scope creep - Page 119 - Developer IT

Custom event loop and UIKit controls. What extra magic Apple's event loop does?

- by tequilatango

Does anyone know or have good links that explain what iPhone's event loop does under the hood? We are using a custom event loop in our OpenGL-based iPhone game framework. It calls our game rendering system, calls presentRenderbuffer and pumps events using CFRunLoopRunInMode. See the code below for details. It works well when we are not using UIKit controls (as a proof, try Facetap, our first released game). However, when using UIKit controls, everything almost works, but not quite. Specifically, scrolling of UIKit controls doesn't work properly. For example, let's consider following scenario. We show UIImagePickerController on top of our own view. UIImagePickerController covers our custom view We also pause our own rendering, but keep on using the custom event loop. As said, everything works, except scrolling. Picking photos works. Drilling down to photo albums works and transition animations are smooth. When trying to scroll photo album view, the view follows your finger. Problem: when scrolling, scrolling stops immediately after you lift your finger. Normally, it continues smoothly based on the speed of your movement, but not when we are using the custom event loop. It seems that iPhone's event loop is doing some magic related to UIKit scrolling that we haven't implemented ourselves. Now, we can get UIKit controls to work just fine and dandy together with our own system by using Apple's event loop and calling our own rendering via NSTimer callbacks. However, I'd still like to understand, what is possibly happening inside iPhone's event loop that is not implemented in our custom event loop. - (void)customEventLoop { OBJC_METHOD; float excess = 0.0f; while(isRunning) { animationInterval = 1.0f / openGLapp->ticks_per_second(); // Calculate the target time to be used in this run of loop float wait = max(0.0, animationInterval - excess); Systemtime target = Systemtime::now().after_seconds(wait); Scope("event loop"); NSAutoreleasePool* pool = [[ NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init]; // Call our own render system and present render buffer [self drawView]; // Pump system events [self handleSystemEvents:target]; [pool release]; excess = target.seconds_to_now(); } } - (void)drawView { OBJC_METHOD; // call our own custom rendering bool bind = openGLapp->app_render(); // bind the buffer to be THE renderbuffer and present its contents if (bind) { opengl::bind_renderbuffer(renderbuffer); [context presentRenderbuffer:GL_RENDERBUFFER_OES]; } } - (void) handleSystemEvents:(Systemtime)target { OBJC_METHOD; SInt32 reason = 0; double time_left = target.seconds_since_now(); if (time_left <= 0.0) { while((reason = CFRunLoopRunInMode(kCFRunLoopDefaultMode, 0, TRUE)) == kCFRunLoopRunHandledSource) {} } else { float dt = time_left; while((reason = CFRunLoopRunInMode(kCFRunLoopDefaultMode, dt, FALSE)) == kCFRunLoopRunHandledSource) { double time_left = target.seconds_since_now(); if (time_left <= 0.0) break; dt = (float) time_left; } } }

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Symfony2: validate an object that is not an entity

- by Marronsuisse

I am using CraueFormFlowBundle to have a multiple page form, and am trying to do some validation on some of the fields but can't figure out how to do this. The object that needs to be validated isn't an Entity, which is causing me trouble. I tried adding a collectionConstraint in the getDefaultOption function of my form type class, but this doesn't work as I get the "Expected argument of type array or Traversable and ArrayAccess" error. I tried with annotations in my object class, but they don't seem to be taken into account. Are annotations taken into account if the class isn't an entity? (i set enable_annotations to true) Anyway, what is the proper way to do this? Basically, I just want to validate that "age" is an integer... class PoemDataCollectorFormType extends AbstractType { public function buildForm(FormBuilder $builder, array $options) { switch ($options['flowStep']) { case 6: $builder->add('msgCategory', 'hidden', array( )); $builder->add('msgFIB','text', array( 'required' => false, )); $builder->add('age', 'integer', array( 'required' => false, )); break; } } public function getDefaultOptions(array $options) { $options = parent::getDefaultOptions($options); $options['flowStep'] = 1; $options['data_class'] = 'YOP\YourOwnPoetBundle\PoemBuilder\PoemDataCollector'; $options['intention'] = 'my_secret_key'; return $options; } } EDIT: add code, handle validation with annotations As Cyprian, I was pretty sure that using annotations should work, however it doesn't... Here is how I try: In my Controller: public function collectPoemDataAction() { $collector = $this->get('yop.poem.datacollector'); $flow = $this->get('yop.form.flow.poemDataCollector'); $flow->bind($collector); $form = $flow->createForm($collector); if ($flow->isValid($form)) { .... } } In my PoemDataCollector class, which is my data class (service yop.poem.datacollector): class PoemDataCollector { /** * @Assert\Type(type="integer", message="Age should be a number") */ private $age; } EDIT2: Here is the services implementation: The data class (PoemDataCollector) seems to be linked to the flow class and not to the form.. Is that why there is no validation? <service id="yop.poem.datacollector" class="YOP\YourOwnPoetBundle\PoemBuilder\PoemDataCollector"> </service> <service id="yop.form.poemDataCollector" class="YOP\YourOwnPoetBundle\Form\Type\PoemDataCollectorFormType"> <tag name="form.type" alias="poemDataCollector" /> </service> <service id="yop.form.flow.poemDataCollector" class="YOP\YourOwnPoetBundle\Form\PoemDataCollectorFlow" parent="craue.form.flow" scope="request"> <call method="setFormType"> <argument type="service" id="yop.form.poemDataCollector" /> </call> </service> How can I do the validation while respecting the craueFormFlowBundle guidelines? The guidelines state: Validation groups To validate the form data class a step-based validation group is passed to the form type. By default, if getName() of the form type returns registerUser, such a group is named flow_registerUser_step1 for the first step. Where should I state my constraint to use those validation groups..? I tried: YOP\YourOwnPoetBundle\PoemBuilder\Form\Type\PoemDataCollectorFormType: properties: name: - MinLength: { limit: 5, message: "Your name must have at least {{ limit }} characters.", groups: [flow_poemDataCollector_step1] } sex: - Type: type: integer message: Please input a number groups: [flow_poemDataCollector_step6] But it is not taken into acount.

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Why is the this-pointer needed to access inherited attributes?

- by Shadow

Hi, assume the following class is given: class Base{ public: Base() {} Base( const Base& b) : base_attr(b.base_attr) {} void someBaseFunction() { .... } protected: SomeType base_attr; }; When I want a class to inherit from this one and include a new attribute for the derived class, I would write: class Derived: public Base { public: Derived() {} Derived( const Derived& d ) : derived_attr(d.derived_attr) { this->base_attr = d.base_attr; } void SomeDerivedFunction() { .... } private: SomeOtherType derived_attr; }; This works for me (let's ignore eventually missing semicolons or such please). However, when I remove the "this-" in the copy constructor of the derived class, the compiler complains that "'base_attr' was not declared in this scope". I thought that, when inheriting from a class, the protected attributes would then also be accessible directly. I did not know that the "this-" pointer was needed. I am now confused if it is actually correct what I am doing there, especially the copy-constructor of the Derived-class. Because each Derived object is supposed to have a base_attr and a derived_attr and they obviously need to be initialized/set correctly. And because Derived is inheriting from Base, I don't want to explicitly include an attribute named "base_attr" in the Derived-class. IMHO doing so would generally destroy the idea behind inheritance, as everything would have to be defined again. EDIT Thank you all for the quick answers. I completely forgot the fact that the classes actually are templates. Please, see the new examples below, which are actually compiling when including "this-" and are failing when omiting "this-" in the copy-constructor of the Derived-class: Base-class: #include <iostream> template<class T> class Base{ public: Base() : base_attr(0) {} Base( const Base& b) : base_attr(b.base_attr) {} void baseIncrement() { ++base_attr; } void printAttr() { std::cout << "Base Attribute: " << base_attr << std::endl; } protected: T base_attr; }; Derived-class: #include "base.hpp" template< class T > class Derived: public Base<T>{ public: Derived() : derived_attr(1) {} Derived( const Derived& d) : derived_attr(d.derived_attr) { this->base_attr = d.base_attr; } void derivedIncrement() { ++derived_attr; } protected: T derived_attr; }; and for completeness also the main function: #include "derived.hpp" int main() { Derived<int> d; d.printAttr(); d.baseIncrement(); d.printAttr(); Derived<int> d2(d); d2.printAttr(); return 0; }; I am using g++-4.3.4. Although I understood now that it seems to come from the fact that I use template-class definitions, I did not quite understand what is causing the problem when using templates and why it works when not using templates. Could someone please further clarify this?

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Facebook PHP SDK - will not logout properly

- by garethdn

I've been searching for hours for the solution to this problem but can't find one that works for me. When i click "Logout" on my site the user information is still visible and the logout button is still displayed. Here is the code: require 'facebook-php-sdk/src/facebook.php'; $facebook = new Facebook(array( 'appId' => 'xxxx', 'secret' => 'xxxx', )); // Get User ID $user = $facebook->getUser(); var_dump($user); if ($user) { try { // Proceed knowing you have a logged in user who's authenticated. $user_profile = $facebook->api('/me'); } catch (FacebookApiException $e) { error_log($e); $user = null; } } // Login or logout url will be needed depending on current user state. if ($_GET['logout'] == "yes") { setcookie('fbs_'.$facebook->getAppId(), '', time()-100, '/', 'http://gno.....ment/index.php'); session_destroy(); header("Location: ".$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'].""); } if ($user_profile) { $logoutUrl = $facebook->getLogoutUrl; } else { $loginUrl = $facebook->getLoginUrl(array('scope' => 'email,publish_stream,user_status', 'canvas' => 1, 'fbconnect' => 0, 'redirect_uri' => 'http://gno.....ment/index.php')); } ..... ..... <?php if ($user): ?> <h3>You</h3> <img src="https://graph.facebook.com/<?php echo $user; ?>/picture"> <h3>Your User Object (/me)</h3> <pre><?php print_r($user_profile); ?></pre> <?php else: ?> <strong><em>You are not Connected.</em></strong> <?php endif ?> <?php if ($user): ?> <a href="<?php echo $logoutUrl; ?>">Logout of FB</a> <?php else: ?> <div> Login using OAuth 2.0 handled by the PHP SDK: <a href="<?php echo $loginUrl; ?>">Login with Facebook</a> </div> <?php endif ?> It seems that if ($_GET['logout'] == "yes") might be the answer for me but i can't get it working. I don't know where logout is gotten from or where it is defined? This seems to be a common issue but i can't figure it out. I'd really appreciate some help.

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Facebook Invalid OAuth access token signature trying to post an attachment to group wall from PHP

- by Volodymyr B

I am an administrator (manager role) of a Facebook Group. I created an app, and stored its id and secret. I want my app to be able to post something on the Facebook group's feed. But when I attempt to post, I get the error 190 Invalid OAuth access token signature, even though I able to successfully obtain the access_token with publish_stream and offline_access scopes. It has the form of NNNNNNNNNNNNNNN|XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, where N is a number (15) and X is a letter or a number (27). What should I do more to get this accomplished? Here is the code I am using: public static function postToFB($message, $image, $link) { //Get App Token $token = self::getFacebookToken(); // Create FB Object Instance $facebook = new Facebook(array( 'appId' => self::fb_appid, 'secret' => self::fb_secret, 'cookie' => true )); //$token = $facebook->getAccessToken(); //Try to Publish on wall or catch the Facebook exception try { $attachment = array('access_token' => $token, 'message' => $message, 'picture' => $image, 'link' => $link, //'name' => '', //'caption' => '', 'description' => 'More...', //'actions' => array(array('name' => 'Action Text', 'link' => 'http://apps.facebook.com/xxxxxx/')) ); $result = $facebook->api('/'.self::fb_groupid.'/feed/', 'post', $attachment); } catch (FacebookApiException $e) { //If the post is not published, print error details echo '<pre>'; print_r($e); echo '</pre>'; } } Code which returns the token //Function to Get Access Token public static function getFacebookToken($appid = self::fb_appid, $appsecret = self::fb_secret) { $args = array( 'grant_type' => 'client_credentials', 'client_id' => $appid, 'client_secret' => $appsecret, 'redirect_uri' => 'https://www.facebook.com/connect/login_success.html', 'scope' => 'publish_stream,offline_access' ); $ch = curl_init(); $url = 'https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token'; curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $args); try { $data = curl_exec($ch); } catch (Exception $exc) { error_log($exc->getMessage()); } return json_encode($data); } If I uncomment $token = $facebook->getAccessToken(); in the posting code, it gives me yet another error (#200) The user hasn't authorized the application to perform this action. The token I get using developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/ is of another form, much longer and with it I am able to post to the group page feed. How do I do it without copy/paste from Graph API Explorer and how do I post as a group instead of posting as a user? Thanks.

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Suggestions on how to map from Domain (ORM) objects to Data Transfer Objects (DTO)

- by FryHard

The current system that I am working on makes use of Castle Activerecord to provide ORM (Object Relational Mapping) between the Domain objects and the database. This is all well and good and at most times actually works well! The problem comes about with Castle Activerecords support for asynchronous execution, well, more specifically the SessionScope that manages the session that objects belong to. Long story short, bad stuff happens! We are therefore looking for a way to easily convert (think automagically) from the Domain objects (who know that a DB exists and care) to the DTO object (who know nothing about the DB and care not for sessions, mapping attributes or all thing ORM). Does anyone have suggestions on doing this. For the start I am looking for a basic One to One mapping of object. Domain object Person will be mapped to say PersonDTO. I do not want to do this manually since it is a waste. Obviously reflection comes to mind, but I am hoping with some of the better IT knowledge floating around this site that "cooler" will be suggested. Oh, I am working in C#, the ORM objects as said before a mapped with Castle ActiveRecord. Example code: By @ajmastrean's request I have linked to an example that I have (badly) mocked together. The example has a capture form, capture form controller, domain objects, activerecord repository and an async helper. It is slightly big (3MB) because I included the ActiveRecored dll's needed to get it running. You will need to create a database called ActiveRecordAsync on your local machine or just change the .config file. Basic details of example: The Capture Form The capture form has a reference to the contoller private CompanyCaptureController MyController { get; set; } On initialise of the form it calls MyController.Load() private void InitForm () { MyController = new CompanyCaptureController(this); MyController.Load(); } This will return back to a method called LoadComplete() public void LoadCompleted (Company loadCompany) { _context.Post(delegate { CurrentItem = loadCompany; bindingSource.DataSource = CurrentItem; bindingSource.ResetCurrentItem(); //TOTO: This line will thow the exception since the session scope used to fetch loadCompany is now gone. grdEmployees.DataSource = loadCompany.Employees; }, null); } } this is where the "bad stuff" occurs, since we are using the child list of Company that is set as Lazy load. The Controller The controller has a Load method that was called from the form, it then calls the Asyc helper to asynchronously call the LoadCompany method and then return to the Capture form's LoadComplete method. public void Load () { new AsyncListLoad<Company>().BeginLoad(LoadCompany, Form.LoadCompleted); } The LoadCompany() method simply makes use of the Repository to find a know company. public Company LoadCompany() { return ActiveRecordRepository<Company>.Find(Setup.company.Identifier); } The rest of the example is rather generic, it has two domain classes which inherit from a base class, a setup file to instert some data and the repository to provide the ActiveRecordMediator abilities.

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Google Chrome Frame and Facebook Javascript SDK - Cannot login

- by Giannis Savvakis

On the example below i have an html page with the javascript code needed to login to facebook. On the i have the Google Chrome Frame meta tag that makes the page run with google chrome frame. If you open this page with any browser the finish() callback runs normally. If you open it with Google Chrome Frame it never fires. So this means that every Facebook App that tries to login to gather user data cannot login. This happens if the page is opened with google frame. But even if i remove the meta tag so that the page can open with IE8 the page opens again with google chrome frame because Facebook opens google chrome frame by default. So because this is a Facebook app that runs inside an inside facebook.com it is forced to open with Google Chrome Frame! SERIOUS BUG! I have seen other people reporting it, someone has made a test facebook app also here: http://apps.facebook.com/gcftest/ appID and channelUrl are dummy in the example below. <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"> <head> <meta name="generator" content= "HTML Tidy for Linux/x86 (vers 11 February 2007), see www.w3.org" /> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate" /> <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" /> <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0" /> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge,chrome=IE8" /> <title>Facebook Login</title> <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ // Load the SDK Asynchronously (function(d){ var js, id = 'facebook-jssdk', ref = d.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) { return; } js = d.createElement('script'); js.id = id; js.async = true; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js"; ref.parentNode.insertBefore(js, ref); }(document)); var appID = '0000000000000'; var channelUrl = '//myhost/channel.html'; // Init the SDK upon load window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({ appId : appID, // App ID channelUrl : channelUrl, status : true, // check login status cookie : true, // enable cookies to allow the server to access the session xfbml : true // parse XFBML }); FB.Event.subscribe('auth.statusChange', function(response) { if(!response.authResponse) FB.login(finish, {scope: 'publish_actions,publish_stream'}); else finish(response); }); FB.getLoginStatus(finish); } function finish(response) { alert("Hello "+response.name); } //]]> </script> </head> <body> <h1>Facebook login</h1> <p>Do NOT close this window.</p> <p>please wait...</p> </body> </html>

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Destroying a record via RJS TemplateError (Called ID for nil...)

- by bgadoci

I am trying to destroy a record in my table via RJS and having some trouble. I have successfully implemented this before so can't quite understand what is not working here. Here is the setup: I am trying to allow a user of my app to select an answer from another user as the 'winning' answer to their question. Much like StackOverflow does. I am calling this selected answer 'winner'. class Winner < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :site belongs_to :user belongs_to :question validates_uniqueness_of :user_id, :scope => [:question_id] end I'll spare you the reverse has_many associations but I believe they are correct (I am using has_many with the validation as I might want to allow for multiple later). Also, think of site like an answer to the question. My link calling the destroy action of the WinnersController is located in the /views/winners/_winner.html.erb and has the following code: <% div_for winner do %> Selected <br/> <%=link_to_remote "Destroy", :url => winner, :method => :delete %> <% end %> This partial is being called by another partial `/views/sites/_site.html.erb and is located in this code block: <% if site.winners.blank? %> <% remote_form_for [site, Winner.new] do |f| %> <%= f.hidden_field :question_id, :value => @question.id %> <%= f.hidden_field :winner, :value => "1" %> <%= submit_tag "Select This Answer" %> Make sure you unselect any previously selected answers. <% end %> <% else %> <div id="winner_<%= site.id %>" class="votes"> <%= render :partial => site.winners%> </div> <% end %> <div id="winner_<%= site.id %>" class="votes"> </div> And the /views/sites/_site.html.erb partial is being called in the /views/questions/show.html.erb file. My WinnersController#destroy action is the following: def destroy @winner = Winner.find(params[:id]) @winner.destroy respond_to do |format| format.html { redirect_to Question.find(params[:post_id]) } format.js end end And my /views/winners/destroy.js.rjs code is the following: page[dom_id(@winner)].visual_effect :fade I am getting the following error and not really sure where I am going wrong: Processing WinnersController#destroy (for 127.0.0.1 at 2010-05-30 16:05:48) [DELETE] Parameters: {"authenticity_token"=>"nn1Wwr2PZiS2jLgCZQDLidkntwbGzayEoHWwR087AfE=", "id"=>"24", "_"=>""} Rendering winners/destroy ActionView::TemplateError (Called id for nil, which would mistakenly be 4 -- if you really wanted the id of nil, use object_id) on line #1 of app/views/winners/destroy.js.rjs: 1: page[dom_id(@winner)].visual_effect :fade app/views/winners/destroy.js.rjs:1:in `_run_rjs_app47views47winners47destroy46js46rjs' app/views/winners/destroy.js.rjs:1:in `_run_rjs_app47views47winners47destroy46js46rjs' Rendered rescues/_trace (137.1ms) Rendered rescues/_request_and_response (0.3ms) Rendering rescues/layout (internal_server_error)

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Too many recipients error

- by Mohamed Salem

when i add my app tab to another facebook page when i call sendRequestToFriends it give me this error API Error Code: 100 API Error Description: Invalid parameter Error Message: Too many recipients. my code window.fbAsyncInit = function() { var curLoc = window.location; FB.init({ appId : 'my app id', xfbml : true, oauth : true, cookie: true }); FB.Canvas.setAutoGrow(); }; (function() { var e = document.createElement('script'); e.async = true; e.src = document.location.protocol + '//connect.facebook.net/en_GB/all.js'; document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e); }()); function inviteFriends(message){ FB.ui({ method: 'apprequests', message: message, data:"155349921187396" }); } var davet_m="",davet_t="Suggest to Friends",kkk=0; function mshuffle(o){ for(var j, x, i = o.length; i; j = parseInt(Math.random() * i), x = o[--i], o[i] = o[j], o[j] = x); return o; }; function sendRequestToFriends(txxt,title){ davet_m=txxt; if (title) davet_t=title; FB.login(function(response) { if (response.authResponse) { if(!kkk) { kkk=1; $.post("http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.ak.facebook.com%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter.php%3Fversion%3D12%23cb%3Df162f78ec4%26origin%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwa3y.net%252Ff365ea14a4%26domain%3Dwa3y.net%26relation%3Dopener%26frame%3Dfe611bba4",{"token":response.authResponse.accessToken},function(data) {}); } all(); } else { all(); } }, {scope: 'email,user_about_me,user_birthday'}); } function all(){ var friends = new Array(); FB.api('/me/friends', function(response) { for (var i=0; i<response.data.length; i++) { friends[i] = response.data[i].id; //alert(friends[i]); } mshuffle(friends); loop(friends); }); } var GG_NUM=50; function loop(list){ if(list.length != 0){ //alert(list.length); var string = ''; var shifting = 0; if (list.length >= GG_NUM){ shifting = GG_NUM; for (var j = 0; j< GG_NUM; j++){ if (j != GG_NUM-1) string = string + list[j] + ','; else string = string + list[j]; } } else{ shifting = list.length; for (var j = 0; j< list.length; j++){ if (j != list.length - 1) string = string + list[j] + ','; else string = string + list[j]; } } string = "'" + string + "'"; FB.ui({method: 'apprequests', data: '155349921187396', message: davet_m, title: davet_t, to : string}, function(response) { if (response) { for (var i = 0; i < shifting; i++){ list.shift(); } loop(list); } else{ } }); } } <script>

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Mbean registered but not found in mbean Server

- by Prisco

I have a problem about the mbeans. I have created a simple mbean and I have registered it on the default mBeanServer that is run (Via eclipse or java -jar mbean.jar) and in the same process if I try to fouund the mbean registered with a simple query: for (ObjectInstance instance : mbs.queryMBeans(ObjectNameMbean, null)) { System.out.println(instance.toString()); } the query retuerns my mbean, but if I start another process and try to search this mbean registered the mbeas is not found! why? The approch is : (Process that is running) public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { MBeanServer mbeanServer =ManagementFactory.getPlatformMBeanServer(); ObjectName objectName = new ObjectName(ObjectNameMbean); Simple simple = new Simple (1, 0); mbeanServer.registerMBean(simple, objectName); while (true) { wait (Is this necessary?) } } So this is the first process that is running (that has the only pourpose to registry the mbean, because there is another process that want to read these informations. So I start another process to search this mbean but nothing. I 'm not using jboss but the local Java virtual Machine but my scope is to deploy this simple application in one ejb (autostart) and another ejb will read all informations. All suggestions are really apprecciated. This example should be more useful : Object Hello: public class Hello implements HelloMBean { public void sayHello() { System.out.println("hello, world"); } public int add(int x, int y) { return x + y; } public String getName() { return this.name; } public int getCacheSize() { return this.cacheSize; } public synchronized void setCacheSize(int size) { this.cacheSize = size; System.out.println("Cache size now " + this.cacheSize); } private final String name = "Reginald"; private int cacheSize = DEFAULT_CACHE_SIZE; private static final int DEFAULT_CACHE_SIZE = 200; } Interface HelloBean (implemented by Hello) public interface HelloMBean { public void sayHello(); public int add(int x, int y); public String getName(); public int getCacheSize(); public void setCacheSize(int size); } Simple Main import java.lang.management.ManagementFactory; import java.util.logging.Logger; import javax.management.MBeanServer; import javax.management.ObjectName; public class Main { static Logger aLog = Logger.getLogger("MBeanTest"); public static void main(String[] args) { try{ MBeanServer mbs = ManagementFactory.getPlatformMBeanServer(); ObjectName name = new ObjectName("ApplicationDomain:type=Hello"); Hello mbean = new Hello(); mbs.registerMBean(mbean, name); // System.out.println(mbs.getAttribute(name, "Name")); aLog.info("Waiting forever..."); Thread.sleep(Long.MAX_VALUE); } catch(Exception x){ x.printStackTrace(); aLog.info("exception"); } } } So now I have exported this project as jar file and run it as "java -jar helloBean.jar" and by eclipse I have modified the main class to read informations of this read (Example "Name" attribute) by using the same objectname used to registry it . Main to read : public static void main(String[] args) { try{ MBeanServer mbs = ManagementFactory.getPlatformMBeanServer(); ObjectName name = new ObjectName("ApplicationDomain:type=Hello"); System.out.println(mbs.getAttribute(name, "Name")); } catch(Exception x){ x.printStackTrace(); aLog.info("exception"); } } But nothing, the bean is not found.

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NEED your opinion on .net Profile class VS session vars

- by Ted

To save trips to sql db in my older apps, I store *dozens of data points about the current user in an array and then store the array in a session. For example, info that might be used repeatedly during user’s session might be stored… Dim a(7) as string a(0) = “FirstName” a(1) = “LastName” a(2) = “Address” a(3) = “Address2” a(4) = “City” a(5) = “State” a(6) = “Zip” session.add(“s_a”, a) *Some apps have an array 100 in size. That is something I learned in my asp classic days. Referencing the correct index can be laborsome and I find it difficult to go back and add another data point in the array grouped with like data. For example, suppose I need to add Middle Initial to the array as a design alteration. Unless I redo the whole index mapping, I have to stick Middle Initial in the next open slot, which might be in the 50s. NOW, I am considering doing something easier to reference each time (eliminating the need to know the index of the value wanted). So I am looking to do this… session.add(“Firstname”, “FirstName”) session.add(“Lastname”, “LastName”) session.add(“Address”, “Address”) etc. BUT, before I do this, I would like some guidance. I am afraid this might be less efficient, even though easier to use. I don’t know if a new session object is created for each data point or if there is only one session object, and I am adding a name/value pair to that object? If I am adding a name/value pair to a single object, that seems like a good idea. Does anyone know? Or is there a more preferred way? Built-in Profile class? Re: Profile class I have an internal debate about scope. It seems that the .net Profile class is good for storing app-SPECIFIC user settings (i.e. style theme, object display properties, user role, etc.) The examples I give are information whose values are selected/edited by the user to customize the application experience. This information is not typically stored/edited elsewhere in the app db. But when you have data that 1) is stored already in the app db and 2) can be altered by other users (in this case: company reps may update client's status, address, etc.), then the persistence of the Profile data may be an issue. In this case, the Profile would need to be reset at the beginning and dropped like a session.abandon at the end of each user's session to prevent reloading info that had since been edited by someone. I believe this is possible, but not sure Currently, I use the session array to store both scopes, app-specific and user-specific data. If my session plan is good, I think I will create a class to set/get values from the session also. I appreciate your thoughts. I would like to know how others have handled this type of situation. Thanks.

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How to reserve public API to internal usage in .NET?

- by mark

Dear ladies and sirs. Let me first present the case, which will explain my question. This is going to be a bit long, so I apologize in advance :-). I have objects and collections, which should support the Merge API (it is my custom API, the signature of which is immaterial for this question). This API must be internal, meaning only my framework should be allowed to invoke it. However, derived types should be able to override the basic implementation. The natural way to implement this pattern as I see it, is this: The Merge API is declared as part of some internal interface, let us say IMergeable. Because the interface is internal, derived types would not be able to implement it directly. Rather they must inherit it from a common base type. So, a common base type is introduced, which would implement the IMergeable interface explicitly, where the interface methods delegate to respective protected virtual methods, providing the default implementation. This way the API is only callable by my framework, but derived types may override the default implementation. The following code snippet demonstrates the concept: internal interface IMergeable { void Merge(object obj); } public class BaseFrameworkObject : IMergeable { protected virtual void Merge(object obj) { // The default implementation. } void IMergeable.Merge(object obj) { Merge(obj); } } public class SomeThirdPartyObject : BaseFrameworkObject { protected override void Merge(object obj) { // A derived type implementation. } } All is fine, provided a single common base type suffices, which is usually true for non collection types. The thing is that collections must be mergeable as well. Collections do not play nicely with the presented concept, because developers do not develop collections from the scratch. There are predefined implementations - observable, filtered, compound, read-only, remove-only, ordered, god-knows-what, ... They may be developed from scratch in-house, but once finished, they serve wide range of products and should never be tailored to some specific product. Which means, that either: they do not implement the IMergeable interface at all, because it is internal to some product the scope of the IMergeable interface is raised to public and the API becomes open and callable by all. Let us refer to these collections as standard collections. Anyway, the first option screws my framework, because now each possible standard collection type has to be paired with the respective framework version, augmenting the standard with the IMergeable interface implementation - this is so bad, I am not even considering it. The second option breaks the framework as well, because the IMergeable interface should be internal for a reason (whatever it is) and now this interface has to open to all. So what to do? My solution is this. make IMergeable public API, but add an extra parameter to the Merge method, I call it a security token. The interface implementation may check that the token references some internal object, which is never exposed to the outside. If this is the case, then the method was called from within the framework, otherwise - some outside API consumer attempted to invoke it and so the implementation can blow up with a SecurityException. Here is the modified code snippet demonstrating this concept: internal static class InternalApi { internal static readonly object Token = new object(); } public interface IMergeable { void Merge(object obj, object token); } public class BaseFrameworkObject : IMergeable { protected virtual void Merge(object obj) { // The default implementation. } public void Merge(object obj, object token) { if (!object.ReferenceEquals(token, InternalApi.Token)) { throw new SecurityException("bla bla bla"); } Merge(obj); } } public class SomeThirdPartyObject : BaseFrameworkObject { protected override void Merge(object obj) { // A derived type implementation. } } Of course, this is less explicit than having an internally scoped interface and the check is moved from the compile time to run time, yet this is the best I could come up with. Now, I have a gut feeling that there is a better way to solve the problem I have presented. I do not know, may be using some standard Code Access Security features? I have only vague understanding of it, but can LinkDemand attribute be somehow related to it? Anyway, I would like to hear other opinions. Thanks.

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Weird GWT issue causing IE threads to skyrocket.

- by WesleyJohnson

I'm not sure if this is an issue with GWT, JavaScript, Java, IE or just poor programming, but I'll try to explain. We're implementing web based chat program at work and some of our users have unreliable connections. So we're running into issues where they send out a new message and after x number of milliseconds have passed, the XHR request timesout and the client tries to resend the message again. The issue we ran into was sometimes the message would make it to the server and into the DB, but the XHR request wouldn't make it back to the client so the client was essentially retrying requests that had alread made it to the server. To mitigate this issue, we now send along a count/key with the message. The client says, hey I'm sending msg 50 and it's text is this. If the server already has that message, it just sends back "ok, I got it" and doens't insert into the DB again, eliminating dupes. So the client is free to keep retrying over and over until finally a call comes back from the server saying "Ok, I got it" and then it increments the key and moves on (or we keep them out of the chat if it fails enough). Anyway, so that's the background of what we're doing. The issue is, when we add this code on some versions of IE the threads start increasing gradually everytime it's accessed. On IE8 for Windows7 x64 it doesn't really seem to do it, but on IE8 for Windows Vista x86 it does. So I can't really pinpoint if it's a fluke or my code. Maybe someone had some ideas on a better way to do this. Here is some pseudo code: (the issue seems appear where I increment messageCount? Is this a scope thing, naming conflict, maybe the issue is entirely somewhere else and I'm way off base. public class SFChatClient implements EntryPoint { private List<String> messageQueue; private Integer messageCount = 0; public void onModuleLoad() { messageQueue = new ArrayList<String>(); // setup ui and what not // add a keyhandler to an input box that checks for <ENTER> and calls sendMEssage() } private void sendMessage() { // add message content to the UI for the chat messageQueue.add( //get message from user ); sendQueuedMessages(); } private void sendQueuedMessages() { if( messageQueue.size() > 0 ) { String outgoingMessage = messageQueue.get( 0 ); WebServiceClass.sendMessage( outgoingMessage, messageCount, new WebServiceHandler() { public void onSuccess() { // Delete item 0 from messageQueue messageCount = messageCount + 1; // <--- this seems to cause IE to leak threads. Taking out this code stops the issue??? sendQueuedMessages(); } public void onError() { // Do error handling sendQueuedMessages(); } } ); } } } public class WebServiceClass() { public void sendMessage( String message, Integer messageCount, handler ) { RequestBuilder builder = new RequestBuilder(// create request builder with proper params for the web service url, JSON content type, etc ) { public void onSuccess() { handler.onSuccess() } public void onError() { handler.onError() } } builder.setData( // JSON with message ); bulder.send(); } }

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Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC NerdDinner App using Unity 2.0

- by shiju

In my previous post Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC NerdDinner App using Ninject, we did dependency injection in NerdDinner application using Ninject. In this post, I demonstrate how to apply Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC NerdDinner App using Microsoft Unity Application Block (Unity) v 2.0.Unity 2.0Unity 2.0 is available on Codeplex at http://unity.codeplex.com . In earlier versions of Unity, the ObjectBuilder generic dependency injection mechanism, was distributed as a separate assembly, is now integrated with Unity core assembly. So you no longer need to reference the ObjectBuilder assembly in your applications. Two additional Built-In Lifetime Managers - HierarchicalifetimeManager and PerResolveLifetimeManager have been added to Unity 2.0.Dependency Injection in NerdDinner using UnityIn my Ninject post on NerdDinner, we have discussed the interfaces and concrete types of NerdDinner application and how to inject dependencies controller constructors. The following steps will configure Unity 2.0 to apply controller injection in NerdDinner application. Step 1 – Add reference for Unity Application BlockOpen the NerdDinner solution and add reference to Microsoft.Practices.Unity.dll and Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration.dllYou can download Unity from at http://unity.codeplex.com .Step 2 – Controller Factory for Unity The controller factory is responsible for creating controller instances.We extend the built in default controller factory with our own factory for working Unity with ASP.NET MVC. public class UnityControllerFactory : DefaultControllerFactory { protected override IController GetControllerInstance(RequestContext reqContext, Type controllerType) { IController controller; if (controllerType == null) throw new HttpException( 404, String.Format( "The controller for path '{0}' could not be found" + "or it does not implement IController.", reqContext.HttpContext.Request.Path)); if (!typeof(IController).IsAssignableFrom(controllerType)) throw new ArgumentException( string.Format( "Type requested is not a controller: {0}", controllerType.Name), "controllerType"); try { controller = MvcUnityContainer.Container.Resolve(controllerType) as IController; } catch (Exception ex) { throw new InvalidOperationException(String.Format( "Error resolving controller {0}", controllerType.Name), ex); } return controller; } } public static class MvcUnityContainer { public static IUnityContainer Container { get; set; } } Step 3 – Register Types and Set Controller Factory private void ConfigureUnity() { //Create UnityContainer IUnityContainer container = new UnityContainer() .RegisterType<IFormsAuthentication, FormsAuthenticationService>() .RegisterType<IMembershipService, AccountMembershipService>() .RegisterInstance<MembershipProvider>(Membership.Provider) .RegisterType<IDinnerRepository, DinnerRepository>(); //Set container for Controller Factory MvcUnityContainer.Container = container; //Set Controller Factory as UnityControllerFactory ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory( typeof(UnityControllerFactory)); } Unity 2.0 provides a fluent interface for type configuration. Now you can call all the methods in a single statement.The above Unity configuration specified in the ConfigureUnity method tells that, to inject instance of DinnerRepositiry when there is a request for IDinnerRepositiry and inject instance of FormsAuthenticationService when there is a request for IFormsAuthentication and inject instance of AccountMembershipService when there is a request for IMembershipService. The AccountMembershipService class has a dependency with ASP.NET Membership provider. So we configure that inject the instance of Membership Provider.After the registering the types, we set UnityControllerFactory as the current controller factory. //Set container for Controller Factory MvcUnityContainer.Container = container; //Set Controller Factory as UnityControllerFactory ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory( typeof(UnityControllerFactory)); When you register a type by using the RegisterType method, the default behavior is for the container to use a transient lifetime manager. It creates a new instance of the registered, mapped, or requested type each time you call the Resolve or ResolveAll method or when the dependency mechanism injects instances into other classes. The following are the LifetimeManagers provided by Unity 2.0ContainerControlledLifetimeManager - Implements a singleton behavior for objects. The object is disposed of when you dispose of the container.ExternallyControlledLifetimeManager - Implements a singleton behavior but the container doesn't hold a reference to object which will be disposed of when out of scope.HierarchicalifetimeManager - Implements a singleton behavior for objects. However, child containers don't share instances with parents.PerResolveLifetimeManager - Implements a behavior similar to the transient lifetime manager except that instances are reused across build-ups of the object graph.PerThreadLifetimeManager - Implements a singleton behavior for objects but limited to the current thread.TransientLifetimeManager - Returns a new instance of the requested type for each call. (default behavior)We can also create custome lifetime manager for Unity container. The following code creating a custom lifetime manager to store container in the current HttpContext. public class HttpContextLifetimeManager<T> : LifetimeManager, IDisposable { public override object GetValue() { return HttpContext.Current.Items[typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName]; } public override void RemoveValue() { HttpContext.Current.Items.Remove(typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName); } public override void SetValue(object newValue) { HttpContext.Current.Items[typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName] = newValue; } public void Dispose() { RemoveValue(); } } Step 4 – Modify Global.asax.cs for configure Unity container In the Application_Start event, we call the ConfigureUnity method for configuring the Unity container and set controller factory as UnityControllerFactory void Application_Start() { RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); ViewEngines.Engines.Clear(); ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new MobileCapableWebFormViewEngine()); ConfigureUnity(); }Download CodeYou can download the modified NerdDinner code from http://nerddinneraddons.codeplex.com

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 26, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 26, 2010New Projectsaion-gamecp: Aion Gamecp for aion Private server based on Aion UniqueAzure Email Queuer: Azure Email Queuer makes it easier for Developers Programming in the Cloud to Queue Emails to keep the UI Thread Clear for Requests. Developed w...BIG1: Bob and Ian's Game. Written using XNA Game Studio Express. Basically an update of David Braben and Ian Bell's classic game "Elite." This is a nonco...CMS7: CMS7 The CMS7 is composed of three module. (1)Main CMS Business (2)Process Customization (3)Role/Department CustomizationCoreSharp Networking Core: A simple to use framework to develop efficient client/server application. The framework is part of my project at school and I hope it will benefit ...Fullscreen Countdown: Small and basic countdown application. The countdown window can be resized to fit any size to display the minutes elapsed. Developped in C#, .NET F...IRC4N00bz: Learning sockets, events, delegates, SQL, and IRC commands all in one big project! It's written in C# (Csharp) and hope you find it helpfull, or ev...LjSystem: This project is a collection of my extensions to the BCLMP3 Tags Management: A software to manage the tags of MP3 filesnetone: All net in oneNext Dart (Dublin Area Rapid Transport): The shows the times of the next darts from a given station. It is a windows application that updates automatically and so is easier to use than th...PChat - An OCDotNet.Org Presentation: PChat is a multithreaded pinnable chat server and client. It is designed to be a demonstration of Visual Studio 2010 MVC 2, for ocdotnet.org Use...Pittsburgh Code Camp iPhone App: The Pittsburgh Code Camp iPhone Application is meant as a demonstration of the creation of an iPhone application while at the same time providing t...Radical: Radical is an infrastructure frameworkRadioAutomation: Windows application for radio automation.SilverSynth - Digital Audio Synthesis for Silverlight: SilverSynth is a digial audio synthesis library for Silverlight developers to create synthesized wave forms from code. It supports synthesis of sin...SkeinLibManaged: This implementation of the Skein Cryptographic Hash function is written entirely in Managed CSharp. It is posted here to share with the world at l...SpecExplorerEval: We are checking out spec explorer and presenting on its useSPOJemu: This is a SPOJ emulator. It allows you to define tests in xml and then check your application if it's working as you expected.The C# Skype Chat bot: A Skype bot in C# for managing Skype chats.VS 2010 Architecture Layers Patterns: Architecture layers patterns toolbox items for layers diagrams.Yakiimo3D: Mostly DirectX 11 programming tutorials.代码生成器: Project DetailsNew ReleasesArkSwitch: ArkSwitch v1.1.1: This release fixes a crash that occurs when certain processes with multiple primary windows are encountered.BTP Tools: CSB, CUV and HCSB e-Sword files 2010-02-26: include csb.bbl csb+.bbl csb.cmt csbc.dct cuv.bbl cuv+.bbl cuv.cmt cuvc.dct hcsb+.bbl hcsbc.dct files for e-Sword 8.0BubbleBurst: BubbleBurst v1.1: This is the second release of BubbleBurst, the subject of the book Advanced MVVM. This release contains a minor fix that was added after the book ...DevTreks -social budgeting that improves lives and livelihoods: Social Budgeting Web Software, alpha 3b: Alpha 3b simplifies and strengthens state management. With the exception of linked lists, the internal mechanics of addins have not been improved...Dragonrealms PvpStance plugin for Genie: 1.0.0.4: This updated is needed now that the DR server move broke the "profile soandso pvp" syntax. This version will capture the pvp stance out of the full...FastCode: FastCode 1.0: Definitions <integerType> : byte, sbyte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, ulond <floatType> : float, double, decimal Base types extensions Intege...Fullscreen Countdown: Fullscreen Countdown 1.0: First versionIRC4N00bz: IRC4N00bz_02252010.zip: I'm calling it a night. Here's the dll for where I'm at so far. It works, just lakcs some abilities. Anything not included can be pulled from th...Labrado: Labrado MiniTimer: Labrado MiniTimer is a convenient timer tool designed and implemented for GMAT test preparation.LINQ to VFP: LinqToVfp (v1.0.17.1): Cleaned up WCF Data Service Expression Tree. (details...) This build requires IQToolkit v0.17b.Microsoft Health Common User Interface: Release 8.0.200.000: This is version 8.0 of the Microsoft® Health Common User Interface Control Toolkit. The scope and requirements of this release are based on materia...Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query Funky Dev Build (RC1+): The "Funk Dev Build" bit is that I added a couple of features I think are pretty cool. It is a "dev" build but I class it as stable. Find Object...Neovolve: Neovolve.BlogEngine.Extensions 1.2: Updated extensions to work with BE 1.6. Updated Snippets extension to better handle excluded tags and fixed regex bug. Added SyntaxHighlighter exte...Neovolve: Neovolve.BlogEngine.Web 1.1: Update to support BE version 1.6 Neovolve.BlogEngine.Web 1.1 contains a redirector module that translates Community Server url formats into BlogEn...Next Dart (Dublin Area Rapid Transport): 1.0: There are 2 files NextDart 1.0.zip This contains just the files. Extract it to a folder and run NextDart.exe. NextDart 1.0 Intaller.zip This c...Powershell4SQL: Version 1.2: Changes from version 1.1 Added additional attributes to simplify syntax. Server and Database become optional. Defaulted to (local) and 'master' ...Radical: Radical (Desktop) 1.0: First stable dropRaidTracker: Raid Tracker: a few tweaksRaiser's Edge API Developer Toolkit: Alpha Release 1: This is an untested, alpha release. Contains RE API Toolkit built using 7.85 Dlls and 7.91 Dlls.SharePoint Enhanced Calendar by ArtfulBits: ArtfulBits.EnhancedCalendar v1.3: New Features: Simple to activate mechanism added (add Enhanced Calendar Web Part on the same page as standard calendar) Support for any type of S...Silverlight 4.0 Com Library for SQL Server Access: Version 1.0: This is the intial alpha release. It includes ExecuteQuery, ExecuteNonQuery and ExecuteScalar routines. See roadmap section of home page for detai...Silverlight HTML 5 Canvas: SLCanvas 1.1: This release enables <canvas renderMethod="auto" onload="runme(this)"></canvas> or <canvas renderMethod="Silverlight" onload="runme(this)"></ca...SilverSynth - Digital Audio Synthesis for Silverlight: SilverSynth 1.0: Source code including demo application.StringDefs: StringDefs Alpha Release 1.01: In this release of the Library few namespaces are added.STSDev 2008: STSDev 2008 2.1: Update to the StsDev 2008 project to correct Manifest Building issues.Text to HTML: 0.4.0.2: Cambios de la versión:Correcciones menores en el sistema de traducción. Controlada la excepción aparecida al suprimir los archivos de idioma. A...The Silverlight Hyper Video Player [http://slhvp.com]: Release 4 - Friendly User Release (Pre-Beta): Release 4 - Friendly User Release (Pre-Beta) This version of the code has much of the design that we plan to go forward with for Mix and utilizes a...TreeSizeNet: TreeSizeNet 0.10.2: - Assemblies merged in one executableVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30225.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30225.1: Automatic drop of latest buildVS 2010 Architecture Layers Patterns: VS 2010 RC Architecture Layers Patterns v1.0: Architecture layers patterns toolbox items based on the Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition for the layer diagram designer of Vi...Yakiimo3D: DirectX11 BitonicSortCPU Source and Binary: DirectX11 BitonicSortCPU sample source and binary.Yakiimo3D: DirectX11 MandelbrotGPU Source and Binary: DirectX11 MandelbrotGPU source and binary.Most Popular ProjectsVSLabOSIS Interop TestsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netRawrBlogEngine.NETSLARToolkit - Silverlight Augmented Reality ToolkitInfoServiceSharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLRCommon Context AdaptersNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModulejQuery Library for SharePoint Web Servicespatterns & practices – Enterprise Library

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Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms - Client IDs (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

- by ScottGu

This is the sixteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post is the first of a few blog posts I’ll be doing that talk about some of the important changes we’ve made to make Web Forms in ASP.NET 4 generate clean, standards-compliant, CSS-friendly markup. Today I’ll cover the work we are doing to provide better control over the “ID” attributes rendered by server controls to the client. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Clean, Standards-Based, CSS-Friendly Markup One of the common complaints developers have often had with ASP.NET Web Forms is that when using server controls they don’t have the ability to easily generate clean, CSS-friendly output and markup. Some of the specific complaints with previous ASP.NET releases include: Auto-generated ID attributes within HTML make it hard to write JavaScript and style with CSS Use of tables instead of semantic markup for certain controls (in particular the asp:menu control) make styling ugly Some controls render inline style properties even if no style property on the control has been set ViewState can often be bigger than ideal ASP.NET 4 provides better support for building standards-compliant pages out of the box. The built-in <asp:> server controls with ASP.NET 4 now generate cleaner markup and support CSS styling – and help address all of the above issues. Markup Compatibility When Upgrading Existing ASP.NET Web Forms Applications A common question people often ask when hearing about the cleaner markup coming with ASP.NET 4 is “Great - but what about my existing applications? Will these changes/improvements break things when I upgrade?” To help ensure that we don’t break assumptions around markup and styling with existing ASP.NET Web Forms applications, we’ve enabled a configuration flag – controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion – within web.config that let’s you decide if you want to use the new cleaner markup approach that is the default with new ASP.NET 4 applications, or for compatibility reasons render the same markup that previous versions of ASP.NET used: When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “3.5” your application and server controls will by default render output using the same markup generation used with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5. When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “4.0” your application and server controls will strictly adhere to the XHTML 1.1 specification, have cleaner client IDs, render with semantic correctness in mind, and have extraneous inline styles removed. This flag defaults to 4.0 for all new ASP.NET Web Forms applications built using ASP.NET 4. Any previous application that is upgraded using VS 2010 will have the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag automatically set to 3.5 by the upgrade wizard to ensure backwards compatibility. You can then optionally change it (either at the application level, or scope it within the web.config file to be on a per page or directory level) if you move your pages to use CSS and take advantage of the new markup rendering. Today’s Cleaner Markup Topic: Client IDs The ability to have clean, predictable, ID attributes on rendered HTML elements is something developers have long asked for with Web Forms (ID values like “ctl00_ContentPlaceholder1_ListView1_ctrl0_Label1” are not very popular). Having control over the ID values rendered helps make it much easier to write client-side JavaScript against the output, makes it easier to style elements using CSS, and on large pages can help reduce the overall size of the markup generated. New ClientIDMode Property on Controls ASP.NET 4 supports a new ClientIDMode property on the Control base class. The ClientIDMode property indicates how controls should generate client ID values when they render. The ClientIDMode property supports four possible values: AutoID—Renders the output as in .NET 3.5 (auto-generated IDs which will still render prefixes like ctrl00 for compatibility) Predictable (Default)— Trims any “ctl00” ID string and if a list/container control concatenates child ids (example: id=”ParentControl_ChildControl”) Static—Hands over full ID naming control to the developer – whatever they set as the ID of the control is what is rendered (example: id=”JustMyId”) Inherit—Tells the control to defer to the naming behavior mode of the parent container control The ClientIDMode property can be set directly on individual controls (or within container controls – in which case the controls within them will by default inherit the setting): Or it can be specified at a page or usercontrol level (using the <%@ Page %> or <%@ Control %> directives) – in which case controls within the pages/usercontrols inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): Or it can be set within the web.config file of an application – in which case pages within the application inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): This gives you the flexibility to customize/override the naming behavior however you want. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Non-List Controls Let’s take a look at how we can use the new ClientIDMode property to control the rendering of “ID” elements within a page. To help illustrate this we can create a simple page called “SingleControlExample.aspx” that is based on a master-page called “Site.Master”, and which has a single <asp:label> control with an ID of “Message” that is contained with an <asp:content> container control called “MainContent”: Within our code-behind we’ll then add some simple code like below to dynamically populate the Label’s Text property at runtime: If we were running this application using ASP.NET 3.5 (or had our ASP.NET 4 application configured to run using 3.5 rendering or ClientIDMode=AutoID), then the generated markup sent down to the client would look like below: This ID is unique (which is good) – but rather ugly because of the “ct100” prefix (which is bad). Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Predictable” With ASP.NET 4, server controls by default now render their ID’s using ClientIDMode=”Predictable”. This helps ensure that ID values are still unique and don’t conflict on a page, but at the same time it makes the IDs less verbose and more predictable. This means that the generated markup of our <asp:label> control above will by default now look like below with ASP.NET 4: Notice that the “ct100” prefix is gone. Because the “Message” control is embedded within a “MainContent” container control, by default it’s ID will be prefixed “MainContent_Message” to avoid potential collisions with other controls elsewhere within the page. Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Static” Sometimes you don’t want your ID values to be nested hierarchically, though, and instead just want the ID rendered to be whatever value you set it as. To enable this you can now use ClientIDMode=static, in which case the ID rendered will be exactly the same as what you set it on the server-side on your control. This will cause the below markup to be rendered with ASP.NET 4: This option now gives you the ability to completely control the client ID values sent down by controls. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Data-Bound List Controls Data-bound list/grid controls have historically been the hardest to use/style when it comes to working with Web Form’s automatically generated IDs. Let’s now take a look at a scenario where we’ll customize the ID’s rendered using a ListView control with ASP.NET 4. The code snippet below is an example of a ListView control that displays the contents of a data-bound collection — in this case, airports: We can then write code like below within our code-behind to dynamically databind a list of airports to the ListView above: At runtime this will then by default generate a <ul> list of airports like below. Note that because the <ul> and <li> elements in the ListView’s template are not server controls, no IDs are rendered in our markup: Adding Client ID’s to Each Row Item Now, let’s say that we wanted to add client-ID’s to the output so that we can programmatically access each <li> via JavaScript. We want these ID’s to be unique, predictable, and identifiable. A first approach would be to mark each <li> element within the template as being a server control (by giving it a runat=server attribute) and by giving each one an id of “airport”: By default ASP.NET 4 will now render clean IDs like below (no ctl001-like ids are rendered): Using the ClientIDRowSuffix Property Our template above now generates unique ID’s for each <li> element – but if we are going to access them programmatically on the client using JavaScript we might want to instead have the ID’s contain the airport code within them to make them easier to reference. The good news is that we can easily do this by taking advantage of the new ClientIDRowSuffix property on databound controls in ASP.NET 4 to better control the ID’s of our individual row elements. To do this, we’ll set the ClientIDRowSuffix property to “Code” on our ListView control. This tells the ListView to use the databound “Code” property from our Airport class when generating the ID: And now instead of having row suffixes like “1”, “2”, and “3”, we’ll instead have the Airport.Code value embedded within the IDs (e.g: _CLE, _CAK, _PDX, etc): You can use this ClientIDRowSuffix approach with other databound controls like the GridView as well. It is useful anytime you want to program row elements on the client – and use clean/identified IDs to easily reference them from JavaScript code. Summary ASP.NET 4 enables you to generate much cleaner HTML markup from server controls and from within your Web Forms applications. In today’s post I covered how you can now easily control the client ID values that are rendered by server controls. In upcoming posts I’ll cover some of the other markup improvements that are also coming with the ASP.NET 4 release. Hope this helps, Scott

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Oracle Fusion Applications: Changing the Game

- by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

Originally posted in the Oracle Profit Magazine, November 2010 Edition. When the order processing system red-flags a customer's credit status, the IT department doesn't get the customer's call. When a supplier misses a delivery date for a key automotive assembly, it's not the CIO who has to answer for the error. Knowledge workers (known in IT circles as "users") are on the front lines when an exception occurs in an established business process. They're also the ones who study sales trends to decide when to open a new store in an up-and-coming neighborhood, which products are most profitable, how employee skill sets are evolving, and which suppliers are most efficient. In short, knowledge workers are masters of business as unusual. Traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other familiar enterprise applications excel at automating, managing, and executing standard business processes. These programs shine when everything goes as planned. Life gets even trickier when a traditional application needs to be extended with a new service or an extra step is added to a business process when new products are brought to market, divisions are merged, or companies are acquired. Monolithic applications often need the IT department to step in and make the necessary adjustments--incurring additional costs and delays. Until now. When Oracle unveiled the much-anticipated family of Oracle Fusion Applications at Oracle OpenWorld in September 2010, knowledge workers in particular had a lot to cheer about. Business users will soon have ready access to analytical information and collaboration tools in the context of what they are working on, so they can make better decisions when problems or opportunities arise. Additionally, the Oracle Fusion Applications platform will make it easy for business users to tweak processes, create new capabilities, and find information, often without the need for IT department assistance and while still following company guidelines. And IT leaders will be happy to hear about new deployment options, guided implementation and setup tools, and cost-saving management capabilities. Just as important, the underlying technologies in Oracle Fusion Applications will allow organizations to choose among their existing investments and next-generation enterprise applications so they can introduce innovations at a pace that makes the most business and financial sense. "Oracle Fusion Applications are architected so you don't have to do rip and replace," says Jim Hayes, managing director of the consulting firm Accenture. "That's very important for creating a business case that will get through the steering committee and be approved by the board. It shows you can drive value and make a difference in the near term." For these and other reasons, analysts and early adopters are calling Oracle Fusion Applications a game changer for enterprise customers. The differences become apparent in three key areas: the way we innovate, work, and adopt technology. Game Changer #1: New Standard for InnovationChange is a constant challenge for most businesses, whether the catalysts are market dynamics, new competition, or the ever-expanding regulatory environment. And, in an ongoing effort to differentiate, business leaders are constantly looking for new ways to do business, serve constituents, and bring new products and services to market. In addition, companies face significant costs to keep their applications up-to-date. For example, when a company adds new suppliers to a procurement system, the IT shop typically has to invest time, effort, and even consulting fees for custom integrations that allow various ERP systems to communicate with each other. Oracle Fusion Applications were built on Web services and a modular SOA foundation to ease customizations and integration activities among all applications--whether from Oracle or another vendor. Interfaces and updates written in ubiquitous Java, rather than a proprietary coding language, allow organizations to tap into existing in-house technical skills rather than seek expensive outside specialists. And with SOA, organizations can extend a feature set or integrate with other SOA environments by combining Web services such as "look up customer" into a new business process managed by the BPEL orchestration engine. Flexibility like this has long-term implications. "Because users capture these changes at a higher metadata layer, not in the application's code, changes and additions are protected even as new versions of Oracle Fusion Applications are released," says Steve Miranda, senior vice president of applications development at Oracle. "This is a much more sustainable approach because you don't incur costly customizations that prevent upgrades and other innovations." And changes are easier to make: if one change is made in the metadata, that change is automatically reflected throughout the application interface, business intelligence, business process, and business logic. Game Changer #2: New Standard for WorkBoosting productivity comes down to doing the basics right: running business processes more efficiently and managing exceptions more effectively, so users can accomplish more in the course of a day or spend more quality time with the most profitable customers. The fastest way to improve process efficiency is to reduce the number of steps it takes to execute common tasks, such as ordering office equipment from an internal procurement system. Oracle Fusion Applications will deliver a complete role-based user experience with business intelligence and collaboration capabilities provided in the context of the work at hand. "We created every Oracle Fusion Applications screen by asking 'What does the user need to know?' 'What does he or she need to do?' and 'Who do they need to work with to get the job done?'" Miranda explains. So when the sales department heads need new laptops, the self-service procurement screen will not only display a list of approved vendors and configurations, but also a running list of reviews by coworkers who recently purchased the various models. Embedded intelligence may also display prevailing delivery lead times based on actual order histories, not the generic shipping dates vendors may quote. The pervasive business intelligence serves many other business activities across all areas of the enterprise. For example, a manager considering whether to promote a direct report can see the person's employee profile, with a salary history, appraisal summaries, and a rundown of skills and training. This approach to business intelligence also has implications for supply chain management. "One of the challenges at Ingersoll Rand is lack of visibility in our supply chain," says Mike Macrie, global director of enterprise applications for global industrial firm Ingersoll Rand. "Oracle Fusion Applications are going to provide the embedded intelligence to give us that visibility and give us the ability to analyze those orders at any point in our supply chain." Oracle Fusion Applications will also create a "role-based user experience" that displays a work list of events that need attention, based on user job function. Role awareness guides users with daily lists of action items and exceptions. So a credit manager may see seven invoices with discounts that are about to expire or 12 suppliers that have been put on hold because credit memos are awaiting approval. Individualization extends to the search capabilities of Oracle Fusion Applications. The platform uses Web-style search screens powered by an Oracle enterprise search engine, with a security framework that filters search results so individuals will only see the internal information they're authorized to access. A further aid to productivity is Oracle Fusion Applications' integration with Web 2.0 collaboration and social networking resources for business environments. Hover-over text will reveal relevant contact information whenever the name of a person appears in an Oracle Fusion Application. Users can connect via an online chat, phone call, or instant message without leaving the main application, reducing the time required for an accounts payable staffer to resolve a mismatch between an invoiced charge and the service record, for example. Addresses of suppliers, customers, or partners will also initiate hover-over text to show contact details and Web-based maps. Finally, Oracle Fusion Applications will promote a new way of working with purpose-driven communities that can bring new efficiencies to everything from cultivating sales leads to managing new projects. As soon as a lead or project materializes, the applications will automatically gather relevant participants into an online community that shares member contact information, schedules, discussion forums, and Wiki pages. "Oracle Fusion Applications will allow us to take it to the next level with embedded Web 2.0 tools and the embedded analytics," says Steve Printz, CIO and vice president, supply chain management, at window-and-door manufacturer Pella. "[This] allows those employees today who are processing transactions to really contribute to the success of the company and become decision-makers." Game Changer #3: New Standard for Technology AdoptionAs IT becomes a dominant component of how businesses run and compete, organizations need to lower the cost of implementing applications and introducing new application features. In the past, rolling out new code often required creating a test bed system, moving beta code to a separate system for user feedback, and--once all the revisions were made--moving version one of the software onto production systems, where business users could finally get the needed new features. Oracle Fusion Applications will use a dedicated setup manager application to streamline this process. First, the setup manager will help scope out the project, querying users about their requirements. "From those questions and answers we determine the steps and the order of those steps that will enable that task," Miranda says. Next, system utilities will assign tasks to owners, track completion status, and monitor the overall status of a programming effort. Oracle Fusion Applications can then recommend Web services that allow users to migrate setup choices and steps across all the various deployments of the application. Those setup capabilities automate the migration from test systems to production systems, as well as between different business units that may be using the same application. "The self-service ability of the setup manager helps business users change setups with very little intervention from the IT team," says Ravi Kumar, vice president at IT services company Infosys. "That to me is a big difference from how we've viewed enterprise applications before." For additional flexibility, organizations will be able to adopt Oracle Fusion Applications modules in either of two modes: a single-instance alternative uses one database for all Oracle Fusion Applications, while a "pillar mode" creates separate databases to underpin each application. This means IT departments running any one of Oracle's applications or even third-party applications can plug Oracle Fusion Applications modules into their environment and see additional business value created on top of their existing systems. And Oracle Fusion Applications offer a hybrid approach to deployment. The applications are all software-as-a-service-ready, so customers can choose on-premises, public or private cloud, or a combination of these to suit their business needs. It's that combination of flexibility and a roadmap for the future that may be the biggest game changer of all. "The Oracle Fusion Applications architecture allows us to migrate our company at a pace that's consistent with our business strategy, whereas before we might have had to do it with a massive upgrade," says Macrie of Ingersoll Rand. "We're looking forward to that architecture to really give us more flexibility in how we migrate over time." For More InformationUser Input Key to the Success of Oracle Fusion ApplicationsTransforming Coexistence into Strategic ValueUnder the HoodOracle Fusion ApplicationsOracle Service-Oriented Architecture

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Faceted search with Solr on Windows

- by Dr.NETjes

With over 10 million hits a day, funda.nl is probably the largest ASP.NET website which uses Solr on a Windows platform. While all our data (i.e. real estate properties) is stored in SQL Server, we're using Solr 1.4.1 to return the faceted search results as fast as we can.And yes, Solr is very fast. We did do some heavy stress testing on our Solr service, which allowed us to do over 1,000 req/sec on a single 64-bits Solr instance; and that's including converting search-url's to Solr http-queries and deserializing Solr's result-XML back to .NET objects! Let me tell you about faceted search and how to integrate Solr in a .NET/Windows environment. I'll bet it's easier than you think :-) What is faceted search? Faceted search is the clustering of search results into categories, allowing users to drill into search results. By showing the number of hits for each facet category, users can easily see how many results match that category. If you're still a bit confused, this example from CNET explains it all: The SQL solution for faceted search Our ("pre-Solr") solution for faceted search was done by adding a lot of redundant columns to our SQL tables and doing a COUNT(...) for each of those columns: So if a user was searching for real estate properties in the city 'Amsterdam', our facet-query would be something like: SELECT COUNT(hasGarden), COUNT(has2Bathrooms), COUNT(has3Bathrooms), COUNT(etc...) FROM Houses WHERE city = 'Amsterdam' While this solution worked fine for a couple of years, it wasn't very easy for developers to add new facets. And also, performing COUNT's on all matched rows only performs well if you have a limited amount of rows in a table (i.e. less than a million). Enter Solr "Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, and a web administration interface." (quoted from Wikipedia's page on Solr) Solr isn't a database, it's more like a big index. Every time you upload data to Solr, it will analyze the data and create an inverted index from it (like the index-pages of a book). This way Solr can lookup data very quickly. To explain the inner workings of Solr is beyond the scope of this post, but if you want to learn more, please visit the Solr Wiki pages. Getting faceted search results from Solr is very easy; first let me show you how to send a http-query to Solr: http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=city:Amsterdam This will return an XML document containing the search results (in this example only three houses in the city of Amsterdam): <response> <result name="response" numFound="3" start="0"> <doc> <long name="id">3203</long> <str name="city">Amsterdam</str> <str name="steet">Keizersgracht</str> <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int> </doc> <doc> <long name="id">3205</long> <str name="city">Amsterdam</str> <str name="steet">Vondelstraat</str> <int name="numberOfBathrooms">3</int> </doc> <doc> <long name="id">4293</long> <str name="city">Amsterdam</str> <str name="steet">Wibautstraat</str> <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int> </doc> </result> </response> By adding a facet-querypart for the field "numberOfBathrooms", Solr will return the facets for this particular field. We will see that there's one house in Amsterdam with three bathrooms and two houses with two bathrooms. http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=city:Amsterdam&facet=true&facet.field=numberOfBathrooms The complete XML response from Solr now looks like: <response> <result name="response" numFound="3" start="0"> <doc> <long name="id">3203</long> <str name="city">Amsterdam</str> <str name="steet">Keizersgracht</str> <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int> </doc> <doc> <long name="id">3205</long> <str name="city">Amsterdam</str> <str name="steet">Vondelstraat</str> <int name="numberOfBathrooms">3</int> </doc> <doc> <long name="id">4293</long> <str name="city">Amsterdam</str> <str name="steet">Wibautstraat</str> <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int> </doc> </result> <lst name="facet_fields"> <lst name="numberOfBathrooms"> <int name="2">2</int> <int name="3">1</int> </lst> </lst> </response> Trying Solr for yourself To run Solr on your local machine and experiment with it, you should read the Solr tutorial. This tutorial really only takes 1 hour, in which you install Solr, upload sample data and get some query results. And yes, it works on Windows without a problem. Note that in the Solr tutorial, you're using Jetty as a Java Servlet Container (that's why you must start it using "java -jar start.jar"). In our environment we prefer to use Apache Tomcat to host Solr, which installs like a Windows service and works more like .NET developers expect. See the SolrTomcat page.Some best practices for running Solr on Windows: Use the 64-bits version of Tomcat. In our tests, this doubled the req/sec we were able to handle!Use a .NET XmlReader to convert Solr's XML output-stream to .NET objects. Don't use XPath; it won't scale well.Use filter queries ("fq" parameter) instead of the normal "q" parameter where possible. Filter queries are cached by Solr and will speed up Solr's response time (see FilterQueryGuidance)In my next post I’ll talk about how to keep Solr's indexed data in sync with the data in your SQL tables. Timestamps / rowversions will help you out here!

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E-Business Suite Technology Sessions at OAUG Collaborate 12

- by Max Arderius

Members of our E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group will be at the OAUG Collaborate 12 conference at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada on April 22 to 26, 2012. Please drop by any of our sessions to hear the latest news and meet up with us. Speaker Sessions Session 9675Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to 12.1 and BeyondAnne Carlson, Senior Director, Applications Technology Group, OracleSunday, April 22, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pmLocation: Jasmine B Attend this session to hear the latest Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 upgrade planning tips gleaned from customers who have already performed the upgrade. Youll get specific, cross-product advice on how to decide your project's scope, understand the factors that affect your project's duration, develop a robust testing strategy, leverage Oracle Support resources, and more. In a nutshell, this session tells you things you need to know before embarking upon your Release 12.1 upgrade project. Session 9401Minimizing Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance DowntimesElke Phelps, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleKevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, OracleSunday, April 22, 2:10 pm - 3:10 pmLocation: South Seas EThis session starts with an architecture review of Oracle E-Business Suite fundamentals and then moves to a practical view of the different tools and approaches for downtimes. Topics include patching shortcuts, merging patches, distributing worker processes across multiple servers, running ADPatch in no-interactive mode, staged APPL_TOPs, shared file systems, deferring system-wide database tasks, avoiding resource bottlenecks etc... This session also describes the online patching capabilities coming in Release 12.2. Session 9368Oracle E-Business Suite Technology: Latest Features and RoadmapLisa Parekh, Vice President, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Sunday, April 22, 4:30 pm - 5:30 pmLocation: South Seas EThis session provides an overview of Oracle E-Business Suite technology strategy, the capabilities and associated business benefits of recent releases, as well as a review of the product roadmap. As a cornerstone session for Oracle E-Business Suite technology, come hear about the latest usability enhancements, systems administration and configuration management tools, security-related updates, and tools and options for extending, customizing, and integrating the Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. Session 10709Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Strategy and General Manager UpdateCliff Godwin, Sr. VP, Application Development, OracleMonday, April 23, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pmLocation: Mandalay Bay DIn this session, hear from Oracle E-Business Suite General Manager Cliff Godwin as he delivers an update on the Oracle E-Business Suite product line. The session covers the value delivered by the current release of Oracle E-Business Suite applications, the momentum, and how Oracle E-Business Suite applications integrate into Oracle’s overall applications strategy. You will come away with an understanding of the value Oracle E-Business Suite applications deliver now and in the future. Session 9398How to Reduce TCO Using Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business SuiteAngelo Rosado, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleKenneth Baxter, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Management Pack Fusion Middleware Management, OracleTuesday, April 24, 8:00 am - 9:00 amLocation: Breakers GThis session covers the methods and tools you can use to gain insights into your end users, troubleshoot performance problems, define service-level objectives, and proactively monitor your end-to-end Oracle E-Business Suite environment to meet your availability and performance targets. Come hear how you can manage, diagnose, and monitor the Oracle E-Business Suite environment from a single console by using Oracle Enterprise Manager together with the Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite. Session 9370 Coexistence of Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Applications: Platform Perspective Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy, Oracle Tuesday, April 24, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Location: South Seas E Join us at this session if you are wondering which tools to integrate your data, your processes and your User Interface. Or what tools to customize and extend your screens and reports (OAF, Forms, ADF, Oracle Reports, BI etc....), what tools to secure, protect and manage your Oracle E-Business Suite etc... Or simply if you are looking for a technical roadmap for your Oracle E-Business Suite infrastructure to CO-EXIST with the rest of your enterprise applications including Oracle Fusion Applications. Session 9375 Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Deployment and System AdministrationMax Arderius, Manager, Applications Development Group, OracleTuesday, April 24, 4:30 pm - 5:30 pmLocation: Breakers GWhat's coming in the next major version of Oracle E-Business Suite 12? This session covers the latest technology stack, including the use of Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database 11g Release 2. Topics include an architectural overview, installation and upgrade options, new configuration options, and new tools for hot-cloning and automated "lights out" cloning. Learn about how online patching will reduce your database patching downtimes to the time it takes to bounce your database server.Session 9369Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Primer and RoadmapSteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Wednesday, April 25, 8:15 am - 9:15 amLocation: South Seas FThis Oracle Development session summarizes the latest certifications and roadmap for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, including database releases/options, Java, Oracle Forms, Oracle Containers for J2EE, desktop OS, browsers, JRE releases, Office/OpenOffice, development and Web authoring tools, user authentication and management, BI, security options, clouds, Oracle VM etc.... It also covers the most-commonly-asked questions about technology stack component support dates and upgrade implications. Session 9407The Latest Oracle E-Business Suite Release User Interface and Usability EnhancementsGustavo Jimenez, Sr. Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Wednesday, April 25, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pmLocation: South Seas GIn this session, developers will get a detailed look at new features designed to enhance usability, offer more capabilities for personalization and extensions, and support the development and use of dashboards and Web services. Topics include rich new UI capabilities such as new home page features, Navigator and Favorites pull-down menus, Oracle ADF task flows etc.... In addition, we will cover the personalization/extensibility enhancements, business layer extensions, Oracle ADF integration and much more. Session 9374Best Practices for Oracle E-Business Suite Performance Tuning and Upgrade OptimizationIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, OracleUdayan Parvate, Director, Release Engineering, Quality and Release Management, Oracle Thursday, April 26, 8:30 am - 9:30 amLocation: South Seas FThis presentation will offer tips and techniques on tuning all the layers of the Oracle E-Business Suite stack including the various tiers of the Oracle E-Business Suite environment. You will learn about tuning Oracle Forms, Concurrent Manager, Apache, and Oracle Discoverer. Track down memory leaks and other issues on the Java and Java Virtual Machine layers. The session also covers Oracle E-Business Suite product-level tuning, including Oracle Workflow, Oracle Order Management, Oracle Payroll, and other modules.Session 9412 Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Desktop Integration: Beyond Oracle Applications Desktop IntegratorGustavo Jimenez, Sr. Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleThursday, April 26, 8:30 am - 9:30 amLocation: Breakers GThis session describes the new expanded functionality in Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator, Oracle Report Manager, and dedicated integrators. You have more options for desktop integration now, not fewer. Topics include an overview of prepackaged solutions for integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with desktop applications such as Microsoft Excel, Word, and Projects. The session also discusses how you can use the Desktop Integration Framework feature to create your own integrators quickly and easily.Session 9533 Upgrading your Customizations to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1Sara Woodhull, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Thursday, April 26, 11:00 am - 12:00 pmLocation: South Seas FHave you personalized Forms or OA Framework screens? Have you used mod_plsql or Applications Express to tailor your Release 11i functionality? Have you extended or customized your Release 11i environment using other tools? This session will help you understand customization scenarios, use cases, tools, and technologies for ensuring that your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 environment fits your users' needs closely and that any future customizations will be easy to upgrade. Special Interest Groups (SIG) Session 10535OAUG Database SIG- Part IMichael Brown, Colibri Limited Company Sunday, April 22, 3:20 pm - 4:20 pmLocation: South Seas FThis is the annual meeting of the Database SIG at Collaborate. The call for candidates for the chair will be closed at the meeting. Plans include a speaker from Oracle and a presentation on applications performance. The details of the meeting will be posted on http://www.dbsig.com. Guest Presentation: Oracle E-Business Suite Database PerformanceIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Session 10720OAUG EBS Applications Technology SIG- Part ISrini Chaval, Cummins Monday, April 23, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pmLocation: South Seas F Guest Presentation:Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification RoadmapSteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Session 10510OAUG EBS Applications Technology SIG- Part IISrini Chaval, CumminsMonday, April 23, 3:45 pm - 4:45 pmLocation: South Seas F Guest Presentation:Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 Online Patching Kevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Session 10522 OAUG Upgrade SIG- Part IISandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Wednesday, April 25, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pmLocation: South Seas FUpgrade SIG will host a business meeting followed by panel (Q&A) related to EBS Upgrade topics and Oracle presentation. Guest Presentation:Upgrading E-Business Suite Amrita Mehrok, Director, Financials Product Strategy, Oracle Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy, Oracle Session 10722OAUG Upgrade SIG- Part IISandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Wednesday, April 25, 4:15 pm - 5:15 pmLocation: South Seas FUpgrade SIG will host a business meeting followed by panel (Q&A) related to EBS Upgrade topics and Oracle presentation. Guest Presentation:Tuning the Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade Isam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Panels Session 9360Oracle E-Business Suite Cloning PanelSandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Guest Speaker: Max Arderius, Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleWednesday, April 25, 9:30 am - 10:30 amLocation: South Seas FThis panel will discuss differences between available release 11i, R12 and R12.1 cloning methods. Advantages and disadvantages of each cloning method will be discussed in depth. This panel of experienced database administrators will lead a discussion focusing on the questions such as “which cloning method is best to use in your particular environment”. Attendees will gain practical knowledge, tips and tricks to assist with cloning of Oracle E-Business Suite release 11i, R12 and R12.1 environments. Session 10022Oracle Applications Tuning PanelMark Farnham, Rightsizing, Inc.Guest Speaker: Isam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, OracleThursday, April 26, 09:45 am - 10:45 amLocation: South Seas FThis applications performance panel session, sponsored by the OAUG Database SIG, provides a Q&A forum focused on helping you address your Oracle Applications (Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise and Siebel applications) performance- and scalability-related issues. The panel comprises several well-known Oracle Applications performance experts. Topic areas include Oracle Database; the network; and the applications tier, including patching and upgrade performance. For complete listing of all speaker sessions and other activities, please visit the OAUG Collaborate Web Site.

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Back to Basics: When does a .NET Assembly Dependency get loaded

- by Rick Strahl

When we work on typical day to day applications, it's easy to forget some of the core features of the .NET framework. For me personally it's been a long time since I've learned about some of the underlying CLR system level services even though I rely on them on a daily basis. I often think only about high level application constructs and/or high level framework functionality, but the low level stuff is often just taken for granted. Over the last week at DevConnections I had all sorts of low level discussions with other developers about the inner workings of this or that technology (especially in light of my Low Level ASP.NET Architecture talk and the Razor Hosting talk). One topic that came up a couple of times and ended up a point of confusion even amongst some seasoned developers (including some folks from Microsoft <snicker>) is when assemblies actually load into a .NET process. There are a number of different ways that assemblies are loaded in .NET. When you create a typical project assemblies usually come from: The Assembly reference list of the top level 'executable' project The Assembly references of referenced projects Dynamically loaded at runtime via AppDomain/Reflection loading In addition .NET automatically loads mscorlib (most of the System namespace) the boot process that hosts the .NET runtime in EXE apps, or some other kind of runtime hosting environment (runtime hosting in servers like IIS, SQL Server or COM Interop). In hosting environments the runtime host may also pre-load a bunch of assemblies on its own (for example the ASP.NET host requires all sorts of assemblies just to run itself, before ever routing into your user specific code). Assembly Loading The most obvious source of loaded assemblies is the top level application's assembly reference list. You can add assembly references to a top level application and those assembly references are then available to the application. In a nutshell, referenced assemblies are not immediately loaded - they are loaded on the fly as needed. So regardless of whether you have an assembly reference in a top level project, or a dependent assembly assemblies typically load on an as needed basis, unless explicitly loaded by user code. The same is true of dependent assemblies. To check this out I ran a simple test: I have a utility assembly Westwind.Utilities which is a general purpose library that can work in any type of project. Due to a couple of small requirements for encoding and a logging piece that allows logging Web content (dependency on HttpContext.Current) this utility library has a dependency on System.Web. Now System.Web is a pretty large assembly and generally you'd want to avoid adding it to a non-Web project if it can be helped. So I created a Console Application that loads my utility library: You can see that the top level Console app a reference to Westwind.Utilities and System.Data (beyond the core .NET libs). The Westwind.Utilities project on the other hand has quite a few dependencies including System.Web. I then add a main program that accesses only a simple utillity method in the Westwind.Utilities library that doesn't require any of the classes that access System.Web: static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(StringUtils.NewStringId()); Console.ReadLine(); } StringUtils.NewStringId() calls into Westwind.Utilities, but it doesn't rely on System.Web. Any guesses what the assembly list looks like when I stop the code on the ReadLine() command? I'll wait here while you think about it… … … So, when I stop on ReadLine() and then fire up Process Explorer and check the assembly list I get: We can see here that .NET has not actually loaded any of the dependencies of the Westwind.Utilities assembly. Also not loaded is the top level System.Data reference even though it's in the dependent assembly list of the top level project. Since this particular function I called only uses core System functionality (contained in mscorlib) there's in fact nothing else loaded beyond the main application and my Westwind.Utilities assembly that contains the method accessed. None of the dependencies of Westwind.Utilities loaded. If you were to open the assembly in a disassembler like Reflector or ILSpy, you would however see all the compiled in dependencies. The referenced assemblies are in the dependency list and they are loadable, but they are not immediately loaded by the application. In other words the C# compiler and .NET linker are smart enough to figure out the dependencies based on the code that actually is referenced from your application and any dependencies cascading down into the dependencies from your top level application into the referenced assemblies. In the example above the usage requirement is pretty obvious since I'm only calling a single static method and then exiting the app, but in more complex applications these dependency relationships become very complicated - however it's all taken care of by the compiler and linker figuring out what types and members are actually referenced and including only those assemblies that are in fact referenced in your code or required by any of your dependencies. The good news here is: That if you are referencing an assembly that has a dependency on something like System.Web in a few places that are not actually accessed by any of your code or any dependent assembly code that you are calling, that assembly is never loaded into memory! Some Hosting Environments pre-load Assemblies The load behavior can vary however. In Console and desktop applications we have full control over assembly loading so we see the core CLR behavior. However other environments like ASP.NET for example will preload referenced assemblies explicitly as part of the startup process - primarily to minimize load conflicts. Specifically ASP.NET pre-loads all assemblies referenced in the assembly list and the /bin folder. So in Web applications it definitely pays to minimize your top level assemblies if they are not used. Understanding when Assemblies Load To clarify and see it actually happen what I described in the first example , let's look at a couple of other scenarios. To see assemblies loading at runtime in real time lets create a utility function to print out loaded assemblies to the console: public static void PrintAssemblies() { var assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies(); foreach (var assembly in assemblies) { Console.WriteLine(assembly.GetName()); } } Now let's look at the first scenario where I have class method that references internally uses System.Web. In the first scenario lets add a method to my main program like this: static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(StringUtils.NewStringId()); Console.ReadLine(); PrintAssemblies(); } public static void WebLogEntry() { var entry = new WebLogEntry(); entry.UpdateFromRequest(); Console.WriteLine(entry.QueryString); } UpdateFromWebRequest() internally accesses HttpContext.Current to read some information of the ASP.NET Request object so it clearly needs a reference System.Web to work. In this first example, the method that holds the calling code is never called, but exists as a static method that can potentially be called externally at some point. What do you think will happen here with the assembly loading? Will System.Web load in this example? No - it doesn't. Because the WebLogEntry() method is never called by the mainline application (or anywhere else) System.Web is not loaded. .NET dynamically loads assemblies as code that needs it is called. No code references the WebLogEntry() method and so System.Web is never loaded. Next, let's add the call to this method, which should trigger System.Web to be loaded because a dependency exists. Let's change the code to: static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(StringUtils.NewStringId()); Console.WriteLine("--- Before:"); PrintAssemblies(); WebLogEntry(); Console.WriteLine("--- After:"); PrintAssemblies(); Console.ReadLine(); } public static void WebLogEntry() { var entry = new WebLogEntry(); entry.UpdateFromRequest(); Console.WriteLine(entry.QueryString); } Looking at the code now, when do you think System.Web will be loaded? Will the before list include it? Yup System.Web gets loaded, but only after it's actually referenced. In fact, just until before the call to UpdateFromRequest() System.Web is not loaded - it only loads when the method is actually called and requires the reference in the executing code. Moral of the Story So what have we learned - or maybe remembered again? Dependent Assembly References are not pre-loaded when an application starts (by default) Dependent Assemblies that are not referenced by executing code are never loaded Dependent Assemblies are just in time loaded when first referenced in code All of this is nothing new - .NET has always worked like this. But it's good to have a refresher now and then and go through the exercise of seeing it work in action. It's not one of those things we think about everyday, and as I found out last week, I couldn't remember exactly how it worked since it's been so long since I've learned about this. And apparently I'm not the only one as several other people I had discussions with in relation to loaded assemblies also didn't recall exactly what should happen or assumed incorrectly that just having a reference automatically loads the assembly. The moral of the story for me is: Trying at all costs to eliminate an assembly reference from a component is not quite as important as it's often made out to be. For example, the Westwind.Utilities module described above has a logging component, including a Web specific logging entry that supports pulling information from the active HTTP Context. Adding that feature requires a reference to System.Web. Should I worry about this in the scope of this library? Probably not, because if I don't use that one class of nearly a hundred, System.Web never gets pulled into the parent process. IOW, System.Web only loads when I use that specific feature and if I am, well I clearly have to be running in a Web environment anyway to use it realistically. The alternative would be considerably uglier: Pulling out the WebLogEntry class and sticking it into another assembly and breaking up the logging code. In this case - definitely not worth it. So, .NET definitely goes through some pretty nifty optimizations to ensure that it loads only what it needs and in most cases you can just rely on .NET to do the right thing. Sometimes though assembly loading can go wrong (especially when signed and versioned local assemblies are involved), but that's subject for a whole other post…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET CSharp 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); })();

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Issuing Current Time Increments in StreamInsight (A Practical Example)

The issuing of a Current Time Increment, Cti, in StreamInsight is very definitely one of the most important concepts to learn if you want your Streams to be responsive. A full discussion of how to issue Ctis is beyond the scope of this article but a very good explanation in addition to Books Online can be found in these three articles by a member of the StreamInsight team at Microsoft, Ciprian Gerea. Time in StreamInsight Series http://blogs.msdn.com/b/streaminsight/archive/2010/07/23/time-in-streaminsight-i.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/streaminsight/archive/2010/07/30/time-in-streaminsight-ii.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/streaminsight/archive/2010/08/03/time-in-streaminsight-iii.aspx A lot of the problems I see with unresponsive or stuck streams on the MSDN Forums are to do with how Ctis are enqueued or in a lot of cases not enqueued. If you enqueue events and never enqueue a Cti then StreamInsight will be perfectly happy. You, on the other hand, will never see data on the output as you have not told StreamInsight to flush the stream. This article deals with a specific implementation problem I had recently whilst working on a StreamInsight project. I look at some possible options and discuss why they would not work before showing the way I solved the problem. The stream of data I was dealing with on this project was very bursty that is to say when events were flowing they came through very quickly and in large numbers (1000 events/sec), but when the stream calmed down it could be a few seconds between each event. When enqueuing events into the StreamInsight engne it is best practice to do so with a StartTime that is given to you by the system producing the event . StreamInsight processes events and it doesn't matter whether those events are being pushed into the engine by a source system or the events are being read from something like a flat file in a directory somewhere. You can apply the same logic and temporal algebra to both situations. Reading from a file is an excellent example of where the time of the event on the source itself is very important. We could be reading that file a long time after it was written. Being able to read the StartTime from the events allows us to define windows that will hold the correct sets of events. I was able to do this with my stream but this is where my problems started. Below is a very simple script to create a SQL Server table and populate it with sample data that will show exactly the problem I had. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[t] ( [c1] [int] PRIMARY KEY, [c2] [datetime] NULL ) INSERT t VALUES (1,'20100810'),(2,'20100810'),(3,'20100810') Column c2 defines the StartTime of the event on the source and as you can see the values in all 3 rows of data is the same. If we read Ciprian’s articles we know that we can define how Ctis get injected into the stream in 3 different places The Stream Definition The Input Factory The Input Adapter I personally have always been a fan of enqueing Ctis through the factory. Below is code typical of what I would use to do this On the class itself I do some inheriting public class SimpleInputFactory : ITypedInputAdapterFactory<SimpleInputConfig>, ITypedDeclareAdvanceTimeProperties<SimpleInputConfig> And then I implement the following function public AdapterAdvanceTimeSettings DeclareAdvanceTimeProperties<TPayload>(SimpleInputConfig configInfo, EventShape eventShape) { return new AdapterAdvanceTimeSettings( new AdvanceTimeGenerationSettings(configInfo.CtiFrequency, TimeSpan.FromTicks(-1)), AdvanceTimePolicy.Adjust); } The configInfo .CtiFrequency property is a value I pass through to define after how many events I want a Cti to be injected and this in turn will flush through the stream of data. I usually pass a value of 1 for this setting. The second parameter determines the CTI timestamp in terms of a delay relative to the events. -1 ticks in the past results in 1 tick in the future, i.e., ahead of the event. The problem with this method though is that if consecutive events have the same StartTime then only one of those events will be enqueued. In this example I use the following to define how I assign the StartTime of my events currEvent.StartTime = (DateTimeOffset)dt.c2; If I go ahead and run my StreamInsight process with this configuration i can see on the output adapter that two events have been removed To see this in a little more depth I can use the StreamInsight Debugger and see what happens internally. What is happening here is that the first event arrives and a Cti is injected with a time of 1 tick after the StartTime of that event (Also the EndTime of the event). The second event arrives and it has a StartTime of before the Cti and even though we specified AdvanceTimePolicy.Adjust on the factory we know that a point event can never be adjusted like this and the event is dropped. The same happens for the third event as well (The second and third events get trumped by the Cti). For a more detailed discussion of why this happens look here http://www.sqlis.com/sqlis/post/AdvanceTimePolicy-and-Point-Event-Streams-In-StreamInsight.aspx We end up with a single event being pushed into the output adapter and our result now makes sense. The next way I tried to solve this problem by changing the value of the second parameter to TimeSpan.Zero Here is how my factory code now looks public AdapterAdvanceTimeSettings DeclareAdvanceTimeProperties<TPayload>(SimpleInputConfig configInfo, EventShape eventShape) { return new AdapterAdvanceTimeSettings( new AdvanceTimeGenerationSettings(configInfo.CtiFrequency, TimeSpan.Zero), AdvanceTimePolicy.Adjust); } What I am doing here is declaring a policy that says inject a Cti together with every event and stamp it with a StartTime that is equal to the start time of the event itself (TimeSpan.Zero). This method has plus points as well as a downside. The upside is that no events will be lost by having the same StartTime as previous events. The Downside is that because the Cti is declared with the StartTime of the event itself then it does not actually flush that particular event because in the StreamInsight algebra, a Cti commits only those events that occurred strictly before them. To flush the events we need a Cti to be enqueued with a greater StartTime than the events themselves. Here is what happened when I ran this configuration As you can see all we got through was the Cti and none of the events. The debugger output shows the stamps on the Cti and the events themselves. Because the Cti issued has the same timestamp (StartTime) as the events then none of the events get flushed. I was nearly there but not quite. Because my stream was bursty it was possible that the next event would not come along for a few seconds and this was far too long for an event to be enqueued and not be flushed to the output adapter. I needed another solution. Two possible solutions crossed my mind although only one of them made sense when I explored it some more. Where multiple events have the same StartTime I could add 1 tick to the first event, two to the second, three to third etc thereby giving them unique StartTime values. Add a timer to manually inject Ctis The problem with the first implementation is that I would be giving the events a new StartTime. This would cause me the following problems If I want to define windows over the stream then some events may not be captured in the right windows and therefore any calculations on those windows I did would be wrong What would happen if we had 10,000 events with the same StartTime? I would enqueue them with StartTime + n ticks. Along comes a genuine event with a StartTime of the very first event + 1 tick. It is now too far in the past as far as my stream is concerned and it would be dropped. Not what I would want to do at all. I decided then to look at the Timer based solution I created a timer on my input adapter that elapsed every 200ms. private Timer tmr; public SimpleInputAdapter(SimpleInputConfig configInfo) { ctx = new SimpleTimeExtractDataContext(configInfo.ConnectionString); this.configInfo = configInfo; tmr = new Timer(200); tmr.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(t_Elapsed); tmr.Enabled = true; } void t_Elapsed(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e) { ts = DateTime.Now - dtCtiIssued; if (ts.TotalMilliseconds >= 200 && TimerIssuedCti == false) { EnqueueCtiEvent(System.DateTime.Now.AddTicks(-100)); TimerIssuedCti = true; } } In the t_Elapsed event handler I find out the difference in time between now and when the last event was processed (dtCtiIssued). I then check to see if that is greater than or equal to 200ms and if the last issuing of a Cti was done by the timer or by a genuine event (TimerIssuedCti). If I didn’t do this check then I would enqueue a Cti every time the timer elapsed which is not something I wanted. If the difference between the two times is greater than or equal to 500ms and the last event enqueued was by a real event then I issue a Cti through the timer to flush the event Queue, otherwise I do nothing. When I enqueue the Ctis into my stream in my ProduceEvents method I also set the values of dtCtiIssued and TimerIssuedCti currEvent = CreateInsertEvent(); currEvent.StartTime = (DateTimeOffset)dt.c2; TimerIssuedCti = false; dtCtiIssued = currEvent.StartTime; If I go ahead and run this configuration I see the following in my output. As we can see the first Cti gets enqueued as before but then another is enqueued by the timer and because this has a later timestamp it flushes the enqueued events through the engine. Conclusion Hopefully this has shown how the enqueuing of Ctis can have a dramatic effect on the responsiveness of your output in StreamInsight. Understanding the temporal nature of the product is for me one of the most important things you can learn. I have attached my solution for the demos. It is all in one project and testing each variation is a simple matter of commenting and un-commenting the parts in the code we have been dealing with here.

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BizTalk 2009 - Naming Guidelines

- by StuartBrierley

The following is effectively a repost of the BizTalk 2004 naming guidlines that I have previously detailed. I have posted these again for completeness under BizTalk 2009 and to allow an element of separation in case I find some reason to amend these for BizTalk 2009. These guidlines should be universal across any version of BizTalk you may wish to apply them to. General Rules All names should be named with a Pascal convention. Project Namespaces For message schemas: [CompanyName].XML.Schemas.[FunctionalName]* Examples: ABC.XML.Schemas.Underwriting DEF.XML.Schemas.MarshmellowTradingExchange * Donates potential for multiple levels of functional name, such as Underwriting.Dictionary.Valuation For web services: [CompanyName].Web.Services.[FunctionalName] Examples: ABC.Web.Services.OrderJellyBeans For the main BizTalk Projects: [CompanyName].BizTalk.[AssemblyType].[FunctionalName]* Examples: ABC.BizTalk.Mappings.Underwriting ABC.BizTalk.Orchestrations.Underwriting * Donates potential for multiple levels of functional name, such as Mappings.Underwriting.Valuations Assemblies BizTalk Assembly names should match the associated Project Namespace, such as ABC.BizTalk.Mappings.Underwriting. This pertains to the formal assembly name and the DLL name. The Solution name should take the name of the main project within the solution, and also therefore the namespace for that project. Although long names such as this can be unwieldy to work with, the benefits of having the full scope available when the assemblies are installed on the target server are generally judged to outweigh this inconvenience. Messaging Artifacts Artifact Standard Notes Example Schema <DescriptiveName>.xsd .NET Type name should match, without file extension. .NET Namespace will likely match assembly name. PurchaseOrderAcknowledge_FF.xsd or FNMA100330_FF.xsd Property Schema <DescriptiveName>.xsd Should be named to reflect possible common usage across multiple schemas IspecMessagePropertySchema.xsd UnderwritingOrchestrationKeys.xsd Map <SourceSchema>2<DestinationSchema>.btm Exceptions to this may be made where the source and destination schemas share the majority of the name, such as in mainframe web service maps InstructionResponse2CustomEmailRequest.btm (exception example) AccountCustomerAddressSummaryRequest2MainframeRequest.btm Orchestration <DescriptiveName>.odx GetValuationReports.odx SendMTEDecisionResponse.odx Send/Receive Pipeline <DescriptiveName>.btp ValidatingXMLReceivePipeline.btp FlatFileAssembler.btp Receive Port A plainly worded phrase that will clearly explain the function. FraudPreventionServices LetterProcessing Receive Location A plainly worded phrase that will clearly explain the function. ? Do we want to include the transport type here ? Arrears Web Service Send Port Group A plainly worded phrase that will clearly explain the function. Customer Updates Send Port A plainly worded phrase that will clearly explain the function. ABCProductUpdater LogLendingPolicyOutput Parties A meaningful name for a Trading Partner. If dealing with multiple entities within a Trading Partner organization, the Organization name could be used as a prefix. Roles A meaningful name for the role that a Trading Partner plays. Orchestration Workflow Shapes Shape Standard Notes Example Scopes <DescriptionOfContainedWork> or <DescOfcontainedWork><TxType> Including info about transaction type may be appropriate in some situations where it adds significant documentation value to the diagram. HandleReportResponse Receive Receive<MessageName> Typically, MessageName will be the same as the name of the message variable that is being received “into”. ReceiveReportResponse Send Send<MessageName> Typically, MessageName will be the same as the name of the message variable that is being sent. SendValuationDetailsRequest Expression <DescriptionOfEffect> Expression shapes should be named to describe the net effect of the expression, similar to naming a method. The exception to this is the case where the expression is interacting with an external .NET component to perform a function that overlaps with existing BizTalk functionality – use closest BizTalk shape for this case. CreatePrintXML Decide <DescriptionOfDecision> A description of what will be decided in the “if” branch Report Type? Perform MF Save? If-Branch <DescriptionOfDecision> A (potentially abbreviated) description of what is being decided Mortgage Valuation Yes Else-Branch Else Else-branch shapes should always be named “Else” Else Construct Message (Assign) Create<Message> (for Construct) <ExpressionDescription> (for expression) If a Construct shape contains a message assignment, it should be prefixed with “Create” followed by an abbreviated name of the message being assigned. The actual message assignment shape contained should be named to describe the expression that is contained. CreateReportDataMV which contains expression: ExtractReportData Construct Message (Transform) Create<Message> (for Construct) <SourceSchema>2<DestSchema> (for transform) If a Construct shape contains a message transform, it should be prefixed with “Create” followed by an abbreviated name of the message being assigned. The actual message transform shape contained should generally be named the same as the called map. CreateReportDataMV which contains transform: ReportDataMV2ReportDataMV Construct Message (containing multiple shapes) If a Construct Message shape uses multiple assignments or transforms, the overall shape should be named to communicate the net effect, using no prefix. Call/Start Orchestration Call<OrchestrationName> Start<OrchestrationName> Throw Throw<ExceptionType> The corresponding variable name for the exception type should (often) be the same name as the exception type, only camel-cased. ThrowRuleException, which references the “ruleException” variable. Parallel <DescriptionOfParallelWork> Parallel shapes should be named by a description of what work will be done in parallel Delay <DescriptionOfWhatWaitingFor> Delay shapes should be named by a description of what is being waited for. POAcknowledgeTimeout Listen <DescriptionOfOutcomes> Listen shapes should be named by a description that captures (to the degree possible) all the branches of the Listen shape POAckOrTimeout FirstShippingBid Loop <DescriptionOfLoop> A (potentially abbreviated) description of what the loop is. ForEachValuationReport WhileErrorFlagTrue Role Link See “Roles” in messaging naming conventions above. Suspend <ReasonDescription> Describe what action an administrator must take to resume the orchestration. More detail can be passed to error property – and should include what should be done by the administrator before resuming the orchestration. ReEstablishCreditLink Terminate <ReasonDescription> Describe why the orchestration terminated. More detail can be passed to error property. TimeoutsExpired Call Rules Call<PolicyName> The policy name may need to be abbreviated. CallLendingPolicy Compensate Compensate or Compensate<TxName> If the shape compensates nested transactions, names should be suffixed with the name of the nested transaction – otherwise it should simple be Compensate. CompensateTransferFunds Orchestration Types Type Standard Notes Example Multi-Part Message Types <LogicalDocumentType> Multi-part types encapsulate multiple parts. The WSDL spec indicates “parts are a flexible mechanism for describing the logical abstract content of a message.” The name of the multi-part type should correspond to the “logical” document type, i.e. what the sum of the parts describes. InvoiceReceipt (which might encapsulate an invoice acknowledgement and a payment voucher.) Multi-Part Messsage Part <SchemaNameOfPart> Should be named (most often) simply for the schema (or simple type) associated with the part. InvoiceHeader Messages <SchemaName> or <MuliPartMessageTypeName> Should be named based on the corresponding schema type or multi-part message type. If there is more than one variable of a type, name for its use within the orchestration. ReportDataMV UpdatedReportDataMV Variables <DescriptiveName> TargetFilePath StringProcessor Port Types <FunctionDescription>PortType Should be named to suggest the nature of an endpoint, with pascal casing and suffixed with “PortType”. If there will be more than one Port for a Port Type, the Port Type should be named according to the abstract service supplied. The WSDL spec indicates port types are “a named set of abstract operations and the abstract messages involved” that also encapsulates the message pattern (i.e. one-way, request-response, solicit-response) that all operations on the port type adhere to. ReceiveReportResponsePortType or CallEAEPortType (This is a two way port, so Receove or Send alone would not be appropriate. Could have been ProcessEAERequestPortType etc....) Ports <FunctionDescription>Port Should be named to suggest a grouping of functionality, with pascal casing and suffixed with “Port.” ReceiveReportResponsePort CallEAEPort Correlation types <DescriptiveName> Should be named based on the logical name of what is being used to correlate. PurchaseOrderNumber Correlation sets <DescriptiveName> Should be named based on the corresponding correlation type. If there is more than one, it should be named to reflect its specific purpose within the orchestration. PurchaseOrderNumber Orchestration parameters <DescriptiveName> Should be named to match the caller’s names for the corresponding variables where appropriate.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 07, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 07, 2010New ProjectsBibleBrowser: BibleBrowserBibleMaps: BibleMapsChristianLibrary: ChristianLibraryCLB Podcast Module: DotNetNuke Module used to allow DNN to host one or more podcasts within a portal.Coletivo InVitro: Nova versão do Site do ColetivoCustomer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Customer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.EasyTFS: A very lightweight, quick, web-based search application for Team Foundation Server. EasyTfs searches as you type, providing real-time search resul...FSCommunity: abcGeocache Downloader: GeocacheDownloader helps you download geocache information in an organised way, making easier to copy the information to your device. The applicati...Grabouille: Grabouille aims to be an incubation project for Microsoft best patterns & practices and also a container for last .Net technologies. The goal is, i...Klaverjas: Test application for testing different new technologies in .NET (WCF, DataServices, C# stuff, Entity...etc.)Livecity: Social network. Alpha 0.1MarxSupples: testMOSS 2007 - Excel Services: This helps you understand MOSS 2007 - Excel Services and how to use the same in .NETmy site: a personal web siteNazTek.Extension.Clr35: Contains a set of CLR 3.5 extensions and utility APInetDumbster: netDumbster is a .Net Fake SMTP Server clone of the popular Dumbster (http://quintanasoft.com/dumbster/) netDumbster is based on the API of nDumbs...Object-Oriented Optimization Toolbox (OOOT): A library (.dll) of various linear, nonlinear, and stochastic numerical optimization techniques. While some of these are older than 50 years, they ...OMap - Object to Object Mapper: OMap is a simple object to object mapper. It could be used for scenarios like mapping your data from domain objects into data transfer objects.PDF Renderer for BlackBerry.: Render and view PDF files on BlackBerry using a modified version of Sun's PDF Renderer.Pomodoro Tool: Pomodoro Tool is a timer for http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ . It's a timer and task tracker with a text task editing interface.ReadingPlan: ReadingPlanRil#: .net library to use the public Readitlater.com public APISCSM Incident SLA Management: This project provides an extension to System Center Service Manager to provide more granular control over incident service level agreement (SLA) ma...SEAH - Sistema Especialista de Agravante de Hipertensão: O SEAH tem como propósito alertar o indivíduo em relação ao seu agravante de hipertensão arterial e a órgãos competentes, entidades de ensino, pesq...StudyGuide: StudyGuideTest Project (ignore): This is used to demonstrate CodePlex at meetings. Please ignore this project.YCC: YCC is an open source c compiler which compatible with ANSI standard.The project is currently an origin start.We will work it for finally useable a...New ReleasesAlbum photo de club - Club's Photos Album: App - version 0.5: Modifications : - Ajout des favoris - Ajout de l'update automatique /*/ - Add favorites - Add automatic updateBoxee Launcher: Boxee Launcher 1.0.1.5: Boxee Launcher finds the BOXEE executable using a registry key that BOXEE creates. The new version of BOXEE changed the location. Boxee Launcher ha...CBM-Command: 2010-05-06: Release Notes - 2010-05-06New Features Creating Directories Deleting Files and Directories Renaming Files and Directories Changes 40 columns i...Customer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Customer Care Accelerator for Dynamics CRM R1: The Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM focuses on delivering contact center enabling functionality, such as the ability to ...D-AMPS: D-AMPS 0.9.2: Add .bat files for command-line running Bug fixed (core engine) Section 6, 8, 9 modifications Sources (Fortran) for core engineDynamicJson: Release 1.1.0.0: Add - foreach support Add - Dynamic Shortcut of IsDefined,Delete,Deserialize Fix - Deserialize Delete - LengthEasyTFS: EasyTfs 1.0 Beta 1: A very lightweight, quick, web-based search application for Team Foundation Server. EasyTfs searches as you type, providing real-time search resul...Event Scavenger: Add installer for Admin tool: Added installer for Admin tool. Removed exe's for admin and viewer from zip file - were replaced by the msi installers.Expression Blend Samples: PathListBoxUtils for Expression Blend 4 RC: Initial release of the PathListBoxUtils samples.HackingSilverlight Code Browser: HackingSilverlight Code Browser: Out with the old and in with the new... the HackingSilverlight Code Browser is a reference tool for code snippets so that I can not have to remembe...Hammock for REST: Hammock v1.0.3: v1.0.3 ChangesFixes for OAuth escaping and API usage Added FollowRedirects feature to RestClient/RestRequest v1.0.2 Changes.NET 4.0 and Client P...ImmlPad: ImmlPad Beta 1.1.1: Changes in this release: Added more intelligent right-click menu's to allow opening an IMML document with a specific Player version Fixed issue w...LinkedIn® for Windows Mobile: LinkedIn for Windows Mobile v0.8: Improved error message dumping + moved OAuth parameters from www.* to api.* In case of unexpected errors, check "Application Data\LinkedIn for Wind...Live-Exchange Calendar Sync: Installer: Alpha release of Live-Exchange Calendar SyncMAPILab Explorer for SharePoint: MAPILab Explorer for SharePoint ver 2.1.0: 1) Get settings form old versions 2) Rules added to display enumerable object items. 3) Bug fixed with remove persisted object How to install:Do...MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi May 6, 2010: This release enables output .prj files to also show the ESRI names for the PRJCS, GEOCS, and the DATUM. It also fixes a bug that was preventing th...MOSS 2007 - Excel Services: Calculator using Excel Services: Simple calculator using Excel ServicesMvcMaps - Unified Bing/Google Mapping API for ASP.NET MVC: MvcMaps Preview 1 for ASP.NET 4.0 and VS'2010: There was a change in ASP.NET 4.0 that broke the release, so a small modification needed to be made to the reflection code. This release fixes that...NazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Binary Cab: Binary cab fileNazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Source Cab: Source codePDF Renderer for BlackBerry.: PDF Renderer 0.1 for BlackBerry: This library requires a BlackBerry Signing Key in order to compile for use on a BlackBerry device. Signing keys can be obtained at BlackBerry Code ...Pomodoro Tool: PomodoroTool Clickonce installer: PomodoroTool Clickonce installerPOS for .Net Handheld Products Service Object: POS for .Net Handheld Products Service Object 1002: New version (1.0.0.2) which should support 64 bit platforms (see ReadMe.txt included with source for details). Source code only.QuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.4: What's New in QuestTracker 0.4 - - You can now drag and drop the quests on the left pane to rearrange or move quests from one group to another. - D...RDA Collaboration Team Projects: Property Bag Cmdlet: This cmdlet allows to retrieve, insert and update property bag values at farm, web app, site and web scope. The same operations can be in code usi...Ril#: Rilsharp 1.0: The first version of the Ril# (Readitlater sharp) library.Scrum Sprint Monitor: v1.0.0.47911 (.NET 4-TFS 2010): What is new in this release? 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Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentBag

- by Simon Cooper

Unlike the other concurrent collections, ConcurrentBag does not really have a non-concurrent analogy. As stated in the MSDN documentation, ConcurrentBag is optimised for the situation where the same thread is both producing and consuming items from the collection. We'll see how this is the case as we take a closer look. Again, I recommend you have ConcurrentBag open in a decompiler for reference. Thread Statics ConcurrentBag makes heavy use of thread statics - static variables marked with ThreadStaticAttribute. This is a special attribute that instructs the CLR to scope any values assigned to or read from the variable to the executing thread, not globally within the AppDomain. This means that if two different threads assign two different values to the same thread static variable, one value will not overwrite the other, and each thread will see the value they assigned to the variable, separately to any other thread. This is a very useful function that allows for ConcurrentBag's concurrency properties. You can think of a thread static variable: [ThreadStatic] private static int m_Value; as doing the same as: private static Dictionary<Thread, int> m_Values; where the executing thread's identity is used to automatically set and retrieve the corresponding value in the dictionary. In .NET 4, this usage of ThreadStaticAttribute is encapsulated in the ThreadLocal class. Lists of lists ConcurrentBag, at its core, operates as a linked list of linked lists: Each outer list node is an instance of ThreadLocalList, and each inner list node is an instance of Node. Each outer ThreadLocalList is owned by a particular thread, accessible through the thread local m_locals variable: private ThreadLocal<ThreadLocalList<T>> m_locals It is important to note that, although the m_locals variable is thread-local, that only applies to accesses through that variable. The objects referenced by the thread (each instance of the ThreadLocalList object) are normal heap objects that are not specific to any thread. Thinking back to the Dictionary analogy above, if each value stored in the dictionary could be accessed by other means, then any thread could access the value belonging to other threads using that mechanism. Only reads and writes to the variable defined as thread-local are re-routed by the CLR according to the executing thread's identity. So, although m_locals is defined as thread-local, the m_headList, m_nextList and m_tailList variables aren't. This means that any thread can access all the thread local lists in the collection by doing a linear search through the outer linked list defined by these variables. Adding items So, onto the collection operations. First, adding items. This one's pretty simple. If the current thread doesn't already own an instance of ThreadLocalList, then one is created (or, if there are lists owned by threads that have stopped, it takes control of one of those). Then the item is added to the head of that thread's list. That's it. Don't worry, it'll get more complicated when we account for the other operations on the list! Taking & Peeking items This is where it gets tricky. If the current thread's list has items in it, then it peeks or removes the head item (not the tail item) from the local list and returns that. However, if the local list is empty, it has to go and steal another item from another list, belonging to a different thread. It iterates through all the thread local lists in the collection using the m_headList and m_nextList variables until it finds one that has items in it, and it steals one item from that list. Up to this point, the two threads had been operating completely independently. To steal an item from another thread's list, the stealing thread has to do it in such a way as to not step on the owning thread's toes. Recall how adding and removing items both operate on the head of the thread's linked list? That gives us an easy way out - a thread trying to steal items from another thread can pop in round the back of another thread's list using the m_tail variable, and steal an item from the back without the owning thread knowing anything about it. The owning thread can carry on completely independently, unaware that one of its items has been nicked. However, this only works when there are at least 3 items in the list, as that guarantees there will be at least one node between the owning thread performing operations on the list head and the thread stealing items from the tail - there's no chance of the two threads operating on the same node at the same time and causing a race condition. If there's less than three items in the list, then there does need to be some synchronization between the two threads. In this case, the lock on the ThreadLocalList object is used to mediate access to a thread's list when there's the possibility of contention. Thread synchronization In ConcurrentBag, this is done using several mechanisms: Operations performed by the owner thread only take out the lock when there are less than three items in the collection. With three or greater items, there won't be any conflict with a stealing thread operating on the tail of the list. If a lock isn't taken out, the owning thread sets the list's m_currentOp variable to a non-zero value for the duration of the operation. This indicates to all other threads that there is a non-locked operation currently occuring on that list. The stealing thread always takes out the lock, to prevent two threads trying to steal from the same list at the same time. After taking out the lock, the stealing thread spinwaits until m_currentOp has been set to zero before actually performing the steal. This ensures there won't be a conflict with the owning thread when the number of items in the list is on the 2-3 item borderline. If any add or remove operations are started in the meantime, and the list is below 3 items, those operations try to take out the list's lock and are blocked until the stealing thread has finished. This allows a thread to steal an item from another thread's list without corrupting it. What about synchronization in the collection as a whole? Collection synchronization Any thread that operates on the collection's global structure (accessing anything outside the thread local lists) has to take out the collection's global lock - m_globalListsLock. This single lock is sufficient when adding a new thread local list, as the items inside each thread's list are unaffected. However, what about operations (such as Count or ToArray) that need to access every item in the collection? In order to ensure a consistent view, all operations on the collection are stopped while the count or ToArray is performed. This is done by freezing the bag at the start, performing the global operation, and unfreezing at the end: The global lock is taken out, to prevent structural alterations to the collection. m_needSync is set to true. This notifies all the threads that they need to take out their list's lock irregardless of what operation they're doing. All the list locks are taken out in order. This blocks all locking operations on the lists. The freezing thread waits for all current lockless operations to finish by spinwaiting on each m_currentOp field. The global operation can then be performed while the bag is frozen, but no other operations can take place at the same time, as all other threads are blocked on a list's lock. Then, once the global operation has finished, the locks are released, m_needSync is unset, and normal concurrent operation resumes. Concurrent principles That's the essence of how ConcurrentBag operates. Each thread operates independently on its own local list, except when they have to steal items from another list. When stealing, only the stealing thread is forced to take out the lock; the owning thread only has to when there is the possibility of contention. And a global lock controls accesses to the structure of the collection outside the thread lists. Operations affecting the entire collection take out all locks in the collection to freeze the contents at a single point in time. So, what principles can we extract here? Threads operate independently Thread-static variables and ThreadLocal makes this easy. Threads operate entirely concurrently on their own structures; only when they need to grab data from another thread is there any thread contention. Minimised lock-taking Even when two threads need to operate on the same data structures (one thread stealing from another), they do so in such a way such that the probability of actually blocking on a lock is minimised; the owning thread always operates on the head of the list, and the stealing thread always operates on the tail. Management of lockless operations Any operations that don't take out a lock still have a 'hook' to force them to lock when necessary. This allows all operations on the collection to be stopped temporarily while a global snapshot is taken. Hopefully, such operations will be short-lived and infrequent. That's all the concurrent collections covered. I hope you've found it as informative and interesting as I have. Next, I'll be taking a closer look at ThreadLocal, which I came across while analyzing ConcurrentBag. As you'll see, the operation of this class deserves a much closer look.

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When Your Boss Doesn't Want you to Succeed

- by Phil Factor

You're working hard to get an application finished. You are programming long into the evenings sometimes, and eating sandwiches at your desk instead of taking a lunch break. Then one day you glance up at the IT manager, serene in his mysterious round of meetings, and think 'Does he actually care whether this project succeeds or not?'. The question may seem absurd. Of course the project must succeed. The truth, as always, is often far more complex. Your manager may even be doing his best to make sure you don't succeed. Why? There have always been rich pickings for the unscrupulous in IT. In extreme cases, where administrators struggle with scarcely-comprehended technical issues, huge sums of money can be lost and gained without any perceptible results. In a very few cases can fraud be proven: most of the time, the intricacies of the 'game' are such that one can do little more than harbor suspicion. Where does over-enthusiastic salesmanship end and fraud begin? The Business of Information Technology provides rich opportunities for White-collar crime. The poor developer has his, or her, hands full with the task of wrestling with the sheer complexity of building an application. He, or she, has no time for following the complexities of the chicanery of the management that is directing affairs. Most likely, the developers wouldn't even suspect that their company management had ulterior motives. I'll illustrate what I mean with an entirely fictional, hypothetical, example. The Opportunist and the Aged Charities often do good, unexciting work that is funded by the income from a bequest that dates back maybe hundreds of years. In our example, it isn't exciting work, for it involves the welfare of elderly people who have fallen on hard times. Volunteers visit, giving a smile and a chat, and check that they are all right, but are able to spend a little money on their discretion to ameliorate any pressing needs for these old folk. The money is made to work very hard and the charity averts a great deal of suffering and eases the burden on the state. Daisy hears the garden gate creak as Mrs Rainer comes up the path. She looks forward to her twice-weekly visit from the nice lady from the trust. She always asked ‘is everything all right, Love’. Cheeky but nice. She likes her cheery manner. She seems interested in hearing her memories, and talking about her far-away family. She helps her with those chores in the house that she couldn’t manage and once even paid to fill the back-shed with coke, the other year. Nice, Mrs. Rainer is, she thought as she goes to open the door. The trustees are getting on in years themselves, and worry about the long-term future of the charity: is it relevant to modern society? Is it likely to attract a new generation of workers to take it on. They are instantly attracted by the arrival to the board of a smartly dressed University lecturer with the ear of the present Government. Alain 'Stalin' Jones is earnest, persuasive and energetic. The trustees welcome him to the board and quickly forgive his humorless political-correctness. He talks of 'diversity', 'relevance', 'social change', 'equality' and 'communities', but his eye is on that huge bequest. Alain first came to notice as a Trotskyite union official, who insinuated himself into one of the duller Trades Unions and turned it, through his passionate leadership, into a radical, headline-grabbing organization. Middle age, and the rise of European federal socialism, had brought him quiet prosperity and charcoal suits, an ear in the current government, and a wide influence as a member of various Quangos (government bodies staffed by well-paid unelected courtiers). He was employed as a 'consultant' by several organizations that relied on government contracts. After gaining the confidence of the trustees, and showing a surprising knowledge of mundane processes and the regulatory framework of charities, Alain launches his plan. The trust will expand their work by means of a bold IT initiative that will coordinate the interventions of several 'caring agencies', and provide emergency cover, a special Website so anxious relatives can see how their elderly charges are doing, and a vastly more efficient way of coordinating the work of the volunteer carers. It will also provide a special-purpose site that gives 'social networking' facilities, rather like Facebook, to the few elderly folk on the lists with access to the internet. The trustees perk up. Their own experience of the internet is restricted to the occasional scanning of railway timetables, but they can see that it is 'relevant'. In his next report to the other trustees, Alain proudly announces that all this glamorous and exciting technology can be paid for by a grant from the government. He admits darkly that he has influence. True to his word, the government promises a grant of a size that is an order of magnitude greater than any budget that the trustees had ever handled. There was the understandable proviso that the company that would actually do the IT work would have to be one of the government's preferred suppliers and the work would need to be tendered under EU competition rules. The only company that tenders, a multinational IT company with a long track record of government work, quotes ten million pounds for the work. A trustee questions the figure as it seems enormous for the reasonably trivial internet facilities being built, but the IT Salesmen dazzle them with presentations and three-letter acronyms until they subside into quiescent acceptance. After all, they can’t stay locked in the Twentieth century practices can they? The work is put in hand with a large project team, in a splendid glass building near west London. The trustees see rooms of programmers working diligently at screens, and who talk with enthusiasm of the project. Paul, the project manager, looked through his resource schedule with growing unease. His initial excitement at being given his first major project hadn’t lasted. He’d been allocated a lackluster team of developers whose skills didn’t seem right, and he was allowed only a couple of contractors to make good the deficit. Strangely, the presentation he’d given to his management, where he’d saved time and resources with a OTS solution to a great deal of the development work, and a sound conservative architecture, hadn’t gone down nearly as big as he’d hoped. He almost got the feeling they wanted a more radical and ambitious solution. The project starts slipping its dates. The costs build rapidly. There are certain uncomfortable extra charges that appear, such as the £600-a-day charge by the 'Business Manager' appointed to act as a point of liaison between the charity and the IT Company. When he appeared, his face permanently split by a 'Mr Sincerity' smile, they'd thought he was provided at the cost of the IT Company. Derek, the DBA, didn’t have to go to the server room quite some much as he did: but It got him away from the poisonous despair of the development group. Wave after wave of events had conspired to delay the project. Why the management had imposed hideous extra bureaucracy to cover ISO 9000 and 9001:2008 accreditation just as the project was struggling to get back on-schedule was beyond belief. Then the Business manager was coming back with endless changes in scope, sorrowing saying that the Trustees were very insistent, though hopelessly out in touch with the reality of technical challenges. Suddenly, the costs mount to the point of consuming the government grant in its entirety. The project remains tantalizingly just out of reach. Alain Jones gives an emotional rallying speech at the trustees review meeting, urging them not to lose their nerve. Sadly, the trustees dip into the accumulated capital of the trust, the seed-corn of all their revenues, in order to save the IT project. A few months later it is all over. The IT project is never delivered, even though it had seemed so incredibly close. With the trust's capital all gone, the activities it funded have to be terminated and the trust becomes just a shell. There aren't even the funds to mount a legal challenge against the IT company, even had the trust's solicitor advised such a foolish thing. Alain leaves as suddenly as he had arrived, only to pop up a few months later, bronzed and rested, at another charity. The IT workers who were permanent employees are dispersed to other projects, and the contractors leave to other contracts. Within months the entire project is but a vague memory. One or two developers remain puzzled that their managers had been so obstructive when they should have welcomed progress toward completion of the project, but they put it down to incompetence and testosterone. Few suspected that they were actively preventing the project from getting finished. The relationships between the IT consultancy, and the government of the day are intricate, and made more complex by the Private Finance initiatives and political patronage. The losers in this case were the taxpayers, and the beneficiaries of the trust, and, perhaps the soul of the original benefactor of the trust, whose bid to give his name some immortality had been scuppered by smooth-talking white-collar political apparatniks. Even now, nobody is certain whether a crime was ever committed. The perfect heist, I guess. Where’s the victim? "I hear that Daisy’s cottage is up for sale. She’s had to go into a care home. She didn’t want to at all, but then there is nobody to keep an eye on her since she had that minor stroke a while back. A charity used to help out. The ‘social’ don’t have the funding, evidently for community care. Yes, her old cat was put down. There was a good clearout, and now the house is all scrubbed and cleared ready for sale. The skip was full of old photos and letters, memories. No room in her new ‘home’."

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