special - Page 131 - Developer IT

.NET (C#): Getting child windows when you only have a process handle or PID?

- by shea241

Kind of a special case problem: I start a process with System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(..) The process opens a splash screen -- this splash screen becomes the main window. The splash screen closes and the 'real' UI is shown. The main window (splash screen) is now invalid. I still have the Process object, and I can query its handle, module, etc. But the main window handle is now invalid. I need to get the process's UI (or UI handle) at this point. Assume I cannot change the behavior of the process to make this any easier (or saner). I have looked around online but I'll admit I didn't look for more than an hour. Seemed like it should be somewhat trivial :-( Thanks

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How can I make the small icon(16x16)?

- by Cora

Hi All, I found it difficult to make small icons look clear and clean. For instance, I made the 16x16 size icons, they looked ok in PS or AI, but after saved them as some other image types, they are not that clear at all. Is that because i used wrong color or wrong tools? I wonder if there are some special tools for making extremely small icons. So any options? How i can make them look more clear and clean? Thanks a lot!

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How do you get the email using facebook api?

- by Marwelln

I'm using this code but I can't figure out how to get the email from the user. I know you must get special permission from the user but I don't know how. I can get the public data from the user but that's not what I even need. The only thing I need is the email. I guess it's something with this line: $me = $facebook->api('/me'); I have read the documentation but I still don't know how I can get the email. How do I get the email from the user loggin in on my website with the facebook api?

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Using FiddlerCore to capture HTTP Requests with .NET

- by Rick Strahl

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

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Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

- by mbcrump

Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created. Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands. For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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SQLAuthority News – SafePeak’s SQL Server Performance Contest – Winners

- by pinaldave

SafePeak, the unique automated SQL performance acceleration and performance tuning software vendor, announced the winners of their SQL Performance Contest 2011. The contest quite unique: the writer of the best / most interesting and most community liked “performance story” would win an expensive gadget. The judges were the community DBAs that could participating and Like’ing stories and could also win expensive prizes. Robert Pearl SQL MVP, was the contest supervisor. I liked most of the stories and decided then to contact SafePeak and suggested to participate in the give-away and they have gladly accepted the same. The winner of best story is: Jason Brimhall (USA) with a story about a proc with a fair amount of business logic. Congratulations Jason! The 3 participants won the second prize of $100 gift card on amazon.com are: Michael Corey (USA), Hakim Ali (USA) and Alex Bernal (USA). And 5 participants won a printed copy of a book of mine (Book Reviews of SQL Wait Stats Joes 2 Pros: SQL Performance Tuning Techniques Using Wait Statistics, Types & Queues) are: Patrick Kansa (USA), Wagner Bianchi (USA), Riyas.V.K (India), Farzana Patwa (USA) and Wagner Crivelini (Brazil). The winners are welcome to send safepeak their mail address to receive the prizes (to “info ‘at’ safepeak.com”). Also SafePeak team asked me to welcome you all to continue sending stories, simply because they (and we all) like to read interesting stuff) as well as to send them ideas for future contests. You can do it from here: www.safepeak.com/SQL-Performance-Contest-2011/Submit-Story Congratulations to everybody! I found this very funny video about SafePeak: It looks like someone (maybe the vendor) played with video’s once and created this non-commercial like video: SafePeak dynamic caching is an immediate plug-n-play performance acceleration and scalability solution for cloud, hosted and business SQL server applications. By caching in memory result sets of queries and stored procedures, while keeping all those cache correct and up to date using unique patent pending technology, SafePeak can fix SQL performance problems and bottlenecks of most applications – most importantly: without actual code changes. By the way, I checked their website prior this contest announcement and noticed that they are running these days a special end year promotion giving between 30% to 45% discounts. Since the installation is quick and full testing can be done within couple of days – those have the need (performance problems) and have budget leftovers: I suggest you hurry. A free fully functional trial is here: www.safepeak.com/download, while those that want to start with a quote should ping here www.safepeak.com/quote. Good luck! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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View Maps and Get Directions in Google Chrome

- by Asian Angel

Every so often we all need to look at a map for reference purposes or to get directions. If you are looking for a great quick reference app then join us as we look at the Mini Google Maps extension for Google Chrome. Mini Google Maps in Action While this may look like a rather basic map extension there is more to it than meets the eye at first glance. Here is the default view when you open Mini Google Maps for the first time. Things that we really liked about this extension were: Three different aerial views available (Map, Satellite, & Terrain) Three different viewing sizes available (and the extension remembers your chosen size) The ability to get directions in combination with a map We decided to try each of the viewing sizes available…here you can see the “Medium Setting”. Notice that the scale stays the same but you get more territory included to view. Then the “Large Setting”…which we infinitely preferred to the others. Once again look at the amount of territory included by default…very nice. Switching over to the “Satellite View”… Followed by the “Terrain View”. For our first example we decided to peek at Vancouver, British Columbia. After zooming out a little bit we had a very nice looking map. For the next test we asked for directions from Vancouver to Toronto. Both the directions and map turned out very well. And just for fun we looked up Paris, France with the “Satellite View”. Conclusion If you find yourself needing to view a map or get directions often then the Mini Google Maps extension will be a very useful tool for you. Links Download the Mini Google Maps extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Get Maps and Directions to Your Contacts in Outlook 2007Stupid Geek Tricks: Browse the Web from OutlookView the Time & Date in Chrome When Hiding Your TaskbarHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserAccess Google Chrome’s Special Pages the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

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Entity Framework Code-First, OData & Windows Phone Client

- by Jon Galloway

Entity Framework Code-First is the coolest thing since sliced bread, Windows Phone is the hottest thing since Tickle-Me-Elmo and OData is just too great to ignore. As part of the Full Stack project, we wanted to put them together, which turns out to be pretty easy… once you know how. EF Code-First CTP5 is available now and there should be very few breaking changes in the release edition, which is due early in 2011. Note: EF Code-First evolved rapidly and many of the existing documents and blog posts which were written with earlier versions, may now be obsolete or at least misleading. Code-First? With traditional Entity Framework you start with a database and from that you generate “entities” – classes that bridge between the relational database and your object oriented program. With Code-First (Magic-Unicorn) (see Hanselman’s write up and this later write up by Scott Guthrie) the Entity Framework looks at classes you created and says “if I had created these classes, the database would have to have looked like this…” and creates the database for you! By deriving your entity collections from DbSet and exposing them via a class that derives from DbContext, you "turn on" database backing for your POCO with a minimum of code and no hidden designer or configuration files. POCO == Plain Old CLR Objects Your entity objects can be used throughout your applications - in web applications, console applications, Silverlight and Windows Phone applications, etc. In our case, we'll want to read and update data from a Windows Phone client application, so we'll expose the entities through a DataService and hook the Windows Phone client application to that data via proxies. Piece of Pie. Easy as cake. The Demo Architecture To see this at work, we’ll create an ASP.NET/MVC application which will act as the host for our Data Service. We’ll create an incredibly simple data layer using EF Code-First on top of SQLCE4 and we’ll expose the data in a WCF Data Service using the oData protocol. Our Windows Phone 7 client will instantiate the data context via a URI and load the data asynchronously. Setting up the Server project with MVC 3, EF Code First, and SQL CE 4 Create a new application of type ASP.NET MVC 3 and name it DeadSimpleServer. We need to add the latest SQLCE4 and Entity Framework Code First CTP's to our project. Fortunately, NuGet makes that really easy. Open the Package Manager Console (View / Other Windows / Package Manager Console) and type in "Install-Package EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact" at the PM> command prompt. Since NuGet handles dependencies for you, you'll see that it installs everything you need to use Entity Framework Code First in your project. PM> install-package EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact 'SQLCE (= 4.0.8435.1)' not installed. Attempting to retrieve dependency from source... Done 'EFCodeFirst (= 0.8)' not installed. Attempting to retrieve dependency from source... Done 'WebActivator (= 1.0.0.0)' not installed. Attempting to retrieve dependency from source... Done You are downloading SQLCE from Microsoft, the license agreement to which is available at http://173.203.67.148/licenses/SQLCE/EULA_ENU.rtf. Check the package for additional dependencies, which may come with their own license agreement(s). Your use of the package and dependencies constitutes your acceptance of their license agreements. If you do not accept the license agreement(s), then delete the relevant components from your device. Successfully installed 'SQLCE 4.0.8435.1' You are downloading EFCodeFirst from Microsoft, the license agreement to which is available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206497. Check the package for additional dependencies, which may come with their own license agreement(s). Your use of the package and dependencies constitutes your acceptance of their license agreements. If you do not accept the license agreement(s), then delete the relevant components from your device. Successfully installed 'EFCodeFirst 0.8' Successfully installed 'WebActivator 1.0.0.0' You are downloading EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact from Microsoft, the license agreement to which is available at http://173.203.67.148/licenses/SQLCE/EULA_ENU.rtf. Check the package for additional dependencies, which may come with their own license agreement(s). Your use of the package and dependencies constitutes your acceptance of their license agreements. If you do not accept the license agreement(s), then delete the relevant components from your device. Successfully installed 'EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact 0.8' Successfully added 'SQLCE 4.0.8435.1' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Successfully added 'EFCodeFirst 0.8' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Successfully added 'WebActivator 1.0.0.0' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Successfully added 'EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact 0.8' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Note: We're using SQLCE 4 with Entity Framework here because they work really well together from a development scenario, but you can of course use Entity Framework Code First with other databases supported by Entity framework. Creating The Model using EF Code First Now we can create our model class. Right-click the Models folder and select Add/Class. Name the Class Person.cs and add the following code: using System.Data.Entity; namespace DeadSimpleServer.Models { public class Person { public int ID { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } } public class PersonContext : DbContext { public DbSet<Person> People { get; set; } } } Notice that the entity class Person has no special interfaces or base class. There's nothing special needed to make it work - it's just a POCO. The context we'll use to access the entities in the application is called PersonContext, but you could name it anything you wanted. The important thing is that it inherits DbContext and contains one or more DbSet which holds our entity collections. Adding Seed Data We need some testing data to expose from our service. The simplest way to get that into our database is to modify the CreateCeDatabaseIfNotExists class in AppStart_SQLCEEntityFramework.cs by adding some seed data to the Seed method: protected virtual void Seed( TContext context ) { var personContext = context as PersonContext; personContext.People.Add( new Person { ID = 1, Name = "George Washington" } ); personContext.People.Add( new Person { ID = 2, Name = "John Adams" } ); personContext.People.Add( new Person { ID = 3, Name = "Thomas Jefferson" } ); personContext.SaveChanges(); } The CreateCeDatabaseIfNotExists class name is pretty self-explanatory - when our DbContext is accessed and the database isn't found, a new one will be created and populated with the data in the Seed method. There's one more step to make that work - we need to uncomment a line in the Start method at the top of of the AppStart_SQLCEEntityFramework class and set the context name, as shown here, public static class AppStart_SQLCEEntityFramework { public static void Start() { DbDatabase.DefaultConnectionFactory = new SqlCeConnectionFactory("System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0"); // Sets the default database initialization code for working with Sql Server Compact databases // Uncomment this line and replace CONTEXT_NAME with the name of your DbContext if you are // using your DbContext to create and manage your database DbDatabase.SetInitializer(new CreateCeDatabaseIfNotExists<PersonContext>()); } } Now our database and entity framework are set up, so we can expose data via WCF Data Services. Note: This is a bare-bones implementation with no administration screens. If you'd like to see how those are added, check out The Full Stack screencast series. Creating the oData Service using WCF Data Services Add a new WCF Data Service to the project (right-click the project / Add New Item / Web / WCF Data Service). We’ll be exposing all the data as read/write. Remember to reconfigure to control and minimize access as appropriate for your own application. Open the code behind for your service. In our case, the service was called PersonTestDataService.svc so the code behind class file is PersonTestDataService.svc.cs. using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; using System.ServiceModel; using DeadSimpleServer.Models; namespace DeadSimpleServer { [ServiceBehavior( IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true )] public class PersonTestDataService : DataService<PersonContext> { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService( DataServiceConfiguration config ) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule( "*", EntitySetRights.All ); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; config.UseVerboseErrors = true; } } } We're enabling a few additional settings to make it easier to debug if you run into trouble. The ServiceBehavior attribute is set to include exception details in faults, and we're using verbose errors. You can remove both of these when your service is working, as your public production service shouldn't be revealing exception information. You can view the output of the service by running the application and browsing to http://localhost:[portnumber]/PersonTestDataService.svc/: <service xml:base="http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:app="http://www.w3.org/2007/app" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/app"> <workspace> <atom:title>Default</atom:title> <collection href="People"> <atom:title>People</atom:title> </collection> </workspace> </service> This indicates that the service exposes one collection, which is accessible by browsing to http://localhost:[portnumber]/PersonTestDataService.svc/People <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" standalone="yes"?> <feed xml:base=http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/ xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> <title type="text">People</title> <id>http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People</id> <updated>2010-12-29T01:01:50Z</updated> <link rel="self" title="People" href="People" /> <entry> <id>http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People(1)</id> <title type="text"></title> <updated>2010-12-29T01:01:50Z</updated> <author> <name /> </author> <link rel="edit" title="Person" href="People(1)" /> <category term="DeadSimpleServer.Models.Person" scheme="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/scheme" /> <content type="application/xml"> <m:properties> <d:ID m:type="Edm.Int32">1</d:ID> <d:Name>George Washington</d:Name> </m:properties> </content> </entry> <entry> ... </entry> </feed> Let's recap what we've done so far. But enough with services and XML - let's get this into our Windows Phone client application. Creating the DataServiceContext for the Client Use the latest DataSvcUtil.exe from http://odata.codeplex.com. As of today, that's in this download: http://odata.codeplex.com/releases/view/54698 You need to run it with a few options: /uri - This will point to the service URI. In this case, it's http://localhost:59342/PersonTestDataService.svc Pick up the port number from your running server (e.g., the server formerly known as Cassini). /out - This is the DataServiceContext class that will be generated. You can name it whatever you'd like. /Version - should be set to 2.0 /DataServiceCollection - Include this flag to generate collections derived from the DataServiceCollection base, which brings in all the ObservableCollection goodness that handles your INotifyPropertyChanged events for you. Here's the console session from when we ran it: <ListBox x:Name="MainListBox" Margin="0,0,-12,0" ItemsSource="{Binding}" SelectionChanged="MainListBox_SelectionChanged"> Next, to keep things simple, change the Binding on the two TextBlocks within the DataTemplate to Name and ID, <ListBox x:Name="MainListBox" Margin="0,0,-12,0" ItemsSource="{Binding}" SelectionChanged="MainListBox_SelectionChanged"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Margin="0,0,0,17" Width="432"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextExtraLargeStyle}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding ID}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Margin="12,-6,12,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextSubtleStyle}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ListBox.ItemTemplate> </ListBox> Getting The Context In the code-behind you’ll first declare a member variable to hold the context from the Entity Framework. This is named using convention over configuration. The db type is Person and the context is of type PersonContext, You initialize it by providing the URI, in this case using the URL obtained from the Cassini web server, PersonContext context = new PersonContext( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/" ) ); Create a second member variable of type DataServiceCollection<Person> but do not initialize it, DataServiceCollection<Person> people; In the constructor you’ll initialize the DataServiceCollection using the PersonContext, public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); people = new DataServiceCollection<Person>( context ); Finally, you’ll load the people collection using the LoadAsync method, passing in the fully specified URI for the People collection in the web service, people.LoadAsync( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People" ) ); Note that this method runs asynchronously and when it is finished the people collection is already populated. Thus, since we didn’t need or want to override any of the behavior we don’t implement the LoadCompleted. You can use the LoadCompleted event if you need to do any other UI updates, but you don't need to. The final code is as shown below: using System; using System.Data.Services.Client; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using DeadSimpleServer.Models; using Microsoft.Phone.Controls; namespace WindowsPhoneODataTest { public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage { PersonContext context = new PersonContext( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/" ) ); DataServiceCollection<Person> people; // Constructor public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); // Set the data context of the listbox control to the sample data // DataContext = App.ViewModel; people = new DataServiceCollection<Person>( context ); people.LoadAsync( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People" ) ); DataContext = people; this.Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler( MainPage_Loaded ); } // Handle selection changed on ListBox private void MainListBox_SelectionChanged( object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e ) { // If selected index is -1 (no selection) do nothing if ( MainListBox.SelectedIndex == -1 ) return; // Navigate to the new page NavigationService.Navigate( new Uri( "/DetailsPage.xaml?selectedItem=" + MainListBox.SelectedIndex, UriKind.Relative ) ); // Reset selected index to -1 (no selection) MainListBox.SelectedIndex = -1; } // Load data for the ViewModel Items private void MainPage_Loaded( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e ) { if ( !App.ViewModel.IsDataLoaded ) { App.ViewModel.LoadData(); } } } } With people populated we can set it as the DataContext and run the application; you’ll find that the Name and ID are displayed in the list on the Mainpage. Here's how the pieces in the client fit together: Complete source code available here

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Desktop Fun: Triple Monitor Wallpaper Collection Series 1

- by Asian Angel

Triple monitor setups provide spacious amounts of screen real-estate but can be extremely frustrating to find good wallpapers for. Today we present the first in a series of wallpaper collections to help decorate your triple monitor setup with lots of wallpaper goodness. Note: Click on the picture to see the full-size image—these wallpapers vary in size so you may need to crop, stretch, or place them on a colored background in order to best match them to your screen’s resolution. Special Note: The screen resolution sizes available for each of these wallpapers has been included to help you match them up to your individual settings as easily as possible. All images shown here are thumbnail screenshots of the largest size available for download. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, 5040*1050, and 5760*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, and 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, and 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, 5040*1050, and 5760*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, and 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, and 5040*1050. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, and 5040*1050. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, and 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, and 5040*1050. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4800*1200, and 5040*1050. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, 5040*1050, 5760*1200, and 7680*1600. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, 5040*1050, and 5760*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 5760*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 5760*1200. More Triple Monitor Goodness Beautiful 3 Screen Multi-Monitor Space Wallpaper Span the same wallpaper across multiple monitors or use a different wallpaper for each. Dual Monitors: Use a Different Wallpaper on Each Desktop in Windows 7, Vista or XP For more wallpapers be certain to see our great collections in the Desktop Fun section. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 Available for Download – Get Your Copy Now The Frustrations of a Computer Literate Watching a Newbie Use a Computer [Humorous Video] Season0nPass Jailbreaks Current Gen Apple TVs IBM’s Jeopardy Playing Computer Watson Shows The Pros How It’s Done [Video] Tranquil Juice Drop Abstract Wallpaper Pulse Is a Sleek Newsreader for iOS and Android Devices

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SQLAuthority News – Monthly Roundup of Best SQL Posts

- by pinaldave

After receiving lots of requests from different readers for long time I have decided to write first monthly round up. If all of you like it I will continue writing the same every month. In fact, I really like the idea as I was able to go back and read all of my posts written in this month. This month was started with answering one of the most common question asked me to about What is Adventureworks? Many of you know the answer but to the surprise more number of the reader did not know the answer. There were few extra blog post which were in the same line as following. SQL SERVER – The Difference between Dual Core vs. Core 2 Duo SQLAuthority News – Wireless Router Security and Attached Devices – Complex Password SQL SERVER – DATE and TIME in SQL Server 2008 DMVs are also one of the most handy tools available in SQL Server, I have written following blog post where I have used DMV in scripts. SQL SERVER – Get Latest SQL Query for Sessions – DMV SQL SERVER – Find Most Expensive Queries Using DMV SQL SERVER – List All the DMV and DMF on Server I was able to write two follow-up of my earlier series where I was finding the size of the indexes using different SQL Scripts. And in fact one of the article Powershell is used as well. This was my very first attempt to use Powershell. SQL SERVER – Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution 2 SQL SERVER – Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution 3 – Powershell SQL SERVER – Four Posts on Removing the Bookmark Lookup – Key Lookup Without realizing I wrote series of the blog post on disabled index here is its complete list. I plan to write one more follow-up list on the same. SQL SERVER – Disable Clustered Index and Data Insert SQL SERVER – Understanding ALTER INDEX ALL REBUILD with Disabled Clustered Index SQL SERVER – Disabled Index and Update Statistics Two special post which I found very interesting to write are as following. SQL SERVER – SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File in SQL Server 2008 SQL SERVER – Simple Example of Snapshot Isolation – Reduce the Blocking Transactions In personal adventures, I won the Community Impact Award for Last Year from Microsoft. Please leave your comment about how can I improve this round up or what more details I should include in the same. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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Oracle UCM GET_SEARCH_RESULTS service with full text search

- by Lyudmil Pelov

Newly I was working on portlet which should be able to do full text search through the UCM documents and I was experimenting with the Ridc and also with the CIS API's. There are some ticks you may take care of, for example using quotes is a very spacial case and most of situations UCM will throw an exception if you not use them well. So during my tests I was able to develop one solution which works very well for me doing full text search and here is it: final IdcClientManager idcManager = new IdcClientManager(); final IdcClient idcClient = idcManager.createClient("idc://127.0.0.1:4444"); final IdcContext idcContext = new IdcContext("sysadmin"); final DataBinder binder = idcClient.createBinder(); // populate the binder with the parameters binder.putLocal ("IdcService", "GET_SEARCH_RESULTS"); binder.putLocal ("QueryText", "dDocFullText <substring> <qsch>"+yourSearchWordOrWords+"</qsch>"); binder.putLocal ("SearchEngineName", "databasefulltext"); binder.putLocal ("ResultCount", "20"); // execute the request ServiceResponse response = idcClient.sendRequest (idcContext, binder); // get the binder DataBinder serverBinder = response.getResponseAsBinder (); DataResultSet resultSet = serverBinder.getResultSet ("SearchResults"); // loop over the results for (DataObject dataObject : resultSet.getRows ()) { System.out.println ("Title is: " + dataObject.get ("dDocTitle")); System.out.println ("Author is: " + dataObject.get ("dDocAuthor")); }Nothing special so far except the line which declares the full text search. To be able to proceed with the full text search you have to use dDocFullText attribute inside the search query. The tag <substring> is the same as 'like'. Also you have to put your searching string or words in quotes which could be a problem sometime, so I used the tag <qsch>. Using this tag you can have quotes now inside you searching string without to break the code and get parsing exceptions.To be able to test the example, you do have to enable full text search inside UCM. To do this follow the steps for example from this blog here and then re-index the documents in UCM.There is also one very nice article about how to define UCM queries if want to replace the full text search with something more specific, you can read this article from Kyle's Blog here.

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Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Spiderman

- by Pinal Dave

I have to admit, Spiderman is my favorite superhero. The most recent movie recently was released in theaters, so it has been at the front of my mind for some time. Spiderman was my favorite superhero even before the latest movie came out, but of course I took my whole family to see the movie as soon as I could! Every one of us loved it, including my daughter. We all left the movie thinking how great it would be to be Spiderman. So, with that in mind, I started thinking about how we are like Spiderman in our everyday lives, especially developers. Let me list some of the reasons why I think every developer is a Spiderman. We have special powers, just like a superhero. There is a reason that when there are problems or emergencies, we get called in, just like a superhero! Our powers might not be the ability to swing through skyscrapers on a web, our powers are our debugging abilities, but there are still similarities! Spiderman never gives up. He might not be the strongest superhero, and the ability to shoot web from your wrists is a pretty cool power, it’s not as impressive as being able to fly, or be invisible, or turn into a hulking green monster. Developers are also human. We have cool abilities, but our true strength lies in our willingness to work hard, find solutions, and go above and beyond to solve problems. Spiderman and developers have “spidey sense.” This is sort of a joke in the comics and movies as well – that Spiderman can just tell when something is about to go wrong, or when a villain is just around the corner. Developers also have a spidey sense about when a server is about to crash (usually at midnight on a Saturday). Spiderman makes a great superhero because he doesn’t look like one. Clark Kent is probably fooling no one, hiding his superhero persona behind glasses. But Peter Parker actually does blend in. Great developers also blend in. When they do their job right, no one knows they were there at all. “With great power comes great responsibility.” There is a joke about developers (sometimes we even tell the jokes) about how if they are unhappy, the server or databases might mysteriously develop problems. The truth is, very few developers would do something to harm a company’s computer system – they take their job very seriously. It is a big responsibility. These are just a few of the reasons why I love Spiderman, why I love being a developer, and why I think developers are the greatest. Let me know other reasons you love Spiderman and developers, or if you can shoot webs from your wrists – I might have a job for you. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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Renewed as MVP

- by Sahil Malik

Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). It is with great humbleness and honor that I accept Microsoft’s MVP award for 2010. This will be my .. I forget how many years, as an MVP. So suffice to say, I was a lot younger when I first got the MVP award, but also the excitement never dies. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still young, foolish and weird :). (and good looking, might I add) I’d like to share a few things with you on what I have learnt being a part of this very prestigious program that I am so unworthy of. Never aim to be an MVP. Let it be a consequence of what you already are. Always be down to earth, just because you’re an MVP doesn’t mean you’re better than anyone else. The biggest reward of the MVP program, yes much bigger than the free top notch MSDN subscription, is the amazing interaction you will have with other fellow MVPs, and incredibly smart people in the community in general. Get involved in the community, for your own sake! You will learn so much from your peers, it is a very very rewarding experience. Learn, Learn and Learn! Never under estimate the power of knowledge. Both technical and otherwise. I thank each one of you for all the attention you have given me over the past many years. And a very special thanks to my MVP lead, Melissa Travers, and my previous MVP lead Rafael Munoz (who isn’t with Microsoft anymore, but I am sure is kicking butt wherever he is). We are truly entering a very very exciting time in the technology space. Both Google and Apple are challenging Microsoft, forcing Microsoft to innovate at a pace like never before. Microsoft is coming out with an incredible amount of good, new and exciting stuff. Windows Mobile 7, Azure, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, IE9, and of course SharePoint 2010. The level of innovation in the tech industry is simply unprecedented. A truly exciting time for anyone who lives, breathes, sleeps and dreams of technology even when awake! (Like me!) As you know, I’ve been working on my SP2010 book lately. I’m happy to also inform that the book is DONE. WOOHOO!! :). So this means, I’ll have more time to blog, and cause more trouble in general. Once again! THANK YOU! Comment on the article ....

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A couple of nice features when using OracleTextSearch

- by kyle.hatlestad

If you have your UCM/URM instance configured to use the Oracle 11g database as the search engine, you can be using OracleTextSearch as the search definition. OracleTextSearch uses the advanced features of Oracle Text for indexing and searching. This includes the ability to specify metadata fields to be optimized for the search index, fast rebuilding, and index optimization. If you are on 10g of UCM, then you'll need to load the OracleTextSearch component that is available in the CS10gR35UpdateBundle component on the support site (patch #6907073). If you are on 11g, no component is needed. Then you specify the search indexer name with the configuration flag of SearchIndexerEngineName=OracleTextSearch. Please see the docs for other configuration settings and setup instructions. So I thought I would highlight a couple of other unique features available with OracleTextSearch. The first is the Drill Down feature. This feature allows you to specify specific metadata fields that will break down the results of that field based on the total results. So in the above graphic, you can see how it broke down the extensions and gives a count for each. Then you just need to click on that link to then drill into that result. This setting is perfect for option list fields and ones with a distinct set of values possible. By default, it will use the fields Type, Security Group, and Account (if enabled). But you can also specify your own fields. In 10g, you can use the following configuration entry: DrillDownFields=xWebsiteObjectType,dExtension,dSecurityGroup,dDocType And in 11g, you can specify it through the Configuration Manager applet. Simply click on the Advanced Search Design, highlight the field to filter, click Edit, and check 'Is a filter category'. The other feature you get with OracleTextSearch are search snippets. These snippets show the occurrence of the search term in context of their usage. This is very similar to how Google displays its results. If you are on 10g, this is enabled by default. If you are on 11g, you need to turn on the feature. The following configuration entry will enable it: OracleTextDisableSearchSnippet=false Once enabled, you can add the snippets to your search results. Go to Change View -> Customize and add a new search result view. In the Available Fields in the Special section, select Snippet and move it to the Main or Additional Information. If you want to include the snippets with the Classic results, you can add the idoc variable of <$srfDocSnippet$> to display them. One caveat is that this can effect search performance on large collections. So plan the infrastructure accordingly.

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Tulsa Azure Boot Camp

- by dmccollough

Windows Azure Boot Camp presented by HyperVize & TulsaTech When: Thursday July 1st and Friday July 2nd Registration: Click here. Where: TulsaTech Riverside Campus 801 East 91st Street Tulsa, Ok 74132-4008 Click here for a map. Summary Tulsa Windows Azure Boot Camp is a comprehensive 2 day training program for members of the development community in Tulsa Oklahoma. At the conclusion of this program, the attendees should have a deep understanding of Azure, BPOS, and advanced development techniques for both platforms. Who should attend: Web Developers, Backend Developers, SQL DBAs, Consultants, & IT Leaders who are interested in using Azure for development, data storage, or processing. Both days is suggested, but if you can't attend both days, contact us for a special one day pass. Schedule: Day one of the training sessions will be held from July 1st 2010 between the hours of 9AM and 4:30PM. Topics covered on day 1: Azure Basics, Web Development, & Data Storage. Day two of the training sessions will be held from July 2nd 2010 between the hours of 9AM and 4:30PM. Topics covered on day 2: Architecture, Business Value, SOA Development, SQL Azure, & Advanced Development. Pre-requisites: If you want to stay up to speed on the Windows Azure Labs you will need to install the tools and updates listed on the Windows Azure Boot Camp website: http://windowsazurebootcamp.com/whattobring Boot Camp Agenda Day 1 – July1st 2010: · 8:30 – 9:00 - Registration · 9:00 – 10:00 - Module 1: Intro to Azure & Cloud Computing · 10:00 – 11:00 - Module 2: Using Web Roles · 11:00 – Noon - Lab 1 & workstation configuration · Noon – 1:00 - Lunch · 1:00 – 2:00 - Module 3: Blobs · 2:00 – 3:00 - Module 4: Tables · 3:00 – 4:00 - Module 5: Queues · 4:00 – ? - Q&A / Open Discussion Day 2 – July 2nd 2010: · 9:00 – 10:00 - Module 6: Building a business with Azure · 10:00 – 11:00 - Module 7: Cloud Scenarios · 11:00 – Noon - Module 8: SQL Azure · Noon – 1:00 - Lunch · 1:00 – 2:00 - Module 9: Basic Worker Roles · 2:00 – 3:00 - Module 10: Advanced Worker Roles · 3:00 – 4:00 - Module 11: Azure Diagnostics · 4:00 – ??? - Module 12: App Fabric

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SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium a super success!

- by JuergenKress

SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium in London was a huge success. More than 600 international attendees participated in it. Our SOA & BPM Community had a great presence there. At joint booth with the Specialized partners link consulting, eProseed and Griffiths Waite, we presented the latest product updates and had many interesting discussions with customers and speakers. Special thanks to our HQ product management team Demed, Tim, Manas for coming over right before OOW. Also a very big Thank to Matthias Ziegler from Accenture for presenting our joint presentation individually! If you missed the conference here are the key presentations links for your reference: Big Data and its impact on SOA Demed L'Her [View PDF] Building 21st Century Service-Oriented Airports Shyam Kumar [View PDF] Building Cloudy Services Anne Thomas Manes [View PDF] Community Management: The Next Wave of SOA Governance and API Management Tim E. Hall [View PDF] Elastic SOA in the Cloud Steve Millidge [View PDF] Governing Shared Services: On-Premise & In the Cloud Thomas Erl [View Video] Introducing the Cloud Computing Design Patterns Catalogue Thomas Erl and Amin Naserpour [CloudPatterns.org] Lost in Translation - Common Mistakes Interpreting Patterns Mark Simpson [View PDF] Moving Applications to the Cloud: Migration Options Anne Thomas Manes [View PDF] New Paradigms for Application Architecture: From Applications to IT Services Anne Thomas Manes [View PDF] NoSQL for Data Services, Data Virtualization & Big Data Guido Schmutz [View PDF] A Pragmatic Approach to Cloud Computing Andrea Morena [View PDF] The Successful Execution of the SOA and BPM Vision Using a Business Capability Framework: Concepts and Examples Clemens Utschig and Manas Deb [View PDF] Service Modeling & BPM Business Value Patterns Matthias Ziegler [View PDF] [Podcast] SOA Adoption in the Brazilian Ministry of Health - Case Study Ricardo Puttini and Andre Toffanello [PDF Coming Soon] SOA Environments are a Big Data Problem Markus Zirn, Splunk and Maciej Barcz [View PDF] SOA Governance at EDP: A Global Energy Company Manuel Rosa [View PDF] For all presentations please visit the SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium Website SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Symposium,Thomas Erl,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff

- by The Geek

Yesterday Microsoft announced the release candidate of Internet Explorer 9, which is very close to the final product. Here’s a screenshot tour of the most interesting new stuff, as well as answers to your questions. The most important question is should you install this version? And the answer is absolutely yes. Even if you don’t use IE, it’s better to have a newer, more secure version on your PC. What’s New Under the Hood in Release Candidate vs Beta? If you want to see the full list of changes with all the original marketing detail, you can read Microsoft’s Beauty of the Web page, but here’s the highlights that you might be interested in. Improved Performance – they’ve made a lot of changes, and it really feels faster, especially when using more intensive web apps like Gmail. Power Consumption Settings – since the JavaScript engine in any browser uses a lot of CPU power, they’ve now integrated it into the power settings, so if you’re on battery it will use less CPU, and save battery life. This is really a great change. UI Changes – The tab bar can now be moved below the address bar (see below for more), they’ve shaved some pixels off the design to save space, and now you can toggle the Menu bar to be always on. Pinned Sites – now you can pin multiple pages to a single taskbar button. Very useful if you always use a couple web apps together. You can also pin a site in InPrivate mode. FlashBlock and AdBlock are Integrated (sorta) – there’s a new ActiveX filtering that lets you enable plug-ins only for sites you trust. There’s also a tracking protection list that can block certain content (which can obviously be used to block ads). Geolocation – while a lot of privacy conscious people might complain about this, if you use your laptop while traveling, it’s really useful to have geo-located features when using Google Maps, etc. Don’t worry, it won’t leak your privacy by default. WebM Video – Yeah, Google recently removed H.264 from Chrome, but Microsoft has added Google’s WebM video format to Internet Explorer. Keep reading for more about using the new features Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines The 50 Faces of Mario Death [Infographic] Clean Up Google Calendar’s Interface in Chrome and Iron The Rise and Fall of Kramerica? [Seinfeld Video] GNOME Shell 3 Live CDs for OpenSUSE and Fedora Available for Testing Picplz Offers Special FX, Sharing, and Backup of Your Smartphone Pics BUILD! An Epic LEGO Stop Motion Film [VIDEO]

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PERT shows relationships between defined tasks in a project without taking into consideration a time line

The program evaluation and review technique (PERT) shows relationships between defined tasks in a project without taking into consideration a time line. This chart is an excellent way to identify dependencies of tasks based on other tasks. This chart allows project managers to identify the critical path of a project to minimize any time delays to the project. According to Craig Borysowich in his article “Pros & Cons of the PERT/CPM Method stated the following advantages and disadvantages: “PERT/CPM has the following advantages: A PERT/CPM chart explicitly defines and makes visible dependencies (precedence relationships) between the WBS elements, PERT/CPM facilitates identification of the critical path and makes this visible, PERT/CPM facilitates identification of early start, late start, and slack for each activity, PERT/CPM provides for potentially reduced project duration due to better understanding of dependencies leading to improved overlapping of activities and tasks where feasible. PERT/CPM has the following disadvantages: There can be potentially hundreds or thousands of activities and individual dependency relationships, The network charts tend to be large and unwieldy requiring several pages to print and requiring special size paper, The lack of a timeframe on most PERT/CPM charts makes it harder to show status although colors can help (e.g., specific color for completed nodes), When the PERT/CPM charts become unwieldy, they are no longer used to manage the project.” (Borysowich, 2008) Traditionally PERT charts are used in the initial planning of a project like in a project that is utilizing the waterfall approach. Once the chart was created then project managers could further analyze this data to determine the earliest start time for each stage in the project. This is important because this information can be used to help forecast resource needs during a project and where in the project. However, the agile environment can approach this differently because of their constant need to be in contact with the client and the other stakeholders. The PERT chart can also be used during project iteration to determine what is to be worked on next, such as a prioritized To-Do list a wife would give her husband at the start of a weekend. In my personal opinion, the COTS-centric environment would not really change how a company uses a PERT chart in their day to day work. The only thing I can is that there would be less tasks to include in the chart because the functionally milestones are already completed when the components are purchased. References: http://www.netmba.com/operations/project/pert/ http://web2.concordia.ca/Quality/tools/20pertchart.pdf http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/enterprise-solutions/pros-cons-of-the-pertcpm-method-22221

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Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010

- by Martin Hinshelwood

I will be presenting a session on “Scrum for TFS2010” not once, but twice! If you are going to be at the Aberdeen Partner Group meeting on 27th April, or DDD Scotland on 8th May then you may be able to catch my session. Credit: I want to give special thanks to Aaron Bjork from Microsoft who provided me with most of my material He is a Scrum and Power Point genius. Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010 Synopsis Visual Studio ALM (formerly Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are the cornerstones of development on the Microsoft .NET platform. These are the best tools for a team to have successful projects and for the developers to have a focused and smooth software development process. For TFS 2010 Microsoft is heavily investing in Scrum and has already started moving some teams across to using it. Martin will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even asses your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. Come and see Martin Hinshelwood, Visual Studio ALM MVP and Solution Architect from SSW show you: How to successfully gather requirements with User stories How to plan a project using TFS 2010 and Scrum How to work with a product backlog in TFS 2010 The right way to plan a sprint with TFS 2010 Tracking your progress The right way to use work items What you can use from the built in reporting as well as the Project portals available on from the SharePoint dashboard The important reports to give your Product Owner / Project Manager Walk away knowing how to see the project health and progress. Visual Studio ALM is designed to help address many of these traditional problems faced by teams. It does so by providing a set of integrated tools to help teams improve their software development activities and to help managers better support the software development processes. During this session we will cover the lifecycle of creating work items and how this fits into Scrum using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server. If you want to know more about how to do Scrum with TFS then there is a new course that has been created in collaboration with Microsoft and Scrum.org that is going to be the official course for working with TFS 2010. SSW has Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools. Ken Schwaber and and Sam Guckenheimer: Professional Scrum Development Technorati Tags: Scrum,VS ALM,VS 2010,TFS 2010

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How to (un)dock IBM Thinkpad X41 from X4 Dock(ing station) successfully?

- by nutty about natty

I'd like to start using my docking station again; however, it still doesn't work as it should, see the following bug descriptions (with special focus on Thinkpad X41 & the X4 Dock). Given that it still doesn't work (effective April 2012), my hope is fading that it will start working all of a sudden with Precise Pangolin at the end of the month. This issue is VERY important to me and I would be MOST grateful to anyone being able to sieve through the following links (some of which are actually quite recent) and translate their meaning into reliable and concrete simple (?) steps. I've read briefly about hal and udev, and can imagine that they are somewhat related to this, see links below. I don't want to fire at random. I don't want to tinker around with bash scripts if avoidable... Problem description (more or less ;-) Pressing the undock button on a "ThinkPad X4 Dock" with a ThinkPad X40 does not cause any udev events. And the lights on the dock never change to indicate it is safe to undock. and IBM Thinkpad X41 & docking station no joy :-( ... when pressing the blue undock button on the docking station: - The screen goes blank (with backlight remaining on), - with some SSD/HDD activity; - ctrl alt del causes a shut down after ... seconds, indicating that the system itself hasn't "crashed" but is still (somewhat ?) responsive. and With recent distributions, docking and undocking should function out of the box. You can monitor this by running # udevadm monitor and when you dock or press the undock button you should see a flurry of events. There are some issues though: No event on undock. - In some cases you may not get any events on undock. This is due to the ACPI dock drivers only registering the first logical Dock port they encounter and in some rare cases there may be more then one, such as on a ThinkPad X40 with ThinkPad X4 Dock. Patches are available, and are merged in 2.6.34. Now, if patches are available and merged into 2.6.34 - why isn't (un)docking simply working / fully supported in the latest version of Natty (which to my humble understanding has surpassed kernel version 2.6.34 a while ago)? More relevant links: ThinkPad X41 Docking Station issues and [HOWTO] Run scripts for laptop lid open/close and dock/undock events and finally Symptoms corrected by the latest BIOS Update - ThinkPad X41 - (Fix) USB devices connected to UltraBase X4 or ThinkPad X4 Dock may not be recognized in Boot Menu by pressing F12 during POST. Thanks!!

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Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010

- by Martin Hinshelwood

I will be presenting a session on “Scrum for TFS2010” not once, but twice! If you are going to be at the Aberdeen Partner Group meeting on 27th April, or DDD Scotland on 8th May then you may be able to catch my session. Credit: I want to give special thanks to Aaron Bjork from Microsoft who provided me with most of my material He is a Scrum and Power Point genius. Updated 9th May 2010 – I have now presented at both of these sessions and posted about it. Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010 Synopsis Visual Studio ALM (formerly Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are the cornerstones of development on the Microsoft .NET platform. These are the best tools for a team to have successful projects and for the developers to have a focused and smooth software development process. For TFS 2010 Microsoft is heavily investing in Scrum and has already started moving some teams across to using it. Martin will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even asses your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Come and see Martin Hinshelwood, Visual Studio ALM MVP and Solution Architect from SSW show you: How to successfully gather requirements with User stories How to plan a project using TFS 2010 and Scrum How to work with a product backlog in TFS 2010 The right way to plan a sprint with TFS 2010 Tracking your progress The right way to use work items What you can use from the built in reporting as well as the Project portals available on from the SharePoint dashboard The important reports to give your Product Owner / Project Manager Walk away knowing how to see the project health and progress. Visual Studio ALM is designed to help address many of these traditional problems faced by teams. It does so by providing a set of integrated tools to help teams improve their software development activities and to help managers better support the software development processes. During this session we will cover the lifecycle of creating work items and how this fits into Scrum using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server. If you want to know more about how to do Scrum with TFS then there is a new course that has been created in collaboration with Microsoft and Scrum.org that is going to be the official course for working with TFS 2010. SSW has Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools. Ken Schwaber and and Sam Guckenheimer: Professional Scrum Development Technorati Tags: Scrum,VS ALM,VS 2010,TFS 2010

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The .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip

- by Laila

Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, the two .NET Rocks radio show hosts, have decided to set off to 15 cities in the US, between April 19th and May 7th, in their DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV). What for you'll ask me? Well, to drive around the US, meet up with .NET developers, and show off the latest and greatest in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0! Each evening, they stop in a city and host a three hour event in front of a 100 to 300 crowd of developers, where Carl is showing off media features in Silverlight 4 and their road trip tracking application, whilst Richard is demo-ing the web performance testing features of VS2010 using his portable server rig. But before they take to the stage, they have a special guest brought in - a rock star from the Visual Studio world - whom they interview for an hour as a .NET Rock episode. So far, they've had - amongst others - Phil Haack, a Program Manager with the ASP.NET team working on ASP.NET MVC, Dan Fernandez, an Evangelism Manager in the Developer and Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft, and Beth Massi, Senior Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft. I love the fact that the audience gets a chance to participate, ask questions and have a great laugh, as you can hear in the first episode! Along the way, the .NET Rocks guys are giving away great prizes (including .NET Reflector Pro, ANTS Memory Profiler licenses, and "40" LCD TVs!). Even more out of the ordinary, at each stop on the road trip, one lucky attendee (who entered in the Ride Along competition) gets to jump in the RV with Carl and Richard and ride along with them to the next stop on the roadtrip. How cool is that! Richard told us: "Our first winner in Mountain View was Eric Ziko. I was looking for him to announce that he had won, when he found us and gave us a bottle of scotch he had brought just to say 'thanks for the great show'. We all had a toast from the bottle the next night when he headed back home." Cheeky! There's still space to a few of these events, so if you want to attend, register now, because it's first come first serve. We're grateful to Richard and Carl for giving us the opportunity to sponsor this major .NET event! A unique .NET adventure worth following for sure. Cheers, Laila

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Tom Cruise: Meet Fusion Apps UX and Feel the Speed

- by ultan o'broin

Unfortunately, I am old enough to remember, and now to admit that I really loved, the movie Top Gun. You know the one - Tom Cruise, US Navy F-14 ace pilot, Mr Maverick, crisis of confidence, meets woman, etc., etc. Anyway, one of more memorable lines (there were a few) was: "I feel the need, the need for speed." I was reminded of Tom Cruise recently. Paraphrasing a certain Senior Vice President talking about Oracle Fusion Applications and user experience at an all-hands meeting, I heard that: Applications can never be too easy to use. Performance can never be too fast. Developers, assume that your code is always "on". Perfect. You cannot overstate the user experience importance of application speed to users, or at least their perception of speed. We all want that super speed of execution and performance, and increasingly so as enterprise users bring the expectations of consumer IT into the work environment. Sten Vesterli (@stenvesterli), an Oracle Fusion Applications User Experience Advocate, also addressed the speed point artfully at an Oracle Usability Advisory Board meeting in Geneva. Sten asked us that when we next Googled something, to think about the message we see that Google has found hundreds of thousands or millions of results for us in a split second (for example, About 8,340,000 results (0.23 seconds)). Now, how many results can we see and how many can we use immediately? Yet, this simple message communicating the total results available to us works a special magic about speed, delight, and excitement that Google has made its own in the search space. And, guess what? The Oracle Application Development Framework table component relies on a similar "virtual performance boost", says Sten, when it displays the first 50 records in a table, and uses a scrollbar indicating the total size of the data record set. The user scrolls and the application automatically retrieves more records as needed. Application speed and its perception by users is worth bearing in mind the next time you're at a customer site and the IT Department demands that you retrieve every record from the database. Just think of... Dave Ensor: I'll give you all the rows you ask for in one second. If you promise to use them. (Again, hat tip to Sten.) And then maybe think of... Tom Cruise. And if you want to read about the speed of Oracle Fusion Applications, and what that really means in terms of user productivity for your entire business, then check out the Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle Fusion Applications white papers on the usable apps website.

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Dynamic meta description and keyword tags for your MasterPages

- by Aamir Hasan

Today we're going to look at a technique for dynamically inserting meta tags into your master pages. By taking control of the head tag and inserting your own HtmlMeta you can easily customise these tags.Might have noticed that when you create a new master page in visual studio your <head> tag gets decorated with a runat="server" attribute.Asp.net doesn't add this kind of decoration to any other html tags (although you are free to add it if you want). So what makes the head tag special?By adding the runat="server" you're giving actually converting the control into a HtmlHead control. That doesn't particularly matter for this tutorial other than to note that given a reference to the head control you get all the extras that come with asp.net controls such as access to its controls collection.The HtmlMeta control lets us wrap up <meta> tags via asp.net code. To add a meta description we need to create an instance, set the name property, the content property, and then add it to the head: asp.net using (C#)protected void Page_Init(object sender, EventArgs e){ // Add meta description tag HtmlMeta metaDescription = new HtmlMeta(); metaDescription.Name = "Description"; metaDescription.Content = "Short, unique and keywords rich page description."; Page.Header.Controls.Add(metaDescription); // Add meta keywords tag HtmlMeta metaKeywords = new HtmlMeta(); metaKeywords.Name = "Keywords"; metaKeywords.Content = "selected,page,keywords"; Page.Header.Controls.Add(metaKeywords);}asp.net ( VB.NET )Protected Sub Page_Init(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Init ' Add meta description tag Dim metaDescription As HtmlMeta = New HtmlMeta() metaDescription.Name = "Description" metaDescription.Content = "Short, unique and keywords rich page description." Page.Header.Controls.Add(metaDescription) ' Add meta keywords tag Dim metaKeywords As HtmlMeta = New HtmlMeta() metaKeywords.Name = "Keywords" metaKeywords.Content = "selected,page,keywords" Page.Header.Controls.Add(metaKeywords)End Sub

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From Trailer to Cloud: Skire acquisition expands Oracle’s on-demand project management options.

- by Melissa Centurio Lopes

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} By Alison Weiss Whether building petrochemical facilities in the Middle East or managing mining operations in Australia, project managers face significant challenges. Local regulations and currencies, contingent labor, hybrid public/private funding sources, and more threaten project budgets and schedules. According to Mike Sicilia, senior vice president and general manager for the Oracle Primavera Global Business Unit, there will be trillions of dollars invested in industrial projects around the globe between 2012 and 2016. But even with so much at stake, project leads don’t always have time to look for new and better enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM) software solutions to manage large-scale capital initiatives across the enterprise. Oracle’s recent acquisition of Skire, a leading provider of capital program management and facilities management applications available both in the cloud and on premises, gives customers outstanding new EPPM options. By combining Skire’s cloud-based solutions for managing capital projects, real estate, and facilities with Oracle’s Primavera EPPM solutions, project managers can quickly get a solution running that is interoperable across an extended enterprise. Staff can access the EPPM solution within days, rather than waiting for corporate IT to put technology in place. “Staff can access the EPPM solution within days, rather than waiting for corporate IT to put technology in place,” says Sicilia. This applies to a problem that has, according to Sicilia, bedeviled project managers for decades: extending EPPM functionality into the field. Frequently, large-scale projects are remotely located, and the lack of communications and IT infrastructure threatened the accuracy of project reporting and scheduling. Read the full version of this article in the November 2012 edition of Oracle's Profit Magazine: Special Report on Project Management

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