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• Performance triage

  - by Dave

  Folks often ask me how to approach a suspected performance issue. My personal strategy is informed by the fact that I work on concurrency issues. (When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but I'll try to keep this general). A good starting point is to ask yourself if the observed performance matches your expectations. Expectations might be derived from known system performance limits, prototypes, and other software or environments that are comparable to your particular system-under-test. Some simple comparisons and microbenchmarks can be useful at this stage. It's also useful to write some very simple programs to validate some of the reported or expected system limits. Can that disk controller really tolerate and sustain 500 reads per second? To reduce the number of confounding factors it's better to try to answer that question with a very simple targeted program. And finally, nothing beats having familiarity with the technologies that underlying your particular layer. On the topic of confounding factors, as our technology stacks become deeper and less transparent, we often find our own technology working against us in some unexpected way to choke performance rather than simply running into some fundamental system limit. A good example is the warm-up time needed by just-in-time compilers in Java Virtual Machines. I won't delve too far into that particular hole except to say that it's rare to find good benchmarks and methodology for java code. Another example is power management on x86. Power management is great, but it can take a while for the CPUs to throttle up from low(er) frequencies to full throttle. And while I love "turbo" mode, it makes benchmarking applications with multiple threads a chore as you have to remember to turn it off and then back on otherwise short single-threaded runs may look abnormally fast compared to runs with higher thread counts. In general for performance characterization I disable turbo mode and fix the power governor at "performance" state. Another source of complexity is the scheduler, which I've discussed in prior blog entries. Lets say I have a running application and I want to better understand its behavior and performance. We'll presume it's warmed up, is under load, and is an execution mode representative of what we think the norm would be. It should be in steady-state, if a steady-state mode even exists. On Solaris the very first thing I'll do is take a set of "pstack" samples. Pstack briefly stops the process and walks each of the stacks, reporting symbolic information (if available) for each frame. For Java, pstack has been augmented to understand java frames, and even report inlining. A few pstack samples can provide powerful insight into what's actually going on inside the program. You'll be able to see calling patterns, which threads are blocked on what system calls or synchronization constructs, memory allocation, etc. If your code is CPU-bound then you'll get a good sense where the cycles are being spent. (I should caution that normal C/C++ inlining can diffuse an otherwise "hot" method into other methods. This is a rare instance where pstack sampling might not immediately point to the key problem). At this point you'll need to reconcile what you're seeing with pstack and your mental model of what you think the program should be doing. They're often rather different. And generally if there's a key performance issue, you'll spot it with a moderate number of samples. I'll also use OS-level observability tools to lock for the existence of bottlenecks where threads contend for locks; other situations where threads are blocked; and the distribution of threads over the system. On Solaris some good tools are mpstat and too a lesser degree, vmstat. Try running "mpstat -a 5" in one window while the application program runs concurrently. One key measure is the voluntary context switch rate "vctx" or "csw" which reflects threads descheduling themselves. It's also good to look at the user; system; and idle CPU percentages. This can give a broad but useful understanding if your threads are mostly parked or mostly running. For instance if your program makes heavy use of malloc/free, then it might be the case you're contending on the central malloc lock in the default allocator. In that case you'd see malloc calling lock in the stack traces, observe a high csw/vctx rate as threads block for the malloc lock, and your "usr" time would be less than expected. Solaris dtrace is a wonderful and invaluable performance tool as well, but in a sense you have to frame and articulate a meaningful and specific question to get a useful answer, so I tend not to use it for first-order screening of problems. It's also most effective for OS and software-level performance issues as opposed to HW-level issues. For that reason I recommend mpstat & pstack as my the 1st step in performance triage. If some other OS-level issue is evident then it's good to switch to dtrace to drill more deeply into the problem. Only after I've ruled out OS-level issues do I switch to using hardware performance counters to look for architectural impediments.

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• Programming language specific package management systems

  - by m0nhawk

  There are some programming languages for which exist their own package management systems: CTAN for TeX CPAN for Perl Pip & Eggs for Python Maven for Java cabal for Haskell Gems for Ruby Is there any other languages with such systems? What about C and C++? (that's the main question!) Why there are no such systems for them? And isn't creating packages for yum, apt-get or other general package management systems better? UPD: And what about unification? Have someone tried to unify that "the zoo"? If yes, looks like that project didn't succeed.

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• TCP/IP Implementation General Questions

  - by user2971023

  I've implemented the concepts shown here; http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Simple_TCP/IP_Client_-_Server outside of unity and it works. (though i had to create the TCPIPServerApp from scratch as i could not find the base project anywhere). I have some general questions on how to use tcp/ip properly however. I've done some research on tcp/ip itself but I'm still a little confused. It seems like using the method above doesn't guarantee that I'll see the message (res). It just checks on every update to see if there is a different message in res. What if multiple messages are sent and the program lags or something, will i miss the earlier packet(s)? Should i instead do an array so it stores the last X messages? How do i know the data was received? Do I need to add a message id and build in my own ack into the data? Should i check to see if the port is in use before setting up a connection? Sorry for all the questions. This is all new to me but I enjoy this very much! ... Below already answered By Anton, Thanks It sounds like tcp uses its own packet numbering to ensure the packets end up in the right order on the other side. What if a packet is missed, are the subsequent packets thrown away? Or is this numbering and packet ordering, only for handling data that is broken out into multiple packets? TCP will automatically break the data into multiple packets if necessary right?

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• SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 5 Out of memory (Needed 4194092 bytes)

  - by Jon Reeks

  Hi I'm receiving the following error on my shared hosting box: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 5 Out of memory (Needed 4194092 bytes) This error is only triggered on a specific page. I guess this indicates that I am reaching the upper limit of the 64MB allocated to me in my current MySQL environment. Does this mean that a single query is going over (returning) 64MB of data? If so, i guess i can just track down and tune that specific query? Or isnt that the correct approach? Thanks Jon

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• Implementation of a general-purpose object structure (property bag)

  - by Thomas Wanner

  We need to implement some general-purpose object structure, much like an object in dynamic languages, that would give us a possibility of creating the whole object graph on-the-fly. This class has to be serializable and somehow user friendly. So far we have made some experiments with class derived from Dictionary<string, object> using the dot notation path to store properties and collections in the object tree. We have also find an article that implements something similar, but it doesn't seem to fit completely into our picture either. Do you know about some good implementations / libraries that deal with a similar problem or do you have any (non-trivial) ideas that could help us with our own implementation ? Also, I probably have to say that we are using .NET 3.5, so we can't take advantage of the new features in .NET 4.0 like dynamic type etc. (as far as I know it's also not possible to use any subset of it in .NET 3.5 solution).

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• General ODBC Error in VBA

  - by raam

  Hi am populating the data from MS Access By Using VBA i am using below mentioned code.if i am run the same code in MS 2007 then It run properly but if i am run the same code in MS 2003 it gives the "General ODBC Error" how to solve this problem Any help would be appreciated!! Thanks in advance Sub Button2_Click() Dim varConnection As String Dim varSQL As String Dim cal, cal1, x varConnection = "ODBC; DSN=MS Access Database;DBQ=D:\Box\Generate.mdb;Driver={Driver do Microsoft Access (*.mdb)}" ' varSQL = "SELECT * FROM Empdata" With ActiveSheet.QueryTables.Add(Connection:=varConnection, Destination:=ActiveSheet.Range("C7")) .CommandText = varSQL .Name = "Query-39008" .Refresh BackgroundQuery = False End With End Sub

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• Tomcat Exception-Type Ignoring Specific Exception for More General

  - by David Marks

  For one type of exception, IOException, I want to display one page. For all other exceptions I have a default error page. In my web.xml I have things setup like this: java.io.IOException /queryException.jsp java.lang.Exception /error.jsp The problem is the error.jsp is the only page that ever shows, even if an IOException is thrown. The order the tags appear in doesn't matter; if I remove the java.lang.Exception tag though, I can get queryException to show for IOExceptions. What is the solution here? How can I keep a general error page for all exceptions EXCEPT for those with specific pages?

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• A general question about inheritence in the .NET framework

  - by Grant

  I have a general question about inheritance in the .NET framework, lets say you have 2 classes, the first is called Parent and the second is called Child. Child inherits from Parent. Parent wants to ensure that each instance of child executes a specific piece of code when it loads irrespective of whether the child has their own onLoad code explicitly specified. From my experience, if i handle onLoad in the parent and not in the child, the parents onLoad code will fire but if its handled in both classes only the child's code will fire. Is this correct? and if so how can i ensure the parents code will always fire for the child...

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• General zoom algorithm for drawing program

  - by Steven Sproat

  My GUI toolkit, wxPython provides some methods for implementing a user zoom factor, however the quality isn't too good. I'm looking for ideas on how to create a zooming feature, which I know is complicated. I have a bitmap representing my canvas which is drawn to. This is displayed inside a scrolled window. Problems I forsee: - performance when zoomed in and panning around the canvas - difficulties with "real" coordinates and zoomed in coordinates - image quality not degrading with the zoom Using wxPython's SetUserScale() on its device contexts presents image quality like this - this is with a 1px line, at 30% zoomed in. I'm just wondering the general steps I'll need to take and the challenges I'll encounter. Thanks for any suggestions

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• A general declaration for all inherited classes

  - by Soham

  Consider, there is a class called SuperClass from which, ClassA, ClassB, ClassC is derived. From each one of those derived Classes, there are further more two classes are derived each called ChildClassAA and ChildClassAB[AB stands for Bth Child class from the Ath Class.Lets not really pull our hair on this nomenclature]. Now, ideally, I want to declare a general type as a private member of another Class say IndependentClass which can be initialized during run time as either of the objects of type ClassAor ClassB or ClassC and even the derived classes like ClassAA or ClassAB. Is there a possible way to do it?

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• Visual Studio 2010 compilation general error c1010070

  - by user1747455

  I wrote a little "hello world" program to test my computer, but when i sompile the program there's an error: ------ Build started: Project: hi, Configuration: Debug Win32 ------ Build started 15/10/2012 22:36:48. InitializeBuildStatus: Touching "Debug\hi.unsuccessfulbuild". Link: hi.vcxproj - D:\MSVS\hi\Debug\hi.exe Manifest: Debug\hi.exe.intermediate.manifest : general error c1010070: Failed to load and parse the manifest. {q~ 0H Build FAILED. Time Elapsed 00:00:02.34 ========== Build: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ========== the creepiest thing i think would be that line of "OH"... i wonder if there's any way to solve this...please help. Many thanks. edit: i tried changing the character set into "multi-byte" and turning "embed manifest"(from "manifest tools") off, but it still cant solve the error

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• General suggestions for making R code faster? [closed]

  - by gsk3

  Questions come up fairly frequently about how to make R code faster. This is an attempt to provide a general framework for thinking about the problem. Questions of this nature seem to fall into one of a few categories: I have a loop and it's running slowly. I've heard that vectorization can speed things up. How do I vectorize it? I've vectorized and it's still running slowly. What do I do next? I'd like to speed up my code but it's running quickly enough already. What are the principles and specifics which can be used to make R code run faster?

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• Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure.  These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps.  Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites.  This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.  You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM).  You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address.  SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with).  Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites.  This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases.  See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode).  This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary.  Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here.  Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing).  Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications.  Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it.  These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require.  In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services.  The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium.  Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs.  You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here):   You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly.  With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable.  Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale.  Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site.  I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances.  The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below.  If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use).  If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running  in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application.  You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected:   Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set.  If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red.  Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users.  Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test:   This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today.  If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Exciting product releases (and one disappointing thing) with Mix10

  - by Jeff

  Sadly, I'm not at Mix this year, for the first time in a few years. It's a little harder to go if you work for Microsoft, oddly enough. And then there's this little guy next to me, who at ten days old really needs his daddy to be around! But oh, the excitement of what Microsoft has in store! It's great to finally see all of these major releases coming together for Microsoft developer products. There is a great deal of excitement among people internally no matter where you work, because there is so much cool stuff in the pipe. In case you live under a rock...Visual Studio 2010 - Great to see all of the positive feedback on the Twitter and what not. I've been using it on one of my home products for awhile, and I really like it. The newer nightly builds of ReSharper also seem to be gaining speed in quality as well. I like the new debugging features, and the text readability is not imagined. Love it.Silverlight 4 - I've been running a couple of minor SL3 apps on my personal sites for awhile now, and I'm thrilled with the platform. With a couple of key concepts down, .NET folk like you and me can do some stellar things with this, and if you're a Mac nerd (like me), it's all kinds of awesome to be able to build stuff for it without the agony of Objective-C and X Code.Windows Phone 7 Series - A few weeks ago you got to see the shiny new UI that went beyond the icon grid, and now you've got the developer story as well. That I can adapt my existing Silverlight apps with minimal effort to work on the phone is pretty powerful. Millions of .NET devs just because phone developers, using the tools they already know. How great is that?ASP.NET MVC2 - The final bits shipped last week, and there was much rejoicing. I love this framework because of the testability and the real ability to get to the true mechanics of HTTP. The other cool thing is the speed at which the framework has evolved. v2 in less than a year is pretty "un-Microsoft" in a lot of eyes.The video of keynotes and sessions is starting to appear on the Mix site, but for reasons I can't understand, they're WMV downloads. For real? Not that helpful for Mac folk. Why wouldn't they be using a Silverlight player?In any case, the thing that continues to motivate me is that getting what you imagine on to the Internet gets easier every year. This is not a new revelation for me. I've only been at Microsoft for four months, but I've felt this way for years. I'm thrilled to be a part of it.

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• Finally, upgrade from Nokia X3 to Samsung Galaxy S III

  This time, something slightly different but nonetheless not less interesting, hopefully. Living on a remote island like Mauritius, ill-praised 'Cyber Island' in the Indian Ocean, has its advantages in life style and relaxed environment to life in but in terms of technological aspects it can be quite a nightmare. Well, I guess this might be different story to report about... one day. Cyber Island Mauritius Despite it's shiny advertisement as Cyber Island and business in ICT hub to Africa, Mauritius is not on the latest track of available models in computer hardware or, in the context of this article, cellulars or smart-phone, or communication technology in general. Okay, I have to admit that this statement is only partly true. Money can buy, even here in Mauritius. Luckily, there are ways and ways to deal with this outcry of modern, read: technological, civilisation issues. Online shopping you might think? Yes, for sure, until you discover in your checkout procedure that a small island in the Indian Ocean isn't a preferred destination for delivery and the precious time you spent on putting your items into your cart and feeding your personal level of anticipation gets ruined on the last stint. Ordering from abroad saves you money Anyway, I got in touch with my personal courier and luckily there were some extra-kilos left in the luggage. First obstacle sorted, we have a Transporter! Okay, on the next occasion off to Amazon online and using their Prime service for fast delivery. Actually, the order was placed on Saturday evening and everything got delivered on Tuesday morning - nice job in less than 72 hours. Okay, among the items of that shopping rush I ordered a shiny Samsung Galaxy S III 16GB in oceanic blue - did I mention, that you hardly get a blue model in Mauritius? - for my BWE. Interesting side-notes: First, Amazon Germany dropped the prices for roughly 30% on the S3, and we got the 16GB model for less than 500 Euro (or approx. Rs. 19.500,-) compared to the usual Rs. 27.000,- on the local market. It even varies whether the local price is inclusive or exclusive VAT (15%). Second, since a while she was bothering me to get an iPhone and an iPad for her, fair enough I thought, decent hardware, posh design and reliable services. Until we watched the 'magical' introduction of Samsung's new models at the IFA exhibition, she read the bashing comments on Google+ on the iPhone 5 and I gave her a brief summary on the law suit between Apple and Samsung in the USA. So, yes, Samsung USA is right, the next big thing is already here - literally. My BWE loves the look and touch of the Galaxy S3. And for me it was more cost-effective in terms of purchases done at the App Store, ups, Play Store. Transfer of contacts, text messages and media files Okay, now that the hardware is in place, how to transfer all those contacts, text messages, media files, etc. between those two devices? In the past, I used to use the Nokia Communication Suite between various models but now for Android? Well, as usual Google and Bing are reliable friends and among the first hits I came across an article about How to Transfer Contacts from Nokia to Android. Couldn't be easier, right? Well, sort of... my main Windows systems are already running on Windows 8, and this actually caused problems with the mobile/smart-phone device drivers. The article provides the download for an older version 1.10 which upgrades to 2.11 (as time of writing this entry) but both couldn't get the Galaxy S3 and the Nokia connected. Shame on me... the product page clearly doesn't mention Windows 8 (for now) and Windows 8 isn't available for the general audience at all... After I took a spare machine running on Windows Vista everything went smooth. Software installed, upgrade done, device drivers for Android automatically downloaded and installed, and the same painless routine for the Nokia part. I think, I rebooted the system twice during the whole setup procedure but hey, it was more or less a distraction while coding some stuff in ASP.NET MVC and Telerik Kendo UI. The transfer of contacts and text messages was done via Wondershare MobileGo for Android, and all media files by moving the additional microSD card from one device to the other. But even without an external SD card, it would have been very easy to copy the files via Windows Explorer directly. Little catch and excellent service Fine, we are almost done and the only step left is to shift the SIM card... Ouch, gotcha! The X3 uses a standard size SIM card while the S III only accepts microSIM form factor. What an irony, bigger smartphone needs smaller SIM card. Luckily, the next showroom of Emtel is just 5 mins away up the road, and the service staff over there know their job. Finally, after roughly 10 mins of paper work, activation and small chit-chat, the S3 came to life on the mobile network. Owning a smart-phone now and knowing that my BWE would like to interact more on social networks away from home, especially to upload pictures and provide local 'check-ins', I activated a data package for her in advance, too. Even that it is Saturday, everything was already done and ready to be used. Nice bonus: The Emtel clerk directly offered me to set up the configuration for the Emtel data services, yes sure, go ahead, this saves me to search for that in the settings. Okay, spoiler-alert here, setting a static APN to access the Emtel network and the internet wouldn't be a challenge. But hey, she already had the phone in her hands and I could keep my eyes on the children. Well done, Emtel! Resume Thanks to the useful software package by Wondershare is was a hands-free experience to transfer all the data from a Nokia mobile on Symbian S60 to a Samsung Galaxy S III on Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). In the future, this wont be a serious issue at all anymore thanks to synchronisation services and cloud storage. And for now, I'm only waiting for the official upgrades for Jelly Bean.

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• .NET Reference "Copy Local" True / Fasle Being Set Based on Contents of General Assembly

  - by D-Sect

  Hello All. First question for me here. We had a very interesting problem with a Win Forms project. It's been resolved. We know what happened, but we want to understand why it happened. This may help other people out in the future who have a similar problem. The WinForms project failed on 2 of our client's PCs. The error was an obscure kernel.dll error. The project ran fine on 3 other PCs. We found that a .DLL (log4net.dll - a very popular open-source logging library) was missing from our release folder. It was previously in our release folder. Why was it missing in this latest release? It was missing because I must have installed a program on my Dev box that used log4net.dll and it was added to the general assembly. When I checked the SLN's references for log4net.dll, they were changed to "copy local=FALSE". They must have changed automagicially because log4net.dll was present in my GAC. Here's where my question starts: Why did my reference for log4net.dll get changed from COPY LOCAL = TRUE to COPY LOCAL = FALSE? I suspect it's because it was added to my GAC by another program. How can we prevent this from happening again? As it stands now, if I install a piece of software that uses a common library and it adds it to my GAC, then my SLNs that REF that DLL will change from Copy Local TRUE to FALSE. Thank you so much. I hope this helps people out who have a piece of software that runs in some places, but not in others, when it used to run fine in ALL places.

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• Architecting iPhone Views - seeking help on a specific issue + general advice

  - by Ev

  Hi there, I am a web developer (rails, python) that is new to iPhone development. I've done some desktop development in the past within the MS environment (C#). I'm trying to build a really simple iPhone application and I am confused by the way that views work in general. If someone can provide advice for my particular problem, along with some resources where I can learn how to architect iPhone views in the future, that would be awesome. I feel like a lot of the Apple documentation that I've come across is too specific - I am lacking a fundamental understanding of how views work on the iPhone. My particular problem looks like this: I need one view that displays some downloaded text content. This is the view that shows when the app loads, and it is pretty straightforward. Then I need a settings area (I've already decided I don't want to use the iPhone settings area). The settings area main page will have some text fields on it. It will also have a 2-row grouped table. Each cell in that table will take you to another view which also has a grouped table used for multi-select. I suspect that I can reuse the same view for these two final "detailed setting" views. In summary: home page settings main page detailed setting 1 detailed setting 2 Any help and advice appreciated.

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• Deployments and TFS, general questions

  - by Velika

  SOX requires that we have a separate group deploy our ASP.NET web to production. Currently, that group has access to our current code repository in VSS and uses VSS to deploy code that has been checked into VSS. How are deployments typically done for web applications? As a developer, I have used the Deploy function in Visual Studio to deploy code to a network share which corresponds to a IS virtual folder, but I don't think we can expect that the deployment group will be purchasing a copy of Visual Studio just to do deployments. We could check the code into TFS, but what is the minimum software that that group would need to perform the deployment? Would a Team Explorer Client Access suffice? I am aware that Team System has functionality to automate the building of an application. Do people typically deploy to Production by copying aspx and dlls files from the QA environment to production or do you normally deploy from TFS or even VS directly? It seems to me that the preferred approach would be to deploy from the QA environment, since that is the environment that must have been approved for release or that those files should be checked into TFS and the deployed from TFS, assuming you can deploy from TFS. What confuses me is whether bin (binary) files that are local to the project-do they go into TFS? Is so, doesn't this create problems for other developers in that only 1 developers-the one with the binary checked - can actually debug because debugging requires write access to the binaries? Does this mean that the binaries shouldn't be checked into TFS? But eventually, if you deploy from TFS, the binaries HAVE to be added to TFS. Are they added as a separate (compiled) application node? If so,m this sounds real ugly. I would assume not. How does one ensure that the binaries match the source code that we mark with a particular version number? Obviously, I'm clueless. Can someone give me a general idea of how you handle version control and deployments in particular using TFS?

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• is there an equivalent of a trigger for general stored procedure execution on sql server

  - by Arj

  Hi All, Hope you can help. Is there a way to detect when a stored proc is being run on SQL Server without altering the SP itself? Here's the requirement. We need to track users running reports from our enterprise data warehouse as the core product we use doesn't allow for this. Both core product reports and a slew of in-house ones we've added all return their data from individual stored procs. We don't have a practical way of altering the parts of the product webpages where reports are called from. We also can't change the stored procs for the core product reports. (It would be trivial to add a logging line to the start/end of each of our inhouse ones). What I'm trying to find therefore, is whether there's a way in SQL Server (2005 / 2008) to execute a logging stored proc whenever any other stored procedure runs, without altering those stored procedures themselves. We have general control over the SQL Server instance itself as it's local, we just don't want to change the product stored procs themselves. Any one have any ideas? Is there a kind of "stored proc executing trigger"? Is there an event model for SQL Server that we can hook custom .Net code into? (Just to discount it from the start, we want to try and make a change to SQL Server rather than get into capturing the report being run from the products webpages etc) Thoughts appreciated Thanks

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• Handling data update/freshness issue in web-app in general (or GWT specifically)

  - by edwin.nathaniel

  In general, how do you guys handle user update/data freshness interaction with the user (UI issue) in web-apps? For example: Multi-users web-app (like project management) Login to a "virtual" space People can update project names, etc How to handle a situation such that: user-A and user-B load a project with title "Project StackOverflow" user-B updates the title to "Project StackExchange" user-A updates the title after user-B update operation to "Project Basecamp" The question I'm asking is from the user perspective (UI) and not about transactional operation. What do most people do in this situation? What would you do after user-B updates the title in user-A screen/view? What happened when user-A tries to update the title after user-B finished his/her update operation? do you inform user-A that the title has changed and he/she has to reload the page? do you go ahead and change the title and let user-B has old data? Do you do some sort of application-level "locking" mechanism? (if someone is updating, nobody else can?) Or fix the application workflow? (who has the access to be able to change things, etc). What would be the simplest solution, but at the same time not annoy the user with more dialog/warning messages. I've encountered this particular problem frequently in a GWT app specifically where domain models are being passed around and refreshing the whole app/client-side isn't the optimal solution in my mind (since it means the whole "loading"/initialization phase must be executed again in this specific environment). Maybe the answer is to stay away from GWT? :) Love to hear options, solutions, and advises from you guys. Thanks

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• Designing a general database interface in PHP

  - by lamas

  I'm creating a small framework for my web projects in PHP so I don't have to do the basic work over and over again for every new website. It is not my goal to create a second CakePHP or Codeigniter and I'm also not planning to build my websites with any of the available frameworks as I prefer to use things I've created myself in general. I have no problems in designing that framework when it comes to parts like the core structure, request handling, and so on but I'm getting stuck with designing the database interface for my modules. I've already thought about using the MVC pattern but thought that it would be a bit of a overkill. So the exact problem I'm facing is how my frameworks modules (viewCustomers could be a module, for example) should interact with the database. Is it a good idea to write SQL directly in PHP (mysql_query( 'SELECT firstname, lastname(.....))? How could I abstract a query like SELECT firstname, lastname FROM customers WHERE id=X Would MySQL helper functions like $this->db->get( array('firstname', 'lastname'), array('id'=>X) ) be a good idea? I suppose not because they actually make everything more complicated by requiring arrays to be created and passed. Is the Model pattern from MVC my only real option?

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• general learning methodology

  - by momo

  just wanted to hear on the different general learning paths people embark on when learning a new language/framework. the one i currently use, which is how i learned bash and am currently learning python, is: instant hacking tutorial (very short tutorial introducing the basic syntax, variable declaration, loops, data types, etc. and how they are generally used) in depth tutorial with good programming style and slightly topic-specific (e.g. Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python), important topics for me personally are regex methods, file IO, and ways the different data types are utilized best (i wrote a very primitive bayesian spam filter using python's dictionaries to keep track of word occurrences) spaced-repition of syntax or short recipes (i use anki, with questions like 'create dictionary with filename and filesize metadata, human-readable' or simpler ones like 'match 0 - 3 occurences of the letter M in a string', or 'return/create an iterator from two sequences') the use of spaced-repitition has been invaluable, and i credit it with the ease that i can recall/create python algorithms. however, i've recently started looking into django, and i've found that spaced-repitition, at least in my case, doesn't work very well for learning a framework, it works best with short code recipes (either that or i should start looking into more basic django framework tutorials). the problem i'm encountering is that since framework programming is not only algorithms, but actually learning the API, which can be quite complex since you have to learn all the methods, modules, the places where they are stored, and the sequence of which things have to be done. for ex. in django to start a project that deals with polls (from the django tutorial), one has to create the project, edit the settings.py file, create the polls app, edit the models.py file (which requires knowing the classes that are present in the module models), edit the urls.py file, etc. i found that my spaced-repition method didn't work very well for this type of learning, so i wanted to ask you guys what method(s) you use for learning the different frameworks/APIs.

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• Best practices for JQuery namespaces + general purpose utility functions

  - by Armchair Bronco

  What are some current "rules of thumb" for implementing JQuery namespaces to host general purpose utility functions? I have a number of JavaScript utility methods scattered in various files that I'd like to consolidate into one (or more) namespaces. What's the best way to do this? I'm currently looking at two different syntaxes, listed in order of preference: //****************************** // JQuery Namespace syntax #1 //****************************** if (typeof(MyNamespace) === "undefined") { MyNamespace = {}; } MyNamespace.SayHello = function () { alert("Hello from MyNamespace!"); } MyNamespace.AddEmUp = function (a, b) { return a + b; } //****************************** // JQuery Namespace syntax #2 //****************************** if (typeof (MyNamespace2) === "undefined") { MyNamespace2 = { SayHello: function () { alert("Hello from MyNamespace2!"); }, AddEmUp: function (a, b) { return a + b; } }; } Syntax #1 is more verbose but it seems like it would be easier to maintain down the road. I don't need to add commas between methods, and I can left align all my functions. Are there other, better ways to do this?

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• General String Encryption in .NET

  - by cryptospin

  I am looking for a general string encryption class in .NET. (Not to be confused with the 'SecureString' class.) I have started to come up with my own class, but thought there must be a .NET class that already allows you to encrypt/decrypt strings of any encoding with any Cryptographic Service Provider. Public Class SecureString Private key() As Byte Private iv() As Byte Private m_SecureString As String Public ReadOnly Property Encrypted() As String Get Return m_SecureString End Get End Property Public ReadOnly Property Decrypted() As String Get Return Decrypt(m_SecureString) End Get End Property Public Sub New(ByVal StringToSecure As String) If StringToSecure Is Nothing Then StringToSecure = "" m_SecureString = Encrypt(StringToSecure) End Sub Private Function Encrypt(ByVal StringToEncrypt As String) As String Dim result As String = "" Dim bytes() As Byte = Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(StringToEncrypt) Using provider As New AesCryptoServiceProvider() With provider .Mode = CipherMode.CBC .GenerateKey() .GenerateIV() key = .Key iv = .IV End With Using ms As New IO.MemoryStream Using cs As New CryptoStream(ms, provider.CreateEncryptor(), CryptoStreamMode.Write) cs.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length) cs.FlushFinalBlock() End Using result = Convert.ToBase64String(ms.ToArray()) End Using End Using Return result End Function Private Function Decrypt(ByVal StringToDecrypt As String) As String Dim result As String = "" Dim bytes() As Byte = Convert.FromBase64String(StringToDecrypt) Using provider As New AesCryptoServiceProvider() Using ms As New IO.MemoryStream Using cs As New CryptoStream(ms, provider.CreateDecryptor(key, iv), CryptoStreamMode.Write) cs.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length) cs.FlushFinalBlock() End Using result = Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ms.ToArray()) End Using End Using Return result End Function End Class

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• floating point equality in Python and in general

  - by eric.frederich

  I have a piece of code that behaves differently depending on whether I go through a dictionary to get conversion factors or whether I use them directly. The following piece of code will print 1.0 == 1.0 -> False But if you replace factors[units_from] with 10.0 and factors[units_to ] with 1.0 / 2.54 it will print 1.0 == 1.0 -> True #!/usr/bin/env python base = 'cm' factors = { 'cm' : 1.0, 'mm' : 10.0, 'm' : 0.01, 'km' : 1.0e-5, 'in' : 1.0 / 2.54, 'ft' : 1.0 / 2.54 / 12.0, 'yd' : 1.0 / 2.54 / 12.0 / 3.0, 'mile' : 1.0 / 2.54 / 12.0 / 5280, 'lightyear' : 1.0 / 2.54 / 12.0 / 5280 / 5.87849981e12, } # convert 25.4 mm to inches val = 25.4 units_from = 'mm' units_to = 'in' base_value = val / factors[units_from] ret = base_value * factors[units_to ] print ret, '==', 1.0, '->', ret == 1.0 Let me first say that I am pretty sure what is going on here. I have seen it before in C, just never in Python but since Python in implemented in C we're seeing it. I know that floating point numbers will change values going from a CPU register to cache and back. I know that comparing what should be two equal variables will return false if one of them was paged out while the other stayed resident in a register. Questions What is the best way to avoid problems like this?... In Python or in general. Am I doing something completely wrong? Side Note This is obviously part of a stripped down example but what I'm trying to do is come with with classes of length, volume, etc that can compare against other objects of the same class but with different units. Rhetorical Questions If this is a potentially dangerous problem since it makes programs behave in an undetermanistic matter, should compilers warn or error when they detect that you're checking equality of floats Should compilers support an option to replace all float equality checks with a 'close enough' function? Do compilers already do this and I just can't find the information.

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