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  • Swiss Re increases data warehouse performance and deploys in record time

    - by KLaker
    Great information on yet another data warehouse deployment on Exadata. A little background on Swiss Re: In 2002, Swiss Re established a data warehouse for its client markets and products to gather reinsurance information across all organizational units into an integrated structure. The data warehouse provided the basis for reporting at the group level with drill-down capability to individual contracts, while facilitating application integration and data exchange by using common data standards. Initially focusing on property and casualty reinsurance information only, it now includes life and health reinsurance, insurance, and nonlife insurance information. Key highlights of the benefits that Swiss Re achieved by using Exadata: Reduced the time to feed the data warehouse and generate data marts by 58% Reduced average runtime by 24% for standard reports comfortably loading two data warehouse refreshes per day with incremental feeds Freed up technical experts by significantly minimizing time spent on tuning activities Most importantly this was one of the fastest project deployments in Swiss Re's history. They went from installation to production in just four months! What is truly surprising is the that it only took two weeks between power-on to testing the machine with full data volumes! Business teams at Swiss Re are now able to fully exploit up-to-date analytics across property, casualty, life, health insurance, and reinsurance lines to identify successful products. These points are highlighted in the following quotes from Dr. Stephan Gutzwiller, Head of Data Warehouse Services at Swiss Re:  "We were operating a complete Oracle stack, including servers, storage area network, operating systems, and databases that was well optimized and delivered very good performance over an extended period of time. When a hardware replacement was scheduled for 2012, Oracle Exadata was a natural choice—and the performance increase was impressive. It enabled us to deliver analytics to our internal customers faster, without hiring more IT staff" “The high quality data that is readily available with Oracle Exadata gives us the insight and agility we need to cater to client needs. We also can continue re-engineering to keep up with the increasing demand without having to grow the organization. This combination creates excellent business value.” Our full press release is available here: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/customers/customersearch/swiss-re-1-exadata-ss-2050409.html. If you want more information about how Exadata can increase the performance of your data warehouse visit our home page: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/exadata-database-machine/overview/index.html

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  • Revenue Recognition: Performance Obligation Pass a Hurdle

    - by Theresa Hickman
    I met up with Seamus Moran, our resident accounting expert, to get his thoughts about the latest happenings with IFRS. Last week, on March 13,  the comment period on the FASB and IASB exposure draft “Revenue From Contracts with Customers” closed.  FASB and IASB have just over 20 comment letters – a very small number.  The implication is that that the exposure draft does reflect general acceptance, and therefore will be published as both a US and Internationally Generally Accepted Accounting Standard. At a recent conference call, FASB and IASB expected to complete their report to both Boards on the comments by early summer, complete their deliberation of the comments by the fall and draft the final standard text by late this year. It is assumed the concept of Performance Obligations would become US GAAP and IFRS in place of the existing standards.  They confirmed that all existing US GAAP and IFRS guidelines would be withdrawn, and that they were in dialogue with the SEC on withdrawing the SEC guidelines on the revenue issue as well.The open question is when will Performance Obligations become effective?  The Boards have said that they would like this Revenue Recognition standard and the the Lease Accounting standard to be effective at the same time because what isn’t either insurance, interest, or a lease is a revenue arrangement.  However, ascertaining what is generally acceptable in respect of Leases is proving a little elusive, and the Boards have recently diverged a little on the P&L side of the accounting (although both are in agreement that there will be no off-balance sheet leases).  It is therefore likely that the Lease standard might be delayed. One wonders if the Boards will  define effectivity of the Revenue standard independently of the Lease standard or if they will stick with their resolve to make them co-effective.  The Boards have also said that neither standard will be effective before June 2015.Here is the gist of the new Revenue Recognition principle and the steps to apply it:Recognize revenue to depict the transfer of goods or services in an amount that reflects the consideration expected to be entitled in exchange for those goods and services.Steps to apply the core principles: Identify the contract with the customer Identify the separate performance obligations Determine the transaction price Allocate the the transaction price Recognize Revenue when a performance obligation is satisfied  

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  • PeopleSoft Grants & the Federal Agency Letter of Credit Draw Changes

    - by Mark Rosenberg
    For decades, most, if not all, US Federal agencies that sponsor research allowed grant recipients to request and receive payments using pooled accounts, commonly known as pooled letter of credit (LOC) draws. This enabled organizations, such as universities and hospitals, fast and efficient access to reimbursement of the expenditures they incurred conducting research across a portfolio of grants. To support this business practice, the PeopleSoft Grants solution has delivered an LOC Draw report to provide the total request amount along with all of the supporting invoice details for reconciliation and audit purposes. Now, in an attempt to provide greater transparency, eliminate fraud, strengthen accountability for grant-related financial transactions, and simplify grant award closeout, many US Federal sponsors are transitioning from the “pooling” letter of credit draw method to requesting on a “grant-by-grant” basis. The National Science Foundation, the second largest issuer of Federal awards, already transitioned to detailed grant draws in 2013. And, in response to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) directive to HHS-supported Agencies, the largest Federal awards sponsor, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will fully transition to the new HHS subaccount draw method. This will require NIH award recipients to request payments based on actual expenses incurred on an award-by-award basis. NIH is expected to fully transition to this new draw method by the end of Federal fiscal year 2015.  (The NIH had planned to fully transition to this new method by the end of fiscal 2014; however, the impact to institutions was deemed to be significant enough that a reprieve was recently granted.) In light of these new Federal draw requirements, we have recently released these new features to aid our customers on both PeopleSoft Grants releases 9.1 and 9.2:1. Federal Award Identification Number on the Proposal and Award Profile 2. Letter of credit fields on contract lines to support award basis draws and comply with Federal close out mandates3. Process to produce both pro forma and final LOC Draw Reports in BI Publisher report format4. Subacccount ID field on the LOC Summary and a new BI Publisher version of the LOC Summary report 5. Added Subaccount Field and contract info to be displayed on the LOC summary page6. Ability to generate by a variety of dimensions pro forma and invoiced draw listings 7. Queries for generation and manipulation of data to upload into sponsor payment request systems and perform payment matching8. Contracts LOC Close Out query to quickly review final balances prior to initiating final draws and preparing Federal Financial Reports prior to close The PeopleSoft Development team actively monitors this and other major Federal changes and continues working closely with the Grants Product Advisory Group of the Higher Education User Group to ensure a clear understanding of what our customers need in order to transition to new approaches for doing business with the Federal government. For more information regarding the enhancements to the PeopleSoft Grants solution, existing customers can login to My Oracle Support and review the Enhancements to Letter of Credit Process (Doc ID 1912692.1) associated with resolution ID 904830. This enhanced LOC functionality is available in both PeopleSoft FSCM 9.1 Bundle #31 and PeopleSoft FSCM 9.2 Update Image 8.

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  • Contract / Project / Line-Item hierarchy design considerations

    - by Ryan
    We currently have an application that allows users to create a Contract. A contract can have 1 or more Project. A project can have 0 or more sub-projects (which can have their own sub-projects, and so on) as well as 1 or more Line. Lines can have any number of sub-lines (which can have their own sub-lines, and so on). Currently, our design contains circular references, and I'd like to get away from that. Currently, it looks a bit like this: public class Contract { public List<Project> Projects { get; set; } } public class Project { public Contract OwningContract { get; set; } public Project ParentProject { get; set; } public List<Project> SubProjects { get; set; } public List<Line> Lines { get; set; } } public class Line { public Project OwningProject { get; set; } public List ParentLine { get; set; } public List<Line> SubLines { get; set; } } We're using the M-V-VM "pattern" and use these Models (and their associated view models) to populate a large "edit" screen where users can modify their contracts and the properties on all of the objects. Where things start to get confusing for me is when we add, for example, a Cost property to the Line. The issue is reflecting at the highest level (the contract) changes made to the lowest level. Looking for some thoughts as to how to change this design to remove the circular references. One thought I had was that the contract would have a Dictionary<Guid, Project> which would contain ALL projects (regardless of their level in hierarchy). The Project would then have a Guid property called "Parent" which could be used to search the contract's dictionary for the parent object. THe same logic could be applied at the Line level. Thanks! Any help is appreciated.

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  • Are there cloud network drives that let users lock files or mark them as "in use"?

    - by Brandon Craig Rhodes
    Having spent several hours reading about the features and limitations of services like DropBox and Jungle Disk and the hundreds of competitors they seem to have (as though everyone with an AWS account these days goes ahead and writes a file sharing application just for fun), I have yet to find one that would let a team of people at a small business collaborate without stepping all over each other's toes. At a small business there are often many small documents per project — estimates, contracts, project plans, budgets — and team members frequently have to open and edit them, with all sorts of problems happening if two people edit a file at once. Even if a sharing service is smart enough to keep both versions of the file created, most small-business software (like word processors, spreadsheets, estimating software, or billing systems) has no way to compare — much less to merge! — the changes in two rival versions of a file that two people edited at the same time without each other's knowledge. So, my question: are their cloud-based file sharing solutions that not only provide a virtual network drive that people can access, but that also let users lock files — even if it's not a real lock but just a flag or indicator — that could possibly prevent remote workers from both editing the same file at once? Having one person wait for another person to finish editing is a very, very small inconvenience compared to the hour or more than it can take to compare two estimates by hand until you find and resolve the rival changes. Given this fact, I am surprised that almost none of the popular file sharing solutions seem to recognize this problem and provide some solution! Does anyone know of a service that does?

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  • Are there cloud network drives that let users lock files or mark them as "in use"?

    - by Brandon Craig Rhodes
    Having spent several hours reading about the features and limitations of services like DropBox and Jungle Disk and the hundreds of competitors they seem to have (as though everyone with an AWS account these days goes ahead and writes a file sharing application just for fun), I have yet to find one that would let a team of people at a small business collaborate without stepping all over each other's toes. At a small business there are often many small documents per project — estimates, contracts, project plans, budgets — and team members frequently have to open and edit them, with all sorts of problems happening if two people edit a file at once. Even if a sharing service is smart enough to keep both versions of the file created, most small-business software (like word processors, spreadsheets, estimating software, or billing systems) has no way to compare — much less to merge! — the changes in two rival versions of a file that two people edited at the same time without each other's knowledge. So, my question: are their cloud-based file sharing solutions that not only provide a virtual network drive that people can access, but that also let users lock files — even if it's not a real lock but just a flag or indicator — that could possibly prevent remote workers from both editing the same file at once? Having one person wait for another person to finish editing is a very, very small inconvenience compared to the hour or more than it can take to compare two estimates by hand until you find and resolve the rival changes. Given this fact, I am surprised that almost none of the popular file sharing solutions seem to recognize this problem and provide some solution! Does anyone know of a service that does?

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  • Web Hosting: Any web host that supports files more than 50,000 in number?

    - by Devner
    Hi all, For my PHP & mySQL based application, I am trying to buy website hosting from a host who does not have a limit on the number of files I carry in my hosting account. Almost all the websites have a common limit of 50,000 files (some websites call it 50,000 nodes). The rest(to the extent of my search) are not even close. I have gone through the various websites, Googled lot of information, have spoken with the customer service of the hosting companies and they said that they have a limit of 50,000 files and that's why they call it the LIMIT. Now I have my application, which is a kind of social networking website, where people can upload various files of varying file size. So say if 50,000 users were to join the website and upload 1 file each, the limit of 50,000 will be reached very easily and my 50,001 customer will start facing file upload problems (& so will my account). So I would like to know if there's any website hosting services that do NOT levy such restrictions. In summary, I need the following options: No maximum file limit (more than 50,000 files in account). No maximum file upload limit in server setting (10MB, 12MB, 15MB, 20MB, etc.). Ability to upload files of various types (zip, flv, jg, png, etc.). Ability to stream Audio and Video (live audio & video not necessary). Access to .htaccess Access to php.ini, my.cnf or my.ini (this would be a plus) Supports SSL. Provides dedicated hosting(& IP) as well. Monthly payments without contracts are a plus. If you know of any such website hosting services, please post a reply ( a link to the same will be appreciated ). Thank you.

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  • Consulting: Organizing site/environment documentation for customers?

    - by ewwhite
    Over time, I've taken on consulting and contract engineering work for various clients. More recently, customers are asking for certain types of documentation. These are small businesses and typically do not have dedicated technical staff. Within a single company, Wiki/Confluence/Sharepoint, etc. all make sense as a central repository for documentation and environment information. I struggle with finding a consistent method to deliver the following information to discrete customers. I'm shooting for a process that's more portable, secure and elegant than a simple spreadsheet or the dreaded binder full of outdated information. Important IP addresses, DHCP scope, etc. Network diagram (if needed). Administrative usernames and passwords and management URLs. Software license keys. Support contracts and warranty information. Vendor support contacts and instructions. I know there are other consultants here. Any suggestions or tips on maintaining documentation across multiple environments in a customer-friendly format? How do you do it?

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  • How to insert sub root node in xml file

    - by pravakar
    Hi guys hope all are doing good. I want to create one sub root node in my xml file like, <CapitalJobsList xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <JobAds> -- element to create <JobAd> <AdvertiserDetails> <AdvertiserId>718508549</AdvertiserId> <AdvertiserName>ABC</AdvertiserName> </AdvertiserDetails> <ConsultantDetails> <ContactName>Naga Divakar</ContactName> <ContactPhone>6239 7755</ContactPhone> <ContactEmail>[email protected]</ContactEmail> <ContactFax>12345678912</ContactFax> </ConsultantDetails> <JobAdDetails> <DateEntered>2009-10-03T21:09:35.500</DateEntered> <AdvertiserJobRef>83754865</AdvertiserJobRef> <Title>IT Operations Manager</Title> <DescriptionShort>Large scale/exciting projects Mentor and manage o...</DescriptionShort> <Description>Large scale/exciting projects Mentor and manage others Management/technical mix This is a fantastic opportunity to join a high profile client who is active across both the commercial and Government domain. As the IT Operations Manager you will be responsible for leading and mentoring a small team of Infrastructure Engineers to ensure the availability and performance of the IT infrastructure. You w</Description> <SalaryMin>0.00</SalaryMin> <SalaryMax>0.00</SalaryMax> <WorkType xsi:nil="true" /> <Location>) as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/Bullets], isnull(Job</Location> <PostCode>2600</PostCode> <ClosingDate>2009-11-01T00:00:00</ClosingDate> <Keywords xsi:nil="true" /> <ApplyEmail xsi:nil="true" /> <ApplyURL>http://jobview.careerone.com.au/GetJob.aspx?JobID=83754865</ApplyURL> </JobAdDetails> <JobAdOptions> <BlindPost xsi:nil="true" /> <AdFormatType xsi:nil="true" /> <AdTemplateName xsi:nil="true" /> <ShowContactDetails xsi:nil="true" /> <ShowSalary xsi:nil="true" /> <HasVideo xsi:nil="true" /> <ResumeRequired>1</ResumeRequired> <ResidentsOnly>0</ResidentsOnly> </JobAdOptions> <CategoryList> <Category xsi:nil="true" /> </CategoryList> <RegionsList> <Region>ACT</Region> </RegionsList> <LevelsList> <Level xsi:nil="true" /> </LevelsList> </JobAd> <JobAd> <AdvertiserDetails> <AdvertiserId>718508549</AdvertiserId> <AdvertiserName>ABC</AdvertiserName> </AdvertiserDetails> <ConsultantDetails> <ContactName>Naga Divakar</ContactName> <ContactPhone>6239 7755</ContactPhone> <ContactEmail>[email protected]</ContactEmail> <ContactFax>12345678912</ContactFax> </ConsultantDetails> <JobAdDetails> <DateEntered>2009-10-03T21:09:35.530</DateEntered> <AdvertiserJobRef>83731488</AdvertiserJobRef> <Title>SAP Developers Required in Canberra - 12 month contract</Title> <DescriptionShort>My client, a large government department in Canbe...</DescriptionShort> <Description>My client, a large government department in Canberra, seeks two SAP Developers for 12 month ongoing contracts. Two SAP Developers Required Expert level ABAP programming skills Large SAP landscape - SAP R/3, SAP Web, SAP BI, SAP ITS My client, a large government department in Canberra, seeks two SAP Developers for 12 month ongoing contracts. My client is a large government department in Canberra, a</Description> <SalaryMin>0.00</SalaryMin> <SalaryMax>0.00</SalaryMax> <WorkType xsi:nil="true" /> <Location>) as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/Bullets], isnull(Job</Location> <PostCode>2600</PostCode> <ClosingDate>2009-11-01T00:00:00</ClosingDate> <Keywords xsi:nil="true" /> <ApplyEmail xsi:nil="true" /> <ApplyURL>http://jobview.careerone.com.au/GetJob.aspx?JobID=83731488</ApplyURL> </JobAdDetails> <JobAdOptions> <BlindPost xsi:nil="true" /> <AdFormatType xsi:nil="true" /> <AdTemplateName xsi:nil="true" /> <ShowContactDetails xsi:nil="true" /> <ShowSalary xsi:nil="true" /> <HasVideo xsi:nil="true" /> <ResumeRequired>1</ResumeRequired> <ResidentsOnly>0</ResidentsOnly> </JobAdOptions> <CategoryList> <Category xsi:nil="true" /> </CategoryList> <RegionsList> <Region>ACT</Region> </RegionsList> <LevelsList> <Level xsi:nil="true" /> </LevelsList> </JobAd> </JobAds> </CapitalJobsList> I have used the sql query for xml path like: select r.advid as [JobAd/AdvertiserDetails/AdvertiserId], CompanyName as [JobAd/AdvertiserDetails/AdvertiserName], firstname +'' ''+ lastname as [JobAd/ConsultantDetails/ContactName], WorkPhone as [JobAd/ConsultantDetails/ContactPhone], AdvEmail as [JobAd/ConsultantDetails/ContactEmail], FaxNo as [JobAd/ConsultantDetails/ContactFax], Job_CreatedDate as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/DateEntered], Job_Id as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/AdvertiserJobRef], Job_Title as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/Title], substring(Job_Description,0,50)+''...'' as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/DescriptionShort], Job_Description as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/Description], CONVERT(DECIMAL(10,2),MinSalary) as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/SalaryMin], CONVERT(DECIMAL(10,2),MaxSalary) as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/SalaryMax], Job_Type as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/WorkType], isnull(Job_Bullets,'') as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/Bullets], isnull(Job_Location,'') as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/Location], Job_PostCode as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/PostCode], Job_ExpireDate as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/ClosingDate], Job_Keywords as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/Keywords], ApplyEmail as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/ApplyEmail], Job_BrandURL+Job_Id as [JobAd/JobAdDetails/ApplyURL], BlindPost as [JobAd/JobAdOptions/BlindPost], AdFormatType as [JobAd/JobAdOptions/AdFormatType], AdTemplateName as [JobAd/JobAdOptions/AdTemplateName], ShowContactDetails as [JobAd/JobAdOptions/ShowContactDetails], ShowSalary as [JobAd/JobAdOptions/ShowSalary], HasVideo as [JobAd/JobAdOptions/HasVideo], ResumeRequired as [JobAd/JobAdOptions/ResumeRequired], ResidentsOnly as [JobAd/JobAdOptions/ResidentsOnly], Job_Category as [JobAd/CategoryList/Category], Job_Location_State as [JobAd/RegionsList/Region], [Level] as [JobAd/LevelsList/Level] from DR_Adv_Registration r, DR_CareerOne_ACTJobs j where r.Advid = j.Advid and job_location_city like(''%'+''+ @City +''+'%'') and job_location_state in('''+ @State +''') and job_status=1 for xml path(''''), Root(''CapitalJobsList''),ELEMENTS XSINIL So, suggest me how to get the sub root node. Thanks in advance

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  • Service Discovery in WCF 4.0 &ndash; Part 1

    - by Shaun
    When designing a service oriented architecture (SOA) system, there will be a lot of services with many service contracts, endpoints and behaviors. Besides the client calling the service, in a large distributed system a service may invoke other services. In this case, one service might need to know the endpoints it invokes. This might not be a problem in a small system. But when you have more than 10 services this might be a problem. For example in my current product, there are around 10 services, such as the user authentication service, UI integration service, location service, license service, device monitor service, event monitor service, schedule job service, accounting service, player management service, etc..   Benefit of Discovery Service Since almost all my services need to invoke at least one other service. This would be a difficult task to make sure all services endpoints are configured correctly in every service. And furthermore, it would be a nightmare when a service changed its endpoint at runtime. Hence, we need a discovery service to remove the dependency (configuration dependency). A discovery service plays as a service dictionary which stores the relationship between the contracts and the endpoints for every service. By using the discovery service, when service X wants to invoke service Y, it just need to ask the discovery service where is service Y, then the discovery service will return all proper endpoints of service Y, then service X can use the endpoint to send the request to service Y. And when some services changed their endpoint address, all need to do is to update its records in the discovery service then all others will know its new endpoint. In WCF 4.0 Discovery it supports both managed proxy discovery mode and ad-hoc discovery mode. In ad-hoc mode there is no standalone discovery service. When a client wanted to invoke a service, it will broadcast an message (normally in UDP protocol) to the entire network with the service match criteria. All services which enabled the discovery behavior will receive this message and only those matched services will send their endpoint back to the client. The managed proxy discovery service works as I described above. In this post I will only cover the managed proxy mode, where there’s a discovery service. For more information about the ad-hoc mode please refer to the MSDN.   Service Announcement and Probe The main functionality of discovery service should be return the proper endpoint addresses back to the service who is looking for. In most cases the consume service (as a client) will send the contract which it wanted to request to the discovery service. And then the discovery service will find the endpoint and respond. Sometimes the contract and endpoint are not enough. It also contains versioning, extensions attributes. This post I will only cover the case includes contract and endpoint. When a client (or sometimes a service who need to invoke another service) need to connect to a target service, it will firstly request the discovery service through the “Probe” method with the criteria. Basically the criteria contains the contract type name of the target service. Then the discovery service will search its endpoint repository by the criteria. The repository might be a database, a distributed cache or a flat XML file. If it matches, the discovery service will grab the endpoint information (it’s called discovery endpoint metadata in WCF) and send back. And this is called “Probe”. Finally the client received the discovery endpoint metadata and will use the endpoint to connect to the target service. Besides the probe, discovery service should take the responsible to know there is a new service available when it goes online, as well as stopped when it goes offline. This feature is named “Announcement”. When a service started and stopped, it will announce to the discovery service. So the basic functionality of a discovery service should includes: 1, An endpoint which receive the service online message, and add the service endpoint information in the discovery repository. 2, An endpoint which receive the service offline message, and remove the service endpoint information from the discovery repository. 3, An endpoint which receive the client probe message, and return the matches service endpoints, and return the discovery endpoint metadata. WCF 4.0 discovery service just covers all these features in it's infrastructure classes.   Discovery Service in WCF 4.0 WCF 4.0 introduced a new assembly named System.ServiceModel.Discovery which has all necessary classes and interfaces to build a WS-Discovery compliant discovery service. It supports ad-hoc and managed proxy modes. For the case mentioned in this post, what we need to build is a standalone discovery service, which is the managed proxy discovery service mode. To build a managed discovery service in WCF 4.0 just create a new class inherits from the abstract class System.ServiceModel.Discovery.DiscoveryProxy. This class implemented and abstracted the procedures of service announcement and probe. And it exposes 8 abstract methods where we can implement our own endpoint register, unregister and find logic. These 8 methods are asynchronized, which means all invokes to the discovery service are asynchronously, for better service capability and performance. 1, OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement, OnEndOnlineAnnouncement: Invoked when a service sent the online announcement message. We need to add the endpoint information to the repository in this method. 2, OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement, OnEndOfflineAnnouncement: Invoked when a service sent the offline announcement message. We need to remove the endpoint information from the repository in this method. 3, OnBeginFind, OnEndFind: Invoked when a client sent the probe message that want to find the service endpoint information. We need to look for the proper endpoints by matching the client’s criteria through the repository in this method. 4, OnBeginResolve, OnEndResolve: Invoked then a client sent the resolve message. Different from the find method, when using resolve method the discovery service will return the exactly one service endpoint metadata to the client. In our example we will NOT implement this method.   Let’s create our own discovery service, inherit the base System.ServiceModel.Discovery.DiscoveryProxy. We also need to specify the service behavior in this class. Since the build-in discovery service host class only support the singleton mode, we must set its instance context mode to single. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.ServiceModel.Discovery; 6: using System.ServiceModel; 7:  8: namespace Phare.Service 9: { 10: [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)] 11: public class ManagedProxyDiscoveryService : DiscoveryProxy 12: { 13: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginFind(FindRequestContext findRequestContext, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 14: { 15: throw new NotImplementedException(); 16: } 17:  18: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 19: { 20: throw new NotImplementedException(); 21: } 22:  23: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 24: { 25: throw new NotImplementedException(); 26: } 27:  28: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginResolve(ResolveCriteria resolveCriteria, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 29: { 30: throw new NotImplementedException(); 31: } 32:  33: protected override void OnEndFind(IAsyncResult result) 34: { 35: throw new NotImplementedException(); 36: } 37:  38: protected override void OnEndOfflineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 39: { 40: throw new NotImplementedException(); 41: } 42:  43: protected override void OnEndOnlineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 44: { 45: throw new NotImplementedException(); 46: } 47:  48: protected override EndpointDiscoveryMetadata OnEndResolve(IAsyncResult result) 49: { 50: throw new NotImplementedException(); 51: } 52: } 53: } Then let’s implement the online, offline and find methods one by one. WCF discovery service gives us full flexibility to implement the endpoint add, remove and find logic. For the demo purpose we will use an internal dictionary to store the services’ endpoint metadata. In the next post we will see how to serialize and store these information in database. Define a concurrent dictionary inside the service class since our it will be used in the multiple threads scenario. 1: [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)] 2: public class ManagedProxyDiscoveryService : DiscoveryProxy 3: { 4: private ConcurrentDictionary<EndpointAddress, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata> _services; 5:  6: public ManagedProxyDiscoveryService() 7: { 8: _services = new ConcurrentDictionary<EndpointAddress, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata>(); 9: } 10: } Then we can simply implement the logic of service online and offline. 1: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 2: { 3: _services.AddOrUpdate(endpointDiscoveryMetadata.Address, endpointDiscoveryMetadata, (key, value) => endpointDiscoveryMetadata); 4: return new OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult(callback, state); 5: } 6:  7: protected override void OnEndOnlineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 8: { 9: OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult.End(result); 10: } 11:  12: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 13: { 14: EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpoint = null; 15: _services.TryRemove(endpointDiscoveryMetadata.Address, out endpoint); 16: return new OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult(callback, state); 17: } 18:  19: protected override void OnEndOfflineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 20: { 21: OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult.End(result); 22: } Regards the find method, the parameter FindRequestContext.Criteria has a method named IsMatch, which can be use for us to evaluate which service metadata is satisfied with the criteria. So the implementation of find method would be like this. 1: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginFind(FindRequestContext findRequestContext, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 2: { 3: _services.Where(s => findRequestContext.Criteria.IsMatch(s.Value)) 4: .Select(s => s.Value) 5: .All(meta => 6: { 7: findRequestContext.AddMatchingEndpoint(meta); 8: return true; 9: }); 10: return new OnFindAsyncResult(callback, state); 11: } 12:  13: protected override void OnEndFind(IAsyncResult result) 14: { 15: OnFindAsyncResult.End(result); 16: } As you can see, we checked all endpoints metadata in repository by invoking the IsMatch method. Then add all proper endpoints metadata into the parameter. Finally since all these methods are asynchronized we need some AsyncResult classes as well. Below are the base class and the inherited classes used in previous methods. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.Threading; 6:  7: namespace Phare.Service 8: { 9: abstract internal class AsyncResult : IAsyncResult 10: { 11: AsyncCallback callback; 12: bool completedSynchronously; 13: bool endCalled; 14: Exception exception; 15: bool isCompleted; 16: ManualResetEvent manualResetEvent; 17: object state; 18: object thisLock; 19:  20: protected AsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 21: { 22: this.callback = callback; 23: this.state = state; 24: this.thisLock = new object(); 25: } 26:  27: public object AsyncState 28: { 29: get 30: { 31: return state; 32: } 33: } 34:  35: public WaitHandle AsyncWaitHandle 36: { 37: get 38: { 39: if (manualResetEvent != null) 40: { 41: return manualResetEvent; 42: } 43: lock (ThisLock) 44: { 45: if (manualResetEvent == null) 46: { 47: manualResetEvent = new ManualResetEvent(isCompleted); 48: } 49: } 50: return manualResetEvent; 51: } 52: } 53:  54: public bool CompletedSynchronously 55: { 56: get 57: { 58: return completedSynchronously; 59: } 60: } 61:  62: public bool IsCompleted 63: { 64: get 65: { 66: return isCompleted; 67: } 68: } 69:  70: object ThisLock 71: { 72: get 73: { 74: return this.thisLock; 75: } 76: } 77:  78: protected static TAsyncResult End<TAsyncResult>(IAsyncResult result) 79: where TAsyncResult : AsyncResult 80: { 81: if (result == null) 82: { 83: throw new ArgumentNullException("result"); 84: } 85:  86: TAsyncResult asyncResult = result as TAsyncResult; 87:  88: if (asyncResult == null) 89: { 90: throw new ArgumentException("Invalid async result.", "result"); 91: } 92:  93: if (asyncResult.endCalled) 94: { 95: throw new InvalidOperationException("Async object already ended."); 96: } 97:  98: asyncResult.endCalled = true; 99:  100: if (!asyncResult.isCompleted) 101: { 102: asyncResult.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); 103: } 104:  105: if (asyncResult.manualResetEvent != null) 106: { 107: asyncResult.manualResetEvent.Close(); 108: } 109:  110: if (asyncResult.exception != null) 111: { 112: throw asyncResult.exception; 113: } 114:  115: return asyncResult; 116: } 117:  118: protected void Complete(bool completedSynchronously) 119: { 120: if (isCompleted) 121: { 122: throw new InvalidOperationException("This async result is already completed."); 123: } 124:  125: this.completedSynchronously = completedSynchronously; 126:  127: if (completedSynchronously) 128: { 129: this.isCompleted = true; 130: } 131: else 132: { 133: lock (ThisLock) 134: { 135: this.isCompleted = true; 136: if (this.manualResetEvent != null) 137: { 138: this.manualResetEvent.Set(); 139: } 140: } 141: } 142:  143: if (callback != null) 144: { 145: callback(this); 146: } 147: } 148:  149: protected void Complete(bool completedSynchronously, Exception exception) 150: { 151: this.exception = exception; 152: Complete(completedSynchronously); 153: } 154: } 155: } 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.ServiceModel.Discovery; 6: using Phare.Service; 7:  8: namespace Phare.Service 9: { 10: internal sealed class OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult : AsyncResult 11: { 12: public OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 13: : base(callback, state) 14: { 15: this.Complete(true); 16: } 17:  18: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 19: { 20: AsyncResult.End<OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult>(result); 21: } 22:  23: } 24:  25: sealed class OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult : AsyncResult 26: { 27: public OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 28: : base(callback, state) 29: { 30: this.Complete(true); 31: } 32:  33: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 34: { 35: AsyncResult.End<OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult>(result); 36: } 37: } 38:  39: sealed class OnFindAsyncResult : AsyncResult 40: { 41: public OnFindAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 42: : base(callback, state) 43: { 44: this.Complete(true); 45: } 46:  47: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 48: { 49: AsyncResult.End<OnFindAsyncResult>(result); 50: } 51: } 52:  53: sealed class OnResolveAsyncResult : AsyncResult 54: { 55: EndpointDiscoveryMetadata matchingEndpoint; 56:  57: public OnResolveAsyncResult(EndpointDiscoveryMetadata matchingEndpoint, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 58: : base(callback, state) 59: { 60: this.matchingEndpoint = matchingEndpoint; 61: this.Complete(true); 62: } 63:  64: public static EndpointDiscoveryMetadata End(IAsyncResult result) 65: { 66: OnResolveAsyncResult thisPtr = AsyncResult.End<OnResolveAsyncResult>(result); 67: return thisPtr.matchingEndpoint; 68: } 69: } 70: } Now we have finished the discovery service. The next step is to host it. The discovery service is a standard WCF service. So we can use ServiceHost on a console application, windows service, or in IIS as usual. The following code is how to host the discovery service we had just created in a console application. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: using (var host = new ServiceHost(new ManagedProxyDiscoveryService())) 4: { 5: host.Opened += (sender, e) => 6: { 7: host.Description.Endpoints.All((ep) => 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine(ep.ListenUri); 10: return true; 11: }); 12: }; 13:  14: try 15: { 16: // retrieve the announcement, probe endpoint and binding from configuration 17: var announcementEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["announcementEndpointAddress"]); 18: var probeEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["probeEndpointAddress"]); 19: var binding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 20: var announcementEndpoint = new AnnouncementEndpoint(binding, announcementEndpointAddress); 21: var probeEndpoint = new DiscoveryEndpoint(binding, probeEndpointAddress); 22: probeEndpoint.IsSystemEndpoint = false; 23: // append the service endpoint for announcement and probe 24: host.AddServiceEndpoint(announcementEndpoint); 25: host.AddServiceEndpoint(probeEndpoint); 26:  27: host.Open(); 28:  29: Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit."); 30: Console.ReadKey(); 31: } 32: catch (Exception ex) 33: { 34: Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString()); 35: } 36: } 37:  38: Console.WriteLine("Done."); 39: Console.ReadKey(); 40: } What we need to notice is that, the discovery service needs two endpoints for announcement and probe. In this example I just retrieve them from the configuration file. I also specified the binding of these two endpoints in configuration file as well. 1: <?xml version="1.0"?> 2: <configuration> 3: <startup> 4: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> 5: </startup> 6: <appSettings> 7: <add key="announcementEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10010/announcement"/> 8: <add key="probeEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10011/probe"/> 9: <add key="bindingType" value="System.ServiceModel.NetTcpBinding, System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/> 10: </appSettings> 11: </configuration> And this is the console screen when I ran my discovery service. As you can see there are two endpoints listening for announcement message and probe message.   Discoverable Service and Client Next, let’s create a WCF service that is discoverable, which means it can be found by the discovery service. To do so, we need to let the service send the online announcement message to the discovery service, as well as offline message before it shutdown. Just create a simple service which can make the incoming string to upper. The service contract and implementation would be like this. 1: [ServiceContract] 2: public interface IStringService 3: { 4: [OperationContract] 5: string ToUpper(string content); 6: } 1: public class StringService : IStringService 2: { 3: public string ToUpper(string content) 4: { 5: return content.ToUpper(); 6: } 7: } Then host this service in the console application. In order to make the discovery service easy to be tested the service address will be changed each time it’s started. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var baseAddress = new Uri(string.Format("net.tcp://localhost:11001/stringservice/{0}/", Guid.NewGuid().ToString())); 4:  5: using (var host = new ServiceHost(typeof(StringService), baseAddress)) 6: { 7: host.Opened += (sender, e) => 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine("Service opened at {0}", host.Description.Endpoints.First().ListenUri); 10: }; 11:  12: host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IStringService), new NetTcpBinding(), string.Empty); 13:  14: host.Open(); 15:  16: Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit."); 17: Console.ReadKey(); 18: } 19: } Currently this service is NOT discoverable. We need to add a special service behavior so that it could send the online and offline message to the discovery service announcement endpoint when the host is opened and closed. WCF 4.0 introduced a service behavior named ServiceDiscoveryBehavior. When we specified the announcement endpoint address and appended it to the service behaviors this service will be discoverable. 1: var announcementAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["announcementEndpointAddress"]); 2: var announcementBinding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 3: var announcementEndpoint = new AnnouncementEndpoint(announcementBinding, announcementAddress); 4: var discoveryBehavior = new ServiceDiscoveryBehavior(); 5: discoveryBehavior.AnnouncementEndpoints.Add(announcementEndpoint); 6: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(discoveryBehavior); The ServiceDiscoveryBehavior utilizes the service extension and channel dispatcher to implement the online and offline announcement logic. In short, it injected the channel open and close procedure and send the online and offline message to the announcement endpoint.   On client side, when we have the discovery service, a client can invoke a service without knowing its endpoint. WCF discovery assembly provides a class named DiscoveryClient, which can be used to find the proper service endpoint by passing the criteria. In the code below I initialized the DiscoveryClient, specified the discovery service probe endpoint address. Then I created the find criteria by specifying the service contract I wanted to use and invoke the Find method. This will send the probe message to the discovery service and it will find the endpoints back to me. The discovery service will return all endpoints that matches the find criteria, which means in the result of the find method there might be more than one endpoints. In this example I just returned the first matched one back. In the next post I will show how to extend our discovery service to make it work like a service load balancer. 1: static EndpointAddress FindServiceEndpoint() 2: { 3: var probeEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["probeEndpointAddress"]); 4: var probeBinding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 5: var discoveryEndpoint = new DiscoveryEndpoint(probeBinding, probeEndpointAddress); 6:  7: EndpointAddress address = null; 8: FindResponse result = null; 9: using (var discoveryClient = new DiscoveryClient(discoveryEndpoint)) 10: { 11: result = discoveryClient.Find(new FindCriteria(typeof(IStringService))); 12: } 13:  14: if (result != null && result.Endpoints.Any()) 15: { 16: var endpointMetadata = result.Endpoints.First(); 17: address = endpointMetadata.Address; 18: } 19: return address; 20: } Once we probed the discovery service we will receive the endpoint. So in the client code we can created the channel factory from the endpoint and binding, and invoke to the service. When creating the client side channel factory we need to make sure that the client side binding should be the same as the service side. WCF discovery service can be used to find the endpoint for a service contract, but the binding is NOT included. This is because the binding was not in the WS-Discovery specification. In the next post I will demonstrate how to add the binding information into the discovery service. At that moment the client don’t need to create the binding by itself. Instead it will use the binding received from the discovery service. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: Console.WriteLine("Say something..."); 4: var content = Console.ReadLine(); 5: while (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(content)) 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine("Finding the service endpoint..."); 8: var address = FindServiceEndpoint(); 9: if (address == null) 10: { 11: Console.WriteLine("There is no endpoint matches the criteria."); 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine("Found the endpoint {0}", address.Uri); 16:  17: var factory = new ChannelFactory<IStringService>(new NetTcpBinding(), address); 18: factory.Opened += (sender, e) => 19: { 20: Console.WriteLine("Connecting to {0}.", factory.Endpoint.ListenUri); 21: }; 22: var proxy = factory.CreateChannel(); 23: using (proxy as IDisposable) 24: { 25: Console.WriteLine("ToUpper: {0} => {1}", content, proxy.ToUpper(content)); 26: } 27: } 28:  29: Console.WriteLine("Say something..."); 30: content = Console.ReadLine(); 31: } 32: } Similarly, the discovery service probe endpoint and binding were defined in the configuration file. 1: <?xml version="1.0"?> 2: <configuration> 3: <startup> 4: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> 5: </startup> 6: <appSettings> 7: <add key="announcementEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10010/announcement"/> 8: <add key="probeEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10011/probe"/> 9: <add key="bindingType" value="System.ServiceModel.NetTcpBinding, System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/> 10: </appSettings> 11: </configuration> OK, now let’s have a test. Firstly start the discovery service, and then start our discoverable service. When it started it will announced to the discovery service and registered its endpoint into the repository, which is the local dictionary. And then start the client and type something. As you can see the client asked the discovery service for the endpoint and then establish the connection to the discoverable service. And more interesting, do NOT close the client console but terminate the discoverable service but press the enter key. This will make the service send the offline message to the discovery service. Then start the discoverable service again. Since we made it use a different address each time it started, currently it should be hosted on another address. If we enter something in the client we could see that it asked the discovery service and retrieve the new endpoint, and connect the the service.   Summary In this post I discussed the benefit of using the discovery service and the procedures of service announcement and probe. I also demonstrated how to leverage the WCF Discovery feature in WCF 4.0 to build a simple managed discovery service. For test purpose, in this example I used the in memory dictionary as the discovery endpoint metadata repository. And when finding I also just return the first matched endpoint back. I also hard coded the bindings between the discoverable service and the client. In next post I will show you how to solve the problem mentioned above, as well as some additional feature for production usage. You can download the code here.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Red Gate Coder interviews: Alex Davies

    - by Michael Williamson
    Alex Davies has been a software engineer at Red Gate since graduating from university, and is currently busy working on .NET Demon. We talked about tackling parallel programming with his actors framework, a scientific approach to debugging, and how JavaScript is going to affect the programming languages we use in years to come. So, if we start at the start, how did you get started in programming? When I was seven or eight, I was given a BBC Micro for Christmas. I had asked for a Game Boy, but my dad thought it would be better to give me a proper computer. For a year or so, I only played games on it, but then I found the user guide for writing programs in it. I gradually started doing more stuff on it and found it fun. I liked creating. As I went into senior school I continued to write stuff on there, trying to write games that weren’t very good. I got a real computer when I was fourteen and found ways to write BASIC on it. Visual Basic to start with, and then something more interesting than that. How did you learn to program? Was there someone helping you out? Absolutely not! I learnt out of a book, or by experimenting. I remember the first time I found a loop, I was like “Oh my God! I don’t have to write out the same line over and over and over again any more. It’s amazing!” When did you think this might be something that you actually wanted to do as a career? For a long time, I thought it wasn’t something that you would do as a career, because it was too much fun to be a career. I thought I’d do chemistry at university and some kind of career based on chemical engineering. And then I went to a careers fair at school when I was seventeen or eighteen, and it just didn’t interest me whatsoever. I thought “I could be a programmer, and there’s loads of money there, and I’m good at it, and it’s fun”, but also that I shouldn’t spoil my hobby. Now I don’t really program in my spare time any more, which is a bit of a shame, but I program all the rest of the time, so I can live with it. Do you think you learnt much about programming at university? Yes, definitely! I went into university knowing how to make computers do anything I wanted them to do. However, I didn’t have the language to talk about algorithms, so the algorithms course in my first year was massively important. Learning other language paradigms like functional programming was really good for breadth of understanding. Functional programming influences normal programming through design rather than actually using it all the time. I draw inspiration from it to write imperative programs which I think is actually becoming really fashionable now, but I’ve been doing it for ages. I did it first! There were also some courses on really odd programming languages, a bit of Prolog, a little bit of C. Having a little bit of each of those is something that I would have never done on my own, so it was important. And then there are knowledge-based courses which are about not programming itself but things that have been programmed like TCP. Those are really important for examples for how to approach things. Did you do any internships while you were at university? Yeah, I spent both of my summers at the same company. I thought I could code well before I went there. Looking back at the crap that I produced, it was only surpassed in its crappiness by all of the other code already in that company. I’m so much better at writing nice code now than I used to be back then. Was there just not a culture of looking after your code? There was, they just didn’t hire people for their abilities in that area. They hired people for raw IQ. The first indicator of it going wrong was that they didn’t have any computer scientists, which is a bit odd in a programming company. But even beyond that they didn’t have people who learnt architecture from anyone else. Most of them had started straight out of university, so never really had experience or mentors to learn from. There wasn’t the experience to draw from to teach each other. In the second half of my second internship, I was being given tasks like looking at new technologies and teaching people stuff. Interns shouldn’t be teaching people how to do their jobs! All interns are going to have little nuggets of things that you don’t know about, but they shouldn’t consistently be the ones who know the most. It’s not a good environment to learn. I was going to ask how you found working with people who were more experienced than you… When I reached Red Gate, I found some people who were more experienced programmers than me, and that was difficult. I’ve been coding since I was tiny. At university there were people who were cleverer than me, but there weren’t very many who were more experienced programmers than me. During my internship, I didn’t find anyone who I classed as being a noticeably more experienced programmer than me. So, it was a shock to the system to have valid criticisms rather than just formatting criticisms. However, Red Gate’s not so big on the actual code review, at least it wasn’t when I started. We did an entire product release and then somebody looked over all of the UI of that product which I’d written and say what they didn’t like. By that point, it was way too late and I’d disagree with them. Do you think the lack of code reviews was a bad thing? I think if there’s going to be any oversight of new people, then it should be continuous rather than chunky. For me I don’t mind too much, I could go out and get oversight if I wanted it, and in those situations I felt comfortable without it. If I was managing the new person, then maybe I’d be keener on oversight and then the right way to do it is continuously and in very, very small chunks. Have you had any significant projects you’ve worked on outside of a job? When I was a teenager I wrote all sorts of stuff. I used to write games, I derived how to do isomorphic projections myself once. I didn’t know what the word was so I couldn’t Google for it, so I worked it out myself. It was horrifically complicated. But it sort of tailed off when I started at university, and is now basically zero. If I do side-projects now, they tend to be work-related side projects like my actors framework, NAct, which I started in a down tools week. Could you explain a little more about NAct? It is a little C# framework for writing parallel code more easily. Parallel programming is difficult when you need to write to shared data. Sometimes parallel programming is easy because you don’t need to write to shared data. When you do need to access shared data, you could just have your threads pile in and do their work, but then you would screw up the data because the threads would trample on each other’s toes. You could lock, but locks are really dangerous if you’re using more than one of them. You get interactions like deadlocks, and that’s just nasty. Actors instead allows you to say this piece of data belongs to this thread of execution, and nobody else can read it. If you want to read it, then ask that thread of execution for a piece of it by sending a message, and it will send the data back by a message. And that avoids deadlocks as long as you follow some obvious rules about not making your actors sit around waiting for other actors to do something. There are lots of ways to write actors, NAct allows you to do it as if it was method calls on other objects, which means you get all the strong type-safety that C# programmers like. Do you think that this is suitable for the majority of parallel programming, or do you think it’s only suitable for specific cases? It’s suitable for most difficult parallel programming. If you’ve just got a hundred web requests which are all independent of each other, then I wouldn’t bother because it’s easier to just spin them up in separate threads and they can proceed independently of each other. But where you’ve got difficult parallel programming, where you’ve got multiple threads accessing multiple bits of data in multiple ways at different times, then actors is at least as good as all other ways, and is, I reckon, easier to think about. When you’re using actors, you presumably still have to write your code in a different way from you would otherwise using single-threaded code. You can’t use actors with any methods that have return types, because you’re not allowed to call into another actor and wait for it. If you want to get a piece of data out of another actor, then you’ve got to use tasks so that you can use “async” and “await” to await asynchronously for it. But other than that, you can still stick things in classes so it’s not too different really. Rather than having thousands of objects with mutable state, you can use component-orientated design, where there are only a few mutable classes which each have a small number of instances. Then there can be thousands of immutable objects. If you tend to do that anyway, then actors isn’t much of a jump. If I’ve already built my system without any parallelism, how hard is it to add actors to exploit all eight cores on my desktop? Usually pretty easy. If you can identify even one boundary where things look like messages and you have components where some objects live on one side and these other objects live on the other side, then you can have a granddaddy object on one side be an actor and it will parallelise as it goes across that boundary. Not too difficult. If we do get 1000-core desktop PCs, do you think actors will scale up? It’s hard. There are always in the order of twenty to fifty actors in my whole program because I tend to write each component as actors, and I tend to have one instance of each component. So this won’t scale to a thousand cores. What you can do is write data structures out of actors. I use dictionaries all over the place, and if you need a dictionary that is going to be accessed concurrently, then you could build one of those out of actors in no time. You can use queuing to marshal requests between different slices of the dictionary which are living on different threads. So it’s like a distributed hash table but all of the chunks of it are on the same machine. That means that each of these thousand processors has cached one small piece of the dictionary. I reckon it wouldn’t be too big a leap to start doing proper parallelism. Do you think it helps if actors get baked into the language, similarly to Erlang? Erlang is excellent in that it has thread-local garbage collection. C# doesn’t, so there’s a limit to how well C# actors can possibly scale because there’s a single garbage collected heap shared between all of them. When you do a global garbage collection, you’ve got to stop all of the actors, which is seriously expensive, whereas in Erlang garbage collections happen per-actor, so they’re insanely cheap. However, Erlang deviated from all the sensible language design that people have used recently and has just come up with crazy stuff. You can definitely retrofit thread-local garbage collection to .NET, and then it’s quite well-suited to support actors, even if it’s not baked into the language. Speaking of language design, do you have a favourite programming language? I’ll choose a language which I’ve never written before. I like the idea of Scala. It sounds like C#, only with some of the niggles gone. I enjoy writing static types. It means you don’t have to writing tests so much. When you say it doesn’t have some of the niggles? C# doesn’t allow the use of a property as a method group. It doesn’t have Scala case classes, or sum types, where you can do a switch statement and the compiler checks that you’ve checked all the cases, which is really useful in functional-style programming. Pattern-matching, in other words. That’s actually the major niggle. C# is pretty good, and I’m quite happy with C#. And what about going even further with the type system to remove the need for tests to something like Haskell? Or is that a step too far? I’m quite a pragmatist, I don’t think I could deal with trying to write big systems in languages with too few other users, especially when learning how to structure things. I just don’t know anyone who can teach me, and the Internet won’t teach me. That’s the main reason I wouldn’t use it. If I turned up at a company that writes big systems in Haskell, I would have no objection to that, but I wouldn’t instigate it. What about things in C#? For instance, there’s contracts in C#, so you can try to statically verify a bit more about your code. Do you think that’s useful, or just not worthwhile? I’ve not really tried it. My hunch is that it needs to be built into the language and be quite mathematical for it to work in real life, and that doesn’t seem to have ended up true for C# contracts. I don’t think anyone who’s tried them thinks they’re any good. I might be wrong. On a slightly different note, how do you like to debug code? I think I’m quite an odd debugger. I use guesswork extremely rarely, especially if something seems quite difficult to debug. I’ve been bitten spending hours and hours on guesswork and not being scientific about debugging in the past, so now I’m scientific to a fault. What I want is to see the bug happening in the debugger, to step through the bug happening. To watch the program going from a valid state to an invalid state. When there’s a bug and I can’t work out why it’s happening, I try to find some piece of evidence which places the bug in one section of the code. From that experiment, I binary chop on the possible causes of the bug. I suppose that means binary chopping on places in the code, or binary chopping on a stage through a processing cycle. Basically, I’m very stupid about how I debug. I won’t make any guesses, I won’t use any intuition, I will only identify the experiment that’s going to binary chop most effectively and repeat rather than trying to guess anything. I suppose it’s quite top-down. Is most of the time then spent in the debugger? Absolutely, if at all possible I will never debug using print statements or logs. I don’t really hold much stock in outputting logs. If there’s any bug which can be reproduced locally, I’d rather do it in the debugger than outputting logs. And with SmartAssembly error reporting, there’s not a lot that can’t be either observed in an error report and just fixed, or reproduced locally. And in those other situations, maybe I’ll use logs. But I hate using logs. You stare at the log, trying to guess what’s going on, and that’s exactly what I don’t like doing. You have to just look at it and see does this look right or wrong. We’ve covered how you get to grip with bugs. How do you get to grips with an entire codebase? I watch it in the debugger. I find little bugs and then try to fix them, and mostly do it by watching them in the debugger and gradually getting an understanding of how the code works using my process of binary chopping. I have to do a lot of reading and watching code to choose where my slicing-in-half experiment is going to be. The last time I did it was SmartAssembly. The old code was a complete mess, but at least it did things top to bottom. There wasn’t too much of some of the big abstractions where flow of control goes all over the place, into a base class and back again. Code’s really hard to understand when that happens. So I like to choose a little bug and try to fix it, and choose a bigger bug and try to fix it. Definitely learn by doing. I want to always have an aim so that I get a little achievement after every few hours of debugging. Once I’ve learnt the codebase I might be able to fix all the bugs in an hour, but I’d rather be using them as an aim while I’m learning the codebase. If I was a maintainer of a codebase, what should I do to make it as easy as possible for you to understand? Keep distinct concepts in different places. And name your stuff so that it’s obvious which concepts live there. You shouldn’t have some variable that gets set miles up the top of somewhere, and then is read miles down to choose some later behaviour. I’m talking from a very much SmartAssembly point of view because the old SmartAssembly codebase had tons and tons of these things, where it would read some property of the code and then deal with it later. Just thousands of variables in scope. Loads of things to think about. If you can keep concepts separate, then it aids me in my process of fixing bugs one at a time, because each bug is going to more or less be understandable in the one place where it is. And what about tests? Do you think they help at all? I’ve never had the opportunity to learn a codebase which has had tests, I don’t know what it’s like! What about when you’re actually developing? How useful do you find tests in finding bugs or regressions? Finding regressions, absolutely. Running bits of code that would be quite hard to run otherwise, definitely. It doesn’t happen very often that a test finds a bug in the first place. I don’t really buy nebulous promises like tests being a good way to think about the spec of the code. My thinking goes something like “This code works at the moment, great, ship it! Ah, there’s a way that this code doesn’t work. Okay, write a test, demonstrate that it doesn’t work, fix it, use the test to demonstrate that it’s now fixed, and keep the test for future regressions.” The most valuable tests are for bugs that have actually happened at some point, because bugs that have actually happened at some point, despite the fact that you think you’ve fixed them, are way more likely to appear again than new bugs are. Does that mean that when you write your code the first time, there are no tests? Often. The chance of there being a bug in a new feature is relatively unaffected by whether I’ve written a test for that new feature because I’m not good enough at writing tests to think of bugs that I would have written into the code. So not writing regression tests for all of your code hasn’t affected you too badly? There are different kinds of features. Some of them just always work, and are just not flaky, they just continue working whatever you throw at them. Maybe because the type-checker is particularly effective around them. Writing tests for those features which just tend to always work is a waste of time. And because it’s a waste of time I’ll tend to wait until a feature has demonstrated its flakiness by having bugs in it before I start trying to test it. You can get a feel for whether it’s going to be flaky code as you’re writing it. I try to write it to make it not flaky, but there are some things that are just inherently flaky. And very occasionally, I’ll think “this is going to be flaky” as I’m writing, and then maybe do a test, but not most of the time. How do you think your programming style has changed over time? I’ve got clearer about what the right way of doing things is. I used to flip-flop a lot between different ideas. Five years ago I came up with some really good ideas and some really terrible ideas. All of them seemed great when I thought of them, but they were quite diverse ideas, whereas now I have a smaller set of reliable ideas that are actually good for structuring code. So my code is probably more similar to itself than it used to be back in the day, when I was trying stuff out. I’ve got more disciplined about encapsulation, I think. There are operational things like I use actors more now than I used to, and that forces me to use immutability more than I used to. The first code that I wrote in Red Gate was the memory profiler UI, and that was an actor, I just didn’t know the name of it at the time. I don’t really use object-orientation. By object-orientation, I mean having n objects of the same type which are mutable. I want a constant number of objects that are mutable, and they should be different types. I stick stuff in dictionaries and then have one thing that owns the dictionary and puts stuff in and out of it. That’s definitely a pattern that I’ve seen recently. I think maybe I’m doing functional programming. Possibly. It’s plausible. If you had to summarise the essence of programming in a pithy sentence, how would you do it? Programming is the form of art that, without losing any of the beauty of architecture or fine art, allows you to produce things that people love and you make money from. So you think it’s an art rather than a science? It’s a little bit of engineering, a smidgeon of maths, but it’s not science. Like architecture, programming is on that boundary between art and engineering. If you want to do it really nicely, it’s mostly art. You can get away with doing architecture and programming entirely by having a good engineering mind, but you’re not going to produce anything nice. You’re not going to have joy doing it if you’re an engineering mind. Architects who are just engineering minds are not going to enjoy their job. I suppose engineering is the foundation on which you build the art. Exactly. How do you think programming is going to change over the next ten years? There will be an unfortunate shift towards dynamically-typed languages, because of JavaScript. JavaScript has an unfair advantage. JavaScript’s unfair advantage will cause more people to be exposed to dynamically-typed languages, which means other dynamically-typed languages crop up and the best features go into dynamically-typed languages. Then people conflate the good features with the fact that it’s dynamically-typed, and more investment goes into dynamically-typed languages. They end up better, so people use them. What about the idea of compiling other languages, possibly statically-typed, to JavaScript? It’s a reasonable idea. I would like to do it, but I don’t think enough people in the world are going to do it to make it pick up. The hordes of beginners are the lifeblood of a language community. They are what makes there be good tools and what makes there be vibrant community websites. And any particular thing which is the same as JavaScript only with extra stuff added to it, although it might be technically great, is not going to have the hordes of beginners. JavaScript is always to be quickest and easiest way for a beginner to start programming in the browser. And dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners. Compilers are pretty scary and beginners don’t write big code. And having your errors come up in the same place, whether they’re statically checkable errors or not, is quite nice for a beginner. If someone asked me to teach them some programming, I’d teach them JavaScript. If dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners, when do you think the benefits of static typing start to kick in? The value of having a statically typed program is in the tools that rely on the static types to produce a smooth IDE experience rather than actually telling me my compile errors. And only once you’re experienced enough a programmer that having a really smooth IDE experience makes a blind bit of difference, does static typing make a blind bit of difference. So it’s not really about size of codebase. If I go and write up a tiny program, I’m still going to get value out of writing it in C# using ReSharper because I’m experienced with C# and ReSharper enough to be able to write code five times faster if I have that help. Any other visions of the future? Nobody’s going to use actors. Because everyone’s going to be running on single-core VMs connected over network-ready protocols like JSON over HTTP. So, parallelism within one operating system is going to die. But until then, you should use actors. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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  • WCF - CODEGEN: Generating message contract since message FileRequest has headers

    - by Tri Q
    I am aware that there is a similar question here with no solution. I'm working on a WCF streaming service over HTTP. Here are my MessageContract [MessageContract] public class FileRequest { #region Message Header [MessageHeader(MustUnderstand = true)] public Credential Credentials { get; set; } #endregion #region Message body [MessageBodyMember(Order = 1)] public FileInfo FileInfo { get; set; } #endregion #region Ctor // ... #endregion } [MessageContract] public class FileRequestResponse { #region Message Header [MessageHeader(MustUnderstand = true)] public FileInfo FileHeader { get; set; } [MessageHeader(MustUnderstand = true)] public OperationResult<bool> OperationResult { get; set; } #endregion #region Message Body [MessageBodyMember] public Stream FileStream { get; set; } #endregion #region Constructor // ... #endregion } Here is my ServiceContract [ServiceContract(Namespace = "https://service.contract.example.com")] public interface IUpdateService { [OperationContract(Action = "GetUpdates")] OperationResult<List<FileInfo>> GetUpates(ApplicationInfo applicationInfo, Credential credential); [OperationContract(Action = "GetFile")] FileRequestResponse FileRequest(FileRequest fileRequest); } Now the question is why I am getting this error: // CODEGEN: Generating message contract since message FileRequest has headers When I add my service reference. The end result is that the service contract wraps the FileRequest operation into a wrapper which I do not want. public FileInfo FileRequest(Credential Credentials, FileInfo, out OperationResult<bool> OperationResult, out System.IO.Stream FileStream) NOTE: I have not checked the "Always generate message contracts" in the service reference.

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  • Need help figuring out an appropriate job title

    - by Programmer
    My official title is Programmer but I do not feel it fully represents what I do because a large portion of my time is spent working with QA on testing, acting as a liason with our offshore development team and meeting with business managers to help make decisions about new features. My understanding has always been that the title "Programmer" is usually applied to someone who simply writes code, not someone who is involved in architecture decisions or managerial issues related to offshore teams. It is true that I do not have any budgeting duties as my manager does and I do not deal with contracts related to the offshore development. My manager handles both of those duties. But the title "Programmer" seems like a very narrow label for the broad range of responsibilities that I have. For example, I sometimes help QA staff to figure out how to do their testing. And I give the offshore team detailed instructions about how to implement new features - I review their code and integrate their changes locally. I don't know if this is typical these days or if I should ask for a title change. If I should ask for a title change, I would appreciate any recommendations.

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  • svcutil, WSDL, and the generated interfaces not being sufficient for implementation

    - by chtmd
    I have a WSDL file defining a service that I have to implement in WCF. I had read that I could generate the proxy using svcutil from the WSDL file, and that I could then use the generated interfaces to implement the service. Unfortunately, I can't quite seem to find a way to have the interfaces contain the correct attributes to expose the contracts. All operations have the "OperationContractAttribute" attribute, but it appears as though for the service to be exposed, I require the "OperationContract" for each one. Same thing with "ServiceContractAttribute" and "ServiceContract", and I imagine DataContract, but I haven't gotten that far. I could manually make these changes, but I would much prefer a technique where the existing code could be easily used, or better code could be generated for my uses. Is there some way that this can be done? Thanks. EDIT: Command used: svcutil ObjectManagerService.wsdl /n:*,Sample /o:ObjectManagerServiceProxy.cs /nologo Code sample: public interface ObjectManagerSyncPortType { // CODEGEN: Generating message contract since the operation createObject is neither RPC nor document wrapped. [System.ServiceModel.OperationContractAttribute(Action="http://www.sample.com/createObject", ReplyAction="*")] [System.ServiceModel.XmlSerializerFormatAttribute()] Sample.createObjectResponse1 createObject(Sample.createObjectRequest1 request); As best as I can tell/see the WSDL file is entirely self-contained and requires no additional XSD files.

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  • Factories, or Dependency Injection for object instantiation in WCF, when coding against an interface

    - by Saajid Ismail
    Hi I am writing a client/server application, where the client is a Windows Forms app, and the server is a WCF service hosted in a Windows Service. Note that I control both sides of the application. I am trying to implement the practice of coding against an interface: i.e. I have a Shared assembly which is referenced by the client application. This project contains my WCF ServiceContracts and interfaces which will be exposed to clients. I am trying to only expose interfaces to the clients, so that they are only dependant on a contract, not any specific implementation. One of the reasons for doing this is so that I can have my service implementation, and domain change at any time without having to recompile and redeploy the clients. The interfaces/contracts will in this case not change. I only need to recompile and redeploy my WCF service. The design issue I am facing now, is: on the client, how do I create new instances of objects, e.g. ICustomer, if the client doesn't know about the Customer concrete implementation? I need to create a new customer to be saved to the DB. Do I use dependency injection, or a Factory class to instantiate new objects, or should I just allow the client to create new instances of concrete implementations? I am not doing TDD, and I will typically only have one implementation of ICustomer or any other exposed interface.

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  • Search XDocument with LINQ with out knowing the Namespace

    - by BarDev
    Is there a way to search a XDocument without knowing the Namespace. I have a process that logs all soap requests and encrypts the sensitive data. I want to find any elements based on name. Something like, give me all elements where the name is CreditCard. I don't care what the namespace is. My problem seems to be with LINQ and requiring a xml namespace. I have other processes that retrieve values from XML, but I know the namespace for these other process. XDocument xDocument = XDocument.Load(@"C:\temp\Packet.xml"); XNamespace xNamespace = "http://CompanyName.AppName.Service.Contracts"; var elements = xDocument.Root.DescendantsAndSelf().Elements().Where(d = d.Name == xNamespace + "CreditCardNumber"); But what I really want, is to have the ability to search xml without knowing about namespaces, something like this: XDocument xDocument = XDocument.Load(@"C:\temp\Packet.xml"); var elements = xDocument.Root.DescendantsAndSelf().Elements().Where(d = d.Name == "CreditCardNumber") But of course this will not work be cause I do no have a namespace. BarDev

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  • Silverlight WCF service consuming inherited types in datacontract

    - by RemotecUk
    Hi, Im trying to consume a WCF service in silverlight... What I have done is to create two seperate assemblies for my datacontracts... Assembly that contains all of my types marked with data contracts build against .Net 3.5 A Silverlight assembly which links to files in the 1st assembly. This means my .Net app can reference assembly 1 and my silverlight app assembly 2. This works fine and I can communicate across the service. The problems occur when I try to transfer inherited classed. I have the following class stucture... IFlight - an interface for all types of flights. BaseFlight : IFlight - a baseflight flight implements IFlight AdhocFlight : BaseFlight, IFlight - an adhoc flight inherits from baseflight and also implements IFlight. I can successfully transfer base flights across the service. However I really need to be able to transfer objects of IFlight across the interface as I want one operation contract that can transfer many types of flight... public IFlight GetFlightBooking() { AdhocFlight af = new AdhocFlight(); return af; } ... should work I think? However I get the error: "The server did not provide a meaningful reply; this might be caused by a contract mismatch, a premature session shutdown or an internal server error." Any ideas would be appreciated.

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  • How to build n-layered web architecture with PHP?

    - by Alex
    I have a description and design of a website and I need to redesign it to allow for new requirements. The website's purpose is the offering of government's contracts and bidding opportunities for different businesses.I'm dealing with the 3-tier architecture PHP website comprising of the user-interface tier(client's web browser),business logic layer(Apache web server with PHP engine in it and a couple of applications running within a web server as well) and a database layer(local mysql database). Now,i need to redesign it to su???rt distributed n-tier architecture and specify how I would go about it.After long hours of research i came to this solution: business logic should be separated into presentation and purely business logic tier to allow for n-layer architecture(user-interface,presentation tier,b.logic and data tier).I have decided to use ??? just for the presentation(since the original existing website is in PHP) and use it within apache web server.In the business logic i want to use J2?? implementation technology instead of implementing it in PHP(i.e using Zend app.server and smarty template) cz J2EE can provide much more essential container services which are essential for business logic,its robustness,maintainability and different critical business operations which will be carried out by the g?v?rnment's website.So,particularly,i want to use J??ss app.server with ?J? business objects in it which would provide all the b.logic in java and would interact with the database and so forth.In order to connect PHP on a web server with java on app.server i'm gonna use PHP/Java bridge API (or maybe Quercus or SOAP is better?).Finally,i have my data tier with mysql which will communicate with b.logic via JD??.Payment system application in ???.server is gonna use S??? to talk with credit card company. From your professional point of view,does it sound like a good way of redesigning the original website to allow for n-tier architecture considering the specifics of the website and the criticality of its operations?(payment system is included in it)or u would personally prefer to use PHP business objects for business logic as well instead of J2EE?If you have any wiser recommendation or some alternative,please let me know what is right or wrong in my current solution. H??? to hear your professional advice very s??n (I'm new to the area of web development) Thanks in advance

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  • Should business objects be able to create their own DTOs?

    - by Sam
    Suppose I have the following class: class Camera { public Camera( double exposure, double brightness, double contrast, RegionOfInterest regionOfInterest) { this.exposure = exposure; this.brightness = brightness; this.contrast = contrast; this.regionOfInterest = regionOfInterest; } public void ConfigureAcquisitionFifo(IAcquisitionFifo acquisitionFifo) { // do stuff to the acquisition FIFO } readonly double exposure; readonly double brightness; readonly double contrast; readonly RegionOfInterest regionOfInterest; } ... and a DTO to transport the camera info across a service boundary (WCF), say, for viewing in a WinForms/WPF/Web app: using System.Runtime.Serialization; [DataContract] public class CameraData { [DataMember] public double Exposure { get; set; } [DataMember] public double Brightness { get; set; } [DataMember] public double Contrast { get; set; } [DataMember] public RegionOfInterestData RegionOfInterest { get; set; } } Now I can add a method to Camera to expose its data: class Camera { // blah blah public CameraData ToData() { var regionOfInterestData = regionOfInterest.ToData(); return new CameraData() { Exposure = exposure, Brightness = brightness, Contrast = contrast, RegionOfInterestData = regionOfInterestData }; } } or, I can create a method that requires a special IReporter to be passed in for the Camera to expose its data to. This removes the dependency on the Contracts layer (Camera no longer has to know about CameraData): class Camera { // beep beep I'm a jeep public void ExposeToReporter(IReporter reporter) { reporter.GetCameraInfo(exposure, brightness, contrast, regionOfInterest); } } So which should I do? I prefer the second, but it requires the IReporter to have a CameraData field (which gets changed by GetCameraInfo()), which feels weird. Also, if there is any even better solution, please share with me! I'm still an object-oriented newb.

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  • Making that move from junior > mid level

    - by dotnetdev
    Hi, Before I start, I know there is another thread about this very issue (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2352874/moving-from-junior-developer-to-mid-level). I am in this very same situation, but of course every person and the company/employment-history is not the same. In my current company, I have not done one piece of coding from start to finish with the oversight of my manager and a Project Manager to manage the work/deadlines etc. I am basically an odd-jobs type of guy. The coding I do is on the side to whatever boring spreadsheet/word document I have to write. Very illogical that you're a coder and you're doing it in secret. In another job I had for 3 months (Was made redundant), it required 1 years experience, perhaps because of the fact I was the sole developer. It wasn't too hard, but then I was solely responsible and I learnt a lot from that. I had 2 other 3 months jobs (contracts), so I have been working for 1 year 9 months. I know found a job which I'm in the last stage for, which needs 3 years .NET experience and 2 years Sharepoint. How can I know if I am ready for this job? My current job has been going on for 1 year, but it doesn't mean squat apart from explaining how I have spent my time. It does not tell me what level I am at (apart from the huge skills gap I have opened up against my peers because I practise at home). So 1 year of doing nothing at work, but 1 year of doing loads at home. In fact, I take 1 week off and do more at home then in the company since I started. How can I know if I am ready for such a job? I am generally very confident given all I've achieved in coding, but I have no idea what a job with this sort of experience entails (what day-to-day-problems I would be facing). Is there any advice on how to handle this transition? Thanks

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  • A simple WCF Service (POX) without complex serialization

    - by jammer59
    I'm a complete WCF novice. I'm trying to build a deploy a very, very simple IIS 7.0 hosted web service. For reasons outside of my control it must be WCF and not ASMX. It's a wrapper service for a pre-existing web application that simply does the following: 1) Receives a POST request with the request body XML-encapsulated form elements. Something like valuevalue. This is untyped XML and the XML is atomic (a form) and not a list of records/objects. 2) Add a couple of tags to the request XML and the invoke another HTTP-based service with a simple POST + bare XML -- this will actually be added by some internal SQL ops but that isn't the issue. 3) Receive the XML response from the 3rd party service and relay it as the response to the original calling client in Step 1. The clients (step 1) will be some sort of web-based scripting but could be anything .aspx, python, php, etc. I can't have SOAP and the usual WCF-based REST examples with their contracts and serialization have me confused. This seems like a very common and very simple problem conceptually. It would be easy to implement in code but IIS-hosted WCF is a requirement. Any pointers?

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  • jQuery - IF then Remove class on .hover

    - by danit
    I have the following jQuery function: $(function(){ if ($(".menu li").hasClass("active")) { $(".active").css("margin-top", "6px"); } }); This is applied to a CSS/jQuery menu, which expands and contracts when each menu item is hovered over. The onClick event adds a margin-top of 6px to give the impressions of a button depress. I'm then using PHP to detect which page the user is visiting to add an .active class to the relevant menu item. The question, the .active class should remain in place until the user hovers over a different menu item. At which point the .active class should be removed from this element - As the .active class is reused on the .hover events. Here is the basic HTML Markup: <ul id="menu"> <li> <div class="inner"> <div class="button"><img src="images/insightbutton.png" /></div> <div class="description">&nbsp;</div> </div> </li> <li> <div class="inner"> <div class="button"><img src="images/insightbutton.png" /></div> <div class="description">&nbsp;</div> </div> </li> </ul> How can I keep the .active class applied to the active menu item, but remove it when .inner is hovered over?

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  • Customize a WCF RIA Services Endpoint

    - by Andrew Garrison
    Is it possible to customize the parameters of a WCF RIA Services endpoint? Specifically, I would like to create a custom binding for the endpoint and increase the maxReceivedMessageSize to allow sending the contents of a file that is a few megabytes in size. I've tried meddling in the web.config, but I'm getting the following error: [InvalidOperationException]: The contract name MyNamespace.MyService could not be found in the list of contracts implemented by the service MyNamespace.MyService web.config <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <customBinding> <binding name="CustomBinaryHttpBinding"> <binaryMessageEncoding /> <httpTransport maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647" maxBufferSize="2147483647" /> </binding> </customBinding> </bindings> <services> <service name="MyNamespace.MyService"> <endpoint address="" binding="wsHttpBinding" contract="MyNamespace.MyService" /> <endpoint address="/binary" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="CustomBinaryHttpBinding" contract="MyNamespace.MyService" /> </service> </services> <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" /> </system.serviceModel>

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  • Does JAXWS client make difference between an empty collection and a null collection value as returne

    - by snowflake
    Since JAX-WS rely on JAXB, and since I observed the code that unpack the XML bean in JAX-B Reference Implementation, I guess the difference is not made and that a JAXWS client always return an empty collection, even the webservice result was a null element: public T startPacking(BeanT bean, Accessor<BeanT, T> acc) throws AccessorException { T collection = acc.get(bean); if(collection==null) { collection = ClassFactory.create(implClass); if(!acc.isAdapted()) acc.set(bean,collection); } collection.clear(); return collection; } I agree that for best interoperability service contracts should be non ambiguous and avoid such differences, but it seems that the JAX-WS service I'm invoking (hosted on a Jboss server with Jbossws implementation) is returning as expected either null either empty collection (tested with SoapUI). I used for my test code generated by wsimport. Return element is defined as: @XmlElement(name = "return", nillable = true) protected List<String> _return; I even tested to change the Response class getReturn method from : public List<String> getReturn() { if (_return == null) { _return = new ArrayList<String>(); } return this._return; } to public List<String> getReturn() { return this._return; } but without success. Any helpful information/comment regarding this problem is welcome !

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  • Multiple WCF calls for a single ASP.NET page load

    - by Rodney Burton
    I have an existing asp.net web application I am redesigning to use a service architecture. I have the beginnings of an WCF service which I am able to call and perform functions with no problems. As far as updating data, it all makes sense. For example, I have a button that says Submit Order, it sends the data to the service, which does the processing. Here's my concern: If I have an ASP.NET page that shows me a list of orders (View Orders page), and at the top I have a bunch of drop down lists for order types, and other search criteria which is populated by querying different tables from the database (lookup tables, etc). I am hoping to eventually completely decouple the web application from the DB, and use data contracts to pass information between the BLL, the SOA, and the web app. With that said, how can I reduce the # of WCF calls needed to load my "View Orders" page? I would need to make 1 call get the list of orders, and 1 call for each drop down list, etc because those are populated by individual functions in my BLL. Is it good architecture to create a web service method that returns back a specialized data contract that consists of everything you would need to display a View Orders page, in 1 shot? Something like this pseudocode: public class ViewOrderPageDTO { public OrderDTO[] Orders { get; set; } public OrderTypesDTO[] OrderTypes { get; set; } public OrderStatusesDTO[] OrderStatuses { get; set; } public CustomerListDTO[] CustomerList { get; set; } } Or is it better practice in the page_load event to make 5 or 6 or even 15 individual calls to the SOA to get the data needed to load the page? Therefore, bypassing the need for specialized wcf methods or DTO's that conglomerate other DTO? Thanks for your input and suggestions.

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