, FileMode.Create);     largeMessageStream.CopyTo(fileOut);     fileOut.Close();       Console.WriteLine("Done!"); } In order to test the application, the sending application is executed, which will use the LargeMessageSender class to split the message and place it on the queue. The output of the sender console is shown below. The console shows that the body size of the large message was 9,929,365 bytes, and the message was sent as a sequence of 51 sub messages. When the receiving application is executed the results are shown below. The console application shows that the aggregator has received the 51 messages from the message sequence that was creating in the sending application. The messages have been aggregated to form a massage with a body of 9,929,365 bytes, which is the same as the original large message. The message body is then saved as a file. Improvements to the Implementation The splitter and aggregator patterns in this implementation were created in order to show the usage of the patterns in a demo, which they do quite well. When implementing these patterns in a real-world scenario there are a number of improvements that could be made to the design. Copying Message Header Properties When sending a large message using these classes, it would be great if the message header properties in the message that was received were copied from the message that was sent. The sending application may well add information to the message context that will be required in the receiving application. When the sub messages are created in the splitter, the header properties in the first message could be set to the values in the original large message. The aggregator could then used the values from this first sub message to set the properties in the message header of the large message during the aggregation process. Using Asynchronous Methods The current implementation uses the synchronous send and receive methods of the QueueClient class. It would be much more performant to use the asynchronous methods, however doing so may well affect the sequence in which the sub messages are enqueued, which would require the implementation of a resequencer in the aggregator to restore the correct message sequence. Handling Exceptions In order to keep the code readable no exception handling was added to the implementations. In a real-world scenario exceptions should be handled accordingly.

  Read the article

• Prepping a conference

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  I have had the chance to talk at many conferences these past few years, and came up with a way to prepare them which works really well for me. Most importantly, it would make it quite easy to overcome an emergency (for example if my laptop would suddenly lose data). The whole code as well as the slides and other documents are in the cloud. I also use source control for my demos, so that I always have the latest and the greatest, but also a history of changes I made to my demos. Finally I have a system of code snippets which works great, and I often had very positive remarks from the audience regarding that. Putting everything in the cloud The one thing I used to be the most scared of was a sudden crash of my laptop, and being unable to restore in time for a conference. Most conferences ask speakers to send slides a few days (or weeks…) in advance, but let's face it, we all have last minute changes to our talks and I always come in the conference with updated slides that I pass to the management team. The answer to that dilemma used to be working off memory sticks, and that worked not bad. However last year I started putting all the documents relating to a conference in a DropBox folder, and that works great too. Obviously DropBox works only if you have connectivity, so if I for instance update slides while on an international flight, I cannot save to the cloud. The obvious answer to that is to backup everything on a memory stick… but I have to admit, I have been trusting my luck and working off my laptop HD and then synching everything to the cloud after landing. Of course on some US national flights you get WiFi on board, so in that case it is even simpler :) Usually after the conference is done, I remove the files from DropBox and copy them to their "final destination". They are backed up from there to BackBlaze, the great online backup service I am using routinely (I currently have about 90GB of data in BackBlaze). Outlining the presentations I like to have a written outline of my presentations written somewhere. I keep it simple, just write the various sections of the presentation with timing. I guess it is a remnant of the time when I was a private pilot, and using checklists for flight preparation. For example: Demo about designability 15' (0:37) Switch to Blend Open MainPage.xaml Create a DataTemplate ... Here I can immediately see during the presentation if I am taking too much time for my demo (0:37 is where I need to be when I am done with this section of the presentation, and 15' is the time that this particular section takes). I keep these sections reasonable, I don't detail every step of the preparation. Typically I have one such section for every 10-15 minutes of my talks. Yes, I am timing my presentations. I keep adjusting these numbers when I rehearse, and this really helps to feel more confident during the presentations. This is especially important for presentations that are long, like my MIX11 demo which clocked at 57 minutes (I had a lot of stuff to show…). Such presentations are risky, because if anything goes wrong, you will have to cut stuff, so the answer to that is: Rehearse, rehearse and when you're done rehearsing, rehearse a little more. I also have a "Preparation" section where I outline what I need to do before a presentation. For instance: Preparation Reboot in VHD Make sure MSN and Twitter are not running. Open VS10 and load demo Open Blend and load demo Run the WP7 emulator ... I typically start preparing my laptop an hour before the talk, starting everything I need to start and then putting my laptop to sleep. Saving and printing the outline, Timing Printing is a real problem because it is really hard to find a printer at most conference venues, and also quite hard in hotels. To solve that, I simply write everything in OneNote (synched to the cloud, now you start to know what I like ;) and then I print it to a PDF (I use CutePDFWriter) that I save to my Kindle. During the presentation, I read the outline off the Kindle (I mostly just need a quick check to see how I am timing). For timing during the presentation, I use the free tool ChronoGPS on my Windows Phone 7, but of course any phone these days has a clock/chrono application. In some conferences, they even have timers that the presenters can see, but they tend to count down and I prefer to count up… so I just use my own :) Source control for demos For demos, I create a separate folder and use Mercurial as source control. Mercurial has the huge advantage (over SVN or TFS) to work offline too, so I can commit while on a plane, and all the history is saved. Then when I have connectivity I push everything to the cloud (I am using the fantastic Trunksapp.com for my private repositories). Here too the obvious downside is the risk of losing my last changes if my laptop crashes before I can push to the cloud, and here too the obvious answer would be to work from a memory stick… though I have to admit I didn't do that lately (except when I was writing Silverlight 4 Unleashed, where I was really paranoid…) And code snippets? I am one of these presenters who hates to type in front of an audience. I can type really fast (writing two books has this advantage, it really teaches you to touch type and be fast at it) but in the context of an audience, on a stage where it is often damn cold (an issue I had a lot in past conferences, air conditioning can freeze your fingers and make it really hard to type), it doesn't work as well. I don't know for you, but I really dislike seeing a presentation where the speaker uses the backspace key more often than others ;) To solve that, I like to have my code ready in snippets, and drag them to the screen. Then I can spend time explaining each code snippet, while highlighting portions of the code (always highlight what you talk about, the audience often doesn't even see the cursor and doesn't know where you are on the screen!) Over the years I have used various solutions for code snippets, and now I have one which works really well… if you take a few precautions! I use the Visual Studio Toolbox. Preparing the code snippets You can store code snippets in the Toolbox for anything, XAML, C# etc. I arrange the snippets in the order in which I need them, which is a great way to remember what comes next in the presentation. I also separate them by topic, to make it easier to find them, for example when I switch to the slides and then back to the code. Remember that no matter how experienced you are, you will feel more nervous on stage than while you are preparing, so any way to make it easier for you is going to be beneficial to the audience. To store a code snippet, I do the following: Open the final demo that you want to show to the audience in Visual Studio. In your code, select a snippet of code that you want to explain in particular. Make sure that the Visual Studio Toolbox is open (menu View, Toolbox or Ctrl-Alt-X). Drag the selected snippet from the code window to the toolbox. (if needed) drag the snippet to the correct location (for example between two other code snippets so that you can access it as you speak through the demo). Right click on the snippet and select Rename Item from the context menu. Select a meaningful name. For me I use the following conventions: If it is a method, I use the method's name. If it is not a whole method, I use a descriptive name. If it is the content of a method (i.e. the body only, without the method's signature), I use "-> MethodName". This reminds me during the presentation that this is only the body, and that I need to insert that into an existing signature. This is the case, for instance, when I use Visual Studio to automatically generate the members of an interface’s implementation; then I only need to insert my snippet inside the generated method body. Saving the snippets This is the most important!! It happened to me a few times that VS10 lost its settings. When that happens, the snippets are lost too! Yeah that really sucks, especially (as it happened once) when this is the case about an hour before a talk… Stress and sweat follows, not good conditions to start a talk in front of an audience believe me. Thankfully, saving snippets is really easy with the following steps: Select the menu Tools, Import and Export Settings. Select Export selected environment settings and press Next. Uncheck All Settings. Then expand General Settings and select Toolbox (only!). Press Next. Select your source control folder and save under a meaningful name (for instance Snippets.vssettings). Commit to source control and push to the cloud. By the way, this also has the advantage of applying source control to the snippets file (which is an XML file), so you get history for free on that file! Reimporting the snippets If VS loses its settings and you need to reimport the snippets, this can be done super easily and very fast. Make sure that the Toolbox is empty. When you import snippets, they are merged with existing ones, they do not replace the content of the Toolbox. Unless merging is really what you want, make sure that your Toolbox is clean before you import, it is really easier. Select the menu Tools, Import and Export Settings. Select Import selected environment settings and press Next. Select No, just import new settings and press Next. Press Browse and select the Snippets.vssettings file. Press Finish. Et voila, all your snippets appear again in the Toolbox. Whew, the worst was averted and you can start your demo without sweating! (I had to do that once literally 5 minutes before the start of a demo, while my laptop was already hooked to the projector, and it went just fine). What about special tools? When using special tools (for example beta versions of tools you have an early access to), or a special configuration of your laptop, things can get tricky because you cannot really be sure that you will get a laptop with the same tools and the same configuration at the conference. To solve that, I use the following precautions: I make my demos from a Virtual Hard Disk. The great John Papa made a very easy-to-follow web page where he explains how to create a VHD and install Win7 to it. This gives you the full power of your laptop (as fast as booting from the metal). For me, I have a basic configuration that I saved on a USB harddrive (Win7 plus drivers, basic settings for desktop, folder options, taskbar etc) and Visual Studio 2010 SP1 on it. When preparing, I start by copying this "basis VHD" to my laptop. I install additional tools and configurations. I save the VHD back to the USB harddrive in a different folder. This would allow me to reinstall my demo environment quite fast, for example in case of harddrive failure. Replace the harddrive, copy the VHD to it, configure the BCD and you can start. Unfortunately this only works if the laptop itself still works. In the worst case of total failure, my security is to back all the installers up: The installers I use are synched on all my laptops and backed up to BackBlaze. If the worst happens and my laptop is absolutely broken, I can download the installer from BackBlaze and install on another laptop. This of course takes some time, and if that happens 5 minutes before a presentation, well… I don't have an answer to that, except of course crossing my fingers. Still, all that gives me additional security. Conclusion Remember folks, talking to an audience, large or small, will make you nervous. Just ask Scott Hanselman :) The goal here is to create the best possible conditions for you, and to create an environment where everything is saved and easy to restore, where everything is well known and provides you with additional confidence. The cooler you feel before the presentation (and during ;)), the better your presentation will be. Here too, the goal is to provide the best user experience you can have, which in turn will make it more enjoyable for your audience! Happy presenting :) Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, April 14, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, April 14, 2012Popular ReleasesJson.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 3: Change - DefaultContractResolver.IgnoreSerializableAttribute is now true by default Fix - Fixed MaxDepth on JsonReader recursively throwing an error Fix - Fixed SerializationBinder.BindToName not being called with full assembly namesVisual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching and Merging Guide: v2 - For Visual Studio 11: Welcome to the BETA of the Branching and Merging Guide preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has not been through an independent technical review Documentation has been reviewed by the quality and recording te...Media Companion: MC 3.435b Release: This release should be the last beta for 3.4xx. A handful of problems have been sorted out since last weeks release. If there are no major problems this time, it will upgraded to 3.500 Stable at the end of the week! General The .NET Framework has been modified to use the Client profile, as provided by normal Windows updates; no longer is there a requirement to download and install the Full profile! mc_com.exe has been worked on to mimic proper Media Companion output (a big thanks to vbat99...THE NVL Maker: The NVL Maker Ver 3.12: SIM??????，TRA??????，ZIP????。 ????????????????，??????~（??????????????????） ??????? simpatch1440x900 trapatch1440x900 ?????1400x900??1440x900，?????????????Data.xp3。 ???? ?????3.12?EXE????????????????， ??????????????，??Tool/krkrconf.exe，??Editor.exe， ???????????????「??????」。 ?????Editor.exe??????。 ???? ???? http://etale.us/gameupload/THE_NVL_Maker_ver3.12_sim.zip ???? http://www.mediafire.com/?je51683g22bz8vo ??Infinite Creation?? http://bbs.etale.us/forum.php ?????? ???? 3.12 ??? ???、????...SnmpMessenger: 0.1.1.1: Project Description SnmpMessenger, a messenger. Using the SNMP protocol to exchange messages. It's developed in C#. SnmpMessenger For .Net 4.0, Mono 2.8. Support SNMP V1, V2, V3. Features Send get, set and other requests and get the response. Send and receive traps. Handle requests and return the response. Note This library is compliant with the Common Language Specification(CLS). The latest version is 0.1.1.1. It is only a messenger, does not involve VACM. Any problems, Please mailto: wa...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.1.1: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.1.1. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports CPython and IronPython • Python editor with advanced member and signature intellisense • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging • Profiling with multiple view...Supporting Guidance and Whitepapers: v1 - Team Foundation Service Whitepapers: Welcome to the BETA release of the Team Foundation Service Whitepapers preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issue...Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer: .NET Gadgeteer Core 2.42.550 (BETA): Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer Core RELEASE NOTES Version 2.42.550 11 April 2012 BETA VERSION WARNING: This is a beta version! Please note: - API changes may be made before the next version (2.42.600) - The designer will not show modules/mainboards for NETMF 4.2 until you get upgraded libraries from the module/mainboard vendors - Install NETMF 4.2 (see link below) to use the new features of this release That warning aside, this version should continue to sup...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.24: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, and Client Profile. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also available via NuGet.Kendo UI ASP.NET Sample Applications: Sample Applications (2012-04-11): Sample application(s) demonstrating the use of Kendo UI in ASP.NET applications.SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.12: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.12 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Improved WMI date conversion to be aware of timezone differences and DST. Fixed new version check. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA on Windows XP. Cmdkey.exe is natively availab...Dual Browsing: Dual Browser: Please note the following: I setup the address bar temporarily to only accepts http:// .com addresses. Just type in the name of the website excluding: http://, www., and .com; (Ex: for www.youtube.com just type: youtube then click OK). The page splitter can be grabbed by holding down your left mouse button and move left or right. By right clicking on the page background, you can choose to refresh, go back a page and so on. Demo video: http://youtu.be/L7NTFVM3JUYCslaGenFork: Rules sample v.1.1.0: On projects for CSLA v.4.2.2, added 5 new Business Rules: - DependencyFrom - RequiredWhenCanWrite - RequiredWhenIsNotNew - RequiredWhenNew - StopIfNotFieldExists Added new projects for CSLA v.4.3.10 with 6 new Business Rules: - DependencyFrom - FieldExists - RequiredWhenCanWrite - RequiredWhenIsNotNew - RequiredWhenNew - StopIfNotFieldExists Following CSLA convention, SL stands for Silverligth 5 and SL4 stands for Silverlight 4. NOTE - Although the projects for CSLA v.4.1.0 still exist, thi...Multiwfn: Multiwfn 2.3.3: Multiwfn 2.3.3Liberty: v3.2.0.1 Release 9th April 2012: Change Log-Fixed -Reach Fixed a bug where the object editor did not work on non-English operating systemsCommonData - Common Functions for ASP.NET projects: CommonData 0.3L: Common Data has been updated to the latest NUnit (2.6.0) The demo project has been updated with an example on how to correctly compare a floating point value.ASP.Net MVC Dynamic JS/CSS Script Compression Framework: Initial Stable: Initial Stable Version Contains Source for Compression Library and example for usage in web application.Path Copy Copy: 10.1: This release addresses the following work items: 11357 11358 11359 This release is a recommended upgrade, especially for users who didn't install the 10.0.1 version.ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.3: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript，?? CSS，?? UpdatePanel，?? ViewState，?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????：Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??：http://extasp.net/ ??：http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??：http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??：http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????： +2012-04-08 v3.1.3 -??Language="zh_TW"?JS???BUG（??）。 +?D...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.5.5: New Controls ChatBubble ChatBubbleTextBox OpacityToggleButton New Stuff TimeSpan languages added: RU, SK, CS Expose the physics math from TimeSpanPicker Image Stretch now on buttons Bug Fixes Layout fix so RoundToggleButton and RoundButton are exactly the same Fix for ColorPicker when set via code behind ToastPrompt bug fix with OnNavigatedTo Toast now adjusts its layout if the SIP is up Fixed some issues with Expression Blend supportNew ProjectsArkadia Operating System: This operating system is based on Cosmos Project and C# Programming Langage.Copy Microsoft Online User Attributes from one domain user to another: CopyMSOLAttributes copies MSOL-specific user attributes from source user to target user (legacyExchangeDN, mail, msExchMailboxGuid, proxyAddresses, targetAddress). This assists in migrating to Office 365 in a multi-domain, multi-forest environment.DevChat: DevChat is a small secure chat for dev groups or teams inside of an organisation that wish to control their information.Dynamic UI Framework: Dynamic UI FrameworkEjemploAndroid: Prueba Trabajar con eclipse y codeplexElfos vs Orcos: videojuego xna elfos vs orcosFacebook Suite Rules Orchard module: Part of the Facebook Suite Orchard module that provides various rules for the Rules engine to interact with Facebook.FakeMail: FakeMail makes testing of email enabled applications easier for DEVs and QAs. You no longer need to have multiple "real" email addresses to test and validate registration and notification features. Written in C# this ASP.Net MVC application uses RavenDB Embedded as a document store and hosts a custom SMTP server. Configure FakeMail and update your existing email-enabled application's SMTP server settings are you are ready to go. FakeMail mail server will accept email sent to ANY addre...FIM Object Visualizer: The FIM Object Visualizer is a tool to display and document configurable FIM objects such as Synchronization Rules, Workflows and Management Policy Rules. FXIB: ThisGoogle Places Autocomplete API for WP7: The Google Places Autocomplete API for WP7 is a project for WP7 developers to use when implementing an autocomplete box in their application. This project provides an easy non-blocking way to get fast results from the Google Places Autocomplete API. hook send/recv function with CreateRemoteThread: this sample is hooking send/recv function with CreateRemoteThread api.Infinity Music: Entertainment center, music player, youtube player, Internet radio, Facebook, Twitter ... All in one application ...! Centro de entretenimiento, reproductor de música, reproductor videos you tube, radio por internet, Facebook, Twitter... Todo en una misma aplicación...! Centre de divertissement, lecteur de musique, lecteur YouTube, la radio sur Internet, Facebook, Twitter ... Tout dans une seule application ...!Library Guard: Library Guard helps you maintain your media library(primarily audio) by correcting tags, maintaining location of your files, etc.MVVM Source Control Monitor: An exercise in MVVM with Wpf to create a useful and unobtrusive source control notification tool that lives in the system tray, and can also be viewed in a window. This is meant to provide a 'real world' application to provide examples of MVVM implementation without understanding any other frameworks that can blur the lines about what MVVM really is (it's a pattern, folks). The application will use as little 3rd party code as possible (Wpf Toolkit, some other goodies) that are all unrel...Orchard Calendar: Module provides calendar capabilities in Orchard. This is accomplished by a new calendar content part and content type along with new calendar layout for Projector module. PaidRanks: PaidRanks makes it easier for minecraft admins to mangae user rights and rewards donators. You'll no longer have to manually change nick names again. It's developed in Java 7.Perritos Project: Practice of the subject projectPython Pygame Sprites Example: This project example uses Python and Pygame to create a game environment. This code requires major refactoring and there is no warranty. Reversi.NET: Reversi is a board game involving abstract strategy and played by two players on a board with 8 rows and 8 columns and a set of distinct pieces for each side.SharePoint Social Tag Counters: The SharePoint Social Tag Counter project takes the social features from SharePoint 2010 to another level. It allows you to immediately show your SharePoint visitors how popular the content is with the help of Social "I like it" and "Tag" counters.Shop systems1: dddddddddddSource Block - Data Access Components: Source Block - Data Access Components Contains two components. 1. DBHandler 2. DBSchemaHandler DBHandler : Pure ADO.Net based Data access layer DBSchemaHandler : Pure ADO.Net based Database schema handlerSource Block - Domain Driven Development Framework: A framework which promotes domain pattern based development. This promotes patterns such as : Repository, Unit of work, Dependency injection and Inversion of control. Built on MS E.F 4.2 using code first approach. Includes features such as code generationSuperSocket Proxy Server: A .NET proxy server based on SuperSocketTestC-Q: This project is on working with KDB database and fetching data from open market data providers. This will do rigorous analysis. Don't try to find any code till Oct 2012.tofinish: tofinishUse National Geographic Photo of the Day as Wallpaper: I used to watch National Geographic Photo of the day everyday. http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day So I thought it might be helpful for people like me if a software synchronise the wallpaper with national geographic photo of the day. It also archives photo of the day along with publication date and photo title.VAMP: Projet industriel MBDS 2012?????: ???????Model???????: ????：??Model??????? ???：??? ??：?????????python?SDK: ??python??????SDK。????

  Read the article

• SQLAuthority News – Job Interviewing the Right Way (and for the Right Reasons) – Guest Post by Feodor Georgiev

  - by pinaldave

  Feodor Georgiev is a SQL Server database specialist with extensive experience of thinking both within and outside the box. He has wide experience of different systems and solutions in the fields of architecture, scalability, performance, etc. Feodor has experience with SQL Server 2000 and later versions, and is certified in SQL Server 2008. Feodor has written excellent article on Job Interviewing the Right Way. Here is his article in his own language. A while back I was thinking to start a blog post series on interviewing and employing IT personnel. At that time I had just read the ‘Smart and gets things done’ book (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/05.html) and I was hyped up on some debatable topics regarding finding and employing the best people in the branch. I have no problem with hiring the best of the best; it’s just the definition of ‘the best of the best’ that makes things a bit more complicated. One of the fundamental books one can read on the topic of interviewing is the one mentioned above. If you have not read it, then you must do so; not because it contains the ultimate truth, and not because it gives the answers to most questions on the subject, but because the book contains an extensive set of questions about interviewing and employing people. Of course, a big part of these questions have different answers, depending on location, culture, available funds and so on. (What works in the US may not necessarily work in the Nordic countries or India, or it may work in a different way). The only thing that is valid regardless of any external factor is this: curiosity. In my belief there are two kinds of people – curious and not-so-curious; regardless of profession. Think about it – professional success is directly proportional to the individual’s curiosity + time of active experience in the field. (I say ‘active experience’ because vacations and any distractions do not count as experience :)  ) So, curiosity is the factor which will distinguish a good employee from the not-so-good one. But let’s shift our attention to something else for now: a few tips and tricks for successful interviews. Tip and trick #1: get your priorities straight. Your status usually dictates your priorities; for example, if the person looking for a job has just relocated to a new country, they might tend to ignore some of their priorities and overload others. In other words, setting priorities straight means to define the personal criteria by which the interview process is lead. For example, similar to the following questions can help define the criteria for someone looking for a job: How badly do I need a (any) job? Is it more important to work in a clean and quiet environment or is it important to get paid well (or both, if possible)? And so on… Furthermore, before going to the interview, the candidate should have a list of priorities, sorted by the most importance: e.g. I want a quiet environment, x amount of money, great helping boss, a desk next to a window and so on. Also it is a good idea to be prepared and know which factors can be compromised and to what extent. Tip and trick #2: the interview is a two-way street. A job candidate should not forget that the interview process is not a one-way street. What I mean by this is that while the employer is interviewing the potential candidate, the job seeker should not miss the chance to interview the employer. Usually, the employer and the candidate will meet for an interview and talk about a variety of topics. In a quality interview the candidate will be presented to key members of the team and will have the opportunity to ask them questions. By asking the right questions both parties will define their opinion about each other. For example, if the candidate talks to one of the potential bosses during the interview process and they notice that the potential manager has a hard time formulating a question, then it is up to the candidate to decide whether working with such person is a red flag for them. There are as many interview processes out there as there are companies and each one is different. Some bigger companies and corporates can afford pre-selection processes, 3 or even 4 stages of interviews, small companies usually settle with one interview. Some companies even give cognitive tests on the interview. Why not? In his book Joel suggests that a good candidate should be pampered and spoiled beyond belief with a week-long vacation in New York, fancy hotels, food and who knows what. For all I can imagine, an interview might even take place at the top of the Eifel tower (right, Mr. Joel, right?) I doubt, however, that this is the optimal way to capture the attention of a good employee. The ‘curiosity’ topic What I have learned so far in my professional experience is that opinions can be subjective. Plus, opinions on technology subjects can also be subjective. According to Joel, only hiring the best of the best is worth it. If you ask me, there is no such thing as best of the best, simply because human nature (well, aside from some physical limitations, like putting your pants on through your head :) ) has no boundaries. And why would it have boundaries? I have seen many curious and interesting people, naturally good at technology, though uninterested in it as one  can possibly be; I have also seen plenty of people interested in technology, who (in an ideal world) should have stayed far from it. At any rate, all of this sums up at the end to the ‘supply and demand’ factor. The interview process big-bang boils down to this: If there is a mutual benefit for both the employer and the potential employee to work together, then it all sorts out nicely. If there is no benefit, then it is much harder to get to a common place. Tip and trick #3: word-of-mouth is worth a thousand words Here I would just mention that the best thing a job candidate can get during the interview process is access to future team members or other employees of the new company. Nowadays the world has become quite small and everyone knows everyone. Look at LinkedIn, look at other professional networks and you will realize how small the world really is. Knowing people is a good way to become more approachable and to approach them. Tip and trick #4: Be confident. It is true that for some people confidence is as natural as breathing and others have to work hard to express it. Confidence is, however, a key factor in convincing the other side (potential employer or employee) that there is a great chance for success by working together. But it cannot get you very far if it’s not backed up by talent, curiosity and knowledge. Tip and trick #5: The right reasons What really bothers me in Sweden (and I am sure that there are similar situations in other countries) is that there is a tendency to fill quotas and to filter out candidates by criteria different from their skill and knowledge. In job ads I see quite often the phrases ‘positive thinker’, ‘team player’ and many similar hints about personality features. So my guess here is that discrimination has evolved to a new level. Let me clear up the definition of discrimination: ‘unfair treatment of a person or group on the basis of prejudice’. And prejudice is the ‘partiality that prevents objective consideration of an issue or situation’. In other words, there is not much difference whether a job candidate is filtered out by race, gender or by personality features – it is all a bad habit. And in reality, there is no proven correlation between the technology knowledge paired with skills and the personal features (gender, race, age, optimism). It is true that a significantly greater number of Darwin awards were given to men than to women, but I am sure that somewhere there is a paper or theory explaining the genetics behind this. J This topic actually brings to mind one of my favorite work related stories. A while back I was working for a big company with many teams involved in their processes. One of the teams was occupying 2 rooms – one had the team members and was full of light, colorful posters, chit-chats and giggles, whereas the other room was dark, lighted only by a single monitor with a quiet person in front of it. Later on I realized that the ‘dark room’ person was the guru and the ultimate problem-solving-brain who did not like the chats and giggles and hence was in a separate room. In reality, all severe problems which the chatty and cheerful team members could not solve and all emergencies were directed to ‘the dark room’. And thus all worked out well. The moral of the story: Personality has nothing to do with technology knowledge and skills. End of story. Summary: I’d like to stress the fact that there is no ultimately perfect candidate for a job, and there is no such thing as ‘best-of-the-best’. From my personal experience, the main criteria by which I measure people (co-workers and bosses) is the curiosity factor; I know from experience that the more curious and inventive a person is, the better chances there are for great achievements in their field. Related stories: (for extra credit) 1) Get your priorities straight. A while back as a consultant I was working for a few days at a time at different offices and for different clients, and so I was able to compare and analyze the work environments. There were two different places which I compared and recently I asked a friend of mine the following question: “Which one would you prefer as a work environment: a noisy office full of people, or a quiet office full of faulty smells because the office is rarely cleaned?” My friend was puzzled for a while, thought about it and said: “Hmm, you are talking about two different kinds of pollution… I will probably choose the second, since I can clean the workplace myself a bit…” 2) The interview is a two-way street. One time, during a job interview, I met a potential boss that had a hard time phrasing a question. At that particular time it was clear to me that I would not have liked to work under this person. According to my work religion, the properly asked question contains at least half of the answer. And if I work with someone who cannot ask a question… then I’d be doing double or triple work. At another interview, after the technical part with the team leader of the department, I was introduced to one of the team members and we were left alone for 5 minutes. I immediately jumped on the occasion and asked the blunt question: ‘What have you learned here for the past year and how do you like your job?’ The team member looked at me and said ‘Nothing really. I like playing with my cats at home, so I am out of here at 5pm and I don’t have time for much.’ I was disappointed at the time and I did not take the job offer. I wasn’t that shocked a few months later when the company went bankrupt. 3) The right reasons to take a job: personality check. A while back I was asked to serve as a job reference for a coworker. I agreed, and after some weeks I got a phone call from the company where my colleague was applying for a job. The conversation started with the manager’s question about my colleague’s personality and about their social skills. (You can probably guess what my internal reaction was… J ) So, after 30 minutes of pouring common sense into the interviewer’s head, we finally agreed on the fact that a shy or quiet personality has nothing to do with work skills and knowledge. Some years down the road my former colleague is taking the manager’s position as the manager is demoted to a different department. Reference: Feodor Georgiev, Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• Pain Comes Instantly

  - by user701213

  When I look back at recent blog entries – many of which are not all that current (more on where my available writing time is going later) – I am struck by how many of them focus on public policy or legislative issues instead of, say, the latest nefarious cyberattack or exploit (or everyone’s favorite new pastime: coining terms for the Coming Cyberpocalypse: “digital Pearl Harbor” is so 1941). Speaking of which, I personally hope evil hackers from Malefactoria will someday hack into my bathroom scale – which in a future time will be connected to the Internet because, gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have absolutely everything in your life Internet-enabled? – and recalibrate it so I’m 10 pounds thinner. The horror. In part, my focus on public policy is due to an admitted limitation of my skill set. I enjoy reading technical articles about exploits and cybersecurity trends, but writing a blog entry on those topics would take more research than I have time for and, quite honestly, doesn’t play to my strengths. The first rule of writing is “write what you know.” The bigger contributing factor to my recent paucity of blog entries is that more and more of my waking hours are spent engaging in “thrust and parry” activity involving emerging regulations of some sort or other. I’ve opined in earlier blogs about what constitutes good and reasonable public policy so nobody can accuse me of being reflexively anti-regulation. That said, you have so many cycles in the day, and most of us would rather spend it slaying actual dragons than participating in focus groups on whether dragons are really a problem, whether lassoing them (with organic, sustainable and recyclable lassos) is preferable to slaying them – after all, dragons are people, too - and whether we need lasso compliance auditors to make sure lassos are being used correctly and humanely. (A point that seems to evade many rule makers: slaying dragons actually accomplishes something, whereas talking about “approved dragon slaying procedures and requirements” wastes the time of those who are competent to dispatch actual dragons and who were doing so very well without the input of “dragon-slaying theorists.”) Unfortunately for so many of us who would just get on with doing our day jobs, cybersecurity is rapidly devolving into the “focus groups on dragon dispatching” realm, which actual dragons slayers have little choice but to participate in. The general trend in cybersecurity is that powers-that-be – which encompasses groups other than just legislators – are often increasingly concerned and therefore feel they need to Do Something About Cybersecurity. Many seem to believe that if only we had the right amount of regulation and oversight, there would be no data breaches: a breach simply must mean Someone Is At Fault and Needs Supervision. (Leaving aside the fact that we have lots of home invasions despite a) guard dogs b) liberal carry permits c) alarm systems d) etc.) Also note that many well-managed and security-aware organizations, like the US Department of Defense, still get hacked. More specifically, many powers-that-be feel they must direct industry in a multiplicity of ways, up to and including how we actually build and deploy information technology systems. The more prescriptive the requirement, the more regulators or overseers a) can be seen to be doing something b) feel as if they are doing something regardless of whether they are actually doing something useful or cost effective. Note: an unfortunate concomitant of Doing Something is that often the cure is worse than the ailment. That is, doing what overseers want creates unfortunate byproducts that they either didn’t foresee or worse, don’t care about. After all, the logic goes, we Did Something. Prescriptive practice in the IT industry is problematic for a number of reasons. For a start, prescriptive guidance is really only appropriate if: • It is cost effective• It is “current” (meaning, the guidance doesn’t require the use of the technical equivalent of buggy whips long after horse-drawn transportation has become passé)*• It is practical (that is, pragmatic, proven and effective in the real world, not theoretical and unproven)• It solves the right problem With the above in mind, heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. A little background on PCI before I get too wound up. In 2008, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council (SSC) introduced the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). That standard requires vendors of payment applications to ensure that their products implement specific requirements and undergo security assessment procedures. In order to have an application listed as a Validated Payment Application (VPA) and available for use by merchants, software vendors are required to execute the PCI Payment Application Vendor Release Agreement (VRA). (Are you still with me through all the acronyms?) Beginning in August 2010, the VRA imposed new obligations on vendors that are extraordinary and extraordinarily bad, short-sighted and unworkable. Specifically, PCI requires vendors to disclose (dare we say “tell all?”) to PCI any known security vulnerabilities and associated security breaches involving VPAs. ASAP. Think about the impact of that. PCI is asking a vendor to disclose to them: • Specific details of security vulnerabilities • Including exploit information or technical details of the vulnerability • Whether or not there is any mitigation available (as in a patch) PCI, in turn, has the right to blab about any and all of the above – specifically, to distribute all the gory details of what is disclosed - to the PCI SSC, qualified security assessors (QSAs), and any affiliate or agent or adviser of those entities, who are in turn permitted to share it with their respective affiliates, agents, employees, contractors, merchants, processors, service providers and other business partners. This assorted crew can’t be more than, oh, hundreds of thousands of entities. Does anybody believe that several hundred thousand people can keep a secret? Or that several hundred thousand people are all equally trustworthy? Or that not one of the people getting all that information would blab vulnerability details to a bad guy, even by accident? Or be a bad guy who uses the information to break into systems? (Wait, was that the Easter Bunny that just hopped by? Bringing world peace, no doubt.) Sarcasm aside, common sense tells us that telling lots of people a secret is guaranteed to “unsecret” the secret. Notably, being provided details of a vulnerability (without a patch) is of little or no use to companies running the affected application. Few users have the technological sophistication to create a workaround, and even if they do, most workarounds break some other functionality in the application or surrounding environment. Also, given the differences among corporate implementations of any application, it is highly unlikely that a single workaround is going to work for all corporate users. So until a patch is developed by the vendor, users remain at risk of exploit: even more so if the details of vulnerability have been widely shared. Sharing that information widely before a patch is available therefore does not help users, and instead helps only those wanting to exploit known security bugs. There’s a shocker for you. Furthermore, we already know that insider information about security vulnerabilities inevitably leaks, which is why most vendors closely hold such information and limit dissemination until a patch is available (and frequently limit dissemination of technical details even with the release of a patch). That’s the industry norm, not that PCI seems to realize or acknowledge that. Why would anybody release a bunch of highly technical exploit information to a cast of thousands, whose only “vetting” is that they are members of a PCI consortium? Oracle has had personal experience with this problem, which is one reason why information on security vulnerabilities at Oracle is “need to know” (we use our own row level access control to limit access to security bugs in our bug database, and thus less than 1% of development has access to this information), and we don’t provide some customers with more information than others or with vulnerability information and/or patches earlier than others. Failure to remember “insider information always leaks” creates problems in the general case, and has created problems for us specifically. A number of years ago, one of the UK intelligence agencies had information about a non-public security vulnerability in an Oracle product that they circulated among other UK and Commonwealth defense and intelligence entities. Nobody, it should be pointed out, bothered to report the problem to Oracle, even though only Oracle could produce a patch. The vulnerability was finally reported to Oracle by (drum roll) a US-based commercial company, to whom the information had leaked. (Note: every time I tell this story, the MI-whatever agency that created the problem gets a bit shirty with us. I know they meant well and have improved their vulnerability handling/sharing processes but, dudes, next time you find an Oracle vulnerability, try reporting it to us first before blabbing to lots of people who can’t actually fix the problem. Thank you!) Getting back to PCI: clearly, these new disclosure obligations increase the risk of exploitation of a vulnerability in a VPA and thus, of misappropriation of payment card data and customer information that a VPA processes, stores or transmits. It stands to reason that VRA’s current requirement for the widespread distribution of security vulnerability exploit details -- at any time, but particularly before a vendor can issue a patch or a workaround -- is very poor public policy. It effectively publicizes information of great value to potential attackers while not providing compensating benefits - actually, any benefits - to payment card merchants or consumers. In fact, it magnifies the risk to payment card merchants and consumers. The risk is most prominent in the time before a patch has been released, since customers often have little option but to continue using an application or system despite the risks. However, the risk is not limited to the time before a patch is issued: customers often need days, or weeks, to apply patches to systems, based upon the complexity of the issue and dependence on surrounding programs. Rather than decreasing the available window of exploit, this requirement increases the available window of exploit, both as to time available to exploit a vulnerability and the ease with which it can be exploited. Also, why would hackers focus on finding new vulnerabilities to exploit if they can get “EZHack” handed to them in such a manner: a) a vulnerability b) in a payment application c) with exploit code: the “Hacking Trifecta!“ It’s fair to say that this is probably the exact opposite of what PCI – or any of us – would want. Established industry practice concerning vulnerability handling avoids the risks created by the VRA’s vulnerability disclosure requirements. Specifically, the norm is not to release information about a security bug until the associated patch (or a pretty darn good workaround) has been issued. Once a patch is available, the notice to the user community is a high-level communication discussing the product at issue, the level of risk associated with the vulnerability, and how to apply the patch. The notices do not include either the specific customers affected by the vulnerability or forensic reports with maps of the exploit (both of which are required by the current VRA). In this way, customers have the tools they need to prioritize patching and to help prevent an attack, and the information released does not increase the risk of exploit. Furthermore, many vendors already use industry standards for vulnerability description: Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE) and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). CVE helps ensure that customers know which particular issues a patch addresses and CVSS helps customers determine how severe a vulnerability is on a relative scale. Industry already provides the tools customers need to know what the patch contains and how bad the problem is that the patch remediates. So, what’s a poor vendor to do? Oracle is reaching out to other vendors subject to PCI and attempting to enlist then in a broad effort to engage PCI in rethinking (that is, eradicating) these requirements. I would therefore urge all who care about this issue, but especially those in the vendor community whose applications are subject to PCI and who may not have know they were being asked to tell-all to PCI and put their customers at risk, to do one of the following: • Contact PCI with your concerns• Contact Oracle (we are looking for vendors to sign our statement of concern)• And make sure you tell your customers that you have to rat them out to PCI if there is a breach involving the payment application I like to be charitable and say “PCI meant well” but in as important a public policy issue as what you disclose about vulnerabilities, to whom and when, meaning well isn’t enough. We need to do well. PCI, as regards this particular issue, has not done well, and has compounded the error by thus far being nonresponsive to those of us who have labored mightily to try to explain why they might want to rethink telling the entire planet about security problems with no solutions. By Way of Explanation… Non-related to PCI whatsoever, and the explanation for why I have not been blogging a lot recently, I have been working on Other Writing Venues with my sister Diane (who has also worked in the tech sector, inflicting upgrades on unsuspecting and largely ungrateful end users). I am pleased to note that we have recently (self-)published the first in the Miss Information Technology Murder Mystery series, Outsourcing Murder. The genre might best be described as “chick lit meets geek scene.” Our sisterly nom de plume is Maddi Davidson and (shameless plug follows): you can order the paper version of the book on Amazon, or the Kindle or Nook versions on www.amazon.com or www.bn.com, respectively. From our book jacket: Emma Jones, a 20-something IT consultant, is working on an outsourcing project at Tahiti Tacos, a restaurant chain offering Polynexican cuisine: refried poi, anyone? Emma despises her boss Padmanabh, a brilliant but arrogant partner in GD Consulting. When Emma discovers His-Royal-Padness’s body (verdict: death by cricket bat), she becomes a suspect.With her overprotective family and her best friend Stacey providing endless support and advice, Emma stumbles her way through an investigation of Padmanabh’s murder, bolstered by fusion food feeding frenzies, endless cups of frou-frou coffee and serious surfing sessions. While Stacey knows a PI who owes her a favor, landlady Magda urges Emma to tart up her underwear drawer before the next cute cop with a search warrant arrives. Emma’s mother offers to fix her up with a PhD student at Berkeley and showers her with self-defense gizmos while her old lover Keoni beckons from Hawai’i. And everyone, even Shaun the barista, knows a good lawyer. Book 2, Denial of Service, is coming out this summer. * Given the rate of change in technology, today’s “thou shalts” are easily next year’s “buggy whip guidance.”

  Read the article

• Why should main() be short?

  - by Stargazer712

  I've been programming for over 9 years, and according to the advice of my first programming teacher, I always keep my main() function extremely short. At first I had no idea why. I just obeyed without understanding, much to the delight of my professors. After gaining experience, I realized that if I designed my code correctly, having a short main() function just sortof happened. Writing modularized code and following the single responsibility principle allowed my code to be designed in "bunches", and main() served as nothing more than a catalyst to get the program running. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, I was looking at Python's souce code, and I found the main() function: /* Minimal main program -- everything is loaded from the library */ ... int main(int argc, char **argv) { ... return Py_Main(argc, argv); } Yay Python. Short main() function == Good code. Programming teachers were right. Wanting to look deeper, I took a look at Py_Main. In its entirety, it is defined as follows: /* Main program */ int Py_Main(int argc, char **argv) { int c; int sts; char *command = NULL; char *filename = NULL; char *module = NULL; FILE *fp = stdin; char *p; int unbuffered = 0; int skipfirstline = 0; int stdin_is_interactive = 0; int help = 0; int version = 0; int saw_unbuffered_flag = 0; PyCompilerFlags cf; cf.cf_flags = 0; orig_argc = argc; /* For Py_GetArgcArgv() */ orig_argv = argv; #ifdef RISCOS Py_RISCOSWimpFlag = 0; #endif PySys_ResetWarnOptions(); while ((c = _PyOS_GetOpt(argc, argv, PROGRAM_OPTS)) != EOF) { if (c == 'c') { /* -c is the last option; following arguments that look like options are left for the command to interpret. */ command = (char *)malloc(strlen(_PyOS_optarg) + 2); if (command == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy -c argument"); strcpy(command, _PyOS_optarg); strcat(command, "\n"); break; } if (c == 'm') { /* -m is the last option; following arguments that look like options are left for the module to interpret. */ module = (char *)malloc(strlen(_PyOS_optarg) + 2); if (module == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy -m argument"); strcpy(module, _PyOS_optarg); break; } switch (c) { case 'b': Py_BytesWarningFlag++; break; case 'd': Py_DebugFlag++; break; case '3': Py_Py3kWarningFlag++; if (!Py_DivisionWarningFlag) Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 1; break; case 'Q': if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "old") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 0; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "warn") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 1; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "warnall") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 2; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "new") == 0) { /* This only affects __main__ */ cf.cf_flags |= CO_FUTURE_DIVISION; /* And this tells the eval loop to treat BINARY_DIVIDE as BINARY_TRUE_DIVIDE */ _Py_QnewFlag = 1; break; } fprintf(stderr, "-Q option should be `-Qold', " "`-Qwarn', `-Qwarnall', or `-Qnew' only\n"); return usage(2, argv[0]); /* NOTREACHED */ case 'i': Py_InspectFlag++; Py_InteractiveFlag++; break; /* case 'J': reserved for Jython */ case 'O': Py_OptimizeFlag++; break; case 'B': Py_DontWriteBytecodeFlag++; break; case 's': Py_NoUserSiteDirectory++; break; case 'S': Py_NoSiteFlag++; break; case 'E': Py_IgnoreEnvironmentFlag++; break; case 't': Py_TabcheckFlag++; break; case 'u': unbuffered++; saw_unbuffered_flag = 1; break; case 'v': Py_VerboseFlag++; break; #ifdef RISCOS case 'w': Py_RISCOSWimpFlag = 1; break; #endif case 'x': skipfirstline = 1; break; /* case 'X': reserved for implementation-specific arguments */ case 'U': Py_UnicodeFlag++; break; case 'h': case '?': help++; break; case 'V': version++; break; case 'W': PySys_AddWarnOption(_PyOS_optarg); break; /* This space reserved for other options */ default: return usage(2, argv[0]); /*NOTREACHED*/ } } if (help) return usage(0, argv[0]); if (version) { fprintf(stderr, "Python %s\n", PY_VERSION); return 0; } if (Py_Py3kWarningFlag && !Py_TabcheckFlag) /* -3 implies -t (but not -tt) */ Py_TabcheckFlag = 1; if (!Py_InspectFlag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONINSPECT")) && *p != '\0') Py_InspectFlag = 1; if (!saw_unbuffered_flag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONUNBUFFERED")) && *p != '\0') unbuffered = 1; if (!Py_NoUserSiteDirectory && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONNOUSERSITE")) && *p != '\0') Py_NoUserSiteDirectory = 1; if ((p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONWARNINGS")) && *p != '\0') { char *buf, *warning; buf = (char *)malloc(strlen(p) + 1); if (buf == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy PYTHONWARNINGS"); strcpy(buf, p); for (warning = strtok(buf, ","); warning != NULL; warning = strtok(NULL, ",")) PySys_AddWarnOption(warning); free(buf); } if (command == NULL && module == NULL && _PyOS_optind < argc && strcmp(argv[_PyOS_optind], "-") != 0) { #ifdef __VMS filename = decc$translate_vms(argv[_PyOS_optind]); if (filename == (char *)0 || filename == (char *)-1) filename = argv[_PyOS_optind]; #else filename = argv[_PyOS_optind]; #endif } stdin_is_interactive = Py_FdIsInteractive(stdin, (char *)0); if (unbuffered) { #if defined(MS_WINDOWS) || defined(__CYGWIN__) _setmode(fileno(stdin), O_BINARY); _setmode(fileno(stdout), O_BINARY); #endif #ifdef HAVE_SETVBUF setvbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stderr, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); #else /* !HAVE_SETVBUF */ setbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL); setbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL); setbuf(stderr, (char *)NULL); #endif /* !HAVE_SETVBUF */ } else if (Py_InteractiveFlag) { #ifdef MS_WINDOWS /* Doesn't have to have line-buffered -- use unbuffered */ /* Any set[v]buf(stdin, ...) screws up Tkinter :-( */ setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); #else /* !MS_WINDOWS */ #ifdef HAVE_SETVBUF setvbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); #endif /* HAVE_SETVBUF */ #endif /* !MS_WINDOWS */ /* Leave stderr alone - it should be unbuffered anyway. */ } #ifdef __VMS else { setvbuf (stdout, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); } #endif /* __VMS */ #ifdef __APPLE__ /* On MacOS X, when the Python interpreter is embedded in an application bundle, it gets executed by a bootstrapping script that does os.execve() with an argv[0] that's different from the actual Python executable. This is needed to keep the Finder happy, or rather, to work around Apple's overly strict requirements of the process name. However, we still need a usable sys.executable, so the actual executable path is passed in an environment variable. See Lib/plat-mac/bundlebuiler.py for details about the bootstrap script. */ if ((p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONEXECUTABLE")) && *p != '\0') Py_SetProgramName(p); else Py_SetProgramName(argv[0]); #else Py_SetProgramName(argv[0]); #endif Py_Initialize(); if (Py_VerboseFlag || (command == NULL && filename == NULL && module == NULL && stdin_is_interactive)) { fprintf(stderr, "Python %s on %s\n", Py_GetVersion(), Py_GetPlatform()); if (!Py_NoSiteFlag) fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", COPYRIGHT); } if (command != NULL) { /* Backup _PyOS_optind and force sys.argv[0] = '-c' */ _PyOS_optind--; argv[_PyOS_optind] = "-c"; } if (module != NULL) { /* Backup _PyOS_optind and force sys.argv[0] = '-c' so that PySys_SetArgv correctly sets sys.path[0] to '' rather than looking for a file called "-m". See tracker issue #8202 for details. */ _PyOS_optind--; argv[_PyOS_optind] = "-c"; } PySys_SetArgv(argc-_PyOS_optind, argv+_PyOS_optind); if ((Py_InspectFlag || (command == NULL && filename == NULL && module == NULL)) && isatty(fileno(stdin))) { PyObject *v; v = PyImport_ImportModule("readline"); if (v == NULL) PyErr_Clear(); else Py_DECREF(v); } if (command) { sts = PyRun_SimpleStringFlags(command, &cf) != 0; free(command); } else if (module) { sts = RunModule(module, 1); free(module); } else { if (filename == NULL && stdin_is_interactive) { Py_InspectFlag = 0; /* do exit on SystemExit */ RunStartupFile(&cf); } /* XXX */ sts = -1; /* keep track of whether we've already run __main__ */ if (filename != NULL) { sts = RunMainFromImporter(filename); } if (sts==-1 && filename!=NULL) { if ((fp = fopen(filename, "r")) == NULL) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: can't open file '%s': [Errno %d] %s\n", argv[0], filename, errno, strerror(errno)); return 2; } else if (skipfirstline) { int ch; /* Push back first newline so line numbers remain the same */ while ((ch = getc(fp)) != EOF) { if (ch == '\n') { (void)ungetc(ch, fp); break; } } } { /* XXX: does this work on Win/Win64? (see posix_fstat) */ struct stat sb; if (fstat(fileno(fp), &sb) == 0 && S_ISDIR(sb.st_mode)) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: '%s' is a directory, cannot continue\n", argv[0], filename); fclose(fp); return 1; } } } if (sts==-1) { /* call pending calls like signal handlers (SIGINT) */ if (Py_MakePendingCalls() == -1) { PyErr_Print(); sts = 1; } else { sts = PyRun_AnyFileExFlags( fp, filename == NULL ? "<stdin>" : filename, filename != NULL, &cf) != 0; } } } /* Check this environment variable at the end, to give programs the * opportunity to set it from Python. */ if (!Py_InspectFlag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONINSPECT")) && *p != '\0') { Py_InspectFlag = 1; } if (Py_InspectFlag && stdin_is_interactive && (filename != NULL || command != NULL || module != NULL)) { Py_InspectFlag = 0; /* XXX */ sts = PyRun_AnyFileFlags(stdin, "<stdin>", &cf) != 0; } Py_Finalize(); #ifdef RISCOS if (Py_RISCOSWimpFlag) fprintf(stderr, "\x0cq\x0c"); /* make frontend quit */ #endif #ifdef __INSURE__ /* Insure++ is a memory analysis tool that aids in discovering * memory leaks and other memory problems. On Python exit, the * interned string dictionary is flagged as being in use at exit * (which it is). Under normal circumstances, this is fine because * the memory will be automatically reclaimed by the system. Under * memory debugging, it's a huge source of useless noise, so we * trade off slower shutdown for less distraction in the memory * reports. -baw */ _Py_ReleaseInternedStrings(); #endif /* __INSURE__ */ return sts; } Good God Almighty...it is big enough to sink the Titanic. It seems as though Python did the "Intro to Programming 101" trick and just moved all of main()'s code to a different function called it something very similar to "main". Here's my question: Is this code terribly written, or are there other reasons reasons to have a short main function? As it stands right now, I see absolutely no difference between doing this and just moving the code in Py_Main() back into main(). Am I wrong in thinking this?

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 13, 2012

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

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 08, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 08, 2011Popular ReleasesAjax Minifier: AjaxMin 4.14: Fixed issue with CSS3 @media and @page parsing. Added support for more properties in the MSBuild task.DotNetAge -a lightweight Mvc jQuery CMS: DotNetAge 2: What is new in DotNetAge 2.0 ? Completely update DJME to DJME2, enhance user experience ,more beautiful and more interactively visit DJME project home to lean more about DJME http://www.dotnetage.com/sites/home/djme.html A new widget engine has came! Faster and easiler. Runtime performance enhanced. SEO enhanced. UI Designer enhanced. A new web resources explorer. Page manager enhanced. BlogML supports added that allows you import/export your blog data to/from dotnetage publishi...Master Data Services Manager: stable 1.0.3: Update 2011-03-07 : bug fixes added external configuration File : configuration.config added TreeView Display of model (still in dev) http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/5067/screenshot073l.jpg added Connection Parameters (username, domain, password, stored encrypted in configuration file) http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/5350/screenshot072qc.jpgSharePoint Content Inventory: Release 1.1: Release 1.1Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.4 Beta: - Moved the core of the PopupMenu class to the new PopupMenuBase class. - Renamed the MenuTriggerElement class to MenuTriggerRelationship. - Renamed the ApplicationMenus property to MenuTriggers. - Renamed the _allowPinnedState property to AllowPinnedState. - Renamed the _restoreFocusOnClose property to RestoreFocusOnClose. - Renamed the SubmenuLaunchKey property to FlyoutKey. - Renamed the AutoMapTriggerElementToSelectableItem property to UseSelectedItemAsTriggerElement. - Renamed the AutoM...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.0 Beta: Files in this downloadkooboo_CMS.zip: The kooboo application files Content_DBProvider.zip: Additional content database implementation of MSSQL,SQLCE, RavenDB and MongoDB. Default is XML based database. To use them, copy the related dlls into web root bin folder and remove old content provider dlls. Content provider has the name like "Kooboo.CMS.Content.Persistence.SQLServer.dll" View_Engines.zip: Supports of Razor, webform and NVelocity view engine. Copy the dlls into web root bin folder t...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.2: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager added fullscreen for the popup and popupformIronPython: 2.7 Release Candidate 2: On behalf of the IronPython team, I am pleased to announce IronPython 2.7 Release Candidate 2. The releases contains a few minor bug fixes, including a working webbrowser module. Please see the release notes for 61395 for what was fixed in previous releases.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.20: Mono 2.8, Silverlight, OAuth, 100% Twitter API coverage, streaming, extensibility via Raw Queries, and added documentation.IIS Tuner: IIS Tuner 1.0: IIS and ASP.NET performance optimization toolMinemapper: Minemapper v0.1.6: Once again supports biomes, thanks to an updated Minecraft Biome Extractor, which added support for the new Minecraft beta v1.3 map format. Updated mcmap to support new biome format.CRM 2011 OData Query Designer: CRM 2011 OData Query Designer: The CRM 2011 OData Query Designer is a Silverlight 4 application that is packaged as a Managed CRM 2011 Solution. This tool allows you to build OData queries by selecting filter criteria, select attributes and order by attributes. The tool also allows you to Execute the query and view the ATOM and JSON data returned. The look and feel of this component will improve and new functionality will be added in the near future so please provide feedback on your experience. Latest Update 8th March ...Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.3.0 Release: This release supports the Sandcastle June 2010 Release (v2.6.10621.1). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release is compiled under .NET 4.0, supports Visual Studio 2010 solutions and projects as documentation sources, and adds support for projects targeting the Silverlight Framework. This release uses the Sandcastle Guided Installation package used by Sandcastle Styles. Download and extract to a folder and then run SandcastleI...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.6.4: It is now possible to run the clicker anyway when it can't detect the Masteries Window Fixed a critical bug in the open file dialog Removed the resize button Some UI changes 3D camera movement is now more intuitive (Trackball rotation) When an error occurs on the clicker it will attempt to focus AutoLoLYAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.5.5 RTW: YAF v1.9.5.5 RTM (Date: 3/4/2011 Rev: 4742) Official Discussion Thread here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postsm47149_v1-9-5-5-RTW--Date-3-4-2011-Rev-4742.aspx Changes in v1.9.5.5 Rev. #4661 - Added "Copy" function to forum administration -- Now instead of having to manually re-enter all the access masks, etc, you can just duplicate an existing forum and modify after the fact. Rev. #4642 - New Setting to Enable/Disable Last Unread posts links Rev. #4641 - Added Arabic Language t...Snippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.3.1: Snippet Designer 1.3.1 for Visual Studio 2010This is a bug fix release. Change logFixed bug where Snippet Designer would fail if you had the most recent Productivity Power Tools installed Fixed bug where "Export as Snippet" was failing in non-english locales Fixed bug where opening a new .snippet file would fail in non-english localesChiave File Encryption: Chiave 1.0: Final Relase for Chave 1.0 Stable: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Now with added support to Windows XP! Change Log from 0.9.2 to 1.0: ==================== Added: > Added Icon Overlay for Windows 7 Taskbar Icon. >Added Thumbnail Toolbar buttons to make the navigation easier...DirectQ: Release 1.8.7 (RC1): Release candidate 1 of 1.8.7GoogleTrail: TrailMap Beta 1: Trailmap beta 1 release Now we have updated custom map builder. Now we have complete gpx file editor. Now we have elevation data update service for any gpx file. (currently supports only google only).ASP.NET: Sprite and Image Optimization Preview 3: The ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization framework is designed to decrease the amount of time required to request and display a page from a web server by performing a variety of optimizations on the page’s images. This is the third preview of the feature and works with ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 3, and ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) projects. The binaries are also available via NuGet: AspNetSprites-Core AspNetSprites-WebFormsControl AspNetSprites-MvcAndRazorHelper It includes the foll...New ProjectsCaxangáV2: Ainda jogando Caxangá.. ou nãoCollection Membership Wizard for SCCM: This application assists SMS 2003 and SCCM 2007 administrators with the everyday task of adding lists of computers or users by name to collections in their hierarchy. The goal of this application is to be very easy to use and to have good performance.CoseaDirectos: Aplicación asp.net, silverlight, sql server 2008 para reclutamiento de personal DoctrineIgniter: Usage of Doctrine 2 ORM and Codeigniter 2 PHP platform.Field Finder: DB Administration tool. Easy search in the SQL server database structure. Provides predefined templates for SQL Scripts and VB.NET source code. Search in database Structure and database Data. First Project Of Skyline's Member: multipoint mouse on C#FloodWarn: A series of server and client apps for monitoring flood levels on the Snoqualmie River in King County, Washington.Fluent Json: Json generator and parser written in C#. Besides basic json support, this library enables you to fluently map your custom types to the json data format.Google Handy Translator: Handy dictionary which use Google Translator and also local database . It will activate by SHIFT+F10 and translate what we have in the clipboard.Grid Model: Extensions to the Task Parallel Library to support distributing tasks across multiple computers participating in a heterogeneous computing grid.HiShow: An ASP.NET website allows everybody too have an overview of many hitech-products: Images, price, and reviewIdeaBlade DevForce/Caliburn Application Framework: The IdeaBlade DevForce/Caliburn Application Framework makes it easy to get started with developing data driven Rich Internet Applications in Silverlight and WPF desktop applications with Caliburn Micro as the MVVM framework and DevForce 2010 as the data access layer. Implement DAO By IBatis and NHibernate: ????????，??IBatis?NHibernate???????，?????????，???????????。iTunes.Scrubber: iTunes.Scrubber is an Open Source library that allows people to easily update metadata for their iTunes libraries. It's developed in C#, and interfaces with various web services, including imdb, and thetvdbLaptop Rental System: This project is for Laptop Rental Software project. It will lasts for 2 weeks. Xuan ChienMathLib.NET: Aims to provide a fully managed implementation of core MATLAB(R) functions, designed to be used from dynamic languages such as IronPython and providing an API matching the MATLAB(R) API, to ease the transition from analysis to implementation.Mobile Application Development Framework: A general purpose Windows CE/Mobile Application Development FrameworkMSMSpec: MSMSpec autogenerates MSTest tests corresponding to MSpec tests. Useful where MSTest integration is desired / required / forced. Also enables using VS test tooling for MSpec tests. Requires VS2010 and .NET 4.0.Multi-touch GIS API for TableTops: This API facilitates the creation of multi-touch GIS applications for digital Tabletops. It is built on top of ESRI API for WPF 4.0 and it uses Windows 7 touch events. It also uses some gestures from the Gesture Toolkit.NewLineReplacer: Replace letter fast and easy in great textfilesOpenGLMaciejLis: Project is a game prototype created in C++ and OpenGLPlanetQuest: Application to poll the current extra-solar planet count at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/ Prime number exporter: Prime number exporter calculates prime numbers using the "Sieve of Eratosthenes" and exports a Textfile. QPAPrintLib: Print every document by its recommended programmRegistry Editor for Windows Mobile: A registry editor for Windows Mobile 6.x and 5.x based devices.Remote desktop on mobile phones: Mobile Remote Desktop enables you to connect to your computer from your mobile devices using bluetooth connectivity. Once connected, Mobile Remote Desktop gives you mouse and keyboard control of your computer from mobile.RestUpProxy: RestUpProxy is a .Net REST client designed to make using RESTful APIs a snap.SharePoint 2010 List Based 404 Handler: A SharePoint WSP that customises the 404 handler for a web application, allowing you to define how to handle missing page requests via a SharePoint list. This is the SharePoint 2010 version.SharePoint Content Inventory: SPContentInventory generates a complete content invetory for SharePoint 2007/2010 sites. The content inventory is exported as an Excel file providing information about all sites, lists and libraries.Shop: open source ecommerce solution for umbraco.SilverVision: Computer vision algorithms implementation in SilverlightSpCop: The aim of this project is to offer a utility similar to fxcop but for wsp packages. At the end it should contain enough rules to ensure good practices and allow automated audits or checks at build time for example.Syscable: Sistema para control de mensualidades para una empresa que proporcione servicios de television por cableSyscart: Aplicacion web para manejo de inventario en bodegas u otros establecimientos. Tranquility.Net (Wcf App Server): Allows developers to host multiple isolated Wcf services within a single Windows service. You'll no longer have to use IIS to host all your services. It's developed in C# .NET. Your services with a smile.USMC Knowledge for WP7: USMC Knowledge is an information application to provide active duty Marines, as well as those with an interest in the USMC with basic knowledge. It's developed in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.Utility4Net: some base class such as xml,string,data,secerity,web,office... etc.. under Microsoft.NET Framework 4.0 by c# Part of the code r collected from the Internet WPF ImageUitls: WPF Image Utils is a set of image related applications that use WPF. Currently the project focuses on a picture viewerZen4Sync, Orchestration and Test Load platform for SQL Server Merge Replication: This project is all about providing a orchestration and test load platform able to validate any SQL Server Merge Replication based Architecture.Zimms: Collaboration Site for friends, a code depot, and scratch pad??tbl??????: ????tbl?????????。 ??tbl??????，??????????，?????、excel???。 ?????????????，????，????????！

  Read the article

• Creating ASP.NET MVC Negotiated Content Results

  - by Rick Strahl

  In a recent ASP.NET MVC application I’m involved with, we had a late in the process request to handle Content Negotiation: Returning output based on the HTTP Accept header of the incoming HTTP request. This is standard behavior in ASP.NET Web API but ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this functionality directly out of the box. Another reason this came up in discussion is last week’s announcements of ASP.NET vNext, which seems to indicate that ASP.NET Web API is not going to be ported to the cloud version of vNext, but rather be replaced by a combined version of MVC and Web API. While it’s not clear what new API features will show up in this new framework, it’s pretty clear that the ASP.NET MVC style syntax will be the new standard for all the new combined HTTP processing framework. Why negotiated Content? Content negotiation is one of the key features of Web API even though it’s such a relatively simple thing. But it’s also something that’s missing in MVC and once you get used to automatically having your content returned based on Accept headers it’s hard to go back to manually having to create separate methods for different output types as you’ve had to with Microsoft server technologies all along (yes, yes I know other frameworks – including my own – have done this for years but for in the box features this is relatively new from Web API). As a quick review,  Accept Header content negotiation works off the request’s HTTP Accept header:POST http://localhost/mydailydosha/Editable/NegotiateContent HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: application/json Accept: application/json Host: localhost Content-Length: 76 Pragma: no-cache { ElementId: "header", PageName: "TestPage", Text: "This is a nice header" } If I make this request I would expect to get back a JSON result based on my application/json Accept header. To request XML  I‘d just change the accept header:Accept: text/xml and now I’d expect the response to come back as XML. Now this only works with media types that the server can process. In my case here I need to handle JSON, XML, HTML (using Views) and Plain Text. HTML results might need more than just a data return – you also probably need to specify a View to render the data into either by specifying the view explicitly or by using some sort of convention that can automatically locate a view to match. Today ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this sort of automatic content switching out of the box. Unfortunately, in my application scenario we have an application that started out primarily with an AJAX backend that was implemented with JSON only. So there are lots of JSON results like this:[Route("Customers")] public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return Json(repo.GetCustomers(),JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } These work fine, but they are of course JSON specific. Then a couple of weeks ago, a requirement came in that an old desktop application needs to also consume this API and it has to use XML to do it because there’s no JSON parser available for it. Ooops – stuck with JSON in this case. While it would have been easy to add XML specific methods I figured it’s easier to add basic content negotiation. And that’s what I show in this post. Missteps – IResultFilter, IActionFilter My first attempt at this was to use IResultFilter or IActionFilter which look like they would be ideal to modify result content after it’s been generated using OnResultExecuted() or OnActionExecuted(). Filters are great because they can look globally at all controller methods or individual methods that are marked up with the Filter’s attribute. But it turns out these filters don’t work for raw POCO result values from Action methods. What we wanted to do for API calls is get back to using plain .NET types as results rather than result actions. That is  you write a method that doesn’t return an ActionResult, but a standard .NET type like this:public Customer UpdateCustomer(Customer cust) { … do stuff to customer :-) return cust; } Unfortunately both OnResultExecuted and OnActionExecuted receive an MVC ContentResult instance from the POCO object. MVC basically takes any non-ActionResult return value and turns it into a ContentResult by converting the value using .ToString(). Ugh. The ContentResult itself doesn’t contain the original value, which is lost AFAIK with no way to retrieve it. So there’s no way to access the raw customer object in the example above. Bummer. Creating a NegotiatedResult This leaves mucking around with custom ActionResults. ActionResults are MVC’s standard way to return action method results – you basically specify that you would like to render your result in a specific format. Common ActionResults are ViewResults (ie. View(vn,model)), JsonResult, RedirectResult etc. They work and are fairly effective and work fairly well for testing as well as it’s the ‘standard’ interface to return results from actions. The problem with the this is mainly that you’re explicitly saying that you want a specific result output type. This works well for many things, but sometimes you do want your result to be negotiated. My first crack at this solution here is to create a simple ActionResult subclass that looks at the Accept header and based on that writes the output. I need to support JSON and XML content and HTML as well as text – so effectively 4 media types: application/json, text/xml, text/html and text/plain. Everything else is passed through as ContentResult – which effecively returns whatever .ToString() returns. Here’s what the NegotiatedResult usage looks like:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return new NegotiatedResult(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return new NegotiatedResult("Show", repo.GetCustomer(id)); } There are two overloads of this method – one that returns just the raw result value and a second version that accepts an optional view name. The second version returns the Razor view specified only if text/html is requested – otherwise the raw data is returned. This is useful in applications where you have an HTML front end that can also double as an API interface endpoint that’s using the same model data you send to the View. For the application I mentioned above this was another actual use-case we needed to address so this was a welcome side effect of creating a custom ActionResult. There’s also an extension method that directly attaches a Negotiated() method to the controller using the same syntax:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return this.Negotiated(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return this.Negotiated("Show",repo.GetCustomer(id)); } Using either of these mechanisms now allows you to return JSON, XML, HTML or plain text results depending on the Accept header sent. Send application/json you get just the Customer JSON data. Ditto for text/xml and XML data. Pass text/html for the Accept header and the "Show.cshtml" Razor view is rendered passing the result model data producing final HTML output. While this isn’t as clean as passing just POCO objects back as I had intended originally, this approach fits better with how MVC action methods are intended to be used and we get the bonus of being able to specify a View to render (optionally) for HTML. How does it work An ActionResult implementation is pretty straightforward. You inherit from ActionResult and implement the ExecuteResult method to send your output to the ASP.NET output stream. ActionFilters are an easy way to effectively do post processing on ASP.NET MVC controller actions just before the content is sent to the output stream, assuming your specific action result was used. Here’s the full code to the NegotiatedResult class (you can also check it out on GitHub):/// <summary> /// Returns a content negotiated result based on the Accept header. /// Minimal implementation that works with JSON and XML content, /// can also optionally return a view with HTML. /// </summary> /// <example> /// // model data only /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult(repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// // optional view for HTML /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public class NegotiatedResult : ActionResult { /// <summary> /// Data stored to be 'serialized'. Public /// so it's potentially accessible in filters. /// </summary> public object Data { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Optional name of the HTML view to be rendered /// for HTML responses /// </summary> public string ViewName { get; set; } public static bool FormatOutput { get; set; } static NegotiatedResult() { FormatOutput = HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data to serialize /// </summary> /// <param name="data">Data to serialize</param> public NegotiatedResult(object data) { Data = data; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data and an optional view for HTML views /// </summary> /// <param name="data"></param> /// <param name="viewName"></param> public NegotiatedResult(string viewName, object data) { Data = data; ViewName = viewName; } public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) { if (context == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("context"); HttpResponseBase response = context.HttpContext.Response; HttpRequestBase request = context.HttpContext.Request; // Look for specific content types if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/html")) { response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/plain")) { response.ContentType = "text/plain"; response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("application/json")) { using (JsonTextWriter writer = new JsonTextWriter(response.Output)) { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings(); if (FormatOutput) settings.Formatting = Newtonsoft.Json.Formatting.Indented; JsonSerializer serializer = JsonSerializer.Create(settings); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/xml")) { response.ContentType = "text/xml"; if (Data != null) { using (var writer = new XmlTextWriter(response.OutputStream, new UTF8Encoding())) { if (FormatOutput) writer.Formatting = System.Xml.Formatting.Indented; XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(Data.GetType()); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } } else { // just write data as a plain string response.Write(Data); } } } /// <summary> /// Extends Controller with Negotiated() ActionResult that does /// basic content negotiation based on the Accept header. /// </summary> public static class NegotiatedResultExtensions { /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated( repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(data); } /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="viewName">Name of the View to when Accept is text/html</param> /// /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, string viewName, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(viewName, data); } } Output Generation – JSON and XML Generating output for XML and JSON is simple – you use the desired serializer and off you go. Using XmlSerializer and JSON.NET it’s just a handful of lines each to generate serialized output directly into the HTTP output stream. Please note this implementation uses JSON.NET for its JSON generation rather than the default JavaScriptSerializer that MVC uses which I feel is an additional bonus to implementing this custom action. I’d already been using a custom JsonNetResult class previously, but now this is just rolled into this custom ActionResult. Just keep in mind that JSON.NET outputs slightly different JSON for certain things like collections for example, so behavior may change. One addition to this implementation might be a flag to allow switching the JSON serializer. Html View Generation Html View generation actually turned out to be easier than anticipated. Initially I used my generic ASP.NET ViewRenderer Class that can render MVC views from any ASP.NET application. However it turns out since we are executing inside of an active MVC request there’s an easier way: We can simply create a custom ViewResult and populate its members and then execute it. The code in text/html handling code that renders the view is simply this:response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); which is a neat and easy way to render a Razor view assuming you have an active controller that’s ready for rendering. Sweet – dependency removed which makes this class self-contained without any external dependencies other than JSON.NET. Summary While this isn’t exactly a new topic, it’s the first time I’ve actually delved into this with MVC. I’ve been doing content negotiation with Web API and prior to that with my REST library. This is the first time it’s come up as an issue in MVC. But as I have worked through this I find that having a way to specify both HTML Views *and* JSON and XML results from a single controller certainly is appealing to me in many situations as we are in this particular application returning identical data models for each of these operations. Rendering content negotiated views is something that I hope ASP.NET vNext will provide natively in the combined MVC and WebAPI model, but we’ll see how this actually will be implemented. In the meantime having a custom ActionResult that provides this functionality is a workable and easily adaptable way of handling this going forward. Whatever ends up happening in ASP.NET vNext the abstraction can probably be changed to support the native features of the future. Anyway I hope some of you found this useful if not for direct integration then as insight into some of the rendering logic that MVC uses to get output into the HTTP stream… Related Resources Latest Version of NegotiatedResult.cs on GitHub Understanding Action Controllers Rendering ASP.NET Views To String© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in MVC  ASP.NET  HTTP   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 13, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 13, 2011Popular ReleasesT.S.T. the T-SQL Test Tool: Version 1.8: Implement the Assert.Ignore API. Fix a bug: A test session is reported as passing if only the test session setup or test session teardown failed. Improve the text and xml output when test session setup/teardown are present. Allow users to customize the prefix "SQLTest_".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.Dynamic PagedCollection (Silverlight / WPF Pagination): PagedCollection: All classes which facilitate your dynamic pagination in Silverlight or WPF !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...DotSpatial: DotSpatial Release Candidate 1 (1.0.823): Supports loading extensions using System.ComponentModel.Composition. DemoMap compiled as x86 so that GDAL runs on x64 machines. How to: Use an Assembly from the WebBe aware that your browser may add an identifier to downloaded files which results in "blocked" dll files. You can follow the following link to learn how to "Unblock" files. Right click on the zip file before unzipping, choose properties, go to the general tab and click the unblock button. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library...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...CODE Framework: 4.0.11110.0: Various minor fixes and tweaks.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...Player Framework by Microsoft: HTML5 Player Framework 1.0: Additional DownloadsHTML5 Player Framework Examples - This is a set of examples showing how to setup and initialize the HTML5 Player Framework. This includes examples of how to use the Player Framework with both the HTML5 video tag and Silverlight player. Note: Be sure to unblock the zip file before using. Note: In order to test Silverlight fallback in the included sample app, you need to run the html and xap files over http (e.g. over localhost). Silverlight Players - Visit the Silverlig...MapWindow 4: MapWindow GIS v4.8.6 - Final release - 64Bit: What’s New in 4.8.6 (Final release)A few minor issues have been fixed What’s New in 4.8.5 (Beta release)Assign projection tool. (Sergei Leschinsky) Projection dialects. (Sergei Leschinsky) Projections database converted to SQLite format. (Sergei Leschinsky) Basic code for database support - will be developed further (ShapefileDataClient class, IDataProvider interface). (Sergei Leschinsky) 'Export shapefile to database' tool. (Sergei Leschinsky) Made the GEOS library static. geos.dl...Facebook C# SDK: v5.3.2: This is a RTW release which adds new features and bug fixes to v5.2.1. Query/QueryAsync methods uses graph api instead of legacy rest api. removed dependency from Code Contracts enabled Task Parallel Support in .NET 4.0+ (experimental) added support for early preview for .NET 4.5 (binaries not distributed in codeplex nor nuget.org, will need to manually build from Facebook-Net45.sln) added additional method overloads for .NET 4.5 to support IProgress<T> for upload progress added ne...Delete Inactive TS Ports: List and delete the Inactive TS Ports: UPDATEAdded support for windows 2003 servers and removed some null reference errors when the registry key was not present List and delete the Inactive TS Ports - The InactiveTSPortList.EXE accepts command line arguments The InactiveTSPortList.Standalone.WithoutPrompt.exe runs as a standalone exe without the need for any command line arguments.ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.60.0: Added almost full support for auto filters (missing custom date filters). See examples Filter Values, Custom Filters Fixed issues 7016, 7391, 7388, 7389, 7198, 7196, 7194, 7186, 7067, 7115, 7144Microsoft Research Boogie: Nightly builds: This download category contains automatically released nightly builds, reflecting the current state of Boogie's development. We try to make sure each nightly build passes the test suite. If you suspect that was not the case, please try the previous nightly build to see if that really is the problem. Also, please see the installation instructions.GoogleMap Control: GoogleMap Control 6.0: Major design changes to the control in order to achieve better scalability and extensibility for the new features comming with GoogleMaps API. GoogleMap control switched to GoogleMaps API v3 and .NET 4.0. GoogleMap control is 100% ScriptControl now, it requires ScriptManager to be registered on the pages where and before it is used. Markers, polylines, polygons and directions were implemented as ExtenderControl, instead of being inner properties of GoogleMap control. Better perfomance. Better...WabbitStudio Z80 Software Tools: WabbitCode Mac 2.1: WabbitCode for the Mac version 2.1. You need 10.7 (Lion) to run this. There won't be any further releases for older versions of OS X.Shell Sort Web service and Application: Shell sort Web service and application: Shell Sort WebserviceSharePoint Backup Augmentation Cmdlets: SharePointBAC Technology Preview: This release is purely an opportunity for administrators who live on the bleeding-edge to "kick the tires." Only two cmdlets are available: Get-SPBackupCatalog and Remove-SPBackupCatalog. Both of these cmdlets are fully functional and documented in their current form, but the cmdlets have seen little testing and real-world use thus far. The code, capabilities, and reliability of this project will evolve in the weeks and months ahead, but for now you should avoid deploying these cmdlets to pro...WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: V2.1: Version 2.1 (click on the right) this uses V4.0 of .net Version 2.1 adds the following features: (apologize if I forget some, added a lot of little things) Manual Lookup with TV or Movie (finally huh!), you can look up a movie or TV episode directly, you can right click on anythign, and choose manual lookup, then will allow you to type anything you want to look up and it will assign it to the file you right clicked. No Rename: a very popular request, this is an option you can set so that t...New ProjectsBTG - Bilateral Tower Guardians: BIEN TA GROTTEc# Extended Link List: The ExtendedLinkList Graffiti CMS Widget is a C# port of an existing widget by Curt C at http://www.codeplex.com/ExtendedLinkListCodePubs: codepubs DegradingLoad: DegradingLoad will attempt to load a process serverside async; if it takes too long it will "degrade" to using clientside ajax to retrieve the result without blocking the main page contentDino: Dino is a simple ORM wrapper framework that provides a consistent set of interfaces for working with a variety of ORMs in a single Unit of Work. Dino is built to be extremely lightweight, with built in support for abstracting away some of the intricicies of using various ORMs.Elenoire: Elenoire is a live bot assistant for everyday that takes a appointment and note for you, the bot work when you are not present on messenger. Fontus: Fontus è un sistema centralizzato per l’erogazione di contenuti informativi. Il sistema Fontus si basa su un meccanismo di plug-in per rendere l’insieme delle fonti estendibile. FoolFish.CodeBase: implement your especial ideas...FullonSMS Desktop Client: Send free sms using fullonsms by this software to anywhere in India, supports grouping and contacts feature. Developed by Ayush PateriaInterface Interceptor: Allows you to filter and intercept interface methods.NBouncer: NBouncer is a Context Aware Validation framework without attributes for .NET 3.5 Winforms, WPF, Silverlight or Asp.NET MVCNetShips: Simple network battleship game for 2 players.Nhung Nai Website: phát tri?n Nhung Nai WebisteOpenCV2.2 Project template For Visual Studio 2010: The intension of the project is to make your life little easier if you use OpenCV2.2. As i couldn't find a project template for OpenCV, I decided to publish it on codeplex. Hope it will help at least some of you.Projeto de Compiladores: Projeto de Compiladores da Unicap 2011.2sejce2008: jce se course wiki and projects linksSharpener: Sharpener is a simple optimizer for .NET and Mono.Simple Live Screen: Simple Live Screen's target is to fasten screen transmits by using it's own protocol. This program is being developed in C#.Simple Note XML - ASP.NET User Control: Simple Note XML makes it easier for ASP.NET Developers to build lists. You'll no longer have to write things down. It's developed in ASP.NET 2.0 C#. SquadLead for Tasks - Community Edition: SquadLead Tasks Community Edition is a PostGreSQL based Task Management software for teams, with wonderful time and resource allocation abilities. Unlinke Gannt charting and dependency abilities, SquadLead gives a flexibility to create ad-hoc tasks with no dependencies and hence suits many different kind of projects in a versatile way. If you take care of dependencies, it takes care of helping you with identifying allocation loads, reports and graphs. Features Task Management and...Stanford db-class algorithms: The algorithms of the relational db theory, described in the introduction to databases Stanford class (www.db-class.org).tfsProjectInitialiser: After creating a Team Project, load the initial state of the project - complete with Areas, Iterations, Work Items - quickly and easily. I am on my one on this so far, so any help or contribution would be appreciated.

  Read the article

• Project Management Helps AmeriCares Deliver International Aid

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

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

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, February 21, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, February 21, 2011Popular ReleasesA2Command: 2011-02-21 - Version 1.0: IntroductionThis is the full release version of A2Command 1.0, dated February 21, 2011. These notes supersede any prior version's notes. All prior releases may be found on the project's website at http://a2command.codeplex.com/releases/ where you can read the release notes for older versions as well as download them. This version of A2Command is intended to replace any previous version you may have downloaded in the past. There were several bug fixes made after Release Candidate 2 and all...Chiave File Encryption: Chiave 0.9: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Feedbacks are Welcome!....Rawr: Rawr 4.0.20 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...Azure Storage Samples: Version 1.0 (February 2011): These downloads contain source code. Each is a complete sample that fully exercises Windows Azure Storage across blobs, queues, and tables. The difference between the downloads is implementation approach. Storage DotNet CS.zip is a .NET StorageClient library implementation in the C# language. This library come with the Windows Azure SDK. Contains helper classes for accessing blobs, queues, and tables. Storage REST CS.zip is a REST implementation in the C# language. The code to implement R...MiniTwitter: 1.66: MiniTwitter 1.66 ???? ?? ?????????? 2 ??????????????????? User Streams ?????????View Layout Replicator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: View Layout Replicator (1.0.119.18): Initial releaseWindows Phone 7 Isolated Storage Explorer: WP7 Isolated Storage Explorer v1.0 Beta: Current release features:WPF desktop explorer client Visual Studio integrated tool window explorer client (Visual Studio 2010 Professional and above) Supported operations: Refresh (isolated storage information), Add Folder, Add Existing Item, Download File, Delete Folder, Delete File Explorer supports operations running on multiple remote applications at the same time Explorer detects application disconnect (1-2 second delay) Explorer confirms operation completed status Explorer d...Advanced Explorer for Wp7: Advanced Explorer for Wp7 Version 1.4 Test8: Added option to run under Lockscreen. Fixed a bug when you open a pdf/mobi file without starting adobe reader/amazon kindle first boost loading time for folders added \Windows directory (all devices) you can now interact with the filesystem while it is loading!Game Files Open - Map Editor: Game Files Open - Map Editor Beta 2 v1.0.0.0: The 2° beta release of the Map Editor, we have fixed a big bug of the files regen.Document.Editor: 2011.6: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.6: New Left to Right and Left to Right support New Indent more/less support Improved Home tab Improved Tooltips/shortcut keys Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsCatel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.2: Catel history ============= (+) Added (*) Changed (-) Removed (x) Error / bug (fix) For more information about issues or new feature requests, please visit: http://catel.codeplex.com =========== Version 1.2 =========== Release date: ============= 2011/02/17 Added/fixed: ============ (+) DataObjectBase now supports Isolated Storage out of the box: Person.Save(myStream) stores a whole object graph in Silverlight (+) DataObjectBase can now be converted to Json via Person.ToJson(); (+)...??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-02-18: ?????All-In-One Code Framework?2011??????????！！http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????，?????AzureBingMaps??????，??Azure，WCF, Silverlight, Window Phone????????，????????????????????????。 ???： Windows Azure SQL Azure Windows Azure AppFabric Windows Live Messenger Connect Bing Maps ?????： ??????HTML??? ??Windows PC?Mac?Silverlight??? ??Windows Phone?Silverlight??? ?????：http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2011...Image.Viewer: 2011: First version of 2011Silverlight Toolkit: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit - Feb 2011: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit OverviewSilverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7. Suggestions? Features? Questions? Ask questions in the Create.msdn.com forum. Add bugs or feature requests to the Issue Tracker. Help us shape the Silverlight Toolkit with your feedback! Please clearly indicate that the work items and issues are for the phone t...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 29 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 29 (beta)New: Added VsTortoise Solution Explorer integration for Web Project Folder, Web Folder and Web Item. Fix: TortoiseProc was called with invalid parameters, when using TSVN 1.4.x or older #7338 (thanks psifive) Fix: Add-in does not work, when "TortoiseSVN/bin" is not added to PATH environment variable #7357 Fix: Missing error message when ...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.0.3 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.3 Community Edition We are happy to introduce you the latest version of Sense/Net with integrated ECM Workflow capabilities! In the past weeks we have been working hard to migrate the product to .Net 4 and include a workflow framework in Sense/Net built upon Windows Workflow Foundation 4. This brand new feature enables developers to define and develop workflows, and supports users when building and setting up complicated business processes involving content creation and response...thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.11): Features Added a new option that allows properties on data contract types to be marked as virtual. Bug Fixes Fixed a bug caused by certain project properties not being available on Web Service Software Factory projects. Fixed a bug that could result in the WrapperName value of the MessageContractAttribute being incorrect when the Adjust Casing option is used. The menu item code now caters for CommandBar instances that are not available. For example the Web Item CommandBar does not exist ...AllNewsManager.NET: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3. This new version provide several new features, improvements and bug fixes. Some new features: Online Users. Avatars. Copy function (to create a new article from another one). SEO improvements (friendly urls). New admin buttons. And more...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.8: Version 0.8 (15 Feb 2011)moved to Beta stage publish photo feature "email" field of User object added new Graph Api object: Group, Event new Graph Api connection: likes, groups, eventsDJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME2 -The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC beta2: The source code and runtime library for DJME2. For more product info you can goto http://www.dotnetage.com/djme.html What is new ?The Grid extension added The ModelBinder added which helping you create Bindable data Action. The DnaFor() control factory added that enabled Model bindable extensions. Enhance the ListBox , ComboBox data binding.New ProjectsAuto-mobile Forum: Automobileforum is a website regarding cars where users can share their ideas about cars and whatever information they want about a car they can get that from this website. The language used for development of this website is ASP.NET Azure Storage Samples: Azure Storage Samples are Windows Azure Storage code samples. They show how to perform every Windows Azure Storage operation for blobs, queues, and tables. There are 2 identical implementations, one using REST and the other using the .NET Storage Client Library (both in C#).b1234: b1234 is b1234betrayal: bahothBungee Jumper: This is a community website for a sport known as Bungee Jumping which is one of the most dangerous adventure sport. Chiave File Encryption: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit Rijndael encryption algorithm with simple UI to use. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5, it incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass.DecEncIT: DecEncIT rend l’expérience de l’utilisateur commun avec la cryptographie (cryptage) plus aisée. Pas de soucies pour les réglages et les termes techniques, vagues et difficiles à comprendre ; inclus également une option pour automatiser toutes les tâches recommandées. VB.Net/3.5ELearningTutorial: A list of tutorialsExtjs Practice - Open our extj journey: ????extjs 1.demo ?? 2.partice ?? 3.work ??Functional: This class library for .NET 3.5 and 4.0 provides extension methods for delegates, to help with functional style programming.HauntedNetworking: HauntedNetworking is a site where people can share their paranormal experiences and related photographs. They can also share pictures of haunted and scary places across the world.KharaSoft Nexus: Nexus is the last inbox you'll ever need.Kojax: kojax projectLEAD - Learn Execute And Develop: It’s a portal to share your knowledge, learn from blogs, wikis, post your questions in query board, learn new things under video training, Execute and develop these, helping gaining knowledge.Luac For 5.1 ????: luac??????? Lunar Lander: Simple WPF Lunar Lander simulator, with reactive intelligent agent autopilot.MasterSchool: Tworzenie swiadectwmovies blogspot: The Movies blog- spot is an interactive site for the information related to movies, actors, personnel and fictional characters features. MvcTemplates: MvcTemplates is a project devoted to creating a complete suite of Razor Editor and Display templates that utilize attributes, built in models, and jQuery. It is developed in C# and packages the templates into an easy to use dll.MySearcher: Quickly and easily search the major search engines with MySearcher. No clicking around, no switching windows; No matter how many windows you have open, or what you're doing, Searching the major search engines is as simple as moving your mouse to the side of the screen!Photography in Kerala: Photography in Kerala's a website which makes easier for people who are into naturistic Photography to share their photos and other Info of Kerala(also called God's own country).You'll no longer have to search about Kerala,Or share your own info/pics here.Developed in ASP.Net.Pixels(Storage Engine): Pixels(Storage Engine)PortsManager: C# Project to Simplify working with Ports Currnetly it's working with COMs in Receive only and soon it'll be updated to work in send and expand the library to handle send informations even in network.Public Web Browser: Public Web Browser is a webbrowser client with alot of featuresRealStatus - MS Communicator 2007 & A Traffic Light Indicator Hardware: A demonstration of a traffic light indicator hardware corresponding to status events of MS Communicator in real-time. A demo video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwgfSVeXVksSABnzbdNet: A SABnzbd monitor and administrator. Built in C# WPF.Sendill: Kerfi fyrir sendibílastöðvarT4 Metadata and Data Annotations Template: This T4 template handles generating metadata classes from an Entity Framework 4 model and decorates primitive and navigation properties with data annotation attributes such as [Required] and [StringLength]. The [DataType] attribute is also applied when appropriate.urlshorten service: urlshorten service need storoom @ http://storoom.codeplex.com/ developed in vb.netuVersionClientCache: uVersionClientCache is a custom macro to always automatically version (URL querstring parameter) your files based on a MD5 hash of the file contents or file last modified date to prevent issues with client browsers caching an old file after you have changed it.Video Game Network Library: A lightweight network library written in C++ for video games.View Layout Replicator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: View Layout Replicator make it easier for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 customizers to copying the layout of a view and paste it to the layout of other views in the same entityVLC MakeIT: This is virtual learning center yogaasana4you: The website is on Yoga Asana for the community who want to feel the amazing experience of Yoga asana - Yoga Exercises and Postures.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, October 09, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, October 09, 2012Popular ReleasesScript SQL Server Configuration: Release 3.0.9: Release 3.0.9 Rewrote trigger scripting. If encrypted triggers are encountered they are listed in a commented line. Scripts event notifications Added an option to script a single database (in addition to the instance) using the /scriptdb parameter. Script user-defined end points Script Service Broker objects Skip database mail on Express EditionMicrosoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.69: Fix for issue #18766: build task should not build the output if it's newer than all the input files. Fix for Issue #18764: build taks -res switch not working. update build task to concatenate input source and then minify, rather than minify and then concatenate. include resource string-replacement root name in the assumed globals list. Stop replacing new Date().getTime() with +new Date -- the latter is smaller, but turns out it executes up to 45% slower. add CSS support for single-...D3 Loot Tracker: 1.5.2: now recording server ip for each drop.WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.3: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features Attachable Behaviors AwaitableUI extensions Controls Converters Debugging helpers Extension methods Imaging helpers IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE:...DevLib: 69721 binary dll: 69721 binary dllVidCoder: 1.4.4 Beta: Fixed inability to create new presets with "Save As".MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.2: Changelog for 2.3.2 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for generating XBMC XML NFO files for files in the conversion queue (store it along with the source video with source video name.nfo). Right click on the file in queue and select generate XML 2. UI bugifx, start and end trim box locations interchanged 3. Added support for removing commercials from non DVRMS/WTV files (MP4, AVI etc) 4. Now checking for Firewall port status before enabling (might help with some firewall problems) 5. User In...Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.5.0 with Visual Studio Package: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This release supports the Sandcastle October 2012 Release (v2.7.1.0). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release suppor...Sofire Suite v1.6: XSqlModelGenerator.AddIn: 1、?? VS2010/2012 2、?? .NET FRAMEWORK 2.0 3、?? SOFIRE V1.6ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.68.0: ClosedXML now resolves formulas! Yes it finally happened. If you call cell.Value and it has a formula the library will try to evaluate the formula and give you the result. For example: var wb = new XLWorkbook(); var ws = wb.AddWorksheet("Sheet1"); ws.Cell("A1").SetValue(1).CellBelow().SetValue(1); ws.Cell("B1").SetValue(1).CellBelow().SetValue(1); ws.Cell("C1").FormulaA1 = "\"The total value is: \" & SUM(A1:B2)"; var...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 10: New feature - Added Portable build to NuGet package New feature - Added GetValue and TryGetValue with StringComparison to JObject Change - Improved duplicate object reference id error message Fix - Fixed error when comparing empty JObjects Fix - Fixed SecAnnotate warnings Fix - Fixed error when comparing DateTime JValue with a DateTimeOffset JValue Fix - Fixed serializer sometimes not using DateParseHandling setting Fix - Fixed error in JsonWriter.WriteToken when writing a DateT...Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.2: Changes: Tested against KeePass 2.20.1 Tested under Ubuntu 12.10 (and KeePass 2.20) Added GenerateAsUtf8 method returning the encrypted passphrase as a UTF8 byte array.patterns & practices: Prism: Prism for .NET 4.5: This is a release does not include any functionality changes over Prism 4.1 Desktop. These assemblies target .NET 4.5. These assemblies also were compiled against updated dependencies: Unity 3.0 and Common Service Locator (Portable Class Library).Snoop, the WPF Spy Utility: Snoop 2.8.0: Snoop 2.8.0Announcing Snoop 2.8.0! It's been exactly six months since the last release, and this one has a bunch of goodies in it. In particular, there is now a PowerShell scripting tab, compliments of Bailey Ling. With this tab, the possibilities are limitless. It basically lets you automate/script the application that you are Snooping. Bailey has a couple blog posts (one and two) on his tab already, and I am sure more is to come. Please note that if you do not have PowerShell installed, y...Z3: Z3 4.1.2: Minor fixes. Now, z3 compiles with gcc 4.7.x.NET Micro Framework: .NET MF 4.3 (Beta): This is the 4.3 Beta version of the .NET Micro Framework. Feature List for v4.3 Support for Visual Studio 2012 (including the Windows Desktop Express version) All v4.2 QFEs features and bug fixes (PWM enhancements, lwIP and network driver reliability improvements, Analog Output, WinUSB and latest GCC support) Improved diagnostic information for deployment Decreased boot time Bug fixes Work Item 1736 - Create link for MFDeploy under start menu Work Item 1504 - Customizing lwIP o...NTCPMSG: V1.2.0.0: Allocate an identify cableid for each single connection cable. * Server can asend to specified cableid directly.Team Foundation Server Word Add-in: Version 1.0.12.0622: Welcome to the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Word Add-in Supported Environments Microsoft Office Word 2007 and 2010 X86 (32-bit) Team Foundation Server 2010 Object Model TFS 2010, 2012 and TFS Service supported, using TFS OM / Explorer 2010. Quality-Bar Details Tool has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Tool has been through an independent technical and quality review All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issues / Bugs WI#43553 - The Acceptance criteria is not pu...UMD????? - PC?: UMDEditor?????V2.7: ??：http://jianyun.org/archives/948.html =============================================================================== UMD??? ???? =============================================================================== 2.7.0 (2012-10-3) ???????“UMD???.exe”??“UMDEditor.exe” ?????????；????????，??????。??????，????！ ??64????，??????????????bug ?????????????，???? ???????????????? ???????????????，??????????bug ------------------------------------------------------- ?? reg.bat ????????????。 ????，??????txt/u...Untangler: Untangler 1.0.0: Add a missing file from first releaseNew Projects3dBuzz: Denise's website for 3d projection mapping artists to develop a web community to show and discuss their work.Advanced DataGridView with Excel-like auto filter: Windows Forms DataGridView Control with Excel-Like auto-filter context menu Windows Forms DataGridView ??????? ? Excel-???????? ????-????????azure media services admin panel: Simple azure media services dashboard. Upload media assets, queue encoder tasks and stream your audio\video assets.BackupCleaner.Net: A C#.Net-based tool for automatically removing old backups selectively. It can be used when you already make daily backups on disk, and want to clean them up while still keeping some of the ones made weeks, months or years ago.Bible Lib: BibleLib is a .net compatible library containing information for books, chapters and verses in the Old Testament.CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011 Queues Upgrades: for more information and documentation, please refer to http://mayankp.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/crm-4-0-to-crm-2011-queues-upgrades/ CSV File Reader and Writer for .NET: C# classes for reading and writing CSV files. Support for multi-line fields, custom delimiter and quote characters, options for how empty lines are handled.DotNetNuke Boards: DNN Boards is a task management solution that allows each user to have their own task board or social group members can collaborate within a single board.FarmaciasCruzAzul: Sistema Cruz AzulFindValueInDatabase: This solution finds the value you input in the hole given database and tells you which columns of which tables have the value you are looking for.Fish Tank: Social networking site for Aquarium enthusiasts.GSBA Apps: GSBA App for Windows 8Heuristics for the Vehicle Routing Problem: This is the code for our class, IEMS 482.Icaro - UPN: Icaro UPN es la recopilación de todos los preyectos realizados en clases de los diferentes proyectos que Enseño, espero les Sirva.JSLogger - free logging library for JavaScript: JSLogger is a free JavaScript Library for log information during the duration of your client script. The target is very easy >>Find every javasvript error<<Just little strategy: Just little strategy writen in C# using XNA Game Studio Now under developmentLightweight Medata Reader: The Lightweight Metadata Reader (LMR) is a tooling friendly version of the CLR Reflection APIs that takes no dependency on the CLR Loader.My Solution: No description for it nowoden????: ???????????????＾＾ooaavee.net: TODOPath Splitter: Path Splitter uses Roslyn to convert a method into a set of methods each equivalent to a distinct execution path. Assume annotations are added for use with Pex.Planning Poker for Azure: Planning Poker application allows distributed teams to play planning poker just using web browser. It can be deployed to IIS or Azure cloud service.plasmatrim.net: A library for controlling the USB PlasmaTrim from a .net application.powersaver: A simple utility, which will turn off your monitor when you lock your work station.Project13251008: gterProject13261008: asdsaProject13271008: sdfPyfus Reload: Server-side framework for Dofus 1.29.1 gameRei do Biscuit: E-commerce do rei do biscuitSofire Suite v1.6: Sofire Suite v1.6Sofire XSql: Sofire XSqlSosa Analysis Module (SAM): Numerical Analysis and data visualization program for SOSA psychological experiment software.SyncProject: The summary is coming soon... Just be patient ! Tistory Syntax Highlighter: ???? SyntaxHighlighter ????TJBHJJ: this is a website for company!tricogol App: nonetuts: My first SVNWatchr Change Control Management: Change control management for development and administrative teams focused on lean or agile processes.WCF Simple multi chat: This is a simple Windows form application that it's like a 'chat room'. Multiple users can login and chat with others users. The chat's core is powered by WCFWindows Event Log Email Notification: This will read the windows event logs based on the supplied xpath filters and email the specified addresses if there are matches.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 18, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 18, 2011Popular ReleasesCatel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.2: Catel history ============= (+) Added (*) Changed (-) Removed (x) Error / bug (fix) For more information about issues or new feature requests, please visit: http://catel.codeplex.com =========== Version 1.2 =========== Release date: ============= 2011/02/17 Added/fixed: ============ (+) DataObjectBase now supports Isolated Storage out of the box: Person.Save(myStream) stores a whole object graph in Silverlight (+) DataObjectBase can now be converted to Json via Person.ToJson(); (+)...Game Files Open - Map Editor: Game Files Open - Map Editor v1.0.0.0 Beta: Game Files Open - Map Editor beta v1.0.0.0Image.Viewer: 2011: First version of 2011Silverlight Toolkit: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit - Feb 2011: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit OverviewSilverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7. Suggestions? Features? Questions? Ask questions in the Create.msdn.com forum. Add bugs or feature requests to the Issue Tracker. Help us shape the Silverlight Toolkit with your feedback! Please clearly indicate that the work items and issues are for the phone t...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 29 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 29 (beta)New: Added VsTortoise Solution Explorer integration for Web Project Folder, Web Folder and Web Item. Fix: TortoiseProc was called with invalid parameters, when using TSVN 1.4.x or older #7338 (thanks psifive) Fix: Add-in does not work, when "TortoiseSVN/bin" is not added to PATH environment variable #7357 Fix: Missing error message when ...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.0.3 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.3 Community Edition We are happy to introduce you the latest version of Sense/Net with integrated ECM Workflow capabilities! In the past weeks we have been working hard to migrate the product to .Net 4 and include a workflow framework in Sense/Net built upon Windows Workflow Foundation 4. This brand new feature enables developers to define and develop workflows, and supports users when building and setting up complicated business processes involving content creation and response...thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.11): Features Added a new option that allows properties on data contract types to be marked as virtual. Bug Fixes Fixed a bug caused by certain project properties not being available on Web Service Software Factory projects. Fixed a bug that could result in the WrapperName value of the MessageContractAttribute being incorrect when the Adjust Casing option is used. The menu item code now caters for CommandBar instances that are not available. For example the Web Item CommandBar does not exist ...Document.Editor: 2011.5: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.5: New export to email New export to image New document background color Improved Tooltips Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsTerminals: Version 2 - RC1: The "Clean Install" will overwrite your log4net configuration (if you have one). If you run in a Portable Environment, you can use the "Clean Install" and target your portable folder. Tested and it works fine. Changes for this release: Re-worked on the Toolstip settings are done, just to avoid the vs.net clash with auto-generating files for .settings files. renamed it to .settings.config Packged both log4net and ToolStripSettings files into the installer Upgraded the version inform...AllNewsManager.NET: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3. This new version provide several new features, improvements and bug fixes. Some new features: Online Users. Avatars. Copy function (to create a new article from another one). SEO improvements (friendly urls). New admin buttons. And more...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.8: Version 0.8 (15 Feb 2011)moved to Beta stage publish photo feature "email" field of User object added new Graph Api object: Group, Event new Graph Api connection: likes, groups, eventsDJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME2 -The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC beta2: The source code and runtime library for DJME2. For more product info you can goto http://www.dotnetage.com/djme.html What is new ?The Grid extension added The ModelBinder added which helping you create Bindable data Action. The DnaFor() control factory added that enabled Model bindable extensions. Enhance the ListBox , ComboBox data binding.Jint - Javascript Interpreter for .NET: Jint - 0.9.0: New CLR interoperability features Many bugfixesBuild Version Increment Add-In Visual Studio: Build Version Increment v2.4.11046.2045: v2.4.11046.2045 Fixes and/or Improvements:Major: Added complete support for VC projects including .vcxproj & .vcproj. All padding issues fixed. A project's assembly versions are only changed if the project has been modified. Minor Order of versioning style values is now according to their respective positions in the attributes i.e. Major, Minor, Build, Revision. Fixed issue with global variable storage with some projects. Fixed issue where if a project item's file does not exist, a ...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1 release. Bug fixes and minor feature requests addedTV4Home - The all-in-one TV solution!: 0.1.0.0 Preview: This is the beta preview release of the TV4Home software.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.2: Fixes a few minor issues with 1.1 including the broken per-desktop backgrounds Further improves the speed of switching desktops A few UI performance improvements Added donations linksNuGet: NuGet 1.1: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. The URL to the package OData feed is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669 To see the list of issues fixed in this release, visit this our issues listEnhSim: EnhSim 2.4.0: 2.4.0This release supports WoW patch 4.06 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 Changes since 2.3.0 - Upd...PDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.5.1: Changes from the previous version * Use dynamic layout to better fit text in other languages * Includes French and Spanish localizations Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructionsChoose one of the following methods: 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0.5.1-setup.exe" (reccomended) 2. Down...New ProjectsAbstractSpoon: Development Code by AbstractSpoonBetchRenamer: ????????ChromeTabControl: I want to create wpf tab control. It will have same behavior that chrome.CLASonline: CS 307 Software Engineering - Purdue University A web based social and collaborative learning system.ElearningProject: ELearning TutorialEPICS .NET - Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System for .NET: EPICS .NET is the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System for .NET Framework 4.0 and above. Written in C#, this control toolkit consists of three sub projects: * EPICS .NET Library, * Virtual Accelerator: Demonstrates full capabilities of the library, * EPICS SimulatorException Manager: Having trouble with unhandled exceptions? Exception Manager will catch these exceptions for you and log them, and then continue running the program. You can choose whether or not to display a dialog box. Only invoked when *not* running from the debugger (Run without Debugging)FileTransferTool: The program is a file transfer client, it monitor one or several local directories, verify,ftp and backup files found to the directory or ftp server you assign. the program is developed by c# + .framework 2.0(to support previous windows version). Hope it can help.httpdSharp: Simple multi-threaded console http server written in C# and .NET 2.0. Simple configuration of wwwroot folder, port and mime-types served. Useful for serving static content when you are in a hurry.Image.Viewer: Basic Ribbon based image viewer for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.Imtihan: Imtihan is an online assessment system (OAS).Iphone: Project about I-PhotoKunalPishewsccsemb: KunalPishewsccsembMAT04 Integrationsprojekt - Stadt- und Sehenswürdigkeitenführer Bern: Für die Stadt Bern soll ein "Stadt- und Sehenswürdigkeitenführer" für Smartphones implementiert werden. Touristen und Besuchern sollen die Sehenswürdigkeiten von Bern näher gebracht, sowie das Zurechtfinden in der Altstadt erleichtert werden.MediaBrowser Silverlight: MediaBrowser Silverlight is a small application designed with Silverlight in an educational purpose. This application allows you to consult a series of media (Movies, Albums, Images, Books) and to administer them.MovieCalc: A small tool to calc the bitrate of a movie with given audio bitrate and destination size of the movie (divx, xvid)MPC Pattern for Microsoft Silverlight 4.0: If you have struggled with MVVM in Silverlight line of business applications and you want a good framework for building an application, MPC is for you. MPC is a Model, ViewModel, Presenter and Controller pattern enhanced with XAML defined States, Actions, and Async WCF.News Man: Rss feed News readerOpenQuestions: OpenQuestions is the leading open source source for exam simulators. Main features: * All type of questions supported (single choice, multiple choice, open answers, matching, fill the gaps, etc) * Customisable appearance (look and feel) with themes. * Multi-lingual support.Ordered images loading: Ordered image loading controls enables you to load images on pages in order you specify. It is nice for sites with lot of images where you want to control which images should be loaded first. It is developed using ASP.NET AJAX Extensions and jQuery.Over the fence: Share your gardening tips. This is a community site for gardeners to share their experiences. Discuss your successes and failures. Swap tips. Which plants grow well in your soil? Where is the best place to source plants? What are your favourites?Phoenix iBooking: Phoenix iBooking is an appointment management system. For salons, sports centers etc. It was originally written in VB .NET as a salon booking and till system. This project will see the conversion to C# .NET 4 and removal of the till functionality.PointlessBends: Simply move the four points around the white area and waste time! Yes, that’s right, its pointless!PRISMvvM: MvvM guidance and framework built on top of the PRISM framework. Makes it easier for developers to properly utilize PRISM to achieve best practices in creating a Silverlight project with MVVM. Sponsored and written by: http://www.architectinginnovation.comrsvp: Projectwork on the IT University in Copenhagen, building a survey system.SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Web Part JavaScript Bridge: This is a project template containing a number of base classes and JavaScript which allows SharePoint 2010 Silverlight web parts to communicate with each other inside the browser. It provides Silverlight web parts with the functionality normal web parts get from interfaces.StatlightTeamBuild: StatlightTeamBuild is a build activity plugin for TFS build 2010. The unittest results, generated by statlight, are processed and publish to TFS. After which, the results are shown in your build summary. TFS to TeamCity Build Notification Plugin: Have you ever wanted to turn VCS polling off? TFS to TeamCity Build Notification Plugin is a tool that will initiate a build request when your source code is checked in. The only configuration includes deploying the notification website and supplying your VCS roots to notify .tipolog: tipologTower Defense 3D with C# and XNA: A classical Tower Defense but in 3D. Developped in C# and using XNA, this game is aimed to be released on both Windows and Xbox 360. This project is a part of a course for the 1st y of IT MASTER in Besancon, France.Utility4Net: some base class such as xml,string,data,secerity,web... etc.. under Microsoft.NET Framework 4.0Windows Azure Starter Kit for Java: This starter kit was designed to work as a simple command line build tool or in the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) to help Java developers deploy their applications to the Windows Azure cloud.WSCCSemesterB: Web Scripting Semester BXaml Physics: Xaml Physics makes it possible to make a physics simulation with only xaml code. It is a wrapper around the Farseer Physics Engine.

  Read the article

• Why should main() be short?

  - by Stargazer712

  I've been programming for over 9 years, and according to the advice of my first programming teacher, I always keep my main() function extremely short. At first I had no idea why. I just obeyed without understanding, much to the delight of my professors. After gaining experience, I realized that if I designed my code correctly, having a short main() function just sortof happened. Writing modularized code and following the single responsibility principle allowed my code to be designed in "bunches", and main() served as nothing more than a catalyst to get the program running. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, I was looking at Python's souce code, and I found the main() function: /* Minimal main program -- everything is loaded from the library */ ... int main(int argc, char **argv) { ... return Py_Main(argc, argv); } Yay python. Short main() function == Good code. Programming teachers were right. Wanting to look deeper, I took a look at Py_Main. In its entirety, it is defined as follows: /* Main program */ int Py_Main(int argc, char **argv) { int c; int sts; char *command = NULL; char *filename = NULL; char *module = NULL; FILE *fp = stdin; char *p; int unbuffered = 0; int skipfirstline = 0; int stdin_is_interactive = 0; int help = 0; int version = 0; int saw_unbuffered_flag = 0; PyCompilerFlags cf; cf.cf_flags = 0; orig_argc = argc; /* For Py_GetArgcArgv() */ orig_argv = argv; #ifdef RISCOS Py_RISCOSWimpFlag = 0; #endif PySys_ResetWarnOptions(); while ((c = _PyOS_GetOpt(argc, argv, PROGRAM_OPTS)) != EOF) { if (c == 'c') { /* -c is the last option; following arguments that look like options are left for the command to interpret. */ command = (char *)malloc(strlen(_PyOS_optarg) + 2); if (command == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy -c argument"); strcpy(command, _PyOS_optarg); strcat(command, "\n"); break; } if (c == 'm') { /* -m is the last option; following arguments that look like options are left for the module to interpret. */ module = (char *)malloc(strlen(_PyOS_optarg) + 2); if (module == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy -m argument"); strcpy(module, _PyOS_optarg); break; } switch (c) { case 'b': Py_BytesWarningFlag++; break; case 'd': Py_DebugFlag++; break; case '3': Py_Py3kWarningFlag++; if (!Py_DivisionWarningFlag) Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 1; break; case 'Q': if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "old") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 0; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "warn") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 1; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "warnall") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 2; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "new") == 0) { /* This only affects __main__ */ cf.cf_flags |= CO_FUTURE_DIVISION; /* And this tells the eval loop to treat BINARY_DIVIDE as BINARY_TRUE_DIVIDE */ _Py_QnewFlag = 1; break; } fprintf(stderr, "-Q option should be `-Qold', " "`-Qwarn', `-Qwarnall', or `-Qnew' only\n"); return usage(2, argv[0]); /* NOTREACHED */ case 'i': Py_InspectFlag++; Py_InteractiveFlag++; break; /* case 'J': reserved for Jython */ case 'O': Py_OptimizeFlag++; break; case 'B': Py_DontWriteBytecodeFlag++; break; case 's': Py_NoUserSiteDirectory++; break; case 'S': Py_NoSiteFlag++; break; case 'E': Py_IgnoreEnvironmentFlag++; break; case 't': Py_TabcheckFlag++; break; case 'u': unbuffered++; saw_unbuffered_flag = 1; break; case 'v': Py_VerboseFlag++; break; #ifdef RISCOS case 'w': Py_RISCOSWimpFlag = 1; break; #endif case 'x': skipfirstline = 1; break; /* case 'X': reserved for implementation-specific arguments */ case 'U': Py_UnicodeFlag++; break; case 'h': case '?': help++; break; case 'V': version++; break; case 'W': PySys_AddWarnOption(_PyOS_optarg); break; /* This space reserved for other options */ default: return usage(2, argv[0]); /*NOTREACHED*/ } } if (help) return usage(0, argv[0]); if (version) { fprintf(stderr, "Python %s\n", PY_VERSION); return 0; } if (Py_Py3kWarningFlag && !Py_TabcheckFlag) /* -3 implies -t (but not -tt) */ Py_TabcheckFlag = 1; if (!Py_InspectFlag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONINSPECT")) && *p != '\0') Py_InspectFlag = 1; if (!saw_unbuffered_flag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONUNBUFFERED")) && *p != '\0') unbuffered = 1; if (!Py_NoUserSiteDirectory && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONNOUSERSITE")) && *p != '\0') Py_NoUserSiteDirectory = 1; if ((p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONWARNINGS")) && *p != '\0') { char *buf, *warning; buf = (char *)malloc(strlen(p) + 1); if (buf == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy PYTHONWARNINGS"); strcpy(buf, p); for (warning = strtok(buf, ","); warning != NULL; warning = strtok(NULL, ",")) PySys_AddWarnOption(warning); free(buf); } if (command == NULL && module == NULL && _PyOS_optind < argc && strcmp(argv[_PyOS_optind], "-") != 0) { #ifdef __VMS filename = decc$translate_vms(argv[_PyOS_optind]); if (filename == (char *)0 || filename == (char *)-1) filename = argv[_PyOS_optind]; #else filename = argv[_PyOS_optind]; #endif } stdin_is_interactive = Py_FdIsInteractive(stdin, (char *)0); if (unbuffered) { #if defined(MS_WINDOWS) || defined(__CYGWIN__) _setmode(fileno(stdin), O_BINARY); _setmode(fileno(stdout), O_BINARY); #endif #ifdef HAVE_SETVBUF setvbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stderr, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); #else /* !HAVE_SETVBUF */ setbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL); setbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL); setbuf(stderr, (char *)NULL); #endif /* !HAVE_SETVBUF */ } else if (Py_InteractiveFlag) { #ifdef MS_WINDOWS /* Doesn't have to have line-buffered -- use unbuffered */ /* Any set[v]buf(stdin, ...) screws up Tkinter :-( */ setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); #else /* !MS_WINDOWS */ #ifdef HAVE_SETVBUF setvbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); #endif /* HAVE_SETVBUF */ #endif /* !MS_WINDOWS */ /* Leave stderr alone - it should be unbuffered anyway. */ } #ifdef __VMS else { setvbuf (stdout, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); } #endif /* __VMS */ #ifdef __APPLE__ /* On MacOS X, when the Python interpreter is embedded in an application bundle, it gets executed by a bootstrapping script that does os.execve() with an argv[0] that's different from the actual Python executable. This is needed to keep the Finder happy, or rather, to work around Apple's overly strict requirements of the process name. However, we still need a usable sys.executable, so the actual executable path is passed in an environment variable. See Lib/plat-mac/bundlebuiler.py for details about the bootstrap script. */ if ((p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONEXECUTABLE")) && *p != '\0') Py_SetProgramName(p); else Py_SetProgramName(argv[0]); #else Py_SetProgramName(argv[0]); #endif Py_Initialize(); if (Py_VerboseFlag || (command == NULL && filename == NULL && module == NULL && stdin_is_interactive)) { fprintf(stderr, "Python %s on %s\n", Py_GetVersion(), Py_GetPlatform()); if (!Py_NoSiteFlag) fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", COPYRIGHT); } if (command != NULL) { /* Backup _PyOS_optind and force sys.argv[0] = '-c' */ _PyOS_optind--; argv[_PyOS_optind] = "-c"; } if (module != NULL) { /* Backup _PyOS_optind and force sys.argv[0] = '-c' so that PySys_SetArgv correctly sets sys.path[0] to '' rather than looking for a file called "-m". See tracker issue #8202 for details. */ _PyOS_optind--; argv[_PyOS_optind] = "-c"; } PySys_SetArgv(argc-_PyOS_optind, argv+_PyOS_optind); if ((Py_InspectFlag || (command == NULL && filename == NULL && module == NULL)) && isatty(fileno(stdin))) { PyObject *v; v = PyImport_ImportModule("readline"); if (v == NULL) PyErr_Clear(); else Py_DECREF(v); } if (command) { sts = PyRun_SimpleStringFlags(command, &cf) != 0; free(command); } else if (module) { sts = RunModule(module, 1); free(module); } else { if (filename == NULL && stdin_is_interactive) { Py_InspectFlag = 0; /* do exit on SystemExit */ RunStartupFile(&cf); } /* XXX */ sts = -1; /* keep track of whether we've already run __main__ */ if (filename != NULL) { sts = RunMainFromImporter(filename); } if (sts==-1 && filename!=NULL) { if ((fp = fopen(filename, "r")) == NULL) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: can't open file '%s': [Errno %d] %s\n", argv[0], filename, errno, strerror(errno)); return 2; } else if (skipfirstline) { int ch; /* Push back first newline so line numbers remain the same */ while ((ch = getc(fp)) != EOF) { if (ch == '\n') { (void)ungetc(ch, fp); break; } } } { /* XXX: does this work on Win/Win64? (see posix_fstat) */ struct stat sb; if (fstat(fileno(fp), &sb) == 0 && S_ISDIR(sb.st_mode)) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: '%s' is a directory, cannot continue\n", argv[0], filename); fclose(fp); return 1; } } } if (sts==-1) { /* call pending calls like signal handlers (SIGINT) */ if (Py_MakePendingCalls() == -1) { PyErr_Print(); sts = 1; } else { sts = PyRun_AnyFileExFlags( fp, filename == NULL ? "<stdin>" : filename, filename != NULL, &cf) != 0; } } } /* Check this environment variable at the end, to give programs the * opportunity to set it from Python. */ if (!Py_InspectFlag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONINSPECT")) && *p != '\0') { Py_InspectFlag = 1; } if (Py_InspectFlag && stdin_is_interactive && (filename != NULL || command != NULL || module != NULL)) { Py_InspectFlag = 0; /* XXX */ sts = PyRun_AnyFileFlags(stdin, "<stdin>", &cf) != 0; } Py_Finalize(); #ifdef RISCOS if (Py_RISCOSWimpFlag) fprintf(stderr, "\x0cq\x0c"); /* make frontend quit */ #endif #ifdef __INSURE__ /* Insure++ is a memory analysis tool that aids in discovering * memory leaks and other memory problems. On Python exit, the * interned string dictionary is flagged as being in use at exit * (which it is). Under normal circumstances, this is fine because * the memory will be automatically reclaimed by the system. Under * memory debugging, it's a huge source of useless noise, so we * trade off slower shutdown for less distraction in the memory * reports. -baw */ _Py_ReleaseInternedStrings(); #endif /* __INSURE__ */ return sts; } Good God Almighty...it is big enough to sink the Titanic. It seems as though Python did the "Intro to Programming 101" trick and just moved all of main()'s code to a different function called it something very similar to "main". Here's my question: Is this code terribly written, or are there other reasons to have a short main function? As it stands right now, I see absolutely no difference between doing this and just moving the code in Py_Main() back into main(). Am I wrong in thinking this?

  Read the article

• 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.

  Read the article

• 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.

  Read the article

• Using FiddlerCore to capture HTTP Requests with .NET

  - by Rick Strahl

  Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on my Web load testing utility West Wind WebSurge. One of the key components of a load testing tool is the ability to capture URLs effectively so that you can play them back later under load. One of the options in WebSurge for capturing URLs is to use its built-in capture tool which acts as an HTTP proxy to capture any HTTP and HTTPS traffic from most Windows HTTP clients, including Web Browsers as well as standalone Windows applications and services. To make this happen, I used Eric Lawrence’s awesome FiddlerCore library, which provides most of the functionality of his desktop Fiddler application, all rolled into an easy to use library that you can plug into your own applications. FiddlerCore makes it almost too easy to capture HTTP content! For WebSurge I needed to capture all HTTP traffic in order to capture the full HTTP request – URL, headers and any content posted by the client. The result of what I ended up creating is this semi-generic capture form: In this post I’m going to demonstrate how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to build this HTTP Capture Form.  If you want to jump right in here are the links to get Telerik’s Fiddler Core and the code for the demo provided here. FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore on NuGet Show me the Code (WebSurge Integration code from GitHub) Download the WinForms Sample Form West Wind Web Surge (example implementation in live app) Note that FiddlerCore is bound by a license for commercial usage – see license.txt in the FiddlerCore distribution for details. Integrating FiddlerCore FiddlerCore is a library that simply plugs into your application. You can download it from the Telerik site and manually add the assemblies to your project, or you can simply install the NuGet package via:       PM> Install-Package FiddlerCore The library consists of the FiddlerCore.dll as well as a couple of support libraries (CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll) that are used for installing SSL certificates. I’ll have more on SSL captures and certificate installation later in this post. But first let’s see how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to capture HTTP content by looking at how to build the above capture form. Capturing HTTP Content Once the library is installed it’s super easy to hook up Fiddler functionality. Fiddler includes a number of static class methods on the FiddlerApplication object that can be called to hook up callback events as well as actual start monitoring HTTP URLs. In the following code directly lifted from WebSurge, I configure a few filter options on Form level object, from the user inputs shown on the form by assigning it to a capture options object. In the live application these settings are persisted configuration values, but in the demo they are one time values initialized and set on the form. Once these options are set, I hook up the AfterSessionComplete event to capture every URL that passes through the proxy after the request is completed and start up the Proxy service:void Start() { if (tbIgnoreResources.Checked) CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = true; else CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = false; string strProcId = txtProcessId.Text; if (strProcId.Contains('-')) strProcId = strProcId.Substring(strProcId.IndexOf('-') + 1).Trim(); strProcId = strProcId.Trim(); int procId = 0; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(strProcId)) { if (!int.TryParse(strProcId, out procId)) procId = 0; } CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId = procId; CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain = txtCaptureDomain.Text; FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete += FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; FiddlerApplication.Startup(8888, true, true, true); } The key lines for FiddlerCore are just the last two lines of code that include the event hookup code as well as the Startup() method call. Here I only hook up to the AfterSessionComplete event but there are a number of other events that hook various stages of the HTTP request cycle you can also hook into. Other events include BeforeRequest, BeforeResponse, RequestHeadersAvailable, ResponseHeadersAvailable and so on. In my case I want to capture the request data and I actually have several options to capture this data. AfterSessionComplete is the last event that fires in the request sequence and it’s the most common choice to capture all request and response data. I could have used several other events, but AfterSessionComplete is one place where you can look both at the request and response data, so this will be the most common place to hook into if you’re capturing content. The implementation of AfterSessionComplete is responsible for capturing all HTTP request headers and it looks something like this:private void FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete(Session sess) { // Ignore HTTPS connect requests if (sess.RequestMethod == "CONNECT") return; if (CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId > 0) { if (sess.LocalProcessID != 0 && sess.LocalProcessID != CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId) return; } if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain)) { if (sess.hostname.ToLower() != CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain.Trim().ToLower()) return; } if (CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources) { string url = sess.fullUrl.ToLower(); var extensions = CaptureConfiguration.ExtensionFilterExclusions; foreach (var ext in extensions) { if (url.Contains(ext)) return; } var filters = CaptureConfiguration.UrlFilterExclusions; foreach (var urlFilter in filters) { if (url.Contains(urlFilter)) return; } } if (sess == null || sess.oRequest == null || sess.oRequest.headers == null) return; string headers = sess.oRequest.headers.ToString(); var reqBody = sess.GetRequestBodyAsString(); // if you wanted to capture the response //string respHeaders = session.oResponse.headers.ToString(); //var respBody = session.GetResponseBodyAsString(); // replace the HTTP line to inject full URL string firstLine = sess.RequestMethod + " " + sess.fullUrl + " " + sess.oRequest.headers.HTTPVersion; int at = headers.IndexOf("\r\n"); if (at < 0) return; headers = firstLine + "\r\n" + headers.Substring(at + 1); string output = headers + "\r\n" + (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(reqBody) ? reqBody + "\r\n" : string.Empty) + Separator + "\r\n\r\n"; BeginInvoke(new Action<string>((text) => { txtCapture.AppendText(text); UpdateButtonStatus(); }), output); } The code starts by filtering out some requests based on the CaptureOptions I set before the capture is started. These options/filters are applied when requests actually come in. This is very useful to help narrow down the requests that are captured for playback based on options the user picked. I find it useful to limit requests to a certain domain for captures, as well as filtering out some request types like static resources – images, css, scripts etc. This is of course optional, but I think it’s a common scenario and WebSurge makes good use of this feature. AfterSessionComplete like other FiddlerCore events, provides a Session object parameter which contains all the request and response details. There are oRequest and oResponse objects to hold their respective data. In my case I’m interested in the raw request headers and body only, as you can see in the commented code you can also retrieve the response headers and body. Here the code captures the request headers and body and simply appends the output to the textbox on the screen. Note that the Fiddler events are asynchronous, so in order to display the content in the UI they have to be marshaled back the UI thread with BeginInvoke, which here simply takes the generated headers and appends it to the existing textbox test on the form. As each request is processed, the headers are captured and appended to the bottom of the textbox resulting in a Session HTTP capture in the format that Web Surge internally supports, which is basically raw request headers with a customized 1st HTTP Header line that includes the full URL rather than a server relative URL. When the capture is done the user can either copy the raw HTTP session to the clipboard, or directly save it to file. This raw capture format is the same format WebSurge and also Fiddler use to import/export request data. While this code is application specific, it demonstrates the kind of logic that you can easily apply to the request capture process, which is one of the reasonsof why FiddlerCore is so powerful. You get to choose what content you want to look up as part of your own application logic and you can then decide how to capture or use that data as part of your application. The actual captured data in this case is only a string. The user can edit the data by hand or in the the case of WebSurge, save it to disk and automatically open the captured session as a new load test. Stopping the FiddlerCore Proxy Finally to stop capturing requests you simply disconnect the event handler and call the FiddlerApplication.ShutDown() method:void Stop() { FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete -= FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; if (FiddlerApplication.IsStarted()) FiddlerApplication.Shutdown(); } As you can see, adding HTTP capture functionality to an application is very straight forward. FiddlerCore offers tons of features I’m not even touching on here – I suspect basic captures are the most common scenario, but a lot of different things can be done with FiddlerCore’s simple API interface. Sky’s the limit! The source code for this sample capture form (WinForms) is provided as part of this article. Adding Fiddler Certificates with FiddlerCore One of the sticking points in West Wind WebSurge has been that if you wanted to capture HTTPS/SSL traffic, you needed to have the full version of Fiddler and have HTTPS decryption enabled. Essentially you had to use Fiddler to configure HTTPS decryption and the associated installation of the Fiddler local client certificate that is used for local decryption of incoming SSL traffic. While this works just fine, requiring to have Fiddler installed and then using a separate application to configure the SSL functionality isn’t ideal. Fortunately FiddlerCore actually includes the tools to register the Fiddler Certificate directly using FiddlerCore. Why does Fiddler need a Certificate in the first Place? Fiddler and FiddlerCore are essentially HTTP proxies which means they inject themselves into the HTTP conversation by re-routing HTTP traffic to a special HTTP port (8888 by default for Fiddler) and then forward the HTTP data to the original client. Fiddler injects itself as the system proxy in using the WinInet Windows settings  which are the same settings that Internet Explorer uses and that are configured in the Windows and Internet Explorer Internet Settings dialog. Most HTTP clients running on Windows pick up and apply these system level Proxy settings before establishing new HTTP connections and that’s why most clients automatically work once Fiddler – or FiddlerCore/WebSurge are running. For plain HTTP requests this just works – Fiddler intercepts the HTTP requests on the proxy port and then forwards them to the original port (80 for HTTP and 443 for SSL typically but it could be any port). For SSL however, this is not quite as simple – Fiddler can easily act as an HTTPS/SSL client to capture inbound requests from the server, but when it forwards the request to the client it has to also act as an SSL server and provide a certificate that the client trusts. This won’t be the original certificate from the remote site, but rather a custom local certificate that effectively simulates an SSL connection between the proxy and the client. If there is no custom certificate configured for Fiddler the SSL request fails with a certificate validation error. The key for this to work is that a custom certificate has to be installed that the HTTPS client trusts on the local machine. For a much more detailed description of the process you can check out Eric Lawrence’s blog post on Certificates. If you’re using the desktop version of Fiddler you can install a local certificate into the Windows certificate store. Fiddler proper does this from the Options menu: This operation does several things: It installs the Fiddler Root Certificate It sets trust to this Root Certificate A new client certificate is generated for each HTTPS site monitored Certificate Installation with FiddlerCore You can also provide this same functionality using FiddlerCore which includes a CertMaker class. Using CertMaker is straight forward to use and it provides an easy way to create some simple helpers that can install and uninstall a Fiddler Root certificate:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } return true; } InstallCertificate() works by first checking whether the root certificate is already installed and if it isn’t goes ahead and creates a new one. The process of creating the certificate is a two step process – first the actual certificate is created and then it’s moved into the certificate store to become trusted. I’m not sure why you’d ever split these operations up since a cert created without trust isn’t going to be of much value, but there are two distinct steps. When you trigger the trustRootCert() method, a message box will pop up on the desktop that lets you know that you’re about to trust a local private certificate. This is a security feature to ensure that you really want to trust the Fiddler root since you are essentially installing a man in the middle certificate. It’s quite safe to use this generated root certificate, because it’s been specifically generated for your machine and thus is not usable from external sources, the only way to use this certificate in a trusted way is from the local machine. IOW, unless somebody has physical access to your machine, there’s no useful way to hijack this certificate and use it for nefarious purposes (see Eric’s post for more details). Once the Root certificate has been installed, FiddlerCore/Fiddler create new certificates for each site that is connected to with HTTPS. You can end up with quite a few temporary certificates in your certificate store. To uninstall you can either use Fiddler and simply uncheck the Decrypt HTTPS traffic option followed by the remove Fiddler certificates button, or you can use FiddlerCore’s CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts() which removes the root cert and any of the intermediary certificates Fiddler created. Keep in mind that when you uninstall you uninstall the certificate for both FiddlerCore and Fiddler, so use UninstallCertificate() with care and realize that you might affect the Fiddler application’s operation by doing so as well. When to check for an installed Certificate Note that the check to see if the root certificate exists is pretty fast, while the actual process of installing the certificate is a relatively slow operation that even on a fast machine takes a few seconds. Further the trust operation pops up a message box so you probably don’t want to install the certificate repeatedly. Since the check for the root certificate is fast, you can easily put a call to InstallCertificate() in any capture startup code – in which case the certificate installation only triggers when a certificate is in fact not installed. Personally I like to make certificate installation explicit – just like Fiddler does, so in WebSurge I use a small drop down option on the menu to install or uninstall the SSL certificate:   This code calls the InstallCertificate and UnInstallCertificate functions respectively – the experience with this is similar to what you get in Fiddler with the extra dialog box popping up to prompt confirmation for installation of the root certificate. Once the cert is installed you can then capture SSL requests. There’s a gotcha however… Gotcha: FiddlerCore Certificates don’t stick by Default When I originally tried to use the Fiddler certificate installation I ran into an odd problem. I was able to install the certificate and immediately after installation was able to capture HTTPS requests. Then I would exit the application and come back in and try the same HTTPS capture again and it would fail due to a missing certificate. CertMaker.rootCertExists() would return false after every restart and if re-installed the certificate a new certificate would get added to the certificate store resulting in a bunch of duplicated root certificates with different keys. What the heck? CertMaker and BcMakeCert create non-sticky CertificatesI turns out that FiddlerCore by default uses different components from what the full version of Fiddler uses. Fiddler uses a Windows utility called MakeCert.exe to create the Fiddler Root certificate. FiddlerCore however installs the CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll assemblies, which use a different crypto library (Bouncy Castle) for certificate creation than MakeCert.exe which uses the Windows Crypto API. The assemblies provide support for non-windows operation for Fiddler under Mono, as well as support for some non-Windows certificate platforms like iOS and Android for decryption. The bottom line is that the FiddlerCore provided bouncy castle assemblies are not sticky by default as the certificates created with them are not cached as they are in Fiddler proper. To get certificates to ‘stick’ you have to explicitly cache the certificates in Fiddler’s internal preferences. A cache aware version of InstallCertificate looks something like this:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", null); App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", null); } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = null; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = null; return true; } In this code I store the Fiddler cert and private key in an application configuration settings that’s stored with the application settings (App.Configuration.UrlCapture object). These settings automatically persist when WebSurge is shut down. The values are read out of Fiddler’s internal preferences store which is set after a new certificate has been created. Likewise I clear out the configuration settings when the certificate is uninstalled. In order for these setting to be used you have to also load the configuration settings into the Fiddler preferences *before* a call to rootCertExists() is made. I do this in the capture form’s constructor:public FiddlerCapture(StressTestForm form) { InitializeComponent(); CaptureConfiguration = App.Configuration.UrlCapture; MainForm = form; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert)) { FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key); FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert); }} This is kind of a drag to do and not documented anywhere that I could find, so hopefully this will save you some grief if you want to work with the stock certificate logic that installs with FiddlerCore. MakeCert provides sticky Certificates and the same functionality as Fiddler But there’s actually an easier way. If you want to skip the above Fiddler preference configuration code in your application you can choose to distribute MakeCert.exe instead of certmaker.dll and bcmakecert.dll. When you use MakeCert.exe, the certificates settings are stored in Windows so they are available without any custom configuration inside of your application. It’s easier to integrate and as long as you run on Windows and you don’t need to support iOS or Android devices is simply easier to deal with. To integrate into your project, you can remove the reference to CertMaker.dll (and the BcMakeCert.dll assembly) from your project. Instead copy MakeCert.exe into your output folder. To make sure MakeCert.exe gets pushed out, include MakeCert.exe in your project and set the Build Action to None, and Copy to Output Directory to Copy if newer. Note that the CertMaker.dll reference in the project has been removed and on disk the files for Certmaker.dll, as well as the BCMakeCert.dll files on disk. Keep in mind that these DLLs are resources of the FiddlerCore NuGet package, so updating the package may end up pushing those files back into your project. Once MakeCert.exe is distributed FiddlerCore checks for it first before using the assemblies so as long as MakeCert.exe exists it’ll be used for certificate creation (at least on Windows). Summary FiddlerCore is a pretty sweet tool, and it’s absolutely awesome that we get to plug in most of the functionality of Fiddler right into our own applications. A few years back I tried to build this sort of functionality myself for an app and ended up giving up because it’s a big job to get HTTP right – especially if you need to support SSL. FiddlerCore now provides that functionality as a turnkey solution that can be plugged into your own apps easily. The only downside is FiddlerCore’s documentation for more advanced features like certificate installation which is pretty sketchy. While for the most part FiddlerCore’s feature set is easy to work with without any documentation, advanced features are often not intuitive to gleam by just using Intellisense or the FiddlerCore help file reference (which is not terribly useful). While Eric Lawrence is very responsive on his forum and on Twitter, there simply isn’t much useful documentation on Fiddler/FiddlerCore available online. If you run into trouble the forum is probably the first place to look and then ask a question if you can’t find the answer. The best documentation you can find is Eric’s Fiddler Book which covers a ton of functionality of Fiddler and FiddlerCore. The book is a great reference to Fiddler’s feature set as well as providing great insights into the HTTP protocol. The second half of the book that gets into the innards of HTTP is an excellent read for anybody who wants to know more about some of the more arcane aspects and special behaviors of HTTP – it’s well worth the read. While the book has tons of information in a very readable format, it’s unfortunately not a great reference as it’s hard to find things in the book and because it’s not available online you can’t electronically search for the great content in it. But it’s hard to complain about any of this given the obvious effort and love that’s gone into this awesome product for all of these years. A mighty big thanks to Eric Lawrence  for having created this useful tool that so many of us use all the time, and also to Telerik for picking up Fiddler/FiddlerCore and providing Eric the resources to support and improve this wonderful tool full time and keeping it free for all. Kudos! Resources FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore NuGet Fiddler Capture Sample Form Fiddler Capture Form in West Wind WebSurge (GitHub) Eric Lawrence’s Fiddler Book© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in .NET  HTTP   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

  Read the article

• West Wind WebSurge - an easy way to Load Test Web Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few months ago on a project the subject of load testing came up. We were having some serious issues with a Web application that would start spewing SQL lock errors under somewhat heavy load. These sort of errors can be tough to catch, precisely because they only occur under load and not during typical development testing. To replicate this error more reliably we needed to put a load on the application and run it for a while before these SQL errors would flare up. It’s been a while since I’d looked at load testing tools, so I spent a bit of time looking at different tools and frankly didn’t really find anything that was a good fit. A lot of tools were either a pain to use, didn’t have the basic features I needed, or are extravagantly expensive. In  the end I got frustrated enough to build an initially small custom load test solution that then morphed into a more generic library, then gained a console front end and eventually turned into a full blown Web load testing tool that is now called West Wind WebSurge. I got seriously frustrated looking for tools every time I needed some quick and dirty load testing for an application. If my aim is to just put an application under heavy enough load to find a scalability problem in code, or to simply try and push an application to its limits on the hardware it’s running I shouldn’t have to have to struggle to set up tests. It should be easy enough to get going in a few minutes, so that the testing can be set up quickly so that it can be done on a regular basis without a lot of hassle. And that was the goal when I started to build out my initial custom load tester into a more widely usable tool. If you’re in a hurry and you want to check it out, you can find more information and download links here: West Wind WebSurge Product Page Walk through Video Download link (zip) Install from Chocolatey Source on GitHub For a more detailed discussion of the why’s and how’s and some background continue reading. How did I get here? When I started out on this path, I wasn’t planning on building a tool like this myself – but I got frustrated enough looking at what’s out there to think that I can do better than what’s available for the most common simple load testing scenarios. When we ran into the SQL lock problems I mentioned, I started looking around what’s available for Web load testing solutions that would work for our whole team which consisted of a few developers and a couple of IT guys both of which needed to be able to run the tests. It had been a while since I looked at tools and I figured that by now there should be some good solutions out there, but as it turns out I didn’t really find anything that fit our relatively simple needs without costing an arm and a leg… I spent the better part of a day installing and trying various load testing tools and to be frank most of them were either terrible at what they do, incredibly unfriendly to use, used some terminology I couldn’t even parse, or were extremely expensive (and I mean in the ‘sell your liver’ range of expensive). Pick your poison. There are also a number of online solutions for load testing and they actually looked more promising, but those wouldn’t work well for our scenario as the application is running inside of a private VPN with no outside access into the VPN. Most of those online solutions also ended up being very pricey as well – presumably because of the bandwidth required to test over the open Web can be enormous. When I asked around on Twitter what people were using– I got mostly… crickets. Several people mentioned Visual Studio Load Test, and most other suggestions pointed to online solutions. I did get a bunch of responses though with people asking to let them know what I found – apparently I’m not alone when it comes to finding load testing tools that are effective and easy to use. As to Visual Studio, the higher end skus of Visual Studio and the test edition include a Web load testing tool, which is quite powerful, but there are a number of issues with that: First it’s tied to Visual Studio so it’s not very portable – you need a VS install. I also find the test setup and terminology used by the VS test runner extremely confusing. Heck, it’s complicated enough that there’s even a Pluralsight course on using the Visual Studio Web test from Steve Smith. And of course you need to have one of the high end Visual Studio Skus, and those are mucho Dinero ($$$) – just for the load testing that’s rarely an option. Some of the tools are ultra extensive and let you run analysis tools on the target serves which is useful, but in most cases – just plain overkill and only distracts from what I tend to be ultimately interested in: Reproducing problems that occur at high load, and finding the upper limits and ‘what if’ scenarios as load is ramped up increasingly against a site. Yes it’s useful to have Web app instrumentation, but often that’s not what you’re interested in. I still fondly remember early days of Web testing when Microsoft had the WAST (Web Application Stress Tool) tool, which was rather simple – and also somewhat limited – but easily allowed you to create stress tests very quickly. It had some serious limitations (mainly that it didn’t work with SSL),  but the idea behind it was excellent: Create tests quickly and easily and provide a decent engine to run it locally with minimal setup. You could get set up and run tests within a few minutes. Unfortunately, that tool died a quiet death as so many of Microsoft’s tools that probably were built by an intern and then abandoned, even though there was a lot of potential and it was actually fairly widely used. Eventually the tools was no longer downloadable and now it simply doesn’t work anymore on higher end hardware. West Wind Web Surge – Making Load Testing Quick and Easy So I ended up creating West Wind WebSurge out of rebellious frustration… The goal of WebSurge is to make it drop dead simple to create load tests. It’s super easy to capture sessions either using the built in capture tool (big props to Eric Lawrence, Telerik and FiddlerCore which made that piece a snap), using the full version of Fiddler and exporting sessions, or by manually or programmatically creating text files based on plain HTTP headers to create requests. I’ve been using this tool for 4 months now on a regular basis on various projects as a reality check for performance and scalability and it’s worked extremely well for finding small performance issues. I also use it regularly as a simple URL tester, as it allows me to quickly enter a URL plus headers and content and test that URL and its results along with the ability to easily save one or more of those URLs. A few weeks back I made a walk through video that goes over most of the features of WebSurge in some detail: Note that the UI has slightly changed since then, so there are some UI improvements. Most notably the test results screen has been updated recently to a different layout and to provide more information about each URL in a session at a glance. The video and the main WebSurge site has a lot of info of basic operations. For the rest of this post I’ll talk about a few deeper aspects that may be of interest while also giving a glance at how WebSurge works. Session Capturing As you would expect, WebSurge works with Sessions of Urls that are played back under load. Here’s what the main Session View looks like: You can create session entries manually by individually adding URLs to test (on the Request tab on the right) and saving them, or you can capture output from Web Browsers, Windows Desktop applications that call services, your own applications using the built in Capture tool. With this tool you can capture anything HTTP -SSL requests and content from Web pages, AJAX calls, SOAP or REST services – again anything that uses Windows or .NET HTTP APIs. Behind the scenes the capture tool uses FiddlerCore so basically anything you can capture with Fiddler you can also capture with Web Surge Session capture tool. Alternately you can actually use Fiddler as well, and then export the captured Fiddler trace to a file, which can then be imported into WebSurge. This is a nice way to let somebody capture session without having to actually install WebSurge or for your customers to provide an exact playback scenario for a given set of URLs that cause a problem perhaps. Note that not all applications work with Fiddler’s proxy unless you configure a proxy. For example, .NET Web applications that make HTTP calls usually don’t show up in Fiddler by default. For those .NET applications you can explicitly override proxy settings to capture those requests to service calls. The capture tool also has handy optional filters that allow you to filter by domain, to help block out noise that you typically don’t want to include in your requests. For example, if your pages include links to CDNs, or Google Analytics or social links you typically don’t want to include those in your load test, so by capturing just from a specific domain you are guaranteed content from only that one domain. Additionally you can provide url filters in the configuration file – filters allow to provide filter strings that if contained in a url will cause requests to be ignored. Again this is useful if you don’t filter by domain but you want to filter out things like static image, css and script files etc. Often you’re not interested in the load characteristics of these static and usually cached resources as they just add noise to tests and often skew the overall url performance results. In my testing I tend to care only about my dynamic requests. SSL Captures require Fiddler Note, that in order to capture SSL requests you’ll have to install the Fiddler’s SSL certificate. The easiest way to do this is to install Fiddler and use its SSL configuration options to get the certificate into the local certificate store. There’s a document on the Telerik site that provides the exact steps to get SSL captures to work with Fiddler and therefore with WebSurge. Session Storage A group of URLs entered or captured make up a Session. Sessions can be saved and restored easily as they use a very simple text format that simply stored on disk. The format is slightly customized HTTP header traces separated by a separator line. The headers are standard HTTP headers except that the full URL instead of just the domain relative path is stored as part of the 1st HTTP header line for easier parsing. Because it’s just text and uses the same format that Fiddler uses for exports, it’s super easy to create Sessions by hand manually or under program control writing out to a simple text file. You can see what this format looks like in the Capture window figure above – the raw captured format is also what’s stored to disk and what WebSurge parses from. The only ‘custom’ part of these headers is that 1st line contains the full URL instead of the domain relative path and Host: header. The rest of each header are just plain standard HTTP headers with each individual URL isolated by a separator line. The format used here also uses what Fiddler produces for exports, so it’s easy to exchange or view data either in Fiddler or WebSurge. Urls can also be edited interactively so you can modify the headers easily as well: Again – it’s just plain HTTP headers so anything you can do with HTTP can be added here. Use it for single URL Testing Incidentally I’ve also found this form as an excellent way to test and replay individual URLs for simple non-load testing purposes. Because you can capture a single or many URLs and store them on disk, this also provides a nice HTTP playground where you can record URLs with their headers, and fire them one at a time or as a session and see results immediately. It’s actually an easy way for REST presentations and I find the simple UI flow actually easier than using Fiddler natively. Finally you can save one or more URLs as a session for later retrieval. I’m using this more and more for simple URL checks. Overriding Cookies and Domains Speaking of HTTP headers – you can also overwrite cookies used as part of the options. One thing that happens with modern Web applications is that you have session cookies in use for authorization. These cookies tend to expire at some point which would invalidate a test. Using the Options dialog you can actually override the cookie: which replaces the cookie for all requests with the cookie value specified here. You can capture a valid cookie from a manual HTTP request in your browser and then paste into the cookie field, to replace the existing Cookie with the new one that is now valid. Likewise you can easily replace the domain so if you captured urls on west-wind.com and now you want to test on localhost you can do that easily easily as well. You could even do something like capture on store.west-wind.com and then test on localhost/store which would also work. Running Load Tests Once you’ve created a Session you can specify the length of the test in seconds, and specify the number of simultaneous threads to run each session on. Sessions run through each of the URLs in the session sequentially by default. One option in the options list above is that you can also randomize the URLs so each thread runs requests in a different order. This avoids bunching up URLs initially when tests start as all threads run the same requests simultaneously which can sometimes skew the results of the first few minutes of a test. While sessions run some progress information is displayed: By default there’s a live view of requests displayed in a Console-like window. On the bottom of the window there’s a running total summary that displays where you’re at in the test, how many requests have been processed and what the requests per second count is currently for all requests. Note that for tests that run over a thousand requests a second it’s a good idea to turn off the console display. While the console display is nice to see that something is happening and also gives you slight idea what’s happening with actual requests, once a lot of requests are processed, this UI updating actually adds a lot of CPU overhead to the application which may cause the actual load generated to be reduced. If you are running a 1000 requests a second there’s not much to see anyway as requests roll by way too fast to see individual lines anyway. If you look on the options panel, there is a NoProgressEvents option that disables the console display. Note that the summary display is still updated approximately once a second so you can always tell that the test is still running. Test Results When the test is done you get a simple Results display: On the right you get an overall summary as well as breakdown by each URL in the session. Both success and failures are highlighted so it’s easy to see what’s breaking in your load test. The report can be printed or you can also open the HTML document in your default Web Browser for printing to PDF or saving the HTML document to disk. The list on the right shows you a partial list of the URLs that were fired so you can look in detail at the request and response data. The list can be filtered by success and failure requests. Each list is partial only (at the moment) and limited to a max of 1000 items in order to render reasonably quickly. Each item in the list can be clicked to see the full request and response data: This particularly useful for errors so you can quickly see and copy what request data was used and in the case of a GET request you can also just click the link to quickly jump to the page. For non-GET requests you can find the URL in the Session list, and use the context menu to Test the URL as configured including any HTTP content data to send. You get to see the full HTTP request and response as well as a link in the Request header to go visit the actual page. Not so useful for a POST as above, but definitely useful for GET requests. Finally you can also get a few charts. The most useful one is probably the Request per Second chart which can be accessed from the Charts menu or shortcut. Here’s what it looks like:   Results can also be exported to JSON, XML and HTML. Keep in mind that these files can get very large rather quickly though, so exports can end up taking a while to complete. Command Line Interface WebSurge runs with a small core load engine and this engine is plugged into the front end application I’ve shown so far. There’s also a command line interface available to run WebSurge from the Windows command prompt. Using the command line you can run tests for either an individual URL (similar to AB.exe for example) or a full Session file. By default when it runs WebSurgeCli shows progress every second showing total request count, failures and the requests per second for the entire test. A silent option can turn off this progress display and display only the results. The command line interface can be useful for build integration which allows checking for failures perhaps or hitting a specific requests per second count etc. It’s also nice to use this as quick and dirty URL test facility similar to the way you’d use Apache Bench (ab.exe). Unlike ab.exe though, WebSurgeCli supports SSL and makes it much easier to create multi-URL tests using either manual editing or the WebSurge UI. Current Status Currently West Wind WebSurge is still in Beta status. I’m still adding small new features and tweaking the UI in an attempt to make it as easy and self-explanatory as possible to run. Documentation for the UI and specialty features is also still a work in progress. I plan on open-sourcing this product, but it won’t be free. There’s a free version available that provides a limited number of threads and request URLs to run. A relatively low cost license  removes the thread and request limitations. Pricing info can be found on the Web site – there’s an introductory price which is $99 at the moment which I think is reasonable compared to most other for pay solutions out there that are exorbitant by comparison… The reason code is not available yet is – well, the UI portion of the app is a bit embarrassing in its current monolithic state. The UI started as a very simple interface originally that later got a lot more complex – yeah, that never happens, right? Unless there’s a lot of interest I don’t foresee re-writing the UI entirely (which would be ideal), but in the meantime at least some cleanup is required before I dare to publish it :-). The code will likely be released with version 1.0. I’m very interested in feedback. Do you think this could be useful to you and provide value over other tools you may or may not have used before? I hope so – it already has provided a ton of value for me and the work I do that made the development worthwhile at this point. You can leave a comment below, or for more extensive discussions you can post a message on the West Wind Message Board in the WebSurge section Microsoft MVPs and Insiders get a free License If you’re a Microsoft MVP or a Microsoft Insider you can get a full license for free. Send me a link to your current, official Microsoft profile and I’ll send you a not-for resale license. Send any messages to [email protected]. Resources For more info on WebSurge and to download it to try it out, use the following links. West Wind WebSurge Home Download West Wind WebSurge Getting Started with West Wind WebSurge Video© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

  Read the article

• Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales.  Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released.  Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge  (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys.   As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching  structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note   Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia   In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch.   Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation.   Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code.   Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from.   Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years.   Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software.     Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow.   Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching?   Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs.   Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established.   Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding.  Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible.   Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

  Read the article

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Concurrent Collections (1 of 3)

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again we consider some of the lesser known classes and keywords of C#.  In the next few weeks, we will discuss the concurrent collections and how they have changed the face of concurrent programming. This week’s post will begin with a general introduction and discuss the ConcurrentStack<T> and ConcurrentQueue<T>.  Then in the following post we’ll discuss the ConcurrentDictionary<T> and ConcurrentBag<T>.  Finally, we shall close on the third post with a discussion of the BlockingCollection<T>. For more of the "Little Wonders" posts, see the index here. A brief history of collections In the beginning was the .NET 1.0 Framework.  And out of this framework emerged the System.Collections namespace, and it was good.  It contained all the basic things a growing programming language needs like the ArrayList and Hashtable collections.  The main problem, of course, with these original collections is that they held items of type object which means you had to be disciplined enough to use them correctly or you could end up with runtime errors if you got an object of a type you weren't expecting. Then came .NET 2.0 and generics and our world changed forever!  With generics the C# language finally got an equivalent of the very powerful C++ templates.  As such, the System.Collections.Generic was born and we got type-safe versions of all are favorite collections.  The List<T> succeeded the ArrayList and the Dictionary<TKey,TValue> succeeded the Hashtable and so on.  The new versions of the library were not only safer because they checked types at compile-time, in many cases they were more performant as well.  So much so that it's Microsoft's recommendation that the System.Collections original collections only be used for backwards compatibility. So we as developers came to know and love the generic collections and took them into our hearts and embraced them.  The problem is, thread safety in both the original collections and the generic collections can be problematic, for very different reasons. Now, if you are only doing single-threaded development you may not care – after all, no locking is required.  Even if you do have multiple threads, if a collection is “load-once, read-many” you don’t need to do anything to protect that container from multi-threaded access, as illustrated below: 1: public static class OrderTypeTranslator 2: { 3: // because this dictionary is loaded once before it is ever accessed, we don't need to synchronize 4: // multi-threaded read access 5: private static readonly Dictionary<string, char> _translator = new Dictionary<string, char> 6: { 7: {"New", 'N'}, 8: {"Update", 'U'}, 9: {"Cancel", 'X'} 10: }; 11:  12: // the only public interface into the dictionary is for reading, so inherently thread-safe 13: public static char? Translate(string orderType) 14: { 15: char charValue; 16: if (_translator.TryGetValue(orderType, out charValue)) 17: { 18: return charValue; 19: } 20:  21: return null; 22: } 23: } Unfortunately, most of our computer science problems cannot get by with just single-threaded applications or with multi-threading in a load-once manner.  Looking at  today's trends, it's clear to see that computers are not so much getting faster because of faster processor speeds -- we've nearly reached the limits we can push through with today's technologies -- but more because we're adding more cores to the boxes.  With this new hardware paradigm, it is even more important to use multi-threaded applications to take full advantage of parallel processing to achieve higher application speeds. So let's look at how to use collections in a thread-safe manner. Using historical collections in a concurrent fashion The early .NET collections (System.Collections) had a Synchronized() static method that could be used to wrap the early collections to make them completely thread-safe.  This paradigm was dropped in the generic collections (System.Collections.Generic) because having a synchronized wrapper resulted in atomic locks for all operations, which could prove overkill in many multithreading situations.  Thus the paradigm shifted to having the user of the collection specify their own locking, usually with an external object: 1: public class OrderAggregator 2: { 3: private static readonly Dictionary<string, List<Order>> _orders = new Dictionary<string, List<Order>>(); 4: private static readonly _orderLock = new object(); 5:  6: public void Add(string accountNumber, Order newOrder) 7: { 8: List<Order> ordersForAccount; 9:  10: // a complex operation like this should all be protected 11: lock (_orderLock) 12: { 13: if (!_orders.TryGetValue(accountNumber, out ordersForAccount)) 14: { 15: _orders.Add(accountNumber, ordersForAccount = new List<Order>()); 16: } 17:  18: ordersForAccount.Add(newOrder); 19: } 20: } 21: } Notice how we’re performing several operations on the dictionary under one lock.  With the Synchronized() static methods of the early collections, you wouldn’t be able to specify this level of locking (a more macro-level).  So in the generic collections, it was decided that if a user needed synchronization, they could implement their own locking scheme instead so that they could provide synchronization as needed. The need for better concurrent access to collections Here’s the problem: it’s relatively easy to write a collection that locks itself down completely for access, but anything more complex than that can be difficult and error-prone to write, and much less to make it perform efficiently!  For example, what if you have a Dictionary that has frequent reads but in-frequent updates?  Do you want to lock down the entire Dictionary for every access?  This would be overkill and would prevent concurrent reads.  In such cases you could use something like a ReaderWriterLockSlim which allows for multiple readers in a lock, and then once a writer grabs the lock it blocks all further readers until the writer is done (in a nutshell).  This is all very complex stuff to consider. Fortunately, this is where the Concurrent Collections come in.  The Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft went through great pains to determine how to make a set of concurrent collections that would have the best performance characteristics for general case multi-threaded use. Now, as in all things involving threading, you should always make sure you evaluate all your container options based on the particular usage scenario and the degree of parallelism you wish to acheive. This article should not be taken to understand that these collections are always supperior to the generic collections. Each fills a particular need for a particular situation. Understanding what each container is optimized for is key to the success of your application whether it be single-threaded or multi-threaded. General points to consider with the concurrent collections The MSDN points out that the concurrent collections all support the ICollection interface. However, since the collections are already synchronized, the IsSynchronized property always returns false, and SyncRoot always returns null.  Thus you should not attempt to use these properties for synchronization purposes. Note that since the concurrent collections also may have different operations than the traditional data structures you may be used to.  Now you may ask why they did this, but it was done out of necessity to keep operations safe and atomic.  For example, in order to do a Pop() on a stack you have to know the stack is non-empty, but between the time you check the stack’s IsEmpty property and then do the Pop() another thread may have come in and made the stack empty!  This is why some of the traditional operations have been changed to make them safe for concurrent use. In addition, some properties and methods in the concurrent collections achieve concurrency by creating a snapshot of the collection, which means that some operations that were traditionally O(1) may now be O(n) in the concurrent models.  I’ll try to point these out as we talk about each collection so you can be aware of any potential performance impacts.  Finally, all the concurrent containers are safe for enumeration even while being modified, but some of the containers support this in different ways (snapshot vs. dirty iteration).  Once again I’ll highlight how thread-safe enumeration works for each collection. ConcurrentStack<T>: The thread-safe LIFO container The ConcurrentStack<T> is the thread-safe counterpart to the System.Collections.Generic.Stack<T>, which as you may remember is your standard last-in-first-out container.  If you think of algorithms that favor stack usage (for example, depth-first searches of graphs and trees) then you can see how using a thread-safe stack would be of benefit. The ConcurrentStack<T> achieves thread-safe access by using System.Threading.Interlocked operations.  This means that the multi-threaded access to the stack requires no traditional locking and is very, very fast! For the most part, the ConcurrentStack<T> behaves like it’s Stack<T> counterpart with a few differences: Pop() was removed in favor of TryPop() Returns true if an item existed and was popped and false if empty. PushRange() and TryPopRange() were added Allows you to push multiple items and pop multiple items atomically. Count takes a snapshot of the stack and then counts the items. This means it is a O(n) operation, if you just want to check for an empty stack, call IsEmpty instead which is O(1). ToArray() and GetEnumerator() both also take snapshots. This means that iteration over a stack will give you a static view at the time of the call and will not reflect updates. Pushing on a ConcurrentStack<T> works just like you’d expect except for the aforementioned PushRange() method that was added to allow you to push a range of items concurrently. 1: var stack = new ConcurrentStack<string>(); 2:  3: // adding to stack is much the same as before 4: stack.Push("First"); 5:  6: // but you can also push multiple items in one atomic operation (no interleaves) 7: stack.PushRange(new [] { "Second", "Third", "Fourth" }); For looking at the top item of the stack (without removing it) the Peek() method has been removed in favor of a TryPeek().  This is because in order to do a peek the stack must be non-empty, but between the time you check for empty and the time you execute the peek the stack contents may have changed.  Thus the TryPeek() was created to be an atomic check for empty, and then peek if not empty: 1: // to look at top item of stack without removing it, can use TryPeek. 2: // Note that there is no Peek(), this is because you need to check for empty first. TryPeek does. 3: string item; 4: if (stack.TryPeek(out item)) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("Top item was " + item); 7: } 8: else 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine("Stack was empty."); 11: } Finally, to remove items from the stack, we have the TryPop() for single, and TryPopRange() for multiple items.  Just like the TryPeek(), these operations replace Pop() since we need to ensure atomically that the stack is non-empty before we pop from it: 1: // to remove items, use TryPop or TryPopRange to get multiple items atomically (no interleaves) 2: if (stack.TryPop(out item)) 3: { 4: Console.WriteLine("Popped " + item); 5: } 6:  7: // TryPopRange will only pop up to the number of spaces in the array, the actual number popped is returned. 8: var poppedItems = new string[2]; 9: int numPopped = stack.TryPopRange(poppedItems); 10:  11: foreach (var theItem in poppedItems.Take(numPopped)) 12: { 13: Console.WriteLine("Popped " + theItem); 14: } Finally, note that as stated before, GetEnumerator() and ToArray() gets a snapshot of the data at the time of the call.  That means if you are enumerating the stack you will get a snapshot of the stack at the time of the call.  This is illustrated below: 1: var stack = new ConcurrentStack<string>(); 2:  3: // adding to stack is much the same as before 4: stack.Push("First"); 5:  6: var results = stack.GetEnumerator(); 7:  8: // but you can also push multiple items in one atomic operation (no interleaves) 9: stack.PushRange(new [] { "Second", "Third", "Fourth" }); 10:  11: while(results.MoveNext()) 12: { 13: Console.WriteLine("Stack only has: " + results.Current); 14: } The only item that will be printed out in the above code is "First" because the snapshot was taken before the other items were added. This may sound like an issue, but it’s really for safety and is more correct.  You don’t want to enumerate a stack and have half a view of the stack before an update and half a view of the stack after an update, after all.  In addition, note that this is still thread-safe, whereas iterating through a non-concurrent collection while updating it in the old collections would cause an exception. ConcurrentQueue<T>: The thread-safe FIFO container The ConcurrentQueue<T> is the thread-safe counterpart of the System.Collections.Generic.Queue<T> class.  The concurrent queue uses an underlying list of small arrays and lock-free System.Threading.Interlocked operations on the head and tail arrays.  Once again, this allows us to do thread-safe operations without the need for heavy locks! The ConcurrentQueue<T> (like the ConcurrentStack<T>) has some departures from the non-concurrent counterpart.  Most notably: Dequeue() was removed in favor of TryDequeue(). Returns true if an item existed and was dequeued and false if empty. Count does not take a snapshot It subtracts the head and tail index to get the count.  This results overall in a O(1) complexity which is quite good.  It’s still recommended, however, that for empty checks you call IsEmpty instead of comparing Count to zero. ToArray() and GetEnumerator() both take snapshots. This means that iteration over a queue will give you a static view at the time of the call and will not reflect updates. The Enqueue() method on the ConcurrentQueue<T> works much the same as the generic Queue<T>: 1: var queue = new ConcurrentQueue<string>(); 2:  3: // adding to queue is much the same as before 4: queue.Enqueue("First"); 5: queue.Enqueue("Second"); 6: queue.Enqueue("Third"); For front item access, the TryPeek() method must be used to attempt to see the first item if the queue.  There is no Peek() method since, as you’ll remember, we can only peek on a non-empty queue, so we must have an atomic TryPeek() that checks for empty and then returns the first item if the queue is non-empty. 1: // to look at first item in queue without removing it, can use TryPeek. 2: // Note that there is no Peek(), this is because you need to check for empty first. TryPeek does. 3: string item; 4: if (queue.TryPeek(out item)) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("First item was " + item); 7: } 8: else 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine("Queue was empty."); 11: } Then, to remove items you use TryDequeue().  Once again this is for the same reason we have TryPeek() and not Peek(): 1: // to remove items, use TryDequeue. If queue is empty returns false. 2: if (queue.TryDequeue(out item)) 3: { 4: Console.WriteLine("Dequeued first item " + item); 5: } Just like the concurrent stack, the ConcurrentQueue<T> takes a snapshot when you call ToArray() or GetEnumerator() which means that subsequent updates to the queue will not be seen when you iterate over the results.  Thus once again the code below will only show the first item, since the other items were added after the snapshot. 1: var queue = new ConcurrentQueue<string>(); 2:  3: // adding to queue is much the same as before 4: queue.Enqueue("First"); 5:  6: var iterator = queue.GetEnumerator(); 7:  8: queue.Enqueue("Second"); 9: queue.Enqueue("Third"); 10:  11: // only shows First 12: while (iterator.MoveNext()) 13: { 14: Console.WriteLine("Dequeued item " + iterator.Current); 15: } Using collections concurrently You’ll notice in the examples above I stuck to using single-threaded examples so as to make them deterministic and the results obvious.  Of course, if we used these collections in a truly multi-threaded way the results would be less deterministic, but would still be thread-safe and with no locking on your part required! For example, say you have an order processor that takes an IEnumerable<Order> and handles each other in a multi-threaded fashion, then groups the responses together in a concurrent collection for aggregation.  This can be done easily with the TPL’s Parallel.ForEach(): 1: public static IEnumerable<OrderResult> ProcessOrders(IEnumerable<Order> orderList) 2: { 3: var proxy = new OrderProxy(); 4: var results = new ConcurrentQueue<OrderResult>(); 5:  6: // notice that we can process all these in parallel and put the results 7: // into our concurrent collection without needing any external locking! 8: Parallel.ForEach(orderList, 9: order => 10: { 11: var result = proxy.PlaceOrder(order); 12:  13: results.Enqueue(result); 14: }); 15:  16: return results; 17: } Summary Obviously, if you do not need multi-threaded safety, you don’t need to use these collections, but when you do need multi-threaded collections these are just the ticket! The plethora of features (I always think of the movie The Three Amigos when I say plethora) built into these containers and the amazing way they acheive thread-safe access in an efficient manner is wonderful to behold. Stay tuned next week where we’ll continue our discussion with the ConcurrentBag<T> and the ConcurrentDictionary<TKey,TValue>. For some excellent information on the performance of the concurrent collections and how they perform compared to a traditional brute-force locking strategy, see this wonderful whitepaper by the Microsoft Parallel Computing Platform team here.   Tweet Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Concurrent Collections,Collections,Multi-Threading,Little Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,James Michael Hare

  Read the article

• 12.04lts: no network internet

  - by dgermann

  Friends-- Cannot connect reliably to ethernet nor at all to Internet: Symptoms: About 2 weeks ago did an upgrade. Have not been able to connect to ethernet nor Internet. Today, for example, boot up this System76 laptop and there was no network connection. Did sudo mount -a and got some internal network connectivity: doug@ubuntu:/sam$ ping earth PING earth (192.168.0.201) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from earth (192.168.0.201): icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.160 ms 64 bytes from earth (192.168.0.201): icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.177 ms 64 bytes from earth (192.168.0.201): icmp_req=3 ttl=64 time=0.159 ms ^C --- earth ping statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 1998ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.159/0.165/0.177/0.013 ms doug@ubuntu:/sam$ ping doug2 PING doug (192.168.0.4) 56(84) bytes of data. ^C --- doug ping statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 1999ms doug@ubuntu:/sam$ ping sharon PING sharon (192.168.0.111) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from sharon (192.168.0.111): icmp_req=1 ttl=128 time=0.276 ms ^C --- sharon ping statistics --- 6 packets transmitted, 1 received, 83% packet loss, time 5031ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.276/0.276/0.276/0.000 ms doug@ubuntu:/sam$ ping 192.168.0.1 PING 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data. ^C --- 192.168.0.1 ping statistics --- 6 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 4999ms doug@ubuntu:/sam$ ping earth PING earth (192.168.0.201) 56(84) bytes of data. ^C --- earth ping statistics --- 5 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 4032ms doug@ubuntu:/sam$ ping yahoo.com ping: unknown host yahoo.com doug@ubuntu:/sam$ ping ubuntu.com ping: unknown host ubuntu.com doug@ubuntu:/sam$ ping 8.8.8.8 PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data. ^C --- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics --- 14 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 13103ms Note that earth is the cifs server, and one time pinging it worked, later failed. Clues: doug@ubuntu:/sam$ grep -i eth /var/log/syslog |tail Aug 23 15:32:46 ubuntu kernel: [ 5328.070401] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 Aug 23 15:32:48 ubuntu kernel: [ 5330.651139] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=19090 PROTO=2 Aug 23 15:34:51 ubuntu kernel: [ 5453.072279] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 Aug 23 15:34:55 ubuntu kernel: [ 5457.085433] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.10 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=16137 PROTO=2 Aug 23 15:36:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 5578.074492] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 Aug 23 15:37:00 ubuntu kernel: [ 5582.359006] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.10 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=16150 PROTO=2 Aug 23 15:39:01 ubuntu kernel: [ 5703.074410] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 Aug 23 15:39:03 ubuntu kernel: [ 5705.070122] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.10 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=16163 PROTO=2 Aug 23 15:41:06 ubuntu kernel: [ 5828.074387] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 Aug 23 15:41:13 ubuntu kernel: [ 5835.319941] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=23298 PROTO=2 doug@ubuntu:/sam$ ifconfig -a eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr [BLANKED] inet addr:192.168.0.7 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::21b:fcff:fe29:9dfc/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:3961 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:2007 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:991204 (991.2 KB) TX bytes:252908 (252.9 KB) Interrupt:16 Base address:0xec00 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:2190 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:2190 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:168052 (168.0 KB) TX bytes:168052 (168.0 KB) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:19:d2:72:5a:0c UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) doug@ubuntu:/sam$ iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11abg ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=15 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off eth0 no wireless extensions. doug@ubuntu:/sam$ lsmod Module Size Used by des_generic 21191 0 md4 12523 0 nls_iso8859_1 12617 1 nls_cp437 12751 1 vfat 17308 1 fat 55605 1 vfat usb_storage 39646 1 dm_crypt 22528 1 joydev 17393 0 snd_hda_codec_analog 75395 1 snd_hda_intel 32719 2 pcmcia 39826 0 snd_hda_codec 109562 2 snd_hda_codec_analog,snd_hda_intel snd_hwdep 13276 1 snd_hda_codec ip6t_LOG 16846 4 xt_hl 12465 6 ip6t_rt 12473 3 snd_pcm 80916 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec nf_conntrack_ipv6 13581 7 nf_defrag_ipv6 13175 1 nf_conntrack_ipv6 ipt_REJECT 12512 1 ipt_LOG 12783 5 xt_limit 12541 12 xt_tcpudp 12531 21 xt_addrtype 12596 4 snd_seq_midi 13132 0 xt_state 12514 14 ip6table_filter 12711 1 ip6_tables 22528 3 ip6t_LOG,ip6t_rt,ip6table_filter nf_conntrack_netbios_ns 12585 0 nf_conntrack_broadcast 12541 1 nf_conntrack_netbios_ns nf_nat_ftp 12595 0 nf_nat 24959 1 nf_nat_ftp nf_conntrack_ipv4 19084 9 nf_nat nf_defrag_ipv4 12649 1 nf_conntrack_ipv4 nf_conntrack_ftp 13183 1 nf_nat_ftp nf_conntrack 73847 8 nf_conntrack_ipv6,xt_state,nf_conntrack_netbios_ns,nf_conntrack_broadcast,nf_nat_ftp,nf_nat,nf_conntrack_ipv4,nf_conntrack_ftp iptable_filter 12706 1 ip_tables 18106 1 iptable_filter snd_rawmidi 25424 1 snd_seq_midi psmouse 86982 0 x_tables 22011 13 ip6t_LOG,xt_hl,ip6t_rt,ipt_REJECT,ipt_LOG,xt_limit,xt_tcpudp,xt_addrtype,xt_state,ip6table_filter,ip6_tables,iptable_filter,ip_tables arc4 12473 2 r592 17808 0 snd_seq_midi_event 14475 1 snd_seq_midi memstick 15857 1 r592 yenta_socket 27465 0 serio_raw 13027 0 pcmcia_rsrc 18367 1 yenta_socket iwl3945 73186 0 pcmcia_core 21511 3 pcmcia,yenta_socket,pcmcia_rsrc iwl_legacy 71334 1 iwl3945 snd_seq 51592 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event mac80211 436493 2 iwl3945,iwl_legacy snd_timer 28931 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14172 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq rfcomm 38139 0 bnep 17830 2 parport_pc 32114 0 bluetooth 158447 10 rfcomm,bnep ppdev 12849 0 cfg80211 178877 3 iwl3945,iwl_legacy,mac80211 asus_laptop 23693 0 sparse_keymap 13658 1 asus_laptop input_polldev 13648 1 asus_laptop nls_utf8 12493 6 cifs 258037 10 snd 62218 13 snd_hda_codec_analog,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device soundcore 14635 1 snd mac_hid 13077 0 snd_page_alloc 14108 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm lp 17455 0 parport 40930 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp i915 428418 3 firewire_ohci 40172 0 sdhci_pci 18324 0 sdhci 28241 1 sdhci_pci firewire_core 56940 1 firewire_ohci crc_itu_t 12627 1 firewire_core r8169 56396 0 drm_kms_helper 45466 1 i915 drm 197641 4 i915,drm_kms_helper i2c_algo_bit 13199 1 i915 video 19115 1 i915 doug@ubuntu:/sam$ dmesg |grep eth [ 0.116936] i2c-core: driver [aat2870] using legacy suspend method [ 0.116939] i2c-core: driver [aat2870] using legacy resume method [ 1.453811] r8169 0000:03:07.0: eth0: RTL8169sb/8110sb at 0xf840ec00, [BLANKED], XID 10000000 IRQ 16 [ 1.453815] r8169 0000:03:07.0: eth0: jumbo features [frames: 7152 bytes, tx checksumming: ok] [ 25.681231] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [ 154.037318] r8169 0000:03:07.0: eth0: link down [ 154.037329] r8169 0000:03:07.0: eth0: link down [ 154.037596] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [ 155.583162] r8169 0000:03:07.0: eth0: link up [ 155.583366] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready [ 156.637048] r8169 0000:03:07.0: eth0: link down [ 156.637066] r8169 0000:03:07.0: eth0: link down [ 156.637339] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [ 156.773699] r8169 0000:03:07.0: eth0: link down [ 156.773983] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [ 158.456181] r8169 0000:03:07.0: eth0: link up [ 158.456378] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready [ 159.364468] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 162.384496] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=38877 PROTO=2 [ 166.272457] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 166.422333] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=40695 PROTO=2 [ 168.736049] eth0: no IPv6 routers present [ 183.572472] r8169 0000:03:07.0: eth0: link down [ 183.572490] r8169 0000:03:07.0: eth0: link down [ 183.572934] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [ 185.204801] r8169 0000:03:07.0: eth0: link up [ 185.205005] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready [ 3620.680451] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 3621.068431] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 3624.912973] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=9118 PROTO=2 [ 3631.088069] eth0: no IPv6 routers present [ 3703.062980] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 3703.465330] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=9210 PROTO=2 [ 3828.062951] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 3833.617772] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=9749 PROTO=2 [ 3953.062920] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 3955.675129] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.10 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=15983 PROTO=2 [ 4078.062922] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 4078.386319] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.10 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=15997 PROTO=2 [ 4203.062899] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 4203.559241] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.10 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=16011 PROTO=2 [ 4328.062833] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 4328.930922] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.10 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=16027 PROTO=2 [ 4453.062811] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 4453.950224] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.10 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=16039 PROTO=2 [ 4578.062742] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 4580.626432] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=13738 PROTO=2 [ 4703.062704] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 4706.310170] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=15942 PROTO=2 [ 4828.062707] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 4832.174324] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=16505 PROTO=2 [ 4953.062628] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 4961.469282] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.10 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=16090 PROTO=2 [ 5078.062552] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 5080.776462] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=17239 PROTO=2 [ 5203.070394] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 5205.358134] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=17665 PROTO=2 [ 5328.070401] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 5330.651139] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=19090 PROTO=2 [ 5453.072279] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 5457.085433] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.10 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=16137 PROTO=2 [ 5578.074492] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 5582.359006] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.10 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=16150 PROTO=2 [ 5703.074410] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 5705.070122] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.10 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=16163 PROTO=2 [ 5828.074387] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED][BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 5835.319941] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED][BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=23298 PROTO=2 [ 5953.074429] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED][BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0xC0 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 [ 5961.925481] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=[BLANKED][BLANKED]--- SRC=192.168.0.5 DST=224.0.0.251 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=24261 PROTO=2 doug@ubuntu:/sam$ lspci -nnk |grep -iA2 eth 03:07.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8169 PCI Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8169] (rev 10) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device [1043:11e5] Kernel driver in use: r8169 doug@ubuntu:/sam$ route -n Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 1000 0 0 eth0 192.168.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 1 0 0 eth0 doug@ubuntu:/sam$ nm-tool NetworkManager Tool State: connected (global) - Device: eth0 [Ifupdown (eth0)] ---------------------------------------------- Type: Wired Driver: r8169 State: connected Default: yes HW Address: [BLANKED] Capabilities: Carrier Detect: yes Speed: 100 Mb/s Wired Properties Carrier: on IPv4 Settings: Address: 192.168.0.7 Prefix: 24 (255.255.255.0) Gateway: 192.168.0.1 DNS: 192.168.0.1 - Device: wlan0 ---------------------------------------------------------------- Type: 802.11 WiFi Driver: iwl3945 State: disconnected Default: no HW Address: 00:19:D2:72:5A:0C Capabilities: Wireless Properties WEP Encryption: yes WPA Encryption: yes WPA2 Encryption: yes Wireless Access Points ATT592: Infra, 30:60:23:76:FE:60, Freq 2437 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 24 WPA WPA2 doug@ubuntu:/sam$ nslookup ubuntu.com ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached doug@ubuntu:/sam$ dig ubuntuforums.org ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> ubuntuforums.org ;; global options: +cmd ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached doug@ubuntu:/sam$ sudo ifconfig eth0 up doug@ubuntu:/sam$ dhcpcd eth0 The program 'dhcpcd' can be found in the following packages: * dhcpcd * dhcpcd5 Try: sudo apt-get install <selected package> doug@ubuntu:/sam$ lspci -k 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel driver in use: agpgart-intel 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1252 Kernel driver in use: i915 Kernel modules: intelfb, i915 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1252 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) Kernel driver in use: pcieport Kernel modules: shpchp 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) Kernel driver in use: pcieport Kernel modules: shpchp 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd 00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd 00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd 00:1d.3 USB controller: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd 00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel modules: leds-ss4200, iTCO_wdt, intel-rng 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel driver in use: ata_piix 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family SMBus Controller (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel modules: i2c-i801 02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02) Subsystem: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection Kernel driver in use: iwl3945 Kernel modules: iwl3945 03:01.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev b3) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel driver in use: yenta_cardbus Kernel modules: yenta_socket 03:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C552 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 08) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel driver in use: firewire_ohci Kernel modules: firewire-ohci 03:01.2 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 17) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel driver in use: sdhci-pci Kernel modules: sdhci-pci 03:01.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 08) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1297 Kernel driver in use: r592 Kernel modules: r592 03:07.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8169 PCI Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 11e5 Kernel driver in use: r8169 Kernel modules: r8169 doug@ubuntu:/sam$ Things I have tried: sudo start network-manager: no help gksudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces changed line to iface eth0 inet dhcp: no help gksudo gedit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf, I changed managed=false to managed=true. Then sudo service network-manager restart: no help: network is unreachable sudo pkill -9 NetworkManager: no help gksudo gedit /etc/resolve.conf added line nameseriver 8.8.8.8: no help I know very little about networking; to date this has simply worked. Thanks for your help! :- Doug.

  Read the article

• Scrum in 5 Minutes

  - by Stephen.Walther

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

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 111 112 113 114 115 116  | Next Page >