save money - Page 139 - Developer IT

How can a software agency deliver quality software/win projects?

- by optician

I currently work for a bespoke software agency. Does anyone have any experience of how to win well priced work? It seems there is so much competition from offshore/bedroom program teams, that cost is extremely competetive these days. I feel that it is very different compared to a software product company or an internal it department, in terms of budget. As someone else said before, we only ever really get to version 1.0 of a lot of our software, unless the client is big enough. In which case it doesn't make business sense to spend ages making the software the best we can. Its like we are doing the same quality of work of internal it. Also a Lot of our clients are not technically minded and so therefor will not pay for things they don't understand. As our company does not have the money to turn down work it often goes that we take on complicated work for far too little money. I have got a lot better at managing change and keeping tight specs etc. It is still hard.

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HTML href with css ie Problem

- by Jordan Pagaduan

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Software Company Library

- by dbemerlin

Hi. A few days ago i had the idea to create a company library since my company has no training and many developers still develop as they did when they learned it 5 years ago. My hope is that they can lend books, read them and hopefully learn something from them (for example: object oriented programming or unit testing, which noone here knows how to use). After asking around most agreed that it was a good idea, so i brought my books, made a simple printed sheet with "Book A belongs to B" and "Developer A took the Book on dd.mm.yyyy" to get it started. Now i want to get some ideas for Books that i could add to the shelf (sadly from my own money since 100€/month for training is too much money for this multi-million euro company). We develop mostly PHP & MySQL so books specific to this topic would be preferred but i think if people learn other languages they might get ideas on how to develop better with the current language so other books are ok, too. Which books would you recommend? PS: Personally i'd like to add some Project Management books, too, as it's a topic i'm interested in, eventhough i'm just a junior developer (We've got Peopleware already, great book btw).

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API-based solutions for sending payments to people without bank accounts

- by Tauren

I'm looking for inexpensive ways to send payments to hundreds or thousands of individual contractors, even if they do not have a bank account. Currently I only need to support payment in the USA, but may eventually be international. Here's the scenario: I offer a service that allows an organization or manager-type person to coordinate contractors for very short term jobs. These jobs are typically only an hour or two in length. A contractor may get only one job over an entire month, several jobs spread out over a month, multiple jobs on a single day, or any other combination. Thus, a single contractor could earn as little as one job's payment up to potentially payment for dozens. Payment for a month could be as little as $10 up to $1000's. Right now, the system provides payroll reports to the manager and it is the manager's responsibility to produce checks, stuff envelopes, and send mail via the US postal service. I'd like to remove this burden from the manager and have all the payments taken care of for them automatically by the system. I'm not sure where to start or what the best options would be. I'm starting to look into the following solutions, but don't know specifics yet and would like some advice before pursuing them. I'd also like to hear about other ideas or suggestions. PayPal (Send Money, Adaptive Payments, x.com, other???) Amazon (Flexible Payments System?) Fund some sort of pre-paid debit card? Web service with API that mails checks for you? Direct deposit via a bank API (for users with bank accounts)? The problem is that many of these contractors may not be able to obtain bank accounts or credit cards within the USA. I don't mind doing a hybrid of solutions, but are there any that would work well with this issue? I want the solution to be easy to use for the contractors, meaning that they can get the money easily (via check in the mail, debit card ATM withdrawal, etc.)

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How to track auto-generated id's in select-insert statement

- by k rey

I have two tables detail and head. The detail table will be written first. Later, the head table will be written. The head is a summary of the detail table. I would like to keep a reference from the detail to the head table. I have a solution but it is not elegant and requires duplicating the joins and filters that were used during summation. I am looking for a better solution. The below is an example of what I currently have. In this example, I have simplified the table structure. In the real world, the summation is very complex. -- Preparation create table #detail ( detail_id int identity(1,1) , code char(4) , amount money , head_id int null ); create table #head ( head_id int identity(1,1) , code char(4) , subtotal money ); insert into #detail ( code, amount ) values ( 'A', 5 ); insert into #detail ( code, amount ) values ( 'A', 5 ); insert into #detail ( code, amount ) values ( 'B', 2 ); insert into #detail ( code, amount ) values ( 'B', 2 ); -- I would like to somehow simplify the following two queries insert into #head ( code, subtotal ) select code, sum(amount) from #detail group by code update #detail set head_id = h.head_id from #detail d inner join #head h on d.code = h.code -- This is the desired end result select * from #detail Desired end result of detail table: detail_id code amount head_id 1 A 5.00 1 2 A 5.00 1 3 B 2.00 2 4 B 2.00 2

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How can i fetch the large image from url

- by Kutbi

i used below code to fetch the image from url.but its not working for large image.. i missing something to add for that type of image to fetch. imgView = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.ImageView01); imgView.setImageBitmap(loadBitmap("http://www.360technosoft.com/mx4.jpg")); //imgView.setImageBitmap(loadBitmap("http://sugardaddydiaries.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/how_do_i_get_sugar_daddy.jpg")); //setImageDrawable("http://sugardaddydiaries.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/holding-money-copy.jpg"); //Drawable drawable = LoadImageFromWebOperations("http://www.androidpeople.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/android.png"); //imgView.setImageDrawable(drawable); /* try { ImageView i = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.ImageView01); Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeStream((InputStream)new URL("http://sugardaddydiaries.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/holding-money-copy.jpg").getContent()); i.setImageBitmap(bitmap); } catch (MalformedURLException e) { System.out.println("hello"); } catch (IOException e) { System.out.println("hello"); }*/ } protected Drawable ImageOperations(Context context, String string, String string2) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub try { InputStream is = (InputStream) this.fetch(string); Drawable d = Drawable.createFromStream(is, "src"); return d; } catch (MalformedURLException e) { e.printStackTrace(); return null; } catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); return null; } }

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My project is no longer used - how should I feel?

- by flybywire

For the last two years I have been developing and supporting an important project for a big customer. The project included mining data from the customer's existing systems, processing, and displaying and updating in the customer's public home page. The project was defined as crucial by the customer and I was payed good money and flown at the customer's expense to meet key employees. Some months ago, when the project was finished and in maintainance mode, I informed the customer that I am no longer interested in doing it as I had a new opportunity that would not be compatible with my existing customer. I was payed to train one of their employees, flown to meet him, make sure everything works and that he can be safely left in charge of the project. We finished in good terms after I complied with all my obligations and they payed me all they owed me. Some days ago, just out of curiosity, I entered to their website to see how the data continues to be updated and much to my dismay I discovered that the day after my contract was finished my system was "turned off" and it ceased to feed data to the public website. Let's put it clear, there is no issue of money or broken contract here. They are in they full right to do whatever they want with my software. But it is an issue of broken "programmer's ego". Should I feel bad about it (I do). Should I care and check out with my customer if they need some help? Or is it none of my matters?

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How can I identify an element from a list within another list

- by Alex

I have been trying to make a block of code that finds the index of the largest bid for each item. Then I was going to use the index as a way to identify the person who paid that much moneys name. However no matter what i try I can't link the person and what they have gained from the auction together. Here is the code I have been writing: It has to be able to work with any information inputted def sealedBids(): n = int(input('\nHow many people are in the group? ')) z = 0 g = [] s = [] b = [] f = [] w = []#goes by number of items q = [] while z < n: b.append([]) z = z + 1 z = 0 while z < n: g.append(input('Enter a bidders name: ')) z = z + 1 z = 0 i = int(input('How many items are being bid on?')) while z < i: s.append(input('Enter the name of an item: ')) w.append(z) z = z + 1 z = 0 for j in range(n):#specifies which persons bids your taking for k in range(i):#specifies which item is being bid on b[j].append(int(input('How much money has {0} bid on the {1}? '.format(g[j], s[k])))) print(' ') for j in range(n):#calculates fair share f.append(sum(b[j])/n) for j in range(i):#identifies which quantity of money was the largest for each item for k in range(n): if w[j] < b[k][j]: w[j] = b[k][j] q.append(k) any advice is much appreciated.

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Are there really safe and legal resources for sound effects to use in applications?

- by mystify

For those who want to opt for "close" immediately: Great user interfaces need great sound effects, right? User interfaces are programmed by programmers, right? So this is a programming question, ok? I had a very hard time to find good and legal sound resources. I am not looking for free sounds. Proper licensing is absolutely crucial, and I don't want to get sued by multibilliondollar music companies, hollywood sound studios and their highly overpaid lawyers. They cry about people downloading their stuff in file sharing sites but when someone comes and wants to really license stuff, the market is so empty like an open and unwatched gold mine. Trust me, whatever I type into google, I always end up getting sort of opaque and strange music libraries that do charge money, but refuse to provide proper licensing evidence to the licensee. When you pay money and they only count how many files you downloaded, that can never be a valid license, nor any evidence for you that you did license the sounds. Imagine that contributor suing you and you say: "I licensed it at xy", and his lawyer just smiles: "Show me proof, mofo!". So you loose a million dollars, or 1 for every downloaded app. Congrats. But that's the way all those "hey we're the worlds largest sound effect library" libraries are doing it. It's really annoying. And I hope someone here is able to point out a sound effects ressource which is A) big B) used by professinals C) has a reasonable pricing and licensing model D) provides the licensee with proper legal evidence about licensed sounds You know, I'm not from the US and typically you US folks are the ones who invent the cool stuff on the net, and maybe I just missed a new great start up. So?

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Sql Server 2005 Check Constraint not being applied in execution when using variables

- by DarylS

Here is some SQL sample code: --Create 2 Sales tables with constraints based on the saledate create table Sales1(SaleDate datetime, Amount money) ALTER TABLE dbo.Sales1 ADD CONSTRAINT CK_Sales1 CHECK (([SaleDate]>='01 May 2010')) GO create table Sales2(SaleDate datetime, Amount money) ALTER TABLE dbo.Sales2 ADD CONSTRAINT CK_Sales2 CHECK (([SaleDate]<'01 May 2010')) GO --Insert some data into Sales1 insert into Sales1 (SaleDate, Amount) values ('02 May 2010', 50) insert into Sales1 (SaleDate, Amount) values ('03 May 2010', 60) GO --Insert some data into Sales2 insert into Sales2 (SaleDate, Amount) values ('30 Mar 2010', 10) insert into Sales2 (SaleDate, Amount) values ('31 Mar 2010', 20) GO --Create a view that combines these 2 tables create VIEW [dbo].[Sales] AS SELECT SaleDate, Amount FROM Sales1 UNION ALL SELECT SaleDate, Amount FROM Sales2 GO --Get the results --Query 1 select * from Sales where SaleDate < '31 Mar 2010' -- if you look at the execution plan this query only looks at Sales2 (Which is good) --Query 2 DECLARE @SaleDate datetime SET @SaleDate = '31 Mar 2010' select * from Sales where SaleDate < @SaleDate -- if you look at the execution plan this query looks at Sales1 and Sales2 (Which is NOT good) Looking at the execution plan you will see that the two queries are differnt. For Query 1 the only table that is accessed is Sales1 (which is good). For Query 2 both tables are accessed (Which is bad). Why are these execution plans different, and how do i get Query 2 to only access the relevant table when variables are used? I have tried to add indexes for the SaleDate column and that does not seem to help.

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Reporting Services Sum of Inner Group in Outer Group

- by Spoonybard

I have a report in Reporting Services 2008 using ASP.net 3.5 and SQL Server 2008. The report has 2 groupings and a detail row. This is the current format: Outer Group Inner Group Detail Row The Detail Row represents an item on a receipt and a receipt can have multiple items. Each receipt was paid with a certain payment method. So the Outer Group is grouped by payment type, the Inner Group is grouped by the receipt's ID, and the Detail Row is each item for the given receipt. My raw data result set has two important columns: The Amount Received and the Amount Applied. The Amount Received is how much money in total was collected for all the items on the receipt. The Amount Applied is how much money each item got from the total Amount Received. Sample Result Set: ReceiptID Item ItemID AmountReceived AmountApplied Payment Method ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 Book 1 $200.00 $40.00 Cash 1 CD 2 $200.00 $20.00 Cash 1 Software 3 $200.00 $100.00 Cash 1 Backpack 4 $200.00 $40.00 Cash The Inner Group displays the AmountReceived correctly as $200. However, the Outer Group displays the AmountReceived as $800, because I believe that it is going off each detail row which in this case is a count of 4 items. What I want is to see in the Outer Group that the Amount Received is $200. I tried restricting the scope in my SUM function to be the Inner Group, but I get the error "The scope parameter must be set to a string constant that is equal to either the name of a containing group, the name of a containing data region, or the name of a dataset." Does anyone have any suggestions on how to solve this issue? Thanks.

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Processing a resultset to look up foriegn keys (and poulate a new table!)

- by Gilly

Hi, I've been handed a dataset that has some fairly basic table structures with no keys at all. eg {myRubishTable} - Area(varchar),AuthorityName(varchar),StartYear(varchar),StartMonth(varcha),EndYear(varchar),EndMonth(varchar),Amount(Money) there are other tables that use the Area and AuthorityName columns as well as a general use of Month and Years so I I figured a good first step was to pull Area and Authority into their own tables. I now want to process the data in the original table and lookup the key value to put into my new table with foreign keys which looks like this. (lookup Tables) {Area} - id (int, PK), name (varchar(50)) {AuthorityName} - id(int, PK), name(varchar(50) (TargetTable) {myBetterTable} - id (int,PK), area_id(int FK-Area),authority_name_id(int FK-AuthorityName),StartYear (varchar),StartMonth(varchar),EndYear(varchar),EndMonth(varchar),Amount(money) so row one in the old table read MYAREA, MYAUTHORITY,2009,Jan,2010,Feb,10000 and I want to populate the new table with 1,1,1,2009,Jan,2010,Feb,10000 where the first '1' is the primary key and the second two '1's are the ids in the lookup tables. Can anyone point me to the most efficient way of achieving this using just SQL? Thanks in advance Footnote:- I've achieved what I needed with some pretty simple WHERE clauses (I had left a rogue tablename in the FROM which was throwing me :o( ) but would be interested to know if this is the most efficient. ie SELECT [area].[area_id], [authority].[authority_name_id], [myRubishTable].[StartYear], [myRubishTable].[StartMonth], [myRubishTable].[EndYear], [myRubishTable].[EndMonth], [myRubishTable].[Amount] FROM [myRubishTable],[Area],[AuthorityName] WHERE [myRubishTable].[Area]=[Area].[name] AND [myRubishTable].[Authority Name]=[dim_AuthorityName].[name] TIA

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jQuery only firing last class in multiple-class click

- by user1134644

I have a set of links like so: <a href="#internalLink1" class="classA">This has Class A</a> <a href="#internalLink2" class="classB">This has Class B</a> <a href="#internalLink3" class="classA classB">This has Class A and Class B</a> And here's the corresponding jQuery: $('.classA').click(function(){ // do class A stuff }); $('.classB').click(function(){ // do class B stuff }); Currently, when I click on the first link with Class A, it does the Class A stuff like it's supposed to. Similarly, when I click on the second link with Class B, it does the Class B stuff like it's supposed to. No worries there. My issue is, when I click on the third link with BOTH classes, it only fires the function for whichever class comes last (in this case, class B. If I put class A at the end instead, it performs class A's function). I want it to fire both. What am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance. EDIT: To those posting fiddles, nearly all of them work, so as many have said, it's most likely not my code, but the way it displays in my file. For a little more clarification, I was teaching myself some jQuery and decided to try making a (very) simple "Choose Your Own Adventure" type game. Here's a jsfiddle containing the opening of my bare-bones-please-don't-laugh game. Click on "Hide in the bushes", then "Examine the victim", then "Take any valuables and leave, he's dead already" <-- THIS is where the issue is. It's supposed to add 98 gold ("hawks") to your inventory, AND tell you that your alignment has shifted 1 point towards Chaotic. At the moment, it only does the chaotic alert, and no gold gets added to your inventory. The other option (refresh the fiddle to restart) that adds money to your inventory, but DOES NOT make you chaotic, works just fine (if you select "Search him for identification" instead of "take the money and run") Sorry this is so long!

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Tip/Trick: Fix Common SEO Problems Using the URL Rewrite Extension

- by ScottGu

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site. A large % of traffic to sites now comes directly from search engines, and improving your site’s search relevancy will lead to more users visiting your site from search engine queries. This can directly or indirectly increase the money you make through your site. This blog post covers how you can use the free Microsoft URL Rewrite Extension to fix a bunch of common SEO problems that your site might have. It takes less than 15 minutes (and no code changes) to apply 4 simple URL Rewrite rules to your site, and in doing so cause search engines to drive more visitors and traffic to your site. The techniques below work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based sites. They also works with all versions of ASP.NET (and even work with non-ASP.NET content). [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Measuring the SEO of your website with the Microsoft SEO Toolkit A few months ago I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit that we’ve shipped. This useful tool enables you to automatically crawl/scan your site for SEO correctness, and it then flags any SEO issues it finds. I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on. It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in your site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further. Below is a simple example of a report I ran against one of my sites (www.scottgu.com) prior to applying the URL Rewrite rules I’ll cover later in this blog post: Search Relevancy and URL Splitting Two of the important things that search engines evaluate when assessing your site’s “search relevancy” are: How many other sites link to your content. Search engines assume that if a lot of people around the web are linking to your content, then it is likely useful and so weight it higher in relevancy. The uniqueness of the content it finds on your site. If search engines find that the content is duplicated in multiple places around the Internet (or on multiple URLs on your site) then it is likely to drop the relevancy of the content. One of the things you want to be very careful to avoid when building public facing sites is to not allow different URLs to retrieve the same content within your site. Doing so will hurt with both of the situations above. In particular, allowing external sites to link to the same content with multiple URLs will cause your link-count and page-ranking to be split up across those different URLs (and so give you a smaller page rank than what it would otherwise be if it was just one URL). Not allowing external sites to link to you in different ways sounds easy in theory – but you might wonder what exactly this means in practice and how you avoid it. 4 Really Common SEO Problems Your Sites Might Have Below are 4 really common scenarios that can cause your site to inadvertently expose multiple URLs for the same content. When this happens external sites linking to yours will end up splitting their page links across multiple URLs - and as a result cause you to have a lower page ranking with search engines than you deserve. SEO Problem #1: Default Document IIS (and other web servers) supports the concept of a “default document”. This allows you to avoid having to explicitly specify the page you want to serve at either the root of the web-site/application, or within a sub-directory. This is convenient – but means that by default this content is available via two different publically exposed URLs (which is bad). For example: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx SEO Problem #2: Different URL Casings Web developers often don’t realize URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web. This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx SEO Problem #3: Trailing Slashes Consider the below two URLs – they might look the same at first, but they are subtly different. The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ SEO Problem #4: Canonical Host Names Sometimes sites support scenarios where they support a web-site with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself. This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling: http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx/ http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx/ How to Easily Fix these SEO Problems in 10 minutes (or less) using IIS Rewrite If you haven’t been careful when coding your sites, chances are you are suffering from one (or more) of the above SEO problems. Addressing these issues will improve your search engine relevancy ranking and drive more traffic to your site. The “good news” is that fixing the above 4 issues is really easy using the URL Rewrite Extension. This is a completely free Microsoft extension available for IIS 7.x (on Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 and Windows Vista). The great thing about using the IIS Rewrite extension is that it allows you to fix the above problems *without* having to change any code within your applications. You can easily install the URL Rewrite Extension in under 3 minutes using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (a free tool we ship that automates setting up web servers and development machines). Just click the green “Install Now” button on the URL Rewrite Spotlight page to install it on your Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 or Windows Vista machine: Once installed you’ll find that a new “URL Rewrite” icon is available within the IIS 7 Admin Tool: Double-clicking the icon will open up the URL Rewrite admin panel – which will display the list of URL Rewrite rules configured for a particular application or site: Notice that our rewrite rule list above is currently empty (which is the default when you first install the extension). We can click the “Add Rule…” link button in the top-right of the panel to add and enable new URL Rewriting logic for our site. Scenario 1: Handling Default Document Scenarios One of the SEO problems I discussed earlier in this post was the scenario where the “default document” feature of IIS causes you to inadvertently expose two URLs for the same content on your site. For example: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the second URL to instead go to the first one. We will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve. Let’s look at how we can create such a rule. We’ll begin by clicking the “Add Rule” link in the screenshot above. This will cause the below dialog to display: We’ll select the “Blank Rule” template within the “Inbound rules” section to create a new custom URL Rewriting rule. This will display an empty pane like below: Don’t worry – setting up the above rule is easy. The following 4 steps explain how to do so: Step 1: Name the Rule Our first step will be to name the rule we are creating. Naming it with a descriptive name will make it easier to find and understand later. Let’s name this rule our “Default Document URL Rewrite” rule: Step 2: Setup the Regular Expression that Matches this Rule Our second step will be to specify a regular expression filter that will cause this rule to execute when an incoming URL matches the regex pattern. Don’t worry if you aren’t good with regular expressions - I suck at them too. The trick is to know someone who is good at them or copy/paste them from a web-site. Below we are going to specify the following regular expression as our pattern rule: (.*?)/?Default\.aspx$ This pattern will match any URL string that ends with Default.aspx. The "(.*?)" matches any preceding character zero or more times. The "/?" part says to match the slash symbol zero or one times. The "$" symbol at the end will ensure that the pattern will only match strings that end with Default.aspx. Combining all these regex elements allows this rule to work not only for the root of your web site (e.g. http://scottgu.com/default.aspx) but also for any application or subdirectory within the site (e.g. http://scottgu.com/photos/default.aspx. Because the “ignore case” checkbox is selected it will match both “Default.aspx” as well as “default.aspx” within the URL. One nice feature built-into the rule editor is a “Test pattern” button that you can click to bring up a dialog that allows you to test out a few URLs with the rule you are configuring: Above I've added a “products/default.aspx” URL and clicked the “Test” button. This will give me immediate feedback on whether the rule will execute for it. Step 3: Setup a Permanent Redirect Action We’ll then setup an action to occur when our regular expression pattern matches the incoming URL: In the dialog above I’ve changed the “Action Type” drop down to be a “Redirect” action. The “Redirect Type” will be a HTTP 301 Permanent redirect – which means search engines will follow it. I’ve also set the “Redirect URL” property to be: {R:1}/ This indicates that we want to redirect the web client requesting the original URL to a new URL that has the originally requested URL path - minus the "Default.aspx" in it. For example, requests for http://scottgu.com/default.aspx will be redirected to http://scottgu.com/, and requests for http://scottgu.com/photos/default.aspx will be redirected to http://scottgu.com/photos/ The "{R:N}" regex construct, where N >= 0, is called a back-reference and N is the back-reference index. In the case of our pattern "(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$", if the input URL is "products/Default.aspx" then {R:0} will contain "products/Default.aspx" and {R:1} will contain "products". We are going to use this {R:1}/ value to be the URL we redirect users to. Step 4: Apply and Save the Rule Our final step is to click the “Apply” button in the top right hand of the IIS admin tool – which will cause the tool to persist the URL Rewrite rule into our application’s root web.config file (under a <system.webServer/rewrite> configuration section): <configuration> <system.webServer> <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" /> <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" /> </rule> </rules> </rewrite> </system.webServer> </configuration> Because IIS 7.x and ASP.NET share the same web.config files, you can actually just copy/paste the above code into your web.config files using Visual Studio and skip the need to run the admin tool entirely. This also makes adding/deploying URL Rewrite rules with your ASP.NET applications really easy. Step 5: Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site. Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx Notice that the second URL automatically redirects to the first one. Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and should update the page ranking of http://scottgu.com to include links to http://scottgu.com/default.aspx as well. Scenario 2: Different URL Casing Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post is that URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web. This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL to instead go to the second (all lower-case) one. Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve. To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again. This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: Unlike the previous scenario (where we created a “Blank Rule”), with this scenario we can take advantage of a built-in “Enforce lowercase URLs” rule template. When we click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that enforces the use of lowercase letters in URLs: When we click the “Yes” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if an incoming URL has upper-case characters in it – and automatically send users to a lower-case version of the URL: We can click the “Apply” button to use this rule “as-is” and have it apply to all incoming URLs to our site. Because my www.scottgu.com site uses ASP.NET Web Forms, I’m going to make one small change to the rule we generated above – which is to add a condition that will ensure that URLs to ASP.NET’s built-in “WebResource.axd” handler are excluded from our case-sensitivity URL Rewrite logic. URLs to the WebResource.axd handler will only come from server-controls emitted from my pages – and will never be linked to from external sites. While my site will continue to function fine if we redirect these URLs to automatically be lower-case – doing so isn’t necessary and will add an extra HTTP redirect to many of my pages. The good news is that adding a condition that prevents my URL Rewriting rule from happening with certain URLs is easy. We simply need to expand the “Conditions” section of the form above We can then click the “Add” button to add a condition clause. This will bring up the “Add Condition” dialog: Above I’ve entered {URL} as the Condition input – and said that this rule should only execute if the URL does not match a regex pattern which contains the string “WebResource.axd”. This will ensure that WebResource.axd URLs to my site will be allowed to execute just fine without having the URL be re-written to be all lower-case. Note: If you have static resources (like references to .jpg, .css, and .js files) within your site that currently use upper-case characters you’ll probably want to add additional condition filter clauses so that URLs to them also don’t get redirected to be lower-case (just add rules for patterns like .jpg, .gif, .js, etc). Your site will continue to work fine if these URLs get redirected to be lower case (meaning the site won’t break) – but it will cause an extra HTTP redirect to happen on your site for URLs that don’t need to be redirected for SEO reasons. So setting up a condition clause makes sense to add. When I click the “ok” button above and apply our lower-case rewriting rule the admin tool will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration> <system.webServer> <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" /> <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" /> </rule> <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" /> </rule> </rules> </rewrite> </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site. Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx Notice that the first URL (which has a capital “A”) automatically does a redirect to a lower-case version of the URL. Scenario 3: Trailing Slashes Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post is the scenario of trailing slashes within URLs. The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that does not have a trailing slash) to instead go to the second one that does. Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve. To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again. This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in “Append or remove the trailing slash symbol” rule template. When we select it and click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that automatically redirects users to a URL with a trailing slash if one isn’t present: Like within our previous lower-casing rewrite rule we’ll add one additional condition clause that will exclude WebResource.axd URLs from being processed by this rule. This will avoid an unnecessary redirect for happening for those URLs. When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL doesn’t have a trailing slash – and if the URL is not processed by either a directory or a file. This will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration> <system.webServer> <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" /> <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" /> </rule> <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" /> </rule> <rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*[^/])$" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" /> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" /> <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" /> </rule> </rules> </rewrite> </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site. Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ Notice that the first URL (which has no trailing slash) automatically does a redirect to a URL with the trailing slash. Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and update the page ranking. Scenario 4: Canonical Host Names The final SEO problem I discussed earlier are scenarios where a site works with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself. This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling: http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that has a www prefix) to instead go to the second URL. Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve. To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again. This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in “Canonical domain name” rule template. When we select it and click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a redirect rule that automatically redirects users to a primary host name URL: Above I’m entering the primary URL address I want to expose to the web: scottgu.com. When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL has another leading domain name prefix. This will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration> <system.webServer> <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Cannonical Hostname"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^scottgu\.com$" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="http://scottgu.com/{R:1}" /> </rule> <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" /> <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" /> </rule> <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" /> </rule> <rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*[^/])$" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" /> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" /> <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" /> </rule> </rules> </rewrite> </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site. Try the following two URLs on my site: http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx Notice that the first URL (which has the “www” prefix) now automatically does a redirect to the second URL which does not have the www prefix. Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and update the page ranking. 4 Simple Rules for Improved SEO The above 4 rules are pretty easy to setup and should take less than 15 minutes to configure on existing sites you already have. The beauty of using a solution like the URL Rewrite Extension is that you can take advantage of it without having to change code within your web-site – and without having to break any existing links already pointing at your site. Users who follow existing links will be automatically redirected to the new URLs you wish to publish. And search engines will start to give your site a higher search relevancy ranking – which will list your site higher in search results and drive more traffic to it. Customizing your URL Rewriting rules further is easy to-do either by editing the web.config file directly, or alternatively, just double click the URL Rewrite icon within the IIS 7.x admin tool and it will list all the active rules for your web-site or application: Clicking any of the rules above will open the rules editor back up and allow you to tweak/customize/save them further. Summary Measuring and improving SEO is something every developer building a public-facing web-site needs to think about and focus on. If you haven’t already, download and use the SEO Toolkit to analyze the SEO of your sites today. New URL Routing features in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms 4 make it much easier to build applications that have more control over the URLs that are published. Tools like the URL Rewrite Extension that I’ve talked about in this blog post make it much easier to improve the URLs that are published from sites you already have built today – without requiring you to change a lot of code. The URL Rewrite Extension provides a bunch of additional great capabilities – far beyond just SEO - as well. I’ll be covering these additional capabilities more in future blog posts. Hope this helps, Scott

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JMS Step 6 - How to Set Up an AQ JMS (Advanced Queueing JMS) for SOA Purposes

- by John-Brown.Evans

JMS Step 6 - How to Set Up an AQ JMS (Advanced Queueing JMS) for SOA Purposes .jblist{list-style-type:disc;margin:0;padding:0;padding-left:0pt;margin-left:36pt} ol{margin:0;padding:0} .c17_6{vertical-align:top;width:468pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c5_6{vertical-align:top;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:0pt 5pt 0pt 5pt} .c6_6{vertical-align:top;width:156pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c15_6{background-color:#ffffff} .c10_6{color:#1155cc;text-decoration:underline} .c1_6{text-align:center;direction:ltr} .c0_6{line-height:1.0;direction:ltr} .c16_6{color:#666666;font-size:12pt} .c18_6{color:inherit;text-decoration:inherit} .c8_6{background-color:#f3f3f3} .c2_6{direction:ltr} .c14_6{font-size:8pt} .c11_6{font-size:10pt} .c7_6{font-weight:bold} .c12_6{height:0pt} .c3_6{height:11pt} .c13_6{border-collapse:collapse} .c4_6{font-family:"Courier New"} .c9_6{font-style:italic} .title{padding-top:24pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#000000;font-size:36pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:bold;padding-bottom:6pt} .subtitle{padding-top:18pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666666;font-style:italic;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Georgia";padding-bottom:4pt} li{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial"} p{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;margin:0;font-family:"Arial"} h1{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h2{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:18pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h3{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:14pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h4{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h5{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h6{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} This post continues the series of JMS articles which demonstrate how to use JMS queues in a SOA context. The previous posts were: JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g JMS Step 2 - Using the QueueSend.java Sample Program to Send a Message to a JMS Queue JMS Step 3 - Using the QueueReceive.java Sample Program to Read a Message from a JMS Queue JMS Step 4 - How to Create an 11g BPEL Process Which Writes a Message Based on an XML Schema to a JMS Queue JMS Step 5 - How to Create an 11g BPEL Process Which Reads a Message Based on an XML Schema from a JMS Queue This example leads you through the creation of an Oracle database Advanced Queue and the related WebLogic server objects in order to use AQ JMS in connection with a SOA composite. If you have not already done so, I recommend you look at the previous posts in this series, as they include steps which this example builds upon. The following examples will demonstrate how to write and read from the queue from a SOA process. 1. Recap and Prerequisites In the previous examples, we created a JMS Queue, a Connection Factory and a Connection Pool in the WebLogic Server Console. Then we wrote and deployed BPEL composites, which enqueued and dequeued a simple XML payload. AQ JMS allows you to interoperate with database Advanced Queueing via JMS in WebLogic server and therefore take advantage of database features, while maintaining compliance with the JMS architecture. AQ JMS uses the WebLogic JMS Foreign Server framework. A full description of this functionality can be found in the following Oracle documentation Oracle® Fusion Middleware Configuring and Managing JMS for Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Release 1 (10.3.6) Part Number E13738-06 7. Interoperating with Oracle AQ JMS http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/web.1111/e13738/aq_jms.htm#CJACBCEJ For easier reference, this sample will use the same names for the objects as in the above document, except for the name of the database user, as it is possible that this user already exists in your database. We will create the following objects Database Objects Name Type AQJMSUSER Database User MyQueueTable Advanced Queue (AQ) Table UserQueue Advanced Queue WebLogic Server Objects Object Name Type JNDI Name aqjmsuserDataSource Data Source jdbc/aqjmsuserDataSource AqJmsModule JMS System Module AqJmsForeignServer JMS Foreign Server AqJmsForeignServerConnectionFactory JMS Foreign Server Connection Factory AqJmsForeignServerConnectionFactory AqJmsForeignDestination AQ JMS Foreign Destination queue/USERQUEUE eis/aqjms/UserQueue Connection Pool eis/aqjms/UserQueue 2. Create a Database User and Advanced Queue The following steps can be executed in the database client of your choice, e.g. JDeveloper or SQL Developer. The examples below use SQL*Plus. Log in to the database as a DBA user, for example SYSTEM or SYS. Create the AQJMSUSER user and grant privileges to enable the user to create AQ objects. Create Database User and Grant AQ Privileges sqlplus system/password as SYSDBA GRANT connect, resource TO aqjmsuser IDENTIFIED BY aqjmsuser; GRANT aq_user_role TO aqjmsuser; GRANT execute ON sys.dbms_aqadm TO aqjmsuser; GRANT execute ON sys.dbms_aq TO aqjmsuser; GRANT execute ON sys.dbms_aqin TO aqjmsuser; GRANT execute ON sys.dbms_aqjms TO aqjmsuser; Create the Queue Table and Advanced Queue and Start the AQ The following commands are executed as the aqjmsuser database user. Create the Queue Table connect aqjmsuser/aqjmsuser; BEGIN dbms_aqadm.create_queue_table ( queue_table = 'myQueueTable', queue_payload_type = 'sys.aq$_jms_text_message', multiple_consumers = false ); END; / Create the AQ BEGIN dbms_aqadm.create_queue ( queue_name = 'userQueue', queue_table = 'myQueueTable' ); END; / Start the AQ BEGIN dbms_aqadm.start_queue ( queue_name = 'userQueue'); END; / The above commands can be executed in a single PL/SQL block, but are shown as separate blocks in this example for ease of reference. You can verify the queue by executing the SQL command SELECT object_name, object_type FROM user_objects; which should display the following objects: OBJECT_NAME OBJECT_TYPE ------------------------------ ------------------- SYS_C0056513 INDEX SYS_LOB0000170822C00041$$ LOB SYS_LOB0000170822C00040$$ LOB SYS_LOB0000170822C00037$$ LOB AQ$_MYQUEUETABLE_T INDEX AQ$_MYQUEUETABLE_I INDEX AQ$_MYQUEUETABLE_E QUEUE AQ$_MYQUEUETABLE_F VIEW AQ$MYQUEUETABLE VIEW MYQUEUETABLE TABLE USERQUEUE QUEUE Similarly, you can view the objects in JDeveloper via a Database Connection to the AQJMSUSER. 3. Configure WebLogic Server and Add JMS Objects All these steps are executed from the WebLogic Server Administration Console. Log in as the webLogic user. Configure a WebLogic Data Source The data source is required for the database connection to the AQ created above. Navigate to domain > Services > Data Sources and press New then Generic Data Source. Use the values:Name: aqjmsuserDataSource JNDI Name: jdbc/aqjmsuserDataSource Database type: Oracle Database Driver: *Oracle’ Driver (Thin XA) for Instance connections; Versions:9.0.1 and later Connection Properties: Enter the connection information to the database containing the AQ created above and enter aqjmsuser for the User Name and Password. Press Test Configuration to verify the connection details and press Next. Target the data source to the soa server. The data source will be displayed in the list. It is a good idea to test the data source at this stage. Click on aqjmsuserDataSource, select Monitoring > Testing > soa_server1 and press Test Data Source. The result is displayed at the top of the page. Configure a JMS System Module The JMS system module is required to host the JMS foreign server for AQ resources. Navigate to Services > Messaging > JMS Modules and select New. Use the values: Name: AqJmsModule (Leave Descriptor File Name and Location in Domain empty.) Target: soa_server1 Click Finish. The other resources will be created in separate steps. The module will be displayed in the list. Configure a JMS Foreign Server A foreign server is required in order to reference a 3rd-party JMS provider, in this case the database AQ, within a local WebLogic server JNDI tree. Navigate to Services > Messaging > JMS Modules and select (click on) AqJmsModule to configure it. Under Summary of Resources, select New then Foreign Server. Name: AqJmsForeignServer Targets: The foreign server is targeted automatically to soa_server1, based on the JMS module’s target. Press Finish to create the foreign server. The foreign server resource will be listed in the Summary of Resources for the AqJmsModule, but needs additional configuration steps. Click on AqJmsForeignServer and select Configuration > General to complete the configuration: JNDI Initial Context Factory: oracle.jms.AQjmsInitialContextFactory JNDI Connection URL: <empty> JNDI Properties Credential:<empty> Confirm JNDI Properties Credential: <empty> JNDI Properties: datasource=jdbc/aqjmsuserDataSource This is an important property. It is the JNDI name of the data source created above, which points to the AQ schema in the database and must be entered as a name=value pair, as in this example, e.g. datasource=jdbc/aqjmsuserDataSource, including the “datasource=” property name. Default Targeting Enabled: Leave this value checked. Press Save to save the configuration. At this point it is a good idea to verify that the data source was written correctly to the config file. In a terminal window, navigate to $MIDDLEWARE_HOME/user_projects/domains/soa_domain/config/jms and open the file aqjmsmodule-jms.xml . The foreign server configuration should contain the datasource name-value pair, as follows: <foreign-server name="AqJmsForeignServer"> <default-targeting-enabled>true</default-targeting-enabled> <initial-context-factory>oracle.jms.AQjmsInitialContextFactory</initial-context-factory> <jndi-property> <key> datasource </key> <value> jdbc/aqjmsuserDataSource </value> </jndi-property> </foreign-server> </weblogic-jms> Configure a JMS Foreign Server Connection Factory When creating the foreign server connection factory, you enter local and remote JNDI names. The name of the connection factory itself and the local JNDI name are arbitrary, but the remote JNDI name must match a specific format, depending on the type of queue or topic to be accessed in the database. This is very important and if the incorrect value is used, the connection to the queue will not be established and the error messages you get will not immediately reflect the cause of the error. The formats required (Remote JNDI names for AQ JMS Connection Factories) are described in the section Configure AQ Destinations of the Oracle® Fusion Middleware Configuring and Managing JMS for Oracle WebLogic Server document mentioned earlier. In this example, the remote JNDI name used is XAQueueConnectionFactory because it matches the AQ and data source created earlier, i.e. thin with AQ. Navigate to JMS Modules > AqJmsModule > AqJmsForeignServer > Connection Factories then New.Name: AqJmsForeignServerConnectionFactory Local JNDI Name: AqJmsForeignServerConnectionFactory Note: this local JNDI name is the JNDI name which your client application, e.g. a later BPEL process, will use to access this connection factory. Remote JNDI Name: XAQueueConnectionFactory Press OK to save the configuration. Configure an AQ JMS Foreign Server Destination A foreign server destination maps the JNDI name on the foreign JNDI provider to the respective local JNDI name, allowing the foreign JNDI name to be accessed via the local server. As with the foreign server connection factory, the local JNDI name is arbitrary (but must be unique), but the remote JNDI name must conform to a specific format defined in the section Configure AQ Destinations of the Oracle® Fusion Middleware Configuring and Managing JMS for Oracle WebLogic Server document mentioned earlier. In our example, the remote JNDI name is Queues/USERQUEUE , because it references a queue (as opposed to a topic) with the name USERQUEUE. We will name the local JNDI name queue/USERQUEUE, which is a little confusing (note the missing “s” in “queue), but conforms better to the JNDI nomenclature in our SOA server and also allows us to differentiate between the local and remote names for demonstration purposes. Navigate to JMS Modules > AqJmsModule > AqJmsForeignServer > Destinations and select New.Name: AqJmsForeignDestination Local JNDI Name: queue/USERQUEUE Remote JNDI Name:Queues/USERQUEUE After saving the foreign destination configuration, this completes the JMS part of the configuration. We still need to configure the JMS adapter in order to be able to access the queue from a BPEL processt. 4. Create a JMS Adapter Connection Pool in Weblogic Server Create the Connection Pool Access to the AQ JMS queue from a BPEL or other SOA process in our example is done via a JMS adapter. To enable this, the JmsAdapter in WebLogic server needs to be configured to have a connection pool which points to the local connection factory JNDI name which was created earlier. Navigate to Deployments > Next and select (click on) the JmsAdapter. Select Configuration > Outbound Connection Pools and New. Check the radio button for oracle.tip.adapter.jms.IJmsConnectionFactory and press Next. JNDI Name: eis/aqjms/UserQueue Press Finish Expand oracle.tip.adapter.jms.IJmsConnectionFactory and click on eis/aqjms/UserQueue to configure it. The ConnectionFactoryLocation must point to the foreign server’s local connection factory name created earlier. In our example, this is AqJmsForeignServerConnectionFactory . As a reminder, this connection factory is located under JMS Modules > AqJmsModule > AqJmsForeignServer > Connection Factories and the value needed here is under Local JNDI Name. Enter AqJmsForeignServerConnectionFactory into the Property Value field for ConnectionFactoryLocation. You must then press Return/Enter then Save for the value to be accepted. If your WebLogic server is running in Development mode, you should see the message that the changes have been activated and the deployment plan successfully updated. If not, then you will manually need to activate the changes in the WebLogic server console.Although the changes have been activated, the JmsAdapter needs to be redeployed in order for the changes to become effective. This should be confirmed by the message Remember to update your deployment to reflect the new plan when you are finished with your changes. Redeploy the JmsAdapter Navigate back to the Deployments screen, either by selecting it in the left-hand navigation tree or by selecting the “Summary of Deployments” link in the breadcrumbs list at the top of the screen. Then select the checkbox next to JmsAdapter and press the Update button. On the Update Application Assistant page, select “Redeploy this application using the following deployment files” and press Finish. After a few seconds you should get the message that the selected deployments were updated. The JMS adapter configuration is complete and it can now be used to access the AQ JMS queue. You can verify that the JNDI name was created correctly, by navigating to Environment > Servers > soa_server1 and View JNDI Tree. Then scroll down in the JNDI Tree Structure to eis and select aqjms. This concludes the sample. In the following post, I will show you how to create a BPEL process which sends a message to this advanced queue via JMS. Best regards John-Brown Evans Oracle Technology Proactive Support Delivery

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

- by ScottGu

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

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Building The Right SharePoint Team For Your Organization

- by Mark Rackley

I see the question posted fairly often asking what kind SharePoint team an organization should have. How many people do I need? What roles do I need to fill? What is best for my organization? Well, just like every other answer in SharePoint, the correct answer is “it depends”. Do you ever get sick of hearing that??? I know I do… So, let me give you my thoughts and opinions based upon my experience and what I’ve seen and let you come to your own conclusions. What are the possible SharePoint roles? I guess the first thing you need to understand are the different roles that exist in SharePoint (and their are LOTS). Remember, SharePoint is a massive beast and you will NOT find one person who can do it all. If you are hoping to find that person you will be sorely disappointed. For the most part this is true in SharePoint 2007 and 2010. However, generally things are improved in 2010 and easier for junior individuals to grasp. SharePoint Administrator The absolutely positively only role that you should not be without no matter the size of your organization or SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint administrator. These guys are essential to keeping things running and figuring out what’s wrong when things aren’t running well. These unsung heroes do more before 10 am than I do all day. The bad thing is, when these guys are awesome, you don’t even know they exist because everything is running so smoothly. You should definitely invest some time and money here to make sure you have some competent if not rockstar help. You need an admin who truly loves SharePoint and will go that extra mile when necessary. Let me give you a real world example of what I’m talking about: We have a rockstar admin… and I’m sure she’s sick of my throwing her name around so she’ll just have to live with remaining anonymous in this post… sorry Lori… Anyway! A couple of weeks ago our Server teams came to us and said Hi Lori, I’m finalizing the MOSS servers and doing updates that require a restart; can I restart them? Seems like a harmless request from your server team does it not? Sure, go ahead and apply the patches and reboot during our scheduled maintenance window. No problem? right? Sounded fair to me… but no…. not to our fearless SharePoint admin… I need a complete list of patches that will be applied. There is an update that is out there that will break SharePoint… KB973917 is the patch that has been shown to cause issues. What? You mean Microsoft released a patch that would actually adversely affect SharePoint? If we did NOT have a rockstar admin, our server team would have applied these patches and then when some problem occurred in SharePoint we’d have to go through the fun task of tracking down exactly what caused the issue and resolve it. How much time would that have taken? If you have a junior SharePoint admin or an admin who’s not out there staying on top of what’s going on you could have spent days tracking down something so simple as applying a patch you should not have applied. I will even go as far to say the only SharePoint rockstar you NEED in your organization is a SharePoint admin. You can always outsource really complicated development projects or bring in a rockstar contractor every now and then to make sure you aren’t way off track in other areas. For your day-to-day sanity and to keep SharePoint running smoothly, you need an awesome Admin. Some rockstars in this category are: Ben Curry, Mike Watson, Joel Oleson, Todd Klindt, Shane Young, John Ferringer, Sean McDonough, and of course Lori Gowin. SharePoint Developer Another essential role for your SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint developer. Things do start to get a little hazy here and there are many flavors of “developers”. Are you writing custom code? using SharePoint Designer? What about SharePoint Branding? Are all of these considered developers? I would say yes. Are they interchangeable? I’d say no. Development in SharePoint is such a large beast in itself. I would say that it’s not so large that you can’t know it all well, but it is so large that there are many people who specialize in one particular category. If you are lucky enough to have someone on staff who knows it all well, you better make sure they are well taken care of because those guys are ready-made to move over to a consulting role and charge you 3 times what you are probably paying them. :) Some of the all-around rockstars are Eric Shupps, Andrew Connell (go Razorbacks), Rob Foster, Paul Schaeflein, and Todd Bleeker SharePoint Power User/No-Code Solutions Developer These SharePoint Swiss Army Knives are essential for quick wins in your organization. These people can twist the out-of-the-box functionality to make it do things you would not even imagine. Give these guys SharePoint Designer, jQuery, InfoPath, and a little time and they will create views, dashboards, and KPI’s that will blow your mind away and give your execs the “wow” they are looking for. Not only can they deliver that wow factor, but they can mashup, merge, and really help make your SharePoint application usable and deliver an overall better user experience. Before you hand off a project to your SharePoint Custom Code developer, let one of these rockstars look at it and show you what they can do (in probably less time). I would say the second most important role you can fill in your organization is one of these guys. Rockstars in this category are Christina Wheeler, Laura Rogers, Jennifer Mason, and Mark Miller SharePoint Developer – Custom Code If you want to really integrate SharePoint into your legacy systems, or really twist it and make it bend to your will, you are going to have to open up Visual Studio and write some custom code. Remember, SharePoint is essentially just a big, huge, ginormous .NET application, so you CAN write code to make it do ANYTHING, but do you really want to spend the time and effort to do so? At some point with every other form of SharePoint development you are going to run into SOME limitation (SPD Workflows is the big one that comes to mind). If you truly want to knock down all the walls then custom development is the way to go. PLEASE keep in mind when you are looking for a custom code developer that a .NET developer does NOT equal a SharePoint developer. Just SOME of the things these guys write are: Custom Workflows Custom Web Parts Web Service functionality Import data from legacy systems Export data to legacy systems Custom Actions Event Receivers Service Applications (2010) These guys are also the ones generally responsible for packaging everything up into solution packages (you are doing that, right?). Rockstars in this category are Phil Wicklund, Christina Wheeler, Geoff Varosky, and Brian Jackett. SharePoint Branding “But it LOOKS like SharePoint!” Somebody call the WAAAAAAAAAAAAHMbulance… Themes, Master Pages, Page Layouts, Zones, and over 2000 styles in CSS.. these guys not only have to be comfortable with all of SharePoint’s quirks and pain points when branding, but they have to know it TWICE for publishing and non-publishing sites. Not only that, but these guys really need to have an eye for graphic design and be able to translate the ramblings of business into something visually stunning. They also have to be comfortable with XSLT, XML, and be able to hand off what they do to your custom developers for them to package as solutions (which you are doing, right?). These rockstars include Heater Waterman, Cathy Dew, and Marcy Kellar SharePoint Architect SharePoint Architects are generally SharePoint Admins or Developers who have moved into more of a BA role? Is that fair to say? These guys really have a grasp and understanding for what SharePoint IS and what it can do. These guys help you structure your farms to meet your needs and help you design your applications the correct way. It’s always a good idea to bring in a rockstar SharePoint Architect to do a sanity check and make sure you aren’t doing anything stupid. Most organizations probably do not have a rockstar architect on staff. These guys are generally brought in at the deployment of a farm, upgrade of a farm, or for large development projects. I personally also find architects very useful for sitting down with the business to translate their needs into what SharePoint can do. A good architect will be able to pick out what can be done out-of-the-box and what has to be custom built and hand those requirements to the development Staff. Architects can generally fill in as an admin or a developer when needed. Some rockstar architects are Rick Taylor, Dan Usher, Bill English, Spence Harbar, Neil Hodgkins, Eric Harlan, and Bjørn Furuknap. Other Roles / Specialties On top of all these other roles you also get these people who specialize in things like Reporting, BDC (BCS in 2010), Search, Performance, Security, Project Management, etc... etc... etc... Again, most organizations will not have one of these gurus on staff, they’ll just pay out the nose for them when they need them. :) SharePoint End User Everyone else in your organization that touches SharePoint falls into this category. What they actually DO in SharePoint is determined by your governance and what permissions you give these guys. Hopefully you have these guys on a fairly short leash and are NOT giving them access to tools like SharePoint Designer. Sadly end users are the ones who truly make your deployment a success by using it, but are also your biggest enemy in breaking it. :) We love you guys… really!!! Okay, all that’s fine and dandy, but what should MY SharePoint team look like? It depends! Okay… Are you just doing out of the box team sites with no custom development? Then you are probably fine with a great Admin team and a great No-Code Solution Development team. How many people do you need? Depends on how busy you can keep them. Sorry, can’t answer the question about numbers without knowing your specific needs. I can just tell you who you MIGHT need and what they will do for you. I’ll leave you with what my ideal SharePoint Team would look like for a particular scenario: Farm / Organization Structure Dev, QA, and 2 Production Farms. 5000 – 10000 Users Custom Development and Integration with legacy systems Team Sites, My Sites, Intranet, Document libraries and overall company collaboration Team Rockstar SharePoint Administrator 2-3 junior SharePoint Administrators SharePoint Architect / Lead Developer 2 Power User / No-Code Solution Developers 2-3 Custom Code developers Branding expert With a team of that size and skill set, they should be able to keep a substantial SharePoint deployment running smoothly and meet your business needs. This does NOT mean that you would not need to bring in contract help from time to time when you need an uber specialist in one area. Also, this team assumes there will be ongoing development for the life of your SharePoint farm. If you are just going to be doing sporadic custom development, it might make sense to partner with an awesome firm that specializes in that sort of work (I can give you the name of a couple if you are interested). Again though, the size of your team depends on the number of requests you are receiving and how much active deployment you are doing. So, don’t bring in a team that looks like this and then yell at me because they are sitting around with nothing to do or are so overwhelmed that nothing is getting done. I do URGE you to take the proper time to asses your needs and determine what team is BEST for your organization. Also, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not skimp on the talent. When it comes to SharePoint you really do get what you pay for when it comes to employees, contractors, and software. SharePoint can become absolutely critical to your business and because you skimped on hiring a developer he created a web part that brings down the farm because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or you hire an admin who thinks it’s fine to stick everything in the same Content Database and then can’t figure out why people are complaining. SharePoint can be an enormous blessing to an organization or it’s biggest curse. Spend the time and money to do it right, or be prepared to spending even more time and money later to fix it.

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Continuous Integration for SQL Server Part II – Integration Testing

- by Ben Rees

My previous post, on setting up Continuous Integration for SQL Server databases using GitHub, Bamboo and Red Gate’s tools, covered the first two parts of a simple Database Continuous Delivery process: Putting your database in to a source control system, and, Running a continuous integration process, each time changes are checked in. However there is, of course, a lot more to to Continuous Delivery than that. Specifically, in addition to the above: Putting some actual integration tests in to the CI process (otherwise, they don’t really do much, do they!?), Deploying the database changes with a managed, automated approach, Monitoring what you’ve just put live, to make sure you haven’t broken anything. This post will detail how to set up a very simple pipeline for implementing the first of these (continuous integration testing). NB: A lot of the setup in this post is built on top of the configuration from before, so it might be difficult to implement this post without running through part I first. There’ll then be a third post on automated database deployment followed by a final post dealing with the last item – monitoring changes on the live system. In the previous post, I used a mixture of Red Gate products and other 3rd party software – GitHub and Atlassian Bamboo specifically. This was partly because I believe most people work in an heterogeneous environment, using software from different vendors to suit their purposes and I wanted to show how this could work for this process. For example, you could easily substitute Atlassian’s BitBucket or Stash for GitHub, depending on your needs, or use an alternative CI server such as TeamCity, TFS or Jenkins. However, in this, post, I’ll be mostly using Red Gate products only (other than tSQLt). I would do this, firstly because I work for Red Gate. However, I also think that in the area of Database Delivery processes, nobody else has the offerings to implement this process fully – so I didn’t have any choice! Background on Continuous Delivery For me, a great source of information on what makes a proper Continuous Delivery process is the Jez Humble and David Farley classic: Continuous Delivery – Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation This book is not of course, primarily about databases, and the process I outline here and in the previous article is a gross simplification of what Jez and David describe (not least because it’s that much harder for databases!). However, a lot of the principles that they describe can be equally applied to database development and, I would argue, should be. As I say however, what I describe here is a very simple version of what would be required for a full production process. A couple of useful resources on handling some of these complexities can be found in the following two references: Refactoring Databases – Evolutionary Database Design, by Scott J Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage Versioning Databases – Branching and Merging, by Scott Allen In particular, I don’t deal at all with the issues of multiple branches and merging of those branches, an issue made particularly acute by the use of GitHub. The other point worth making is that, in the words of Martin Fowler: Continuous Delivery is about keeping your application in a state where it is always able to deploy into production. I.e. we are not talking about continuously delivery updates to the production database every time someone checks in an amendment to a stored procedure. That is possible (and what Martin calls Continuous Deployment). However, again, that’s more than I describe in this article. And I doubt I need to remind DBAs or Developers to Proceed with Caution! Integration Testing Back to something practical. The next stage, building on our set up from the previous article, is to add in some integration tests to the process. As I say, the CI process, though interesting, isn’t enormously useful without some sort of test process running. For this we’ll use the tSQLt framework, an open source framework designed specifically for running SQL Server tests. tSQLt is part of Red Gate’s SQL Test found on http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/ or can be downloaded separately from www.tsqlt.org - though I’ll provide a step-by-step guide below for setting this up. Getting tSQLt set up via SQL Test Click on the link http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/ and click on the blue Download button to download the Red Gate SQL Test product, if not already installed. Follow the install process for SQL Test to install the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) plugin on to your machine, if not already installed. Open SSMS. You should now see SQL Test under the Tools menu: Clicking this link will give you the basic SQL Test dialogue: As yet, though we’ve installed the SQL Test product we haven’t yet installed the tSQLt test framework on to any particular database. To do this, we need to add our RedGateApp database using this dialogue, by clicking on the + Add Database to SQL Test… link, selecting the RedGateApp database and clicking the Add Database link: In the next screen, SQL Test describes what will be installed on the database for the tSQLt framework. Also in this dialogue, uncheck the “Add SQL Cop tests” option (shown below). SQL Cop is a great set of pre-defined tests that work within the tSQLt framework to check the general health of your SQL Server database. However, we won’t be using them in this particular simple example: Once you’ve clicked on the OK button, the changes described in the dialogue will be made to your database. Some of these are shown in the left-hand-side below: We’ve now installed the framework. However, we haven’t actually created any tests, so this will be the next step. But, before we proceed, we’ve made an update to our database so should, again check this in to source control, adding comments as required: Also worth a quick check that your build still runs with the new additions!: (And a quick check of the RedGateAppCI database shows that the changes have been made). Creating and Testing a Unit Test There are, of course, a lot of very interesting unit tests that you could and should set up for a database. The great thing about the tSQLt framework is that you can write these in SQL. The example I’m going to use here is pretty Mickey Mouse – our database table is going to include some email addresses as reference data and I want to check whether these are all in a correct email format. Nothing clever but it illustrates the process and hopefully shows the method by which more interesting tests could be set up. Adding Reference Data to our Database To start, I want to add some reference data to my database, and have this source controlled (as well as the schema). First of all I need to add some data in to my solitary table – this can be done a number of ways, but I’ll do this in SSMS for simplicity: I then add some reference data to my table: Currently this reference data just exists in the database. For proper integration testing, this needs to form part of the source-controlled version of the database – and so needs to be added to the Git repository. This can be done via SQL Source Control, though first a Primary Key needs to be added to the table. Right click the table, select Design, then right-click on the first “id” row. Then click on “Set Primary Key”: NB: once this change is made, click Save to save the change to the table. Then, to source control this reference data, right click on the table (dbo.Email) and selecting the following option: In the next screen, link the data in the Email table, by selecting it from the list and clicking “save and close”: We should at this point re-commit the changes (both the addition of the Primary Key, and the data) to the Git repo. NB: From here on, I won’t show screenshots for the GitHub side of things – it’s the same each time: whenever a change is made in SQL Source Control and committed to your local folder, you then need to sync this in the GitHub Windows client (as this is where the build server, Bamboo is taking it from). An interesting point to note here, when these changes are committed in SQL Source Control (right-click database and select “Commit Changes to Source Control..”): The display gives a warning about possibly needing a migration script for the “Add Primary Key” step of the changes. This isn’t actually necessary in this case, but this mechanism would allow you to create override scripts to replace the default change scripts created by the SQL Compare engine (which runs underneath SQL Source Control). Ignoring this message (!), we add a comment and commit the changes to Git. I then sync these, run a build (or the build gets run automatically), and check that the data is being deployed over to the target RedGateAppCI database: Creating and Running the Test As I mention, the test I’m going to use here is a very simple one - are the email addresses in my reference table valid? This isn’t of course, a full test of email validation (I expect the email addresses I’ve chosen here aren’t really the those of the Fab Four) – but just a very basic check of format used. I’ve taken the relevant SQL from this Stack Overflow article. In SSMS select “SQL Test” from the Tools menu, then click on + New Test: In the next screen, give your new test a name, and also enter a name in the Test Class box (test classes are schemas that help you keep things organised). Also check that the database in which the test is going to be created is correct – RedGateApp in this example: Click “Create Test”. After closing a couple of subsequent dialogues, you’ll see a dummy script for the test, that needs filling in: We now need to define the SQL for our test. As mentioned before, tSQLt allows you to write your unit tests in T-SQL, and the code I’m going to use here is as below. This needs to be copied and pasted in to the query window, to replace the default given by tSQLt: – Basic email check test ALTER PROCEDURE [MyChecks].[test Check Email Addresses] AS BEGIN SET NOCOUNT ON Declare @Output VarChar(max) Set @Output = ” SELECT @Output = @Output + Email +Char(13) + Char(10) FROM dbo.Email WHERE email NOT LIKE ‘%_@__%.__%’ If @Output > ” Begin Set @Output = Char(13) + Char(10) + @Output EXEC tSQLt.Fail@Output End END; Once this script is entered, hit execute to add the Stored Procedure to the database. Before committing the test to source control, it’s worth just checking that it works! For a positive test, click on “SQL Test” from the Tools menu, then click Run Tests. You should see output like the following: - a green tick to indicate success! But of course, what we also need to do is test that this is actually doing something by showing a failed test. Edit one of the email addresses in your table to an incorrect format: Now, re-run the same SQL Test as before and you’ll see the following: Great – we now know that our test is really doing something! You’ll also see a useful error message at the bottom of SSMS: (leave the email address as invalid for now, for the next steps). The next stage is to check this new test in to source control again, by right-clicking on the database and checking in the changes with a commit message (and not forgetting to sync in the GitHub client): Checking that the Tests are Running as Integration Tests After the changes above are made, and after a build has run on Bamboo (manual or automatic), looking at the Stored Procedures for the RedGateAppCI, the SPROC for the new test has been moved over to the database. However this is not exactly what we were after. We didn’t want to just copy objects from one database to another, but actually run the tests as part of the build/integration test process. I.e. we’re continuously checking any changes we make (in this case, to the reference data emails), to ensure we’re not breaking a test that we’ve set up. The behaviour we want to see is that, if we check in static data that is incorrect (as we did in step 9 above) and we have the tSQLt test set up, then our build in Bamboo should fail. However, re-running the build shows the following: - sadly, a successful build! To make sure the tSQLt tests are run as part of the integration test, we need to amend a switch in the Red Gate CI config file. First, navigate to file sqlCI.targets in your working folder: Edit this document, make the following change, save the document, then commit and sync this change in the GitHub client:    <enableTsqlt>true</enableTsqlt> Now, if we re-run the build in Bamboo (NB: I’ve moved to a new server here, hence different address and build number): - superb, a broken build!! The error message isn’t great here, so to get more detailed info, click on the full build log link on this page (below the fold). The interesting part of the log shown is towards the bottom. Pulling out this part: 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 Build FAILED. 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 "C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj" (default target) (1) -> 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 (sqlCI target) -> 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: RedGate.Deploy.SqlServerDbPackage.Shared.Exceptions.InvalidSqlException: Test Case Summary: 1 test case(s) executed, 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 errored. [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: [MyChecks].[test Check Email Addresses] failed: [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: ringo.starr@beatles [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: +----------------------+ [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: |Test Execution Summary| [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] As a final check, we should make sure that, if we now fix this error, the build succeeds. So in SSMS, I’m going to correct the invalid email address, then check this change in to SQL Source Control (with a comment), commit to GitHub, and re-run the build: This should have fixed the build: It worked! Summary This has been a very quick run through the implementation of CI for databases, including tSQLt tests to test whether your database updates are working. The next post in this series will focus on automated deployment – we’ve tested our database changes, how can we now deploy these to target sites?

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Windows Phone 7: Building a simple dictionary web client

- by TechTwaddle

Like I mentioned in this post a while back, I came across a dictionary web service called Aonaware that serves up word definitions from various dictionaries and is really easy to use. The services page on their website, http://services.aonaware.com/DictService/DictService.asmx, lists all the operations that are supported by the dictionary service. Here they are, Word Dictionary Web Service The following operations are supported. For a formal definition, please review the Service Description. Define Define given word, returning definitions from all dictionaries DefineInDict Define given word, returning definitions from specified dictionary DictionaryInfo Show information about the specified dictionary DictionaryList Returns a list of available dictionaries DictionaryListExtended Returns a list of advanced dictionaries (e.g. translating dictionaries) Match Look for matching words in all dictionaries using the given strategy MatchInDict Look for matching words in the specified dictionary using the given strategy ServerInfo Show remote server information StrategyList Return list of all available strategies on the server Follow the links above to get more information on each API. In this post we will be building a simple windows phone 7 client which uses this service to get word definitions for words entered by the user. The application will also allow the user to select a dictionary from all the available ones and look up the word definition in that dictionary. So of all the apis above we will be using only two, DictionaryList() to get a list of all supported dictionaries and DefineInDict() to get the word definition from a particular dictionary. Before we get started, a note to you all; I would have liked to implement this application using concepts from data binding, item templates, data templates etc. I have a basic understanding of what they are but, being a beginner, I am not very comfortable with those topics yet so I didn’t use them. I thought I’ll get this version out of the way and maybe in the next version I could give those a try. A somewhat scary mock-up of the what the final application will look like, Select Dictionary is a list picker control from the silverlight toolkit (you need to download and install the toolkit if you haven’t already). Below it is a textbox where the user can enter words to look up and a button beside it to fetch the word definition when clicked. Finally we have a textblock which occupies the remaining area and displays the word definition from the selected dictionary. Create a silverlight application for windows phone 7, AonawareDictionaryClient, and add references to the silverlight toolkit and the web service. From the solution explorer right on References and select Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit from under the .NET tab, Next, add a reference to the web service. Again right click on References and this time select Add Service Reference In the resulting dialog paste the service url in the Address field and press go, (url –> http://services.aonaware.com/DictService/DictService.asmx) once the service is discovered, provide a name for the NameSpace, in this case I’ve called it AonawareDictionaryService. Press OK. You can now use the classes and functions that are generated in the AonawareDictionaryClient.AonawareDictionaryService namespace. Let’s get the UI done now. In MainPage.xaml add a namespace declaration to use the toolkit controls, xmlns:toolkit="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit" the content of LayoutRoot is changed as follows, (sorry, no syntax highlighting in this post) <StackPanel x:Name="TitlePanel" Grid.Row="0" Margin="12,5,0,5"> <TextBlock x:Name="ApplicationTitle" Text="AONAWARE DICTIONARY CLIENT" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}"/>  </StackPanel>  <Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition Height="*"/> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <toolkit:ListPicker Grid.Column="1" x:Name="listPickerDictionaryList" Header="Select Dictionary :"> </toolkit:ListPicker> <Grid Grid.Row="1" Margin="0,5,0,0"> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBox x:Name="txtboxInputWord" Grid.Column="0" GotFocus="OnTextboxInputWordGotFocus" /> <Button x:Name="btnGo" Grid.Column="1" Click="OnButtonGoClick" > <Button.Content> <Image Source="/images/button-go.png"/> </Button.Content> </Button> </Grid> <ScrollViewer Grid.Row="2" x:Name="scrollViewer"> <TextBlock Margin="12,5,12,5" x:Name="txtBlockWordMeaning" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" TextWrapping="Wrap" FontSize="26" /> </ScrollViewer> </Grid> I have commented out the PageTitle as it occupies too much valuable space, and the ContentPanel is changed to contain three rows. First row contains the list picker control, second row contains the textbox and the button, and the third row contains a textblock within a scroll viewer. The designer will now be showing the final ui, Now go to MainPage.xaml.cs, and add the following namespace declarations, using Microsoft.Phone.Controls; using AonawareDictionaryClient.AonawareDictionaryService; using System.IO.IsolatedStorage; A class called DictServiceSoapClient would have been created for you in the background when you added a reference to the web service. This class functions as a wrapper to the services exported by the web service. All the web service functions that we saw at the start can be access through this class, or more precisely through an object of this class. Create a data member of type DictServiceSoapClient in the Mainpage class, and a function which initializes it, DictServiceSoapClient DictSvcClient = null; private DictServiceSoapClient GetDictServiceSoapClient() { if (null == DictSvcClient) { DictSvcClient = new DictServiceSoapClient(); } return DictSvcClient; } We have two major tasks remaining. First, when the application loads we need to populate the list picker with all the supported dictionaries and second, when the user enters a word and clicks on the arrow button we need to fetch the word’s meaning. Populating the List Picker In the OnNavigatingTo event of the MainPage, we call the DictionaryList() api. This can also be done in the OnLoading event handler of the MainPage; not sure if one has an advantage over the other. Here’s the code for OnNavigatedTo, protected override void OnNavigatedTo(System.Windows.Navigation.NavigationEventArgs e) { DictServiceSoapClient client = GetDictServiceSoapClient(); client.DictionaryListCompleted += new EventHandler<DictionaryListCompletedEventArgs>(OnGetDictionaryListCompleted); client.DictionaryListAsync(); base.OnNavigatedTo(e); } Windows Phone 7 supports only async calls to web services. When we added a reference to the dictionary service, asynchronous versions of all the functions were generated automatically. So in the above function we register a handler to the DictionaryListCompleted event which will occur when the call to DictionaryList() gets a response from the server. Then we call the DictionaryListAsynch() function which is the async version of the DictionaryList() api. The result of this api will be sent to the handler OnGetDictionaryListCompleted(), void OnGetDictionaryListCompleted(object sender, DictionaryListCompletedEventArgs e) { IsolatedStorageSettings settings = IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings; Dictionary[] listOfDictionaries; if (e.Error == null) { listOfDictionaries = e.Result; PopulateListPicker(listOfDictionaries, settings); } else if (settings.Contains("SavedDictionaryList")) { listOfDictionaries = settings["SavedDictionaryList"] as Dictionary[]; PopulateListPicker(listOfDictionaries, settings); } else { MessageBoxResult res = MessageBox.Show("An error occured while retrieving dictionary list, do you want to try again?", "Error", MessageBoxButton.OKCancel); if (MessageBoxResult.OK == res) { GetDictServiceSoapClient().DictionaryListAsync(); } } settings.Save(); } I have used IsolatedStorageSettings to store a few things; the entire dictionary list and the dictionary that is selected when the user exits the application, so that the next time when the user starts the application the current dictionary is set to the last selected value. First we check if the api returned any error, if the error object is null e.Result will contain the list (actually array) of Dictionary type objects. If there was an error, we check the isolated storage settings to see if there is a dictionary list stored from a previous instance of the application and if so, we populate the list picker based on this saved list. Note that in this case there are chances that the dictionary list might be out of date if there have been changes on the server. Finally, if none of these cases are true, we display an error message to the user and try to fetch the list again. PopulateListPicker() is passed the array of Dictionary objects and the settings object as well, void PopulateListPicker(Dictionary[] listOfDictionaries, IsolatedStorageSettings settings) { listPickerDictionaryList.Items.Clear(); foreach (Dictionary dictionary in listOfDictionaries) { listPickerDictionaryList.Items.Add(dictionary.Name); } settings["SavedDictionaryList"] = listOfDictionaries; string savedDictionaryName; if (settings.Contains("SavedDictionary")) { savedDictionaryName = settings["SavedDictionary"] as string; } else { savedDictionaryName = "WordNet (r) 2.0"; //default dictionary, wordnet } foreach (string dictName in listPickerDictionaryList.Items) { if (dictName == savedDictionaryName) { listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem = dictName; break; } } settings["SavedDictionary"] = listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem as string; } We first clear all the items from the list picker, add the dictionary names from the array and then create a key in the settings called SavedDictionaryList and store the dictionary list in it. We then check if there is saved dictionary available from a previous instance, if there is, we set it as the selected item in the list picker. And if not, we set “WordNet ® 2.0” as the default dictionary. Before returning, we save the selected dictionary in the “SavedDictionary” key of the isolated storage settings. Fetching word definitions Getting this part done is very similar to the above code. We get the input word from the textbox, call into DefineInDictAsync() to fetch the definition and when DefineInDictAsync completes, we get the result and display it in the textblock. Here is the handler for the button click, private void OnButtonGoClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { txtBlockWordMeaning.Text = "Please wait.."; IsolatedStorageSettings settings = IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings; if (txtboxInputWord.Text.Trim().Length <= 0) { MessageBox.Show("Please enter a word in the textbox and press 'Go'"); } else { Dictionary[] listOfDictionaries = settings["SavedDictionaryList"] as Dictionary[]; string selectedDictionary = listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem.ToString(); string dictId = "wn"; //default dictionary is wordnet (wn is the dict id) foreach (Dictionary dict in listOfDictionaries) { if (dict.Name == selectedDictionary) { dictId = dict.Id; break; } } DictServiceSoapClient client = GetDictServiceSoapClient(); client.DefineInDictCompleted += new EventHandler<DefineInDictCompletedEventArgs>(OnDefineInDictCompleted); client.DefineInDictAsync(dictId, txtboxInputWord.Text.Trim()); } } We validate the input and then select the dictionary id based on the currently selected dictionary. We need the dictionary id because the api DefineInDict() expects the dictionary identifier and not the dictionary name. We could very well have stored the dictionary id in isolated storage settings too. Again, same as before, we register a event handler for the DefineInDictCompleted event and call the DefineInDictAsync() method passing in the dictionary id and the input word. void OnDefineInDictCompleted(object sender, DefineInDictCompletedEventArgs e) { WordDefinition wd = e.Result; scrollViewer.ScrollToVerticalOffset(0.0f); if (wd.Definitions.Length == 0) { txtBlockWordMeaning.Text = String.Format("No definitions were found for '{0}' in '{1}'", txtboxInputWord.Text.Trim(), listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem.ToString().Trim()); } else { foreach (Definition def in wd.Definitions) { string str = def.WordDefinition; str = str.Replace(" ", " "); //some formatting txtBlockWordMeaning.Text = str; } } } When the api completes, e.Result will contain a WordDefnition object. This class is also generated in the background while adding the service reference. We check the word definitions within this class to see if any results were returned, if not, we display a message to the user in the textblock. If a definition was found the text on the textblock is set to display the definition of the word. Adding final touches, we now need to save the current dictionary when the application exits. A small but useful thing is selecting the entire word in the input textbox when the user selects it. This makes sure that if the user has looked up a definition for a really long word, he doesn’t have to press ‘clear’ too many times to enter the next word, protected override void OnNavigatingFrom(System.Windows.Navigation.NavigatingCancelEventArgs e) { IsolatedStorageSettings settings = IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings; settings["SavedDictionary"] = listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem as string; settings.Save(); base.OnNavigatingFrom(e); } private void OnTextboxInputWordGotFocus(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { TextBox txtbox = sender as TextBox; if (txtbox.Text.Trim().Length > 0) { txtbox.SelectionStart = 0; txtbox.SelectionLength = txtbox.Text.Length; } } OnNavigatingFrom() is called whenever you navigate away from the MainPage, since our application contains only one page that would mean that it is exiting. I leave you with a short video of the application in action, but before that if you have any suggestions on how to make the code better and improve it please do leave a comment. Until next time…

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Prepping a conference

- by Laurent Bugnion

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

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Developing custom MBeans to manage J2EE Applications (Part III)

- by philippe Le Mouel

This is the third and final part in a series of blogs, that demonstrate how to add management capability to your own application using JMX MBeans. In Part I we saw: How to implement a custom MBean to manage configuration associated with an application. How to package the resulting code and configuration as part of the application's ear file. How to register MBeans upon application startup, and unregistered them upon application stop (or undeployment). How to use generic JMX clients such as JConsole to browse and edit our application's MBean. In Part II we saw: How to add localized descriptions to our MBean, MBean attributes, MBean operations and MBean operation parameters. How to specify meaningful name to our MBean operation parameters. We also touched on future enhancements that will simplify how we can implement localized MBeans. In this third and last part, we will re-write our MBean to simplify how we added localized descriptions. To do so we will take advantage of the functionality we already described in part II and that is now part of WebLogic 10.3.3.0. We will show how to take advantage of WebLogic's localization support to localize our MBeans based on the client's Locale independently of the server's Locale. Each client will see MBean descriptions localized based on his/her own Locale. We will show how to achieve this using JConsole, and also using a sample programmatic JMX Java client. The complete code sample and associated build files for part III are available as a zip file. The code has been tested against WebLogic Server 10.3.3.0 and JDK6. To build and deploy our sample application, please follow the instruction provided in Part I, as they also apply to part III's code and associated zip file. Providing custom descriptions take II In part II we localized our MBean descriptions by extending the StandardMBean class and overriding its many getDescription methods. WebLogic 10.3.3.0 similarly to JDK 7 can automatically localize MBean descriptions as long as those are specified according to the following conventions: Descriptions resource bundle keys are named according to: MBean description: <MBeanInterfaceClass>.mbean MBean attribute description: <MBeanInterfaceClass>.attribute.<AttributeName> MBean operation description: <MBeanInterfaceClass>.operation.<OperationName> MBean operation parameter description: <MBeanInterfaceClass>.operation.<OperationName>.<ParameterName> MBean constructor description: <MBeanInterfaceClass>.constructor.<ConstructorName> MBean constructor parameter description: <MBeanInterfaceClass>.constructor.<ConstructorName>.<ParameterName> We also purposely named our resource bundle class MBeanDescriptions and included it as part of the same package as our MBean. We already followed the above conventions when creating our resource bundle in part II, and our default resource bundle class with English descriptions looks like: package blog.wls.jmx.appmbean; import java.util.ListResourceBundle; public class MBeanDescriptions extends ListResourceBundle { protected Object[][] getContents() { return new Object[][] { {"PropertyConfigMXBean.mbean", "MBean used to manage persistent application properties"}, {"PropertyConfigMXBean.attribute.Properties", "Properties associated with the running application"}, {"PropertyConfigMXBean.operation.setProperty", "Create a new property, or change the value of an existing property"}, {"PropertyConfigMXBean.operation.setProperty.key", "Name that identify the property to set."}, {"PropertyConfigMXBean.operation.setProperty.value", "Value for the property being set"}, {"PropertyConfigMXBean.operation.getProperty", "Get the value for an existing property"}, {"PropertyConfigMXBean.operation.getProperty.key", "Name that identify the property to be retrieved"} }; } } We have now also added a resource bundle with French localized descriptions: package blog.wls.jmx.appmbean; import java.util.ListResourceBundle; public class MBeanDescriptions_fr extends ListResourceBundle { protected Object[][] getContents() { return new Object[][] { {"PropertyConfigMXBean.mbean", "Manage proprietes sauvegarde dans un fichier disque."}, {"PropertyConfigMXBean.attribute.Properties", "Proprietes associee avec l'application en cour d'execution"}, {"PropertyConfigMXBean.operation.setProperty", "Construit une nouvelle proprietee, ou change la valeur d'une proprietee existante."}, {"PropertyConfigMXBean.operation.setProperty.key", "Nom de la propriete dont la valeur est change."}, {"PropertyConfigMXBean.operation.setProperty.value", "Nouvelle valeur"}, {"PropertyConfigMXBean.operation.getProperty", "Retourne la valeur d'une propriete existante."}, {"PropertyConfigMXBean.operation.getProperty.key", "Nom de la propriete a retrouver."} }; } } So now we can just remove the many getDescriptions methods from our MBean code, and have a much cleaner: package blog.wls.jmx.appmbean; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.InputStream; import java.io.OutputStream; import java.io.FileInputStream; import java.io.FileOutputStream; import java.io.File; import java.net.URL; import java.util.Map; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Properties; import javax.management.MBeanServer; import javax.management.ObjectName; import javax.management.MBeanRegistration; import javax.management.StandardMBean; import javax.management.MBeanOperationInfo; import javax.management.MBeanParameterInfo; public class PropertyConfig extends StandardMBean implements PropertyConfigMXBean, MBeanRegistration { private String relativePath_ = null; private Properties props_ = null; private File resource_ = null; private static Map operationsParamNames_ = null; static { operationsParamNames_ = new HashMap(); operationsParamNames_.put("setProperty", new String[] {"key", "value"}); operationsParamNames_.put("getProperty", new String[] {"key"}); } public PropertyConfig(String relativePath) throws Exception { super(PropertyConfigMXBean.class , true); props_ = new Properties(); relativePath_ = relativePath; } public String setProperty(String key, String value) throws IOException { String oldValue = null; if (value == null) { oldValue = String.class.cast(props_.remove(key)); } else { oldValue = String.class.cast(props_.setProperty(key, value)); } save(); return oldValue; } public String getProperty(String key) { return props_.getProperty(key); } public Map getProperties() { return (Map) props_; } private void load() throws IOException { InputStream is = new FileInputStream(resource_); try { props_.load(is); } finally { is.close(); } } private void save() throws IOException { OutputStream os = new FileOutputStream(resource_); try { props_.store(os, null); } finally { os.close(); } } public ObjectName preRegister(MBeanServer server, ObjectName name) throws Exception { // MBean must be registered from an application thread // to have access to the application ClassLoader ClassLoader cl = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader(); URL resourceUrl = cl.getResource(relativePath_); resource_ = new File(resourceUrl.toURI()); load(); return name; } public void postRegister(Boolean registrationDone) { } public void preDeregister() throws Exception {} public void postDeregister() {} protected String getParameterName(MBeanOperationInfo op, MBeanParameterInfo param, int sequence) { return operationsParamNames_.get(op.getName())[sequence]; } } The only reason we are still extending the StandardMBean class, is to override the default values for our operations parameters name. If this isn't a concern, then one could just write the following code: package blog.wls.jmx.appmbean; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.InputStream; import java.io.OutputStream; import java.io.FileInputStream; import java.io.FileOutputStream; import java.io.File; import java.net.URL; import java.util.Properties; import javax.management.MBeanServer; import javax.management.ObjectName; import javax.management.MBeanRegistration; import javax.management.StandardMBean; import javax.management.MBeanOperationInfo; import javax.management.MBeanParameterInfo; public class PropertyConfig implements PropertyConfigMXBean, MBeanRegistration { private String relativePath_ = null; private Properties props_ = null; private File resource_ = null; public PropertyConfig(String relativePath) throws Exception { props_ = new Properties(); relativePath_ = relativePath; } public String setProperty(String key, String value) throws IOException { String oldValue = null; if (value == null) { oldValue = String.class.cast(props_.remove(key)); } else { oldValue = String.class.cast(props_.setProperty(key, value)); } save(); return oldValue; } public String getProperty(String key) { return props_.getProperty(key); } public Map getProperties() { return (Map) props_; } private void load() throws IOException { InputStream is = new FileInputStream(resource_); try { props_.load(is); } finally { is.close(); } } private void save() throws IOException { OutputStream os = new FileOutputStream(resource_); try { props_.store(os, null); } finally { os.close(); } } public ObjectName preRegister(MBeanServer server, ObjectName name) throws Exception { // MBean must be registered from an application thread // to have access to the application ClassLoader ClassLoader cl = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader(); URL resourceUrl = cl.getResource(relativePath_); resource_ = new File(resourceUrl.toURI()); load(); return name; } public void postRegister(Boolean registrationDone) { } public void preDeregister() throws Exception {} public void postDeregister() {} } Note: The above would also require changing the operations parameters name in the resource bundle classes. For instance: PropertyConfigMXBean.operation.setProperty.key would become: PropertyConfigMXBean.operation.setProperty.p0 Client based localization When accessing our MBean using JConsole started with the following command line: jconsole -J-Djava.class.path=$JAVA_HOME/lib/jconsole.jar:$JAVA_HOME/lib/tools.jar: $WL_HOME/server/lib/wljmxclient.jar -J-Djmx.remote.protocol.provider.pkgs=weblogic.management.remote -debug We see that our MBean descriptions are localized according to the WebLogic's server Locale. English in this case: Note: Consult Part I for information on how to use JConsole to browse/edit our MBean. Now if we specify the client's Locale as part of the JConsole command line as follow: jconsole -J-Djava.class.path=$JAVA_HOME/lib/jconsole.jar:$JAVA_HOME/lib/tools.jar: $WL_HOME/server/lib/wljmxclient.jar -J-Djmx.remote.protocol.provider.pkgs=weblogic.management.remote -J-Dweblogic.management.remote.locale=fr-FR -debug We see that our MBean descriptions are now localized according to the specified client's Locale. French in this case: We use the weblogic.management.remote.locale system property to specify the Locale that should be associated with the cient's JMX connections. The value is composed of the client's language code and its country code separated by the - character. The country code is not required, and can be omitted. For instance: -Dweblogic.management.remote.locale=fr We can also specify the client's Locale using a programmatic client as demonstrated below: package blog.wls.jmx.appmbean.client; import javax.management.MBeanServerConnection; import javax.management.ObjectName; import javax.management.MBeanInfo; import javax.management.remote.JMXConnector; import javax.management.remote.JMXServiceURL; import javax.management.remote.JMXConnectorFactory; import java.util.Hashtable; import java.util.Set; import java.util.Locale; public class JMXClient { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { JMXConnector jmxCon = null; try { JMXServiceURL serviceUrl = new JMXServiceURL( "service:jmx:iiop://127.0.0.1:7001/jndi/weblogic.management.mbeanservers.runtime"); System.out.println("Connecting to: " + serviceUrl); // properties associated with the connection Hashtable env = new Hashtable(); env.put(JMXConnectorFactory.PROTOCOL_PROVIDER_PACKAGES, "weblogic.management.remote"); String[] credentials = new String[2]; credentials[0] = "weblogic"; credentials[1] = "weblogic"; env.put(JMXConnector.CREDENTIALS, credentials); // specifies the client's Locale env.put("weblogic.management.remote.locale", Locale.FRENCH); jmxCon = JMXConnectorFactory.newJMXConnector(serviceUrl, env); jmxCon.connect(); MBeanServerConnection con = jmxCon.getMBeanServerConnection(); Set mbeans = con.queryNames( new ObjectName( "blog.wls.jmx.appmbean:name=myAppProperties,type=PropertyConfig,*"), null); for (ObjectName mbeanName : mbeans) { System.out.println("\n\nMBEAN: " + mbeanName); MBeanInfo minfo = con.getMBeanInfo(mbeanName); System.out.println("MBean Description: "+minfo.getDescription()); System.out.println("\n"); } } finally { // release the connection if (jmxCon != null) jmxCon.close(); } } } The above client code is part of the zip file associated with this blog, and can be run using the provided client.sh script. The resulting output is shown below: $ ./client.sh Connecting to: service:jmx:iiop://127.0.0.1:7001/jndi/weblogic.management.mbeanservers.runtime MBEAN: blog.wls.jmx.appmbean:type=PropertyConfig,name=myAppProperties MBean Description: Manage proprietes sauvegarde dans un fichier disque. $ Miscellaneous Using Description annotation to specify MBean descriptions Earlier we have seen how to name our MBean descriptions resource keys, so that WebLogic 10.3.3.0 automatically uses them to localize our MBean. In some cases we might want to implicitly specify the resource key, and resource bundle. For instance when operations are overloaded, and the operation name is no longer sufficient to uniquely identify a single operation. In this case we can use the Description annotation provided by WebLogic as follow: import weblogic.management.utils.Description; @Description(resourceKey="myapp.resources.TestMXBean.description", resourceBundleBaseName="myapp.resources.MBeanResources") public interface TestMXBean { @Description(resourceKey="myapp.resources.TestMXBean.threshold.description", resourceBundleBaseName="myapp.resources.MBeanResources" ) public int getthreshold(); @Description(resourceKey="myapp.resources.TestMXBean.reset.description", resourceBundleBaseName="myapp.resources.MBeanResources") public int reset( @Description(resourceKey="myapp.resources.TestMXBean.reset.id.description", resourceBundleBaseName="myapp.resources.MBeanResources", displayNameKey= "myapp.resources.TestMXBean.reset.id.displayName.description") int id); } The Description annotation should be applied to the MBean interface. It can be used to specify MBean, MBean attributes, MBean operations, and MBean operation parameters descriptions as demonstrated above. Retrieving the Locale associated with a JMX operation from the MBean code There are several cases where it is necessary to retrieve the Locale associated with a JMX call from the MBean implementation. For instance this can be useful when localizing exception messages. This can be done as follow: import weblogic.management.mbeanservers.JMXContextUtil; ...... // some MBean method implementation public String setProperty(String key, String value) throws IOException { Locale callersLocale = JMXContextUtil.getLocale(); // use callersLocale to localize Exception messages or // potentially some return values such a Date .... } Conclusion With this last part we conclude our three part series on how to write MBeans to manage J2EE applications. We are far from having exhausted this particular topic, but we have gone a long way and are now capable to take advantage of the latest functionality provided by WebLogic's application server to write user friendly MBeans.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 28, 2011

CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 28, 2011Popular ReleasesCommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 - Alpha: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. Samples in <root>\src\Lib\CommonLibrary.NET\Samples CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 AlphaNew Dynamic Scripting Language : workitem : 7493 Fixes 1622 6803Widget Suite for DotNetNuke: 01.04.00: The following features/enhancements are associated with this release: Bug: Removed the empty box/white space created by some widgets New Widget: FlexSlider New Widget: Google+ Button New Widget: Klout Badge Sample Widget Script FileTools for SharePoint: Reset SharePoint Configuration Cache: This tool is used to detect the existing location of the SharePoint configuration cache files then remove them to trigger the timer service to rebuild a fresh new cache. This tool runs on any SharePoint box version 2003 and above supporting x64 bit & x32 bit OS assuming .NET framework 3.5 is installed. You must run the tool with elevated privileges if running on Win 2008 server to ensure that the tool has enough rights to restart the timer service. The tool auto-detects whether its running i...WinRT File Based Database: 0.9.1.5: Implement IsBusy property to support Save button state. See Quick Start project that is distributed as part of the download for details on how to implement Save button, use IsBusy property and how to implement SimpleCommand to use behind the Save button.Multiwfn: Multiwfn2.2_source: Multiwfn2.2_sourceBatchus-GUI: Batchus-GUI-vb 0.1.3.3: Here is v0.1.3.3. It is relatively stable. Just need some more designer layout, and tutorials, and templates.Groovy IM: Groovy IM Version 0.3: Groovy IM Version 0.3 for Windows Phone 7Internet Cache Examiner: Internet Cache Examiner 0.9.2: This is the release binary for the 0.9.2 version of Internet Cache Examiner.Composite Data Service Framework: Composite Data Service Framework 1.0: This solution contains the Composite Data Service framework solution along with a Sample Project.FxCop Integrator for Visual Studio 2010: FxCop Integrator 2.0.0 RC: Replaced the MSBuild Tasks installer to fix the bug of the targets file. FxCop Integrator is not affected by this bug. (Nov 28 2011) New FeatureSupported calculating code metrics with Code Metrics PowerTool. (Work Item #6568: 6568). Provided MSBuild tasks. #7454: 7454 Supported to filter out auto-generated code from code analysis result. #7485: 7485 Supported exporting report of code analysis result. Supported multi-project analysis. Supported file level analysis. Added the featu...Terminals: Version 2 - Beta 4 Release: Beta 4 Refresh Build Dont forget to backup your config files BEFORE upgrading! As usual, please take time to use and abuse this release. We left logging in place, and this is a debug build so be sure to submit your logs on each bug reported, and please do report all bugs! Updated the About form to include the date and time of the build. Useful for CI builds to ensure we have the correct version "Favourites" and "History" save their expanded states after app restarts Code cleanup, secu...MiniTwitter: 1.76: MiniTwitter 1.76 ???? ?? ?????????? User Streams ???????????? User Streams ???????????、??????????????? REST ?????????? ?????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????Media Companion: MC 3.424b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movie Show Resolutions... Resolved issue when reverting multiselection of movies to "-none-" Added movie rename support for subtitle files '.srt' & '.sub' Finalised code for '-1' fix - radiobutton to choose either filename or title Fixed issue with Movie Batch Wizard Fanart - ...Advanced Windows Phone Enginering Tool: WPE Downloads: This version of WPE gives you basic updating, restoring, and, erasing for your Windows Phone device.Anno 2070 Assistant: Beta v1.0 (STABLE): Anno 2070 Assistant Beta v1.0 Released! Features Included: Complete Building Layouts for Ecos, Tycoons & Techs Complete Production Chains for Ecos, Tycoons & Techs Completed Credits Screen Known Issues: Not all production chains and building layouts may be on the lists because they have not yet been discovered. However, data is still 99.9% complete. Currently the Supply & Demand, including Calculator screen are disabled until version 1.1.Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.7: Including updated Minecraft Biome Extractor and mcmap to support the new Minecraft 1.0.0 release (new block types, etc).Visual Leak Detector for Visual C++ 2008/2010: v2.2.1: Enhancements: * strdup and _wcsdup functions support added. * Preliminary support for VS 11 added. Bugs Fixed: * Low performance after upgrading from VLD v2.1. * Memory leaks with static linking fixed (disabled calloc support). * Runtime error R6002 fixed because of wrong memory dump format. * version.h fixed in installer. * Some PVS studio warning fixed.NetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.10: 3.6.0.10 22-Nov-2011 Update: Removed PreEmptive Platform integration (PreEmptive analytics) Removed all PreEmptive attributes Removed PreEmptive.dll assembly references from all projects Added first support to ADAM/AD LDS Thanks to PatBea. Work Item 9775: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/9775VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF & Silverlight 5: VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF, SL5 - 2011.11.22: The new version contains Silverlight 5 library: Vlc.DotNet.Silverlight. A sample could be tested here The new version add and correct many features : Correction : Reinitialize some variables Deprecate : Logging API, since VLC 1.2 (08/20/2011) Add subitem in LocationMedia (for Youtube videos, ...) Update Wpf sample to use Youtube videos Many others correctionsSharePoint 2010 FBA Pack: SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack 1.2.0: Web parts are now fully customizable via html templates (Issue #323) FBA Pack is now completely localizable using resource files. Thank you David Chen for submitting the code as well as Chinese translations of the FBA Pack! The membership request web part now gives the option of having the user enter the password and removing the captcha (Issue # 447) The FBA Pack will now work in a zone that does not have FBA enabled (Another zone must have FBA enabled, and the zone must contain the me...New ProjectsA lightweight database access component: DataAccessor?????????????，??DataAccessor????????????： 1.??????????SQL??，?????SQL???????????； 2.?????????； 3.????????????，??MSAccess??????????????????????????????????????，?????????； 4.?????????????DBMS，??：SqlServer、Oracle??MSAccess，??????DBMS???，??????N?????????； 5.????，?????????DataAccess??????DBMS； 6.???Sql????xml??????????????dbms?SQL?????，??sql??????????????； 7.???，???DLL??????????……AdHoc.Wavesque: Wavesque provides a simple infrastructure to generate waveforms.AIRO - Interoperable Experiment Automation Package: The main goal of this project is to provide engineers and scientists flexible and extendable framework for building test, measurement and control applications. This framework is compatible with IVI-COM drivers and extends IVI Instrument Classes with custom .NET (and COM) interfaces for such devices as: step motors, different positioning devices, magnet power supplies, lock-in amplifiers etc. We maintain IVI Foundation's aim: "simplify upgrading or replacing components in complex test systems...AKBK-Schulprojekt - USB-Guard: Das Projekt USB-Überwachung wird im Rahmen des Anwendungsentwicklungs-Unterrichts des Adolf-Kolping-Berufskollegs geplant und durchgeführt. Die Software wird zur Prävention von Manipulationsversuchen während einer Informatikklausur entwickelt. Sie erkennt manipulierte und nicht erlaubte USB-Datenträger, protokolliert deren Inhalt und gibt ggf. eine Warnung aus. Sie hilft dem Lehrer dabei, Manipulationsversuche schneller und effizienter zu erkennen.Android Vision: Project to learn all things Android and some image processingAuto Fill Title of Document in Document Library in SharePoint 2010: Automatically fill title of any document in any document library in SharePoint 2010.Batchus-GUI: A graphical user interface, used to create batch files.Bazeli: Windows Phone 7 application that supports tracking of expenses.Clannad: This is a family of many things.Csv2Entity: CSV 2 Entity is a serials of tools that deal with CSV files as well as Excel files and Access files. This framework include: A VSIX file which contains VB and CS source code generate wizard for CSV Objects. Read/Write CSV files facilities. Documentation Help facilities.Cypher Bot: Encrypt secrets, messages, documents, files and more. Then decrypt them. Then repeat with the US government's encryption standard: AES 256-bit (Accepted by NIST and NSA).Cypher Bot makes it fun and easy for anyone to secure files. This is the best security solution available on the web. You are now able to encrypt/decrypt files (avi, mov, mpeg, mp3, wav, png, jpg, txt, html, vb, js) and text ALL IN ONE beautiful slick interface. Cypher Bot is developed in visual basic.EmailWebLinker: A very simple text to html converter designed to deal with those email messages that contain a list of links to images. Any http links it finds to pictures are converted inline. eps files are downloaded and rendered. Can be easily extended.FileHasher: This project provides a simple tool for generating and verifying file hashes. I created this to help the QA team I work with. The project is all C# using .NET 3.5 SP1.Financial Controls: WPF/Silverlight Controls for Financial ApplicationsGroovy IM: Groovy IM makes it easy for Windows Phone 7 consumers to chat while on there Windows Phone 7 device(s). Groovy IM is developed in C# under the GPL V2 license.IBlog: Project created to learn things ASP.NETInjectivity (Dependency Injection): Injectivity is a dependency injection framework (written in C#) with a strong focus on the ease of configuration and performance. Having been written over 5 years and at version 2.8 with unit tests & intellisense comments it is a mature framework.Lizard Chess: Chess openings preparation tool using F#. WinForms C# used for UI.MCPD: I am doing a self study course for MCPD in .NET 4 (web track), so I am committing any custom source code as a result of my study in this open source location which I can later show the work for. * MCTS Exam 70-515 Web Applications Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4MVC TreeView Helper: This fluent MVC TreeView helper makes it easy to build and customize an HTML unordered-list tree from a recursive model.Onion Architecture with ASP.NET MVC: Onion Architecture with ASP.NET MVCOpenBank: OpenBank est une application client/serveur destinée à la gestion de compte banquaire.Philosophy Widget: This Widget for the Mac OS X Dashboard aids in memorizing the association between known works of philosophy and their authors.Physic Engine: Physic EnginePUL Programming Utility Language: PUL is a programming utility language that allows people to do tasks automatically without having to manually do them, which that process would take longer. Using PUL, you can make programs that automatically do the work for you.QuakeMeApp: QuakeMeApp is a Windows Phone 7 Earthquake Alert AppSense/Net SourceCode Field Control: This is a Field Control for Sense/Net ECMS, it provides syntax highlighting.Silverlight Video CoverFlow: This a Silverlight Sample Application including a Coverflow of Video (streaming)SpaceConquest: Incorporated standard design patterns to build a peer to peer game in Java. The game rules were similar in complexity to games like Civilization and StarcraftSPGE - An XNA 2D graphics engine for Windows and Windows Phone 7.: SPGE is an open-source graphics engine build over XNA that allows the creation of simple 2D games that target Windows and Windows Phone 7. The aim of this graphic engine is to allow for an easy creation of simle 2D games, game prototyping, and teaching of game development.SQL CRUD Expression Builder: A library to build sql crud commands that is based on expressions so every part of the sql statement could be an expression like ColumnSetExpression, FilterExpression, JoinExpression, etc, is intended to be agnostic but right now is being tested only with SqlServer and MySql.TDD-Katas: *TDD-Katas* simply defines the Test Driven Development Katas. In this, I tried to create most famous katas to understand what is exactly Kata. So, get into the code and let us know for any improvementTFS Team Project Manager: TFS Team Project Manager automates various tasks across Team Projects in Team Foundation Server. If you find yourself managing multiple Team Projects for an organization and have recurring tasks and questions that repeat themselves over and over again, Team Project Manager probably has some answers for you. Team Project Manager can help you... * Manage build process templates (understanding which build templates are used by which build definitions, uploading new build process templates,...USB Camera Driver for Windows Embedded Compact 7: This project helps people to get the USB camera working on the Windows Embedded Compact 7.This is modified source of the WinCE 6.0 USB Camera Shared source available from the following link http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=19512 User Profile with RecordID replicator: <User Profile with RecordID replicator> will let SharePoint 2010 administrators create a new Profile database maintaining the RecordId of the profile to make sure the social features (I like it, tags, notes) are not gone.VS Tool for WSS 3.0: Visual Studio (2005 and 2008) add-ons for WSS. Included: - schema.xml explorerWhs2Smugmug: Windows Home Server Add-In for uploading files to Smugmug. Written in C# using .Net 3.5 and WCF. Also using the Smugmug API Project. ??UBBCODE: PHP????UBBCODE????，??????： 1.??????（10px ? 24px）； 2.????； 3.?????； 4.??????； 5.??????； 6.??????（????????????）； 7.??????； 8.?????； 9.?????； 10.???QQ??，??????； 11.???????（?????，??????????）； 12.?????????； 13.????????； 14.?????????； 15.?????????； 16.?????????。

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 10, 2014

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 10, 2014Popular ReleasesTerraMap (Terraria World Map Viewer): TerraMap 1.0.3.14652: Added support for the new Terraria v1.2.4 update. New items, walls, and tiles The setup file will make sure .NET 4 is installed, install TerraMap, create desktop and start menu shortcuts, add a .wld file association, and launch TerraMap. If you prefer the zip file, make sure you have .NET Framework v4.5 installed, then just download and extract the ZIP file, and run TerraMap.exe.R.NET: R.NET 1.5.12: R.NET 1.5.12 is a beta release towards R.NET 1.6. You are encouraged to use 1.5.12 now and give feedback. See the documentation for setup and usage instructions. Main changes for R.NET 1.5.12: The C stack limit was not disabled on Windows. For reasons possibly peculiar to R, this means that non-concurrent access to R from multiple threads was not stable. This is now fixed, with the fix validated with a unit test. Thanks to Odugen, skyguy94, and previously others (evolvedmicrobe, tomasp) fo...CTI Text Encryption: CTI Text Encryption 5.2: Change log: 5.2 - Remove Cut button. - Fixed Reset All button does not reset encrypted text column. - Switch button location between Copy and Paste. - Enable users to use local fonts to display characters of their language correctly. (A font settings file will be saved at the same folder of this program.) 5.1 - Improve encryption process. - Minor UI update. - Version 5.1 is not compatible with older version. 5.0 - Improve encryption algorithm. - Simply inner non-encryption related mec...SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.029.006 Release 1: Fix to allow keyboard search on load dialog. (type the first few letters of your save) Fixed check for new release. Changed the way ship details are loaded to alleviate load time for worlds with very large ships (100,000+ blocks). Fixed Image importer, was incorrectly listing 'Asteroid' as import option. Minor changes to menus (text and appearance) for clarity and OS consistency. Added in reading of world palette for color dialog editor. WIP on subsystem editor. Can now multiselec...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.597b: Thank you for being patient, againThere are a number of fixes in place with this release. and some new features added. Most are self explanatory, so check out the options in Preferences. Couple of new Features:* Movie - Allow save Title and Sort Title in Title Case format. * Movie - Allow save fanart.jpg if movie in folder. * TV - display episode source. Get episode source from episode filename. Fixed:* Movie - Added Fill Tags from plot keywords to Batch Rescraper. * Movie - Fixed TMDB s...SimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.3.0.0: Contains several bugfixes, newly identified properties and some UI improvements. Main new features UI overhaul for the main index list: Icons for each different index, including icons for different property files Tooltips for all relevant fields Removed clutter Identified hundreds of additional properties (thanks to MaxisGuillaume) - this should make modding gameplay easierSeal Report: Seal Report 1.4: New Features: Report Designer: New option to convert a Report Source into a Repository Source. Report Designer: New contextual helper menus to select, remove, copy, prompt elements in a model. Web Server: New option to expand sub-folders displayed in the tree view. Web Server: Web Folder Description File can be a .cshtml file to display a MVC View. Views: additional CSS parameters for some DIVs. NVD3 Chart: Some default configuration values have been changed. Issues Addressed:16 ...Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.9.002: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.9.0.VidCoder: 1.5.22 Beta: Added ability to burn SRT subtitles. Updated to HandBrake SVN 6169. 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Connecting SceneBuilder edited FXML to Java code

- by daniel

Recently I had to answer several questions regarding how to connect an UI built with the JavaFX SceneBuilder 1.0 Developer Preview to Java Code. So I figured out that a short overview might be helpful. But first, let me state the obvious. What is FXML? To make it short, FXML is an XML based declaration format for JavaFX. JavaFX provides an FXML loader which will parse FXML files and from that construct a graph of Java object. It may sound complex when stated like that but it is actually quite simple. Here is an example of FXML file, which instantiate a StackPane and puts a Button inside it: -- <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?import java.lang.*?> <?import java.util.*?> <?import javafx.scene.control.*?> <?import javafx.scene.layout.*?> <?import javafx.scene.paint.*?> <StackPane prefHeight="150.0" prefWidth="200.0" xmlns:fx="http://javafx.com/fxml"> <children> <Button mnemonicParsing="false" text="Button" /> </children> </StackPane> ... and here is the code I would have had to write if I had chosen to do the same thing programatically: import javafx.scene.control.*; import javafx.scene.layout.*; ... final Button button = new Button("Button"); button.setMnemonicParsing(false); final StackPane stackPane = new StackPane(); stackPane.setPrefWidth(200.0); stackPane.setPrefHeight(150.0); stacPane.getChildren().add(button); As you can see - FXML is rather simple to understand - as it is quite close to the JavaFX API. So OK FXML is simple, but why would I use it?Well, there are several answers to that - but my own favorite is: because you can make it with SceneBuilder. What is SceneBuilder? In short SceneBuilder is a layout tool that will let you graphically build JavaFX user interfaces by dragging and dropping JavaFX components from a library, and save it as an FXML file. SceneBuilder can also be used to load and modify JavaFX scenegraphs declared in FXML. Here is how I made the small FXML file above: Start the JavaFX SceneBuilder 1.0 Developer Preview In the Library on the left hand side, click on 'StackPane' and drag it on the content view (the white rectangle) In the Library, select a Button and drag it onto the StackPane on the content view. In the Hierarchy Panel on the left hand side - select the StackPane component, then invoke 'Edit > Trim To Selected' from the menubar That's it - you can now save, and you will obtain the small FXML file shown above. Of course this is only a trivial sample, made for the sake of the example - and SceneBuilder will let you create much more complex UIs. So, I have now an FXML file. But what do I do with it? How do I include it in my program? How do I write my main class? Loading an FXML file with JavaFX Well, that's the easy part - because the piece of code you need to write never changes. You can download and look at the SceneBuilder samples if you need to get convinced, but here is the short version: Create a Java class (let's call it 'Main.java') which extends javafx.application.Application In the same directory copy/save the FXML file you just created using SceneBuilder. Let's name it "simple.fxml" Now here is the Java code for the Main class, which simply loads the FXML file and puts it as root in a stage's scene. /* * Copyright (c) 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. */ package simple; import java.util.logging.Level; import java.util.logging.Logger; import javafx.application.Application; import javafx.fxml.FXMLLoader; import javafx.scene.Scene; import javafx.scene.layout.StackPane; import javafx.stage.Stage; public class Main extends Application { /** * @param args the command line arguments */ public static void main(String[] args) { Application.launch(Main.class, (java.lang.String[])null); } @Override public void start(Stage primaryStage) { try { StackPane page = (StackPane) FXMLLoader.load(Main.class.getResource("simple.fxml")); Scene scene = new Scene(page); primaryStage.setScene(scene); primaryStage.setTitle("FXML is Simple"); primaryStage.show(); } catch (Exception ex) { Logger.getLogger(Main.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } } } Great! Now I only have to use my favorite IDE to compile the class and run it. But... wait... what does it do? Well nothing. It just displays a button in the middle of a window. There's no logic attached to it. So how do we do that? How can I connect this button to my application logic? Here is how: Connection to code First let's define our application logic. Since this post is only intended to give a very brief overview - let's keep things simple. Let's say that the only thing I want to do is print a message on System.out when the user clicks on my button. To do that, I'll need to register an action handler with my button. And to do that, I'll need to somehow get a handle on my button. I'll need some kind of controller logic that will get my button and add my action handler to it. So how do I get a handle to my button and pass it to my controller? Once again - this is easy: I just need to write a controller class for my FXML. With each FXML file, it is possible to associate a controller class defined for that FXML. That controller class will make the link between the UI (the objects defined in the FXML) and the application logic. To each object defined in FXML we can associate an fx:id. The value of the id must be unique within the scope of the FXML, and is the name of an instance variable inside the controller class, in which the object will be injected. Since I want to have access to my button, I will need to add an fx:id to my button in FXML, and declare an @FXML variable in my controller class with the same name. In other words - I will need to add fx:id="myButton" to my button in FXML: -- <Button fx:id="myButton" mnemonicParsing="false" text="Button" /> and declare @FXML private Button myButton in my controller class @FXML private Button myButton; // value will be injected by the FXMLLoader Let's see how to do this. Add an fx:id to the Button object Load "simple.fxml" in SceneBuilder - if not already done In the hierarchy panel (bottom left), or directly on the content view, select the Button object. Open the Properties sections of the inspector (right panel) for the button object At the top of the section, you will see a text field labelled fx:id. Enter myButton in that field and validate. Associate a controller class with the FXML file Still in SceneBuilder, select the top root object (in our case, that's the StackPane), and open the Code section of the inspector (right hand side) At the top of the section you should see a text field labelled Controller Class. In the field, type simple.SimpleController. This is the name of the class we're going to create manually. If you save at this point, the FXML will look like this: -- <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?import java.lang.*?> <?import java.util.*?> <?import javafx.scene.control.*?> <?import javafx.scene.layout.*?> <?import javafx.scene.paint.*?> <StackPane prefHeight="150.0" prefWidth="200.0" xmlns:fx="http://javafx.com/fxml" fx:controller="simple.SimpleController"> <children> <Button fx:id="myButton" mnemonicParsing="false" text="Button" /> </children> </StackPane> As you can see, the name of the controller class has been added to the root object: fx:controller="simple.SimpleController" Coding the controller class In your favorite IDE, create an empty SimpleController.java class. Now what does a controller class looks like? What should we put inside? Well - SceneBuilder will help you there: it will show you an example of controller skeleton tailored for your FXML. In the menu bar, invoke View > Show Sample Controller Skeleton. A popup appears, displaying a suggestion for the controller skeleton: copy the code displayed there, and paste it into your SimpleController.java: /** * Sample Skeleton for "simple.fxml" Controller Class * Use copy/paste to copy paste this code into your favorite IDE **/ package simple; import java.net.URL; import java.util.ResourceBundle; import javafx.fxml.FXML; import javafx.fxml.Initializable; import javafx.scene.control.Button; public class SimpleController implements Initializable { @FXML // fx:id="myButton" private Button myButton; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @Override // This method is called by the FXMLLoader when initialization is complete public void initialize(URL fxmlFileLocation, ResourceBundle resources) { assert myButton != null : "fx:id=\"myButton\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'simple.fxml'."; // initialize your logic here: all @FXML variables will have been injected } } Note that the code displayed by SceneBuilder is there only for educational purpose: SceneBuilder does not create and does not modify Java files. This is simply a hint of what you can use, given the fx:id present in your FXML file. You are free to copy all or part of the displayed code and paste it into your own Java class. Now at this point, there only remains to add our logic to the controller class. Quite easy: in the initialize method, I will register an action handler with my button: () { @Override public void handle(ActionEvent event) { System.out.println("That was easy, wasn't it?"); } }); ... -- ... // initialize your logic here: all @FXML variables will have been injected myButton.setOnAction(new EventHandler<ActionEvent>() { @Override public void handle(ActionEvent event) { System.out.println("That was easy, wasn't it?"); } }); ... That's it - if you now compile everything in your IDE, and run your application, clicking on the button should print a message on the console! Summary What happens is that in Main.java, the FXMLLoader will load simple.fxml from the jar/classpath, as specified by 'FXMLLoader.load(Main.class.getResource("simple.fxml"))'. When loading simple.fxml, the loader will find the name of the controller class, as specified by 'fx:controller="simple.SimpleController"' in the FXML. Upon finding the name of the controller class, the loader will create an instance of that class, in which it will try to inject all the objects that have an fx:id in the FXML. Thus, after having created '<Button fx:id="myButton" ... />', the FXMLLoader will inject the button instance into the '@FXML private Button myButton;' instance variable found on the controller instance. This is because The instance variable has an @FXML annotation, The name of the variable exactly matches the value of the fx:id Finally, when the whole FXML has been loaded, the FXMLLoader will call the controller's initialize method, and our code that registers an action handler with the button will be executed. For a complete example, take a look at the HelloWorld SceneBuilder sample. Also make sure to follow the SceneBuilder Get Started guide, which will guide you through a much more complete example. Of course, there are more elegant ways to set up an Event Handler using FXML and SceneBuilder. There are also many different ways to work with the FXMLLoader. But since it's starting to be very late here, I think it will have to wait for another post. I hope you have enjoyed the tour! --daniel

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C#/.NET Little Wonders: Interlocked CompareExchange()

- by James Michael Hare

Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Two posts ago, I discussed the Interlocked Add(), Increment(), and Decrement() methods (here) for adding and subtracting values in a thread-safe, lightweight manner. Then, last post I talked about the Interlocked Read() and Exchange() methods (here) for safely and efficiently reading and setting 32 or 64 bit values (or references). This week, we’ll round out the discussion by talking about the Interlocked CompareExchange() method and how it can be put to use to exchange a value if the current value is what you expected it to be. Dirty reads can lead to bad results Many of the uses of Interlocked that we’ve explored so far have centered around either reading, setting, or adding values. But what happens if you want to do something more complex such as setting a value based on the previous value in some manner? Perhaps you were creating an application that reads a current balance, applies a deposit, and then saves the new modified balance, where of course you’d want that to happen atomically. If you read the balance, then go to save the new balance and between that time the previous balance has already changed, you’ll have an issue! Think about it, if we read the current balance as $400, and we are applying a new deposit of $50.75, but meanwhile someone else deposits $200 and sets the total to $600, but then we write a total of $450.75 we’ve lost $200! Now, certainly for int and long values we can use Interlocked.Add() to handles these cases, and it works well for that. But what if we want to work with doubles, for example? Let’s say we wanted to add the numbers from 0 to 99,999 in parallel. We could do this by spawning several parallel tasks to continuously add to a total: 1: double total = 0; 2: 3: Parallel.For(0, 10000, next => 4: { 5: total += next; 6: }); Were this run on one thread using a standard for loop, we’d expect an answer of 4,999,950,000 (the sum of all numbers from 0 to 99,999). But when we run this in parallel as written above, we’ll likely get something far off. The result of one of my runs, for example, was 1,281,880,740. That is way off! If this were banking software we’d be in big trouble with our clients. So what happened? The += operator is not atomic, it will read in the current value, add the result, then store it back into the total. At any point in all of this another thread could read a “dirty” current total and accidentally “skip” our add. So, to clean this up, we could use a lock to guarantee concurrency: 1: double total = 0.0; 2: object locker = new object(); 3: 4: Parallel.For(0, count, next => 5: { 6: lock (locker) 7: { 8: total += next; 9: } 10: }); Which will give us the correct result of 4,999,950,000. One thing to note is that locking can be heavy, especially if the operation being locked over is trivial, or the life of the lock is a high percentage of the work being performed concurrently. In the case above, the lock consumes pretty much all of the time of each parallel task – and the task being locked on is relatively trivial. Now, let me put in a disclaimer here before we go further: For most uses, lock is more than sufficient for your needs, and is often the simplest solution! So, if lock is sufficient for most needs, why would we ever consider another solution? The problem with locking is that it can suspend execution of your thread while it waits for the signal that the lock is free. Moreover, if the operation being locked over is trivial, the lock can add a very high level of overhead. This is why things like Interlocked.Increment() perform so well, instead of locking just to perform an increment, we perform the increment with an atomic, lockless method. As with all things performance related, it’s important to profile before jumping to the conclusion that you should optimize everything in your path. If your profiling shows that locking is causing a high level of waiting in your application, then it’s time to consider lighter alternatives such as Interlocked. CompareExchange() – Exchange existing value if equal some value So let’s look at how we could use CompareExchange() to solve our problem above. The general syntax of CompareExchange() is: T CompareExchange<T>(ref T location, T newValue, T expectedValue) If the value in location == expectedValue, then newValue is exchanged. Either way, the value in location (before exchange) is returned. Actually, CompareExchange() is not one method, but a family of overloaded methods that can take int, long, float, double, pointers, or references. It cannot take other value types (that is, can’t CompareExchange() two DateTime instances directly). Also keep in mind that the version that takes any reference type (the generic overload) only checks for reference equality, it does not call any overridden Equals(). So how does this help us? Well, we can grab the current total, and exchange the new value if total hasn’t changed. This would look like this: 1: // grab the snapshot 2: double current = total; 3: 4: // if the total hasn’t changed since I grabbed the snapshot, then 5: // set it to the new total 6: Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + next, current); So what the code above says is: if the amount in total (1st arg) is the same as the amount in current (3rd arg), then set total to current + next (2nd arg). This check and exchange pair is atomic (and thus thread-safe). This works if total is the same as our snapshot in current, but the problem, is what happens if they aren’t the same? Well, we know that in either case we will get the previous value of total (before the exchange), back as a result. Thus, we can test this against our snapshot to see if it was the value we expected: 1: // if the value returned is != current, then our snapshot must be out of date 2: // which means we didn't (and shouldn't) apply current + next 3: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + next, current) != current) 4: { 5: // ooops, total was not equal to our snapshot in current, what should we do??? 6: } So what do we do if we fail? That’s up to you and the problem you are trying to solve. It’s possible you would decide to abort the whole transaction, or perhaps do a lightweight spin and try again. Let’s try that: 1: double current = total; 2: 3: // make first attempt... 4: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + i, current) != current) 5: { 6: // if we fail, go into a spin wait, spin, and try again until succeed 7: var spinner = new SpinWait(); 8: 9: do 10: { 11: spinner.SpinOnce(); 12: current = total; 13: } 14: while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + i, current) != current); 15: } 16: This is not trivial code, but it illustrates a possible use of CompareExchange(). What we are doing is first checking to see if we succeed on the first try, and if so great! If not, we create a SpinWait and then repeat the process of SpinOnce(), grab a fresh snapshot, and repeat until CompareExchnage() succeeds. You may wonder why not a simple do-while here, and the reason it’s more efficient to only create the SpinWait until we absolutely know we need one, for optimal efficiency. Though not as simple (or maintainable) as a simple lock, this will perform better in many situations. Comparing an unlocked (and wrong) version, a version using lock, and the Interlocked of the code, we get the following average times for multiple iterations of adding the sum of 100,000 numbers: 1: Unlocked money average time: 2.1 ms 2: Locked money average time: 5.1 ms 3: Interlocked money average time: 3 ms So the Interlocked.CompareExchange(), while heavier to code, came in lighter than the lock, offering a good compromise of safety and performance when we need to reduce contention. CompareExchange() - it’s not just for adding stuff… So that was one simple use of CompareExchange() in the context of adding double values -- which meant we couldn’t have used the simpler Interlocked.Add() -- but it has other uses as well. If you think about it, this really works anytime you want to create something new based on a current value without using a full lock. For example, you could use it to create a simple lazy instantiation implementation. In this case, we want to set the lazy instance only if the previous value was null: 1: public static class Lazy<T> where T : class, new() 2: { 3: private static T _instance; 4: 5: public static T Instance 6: { 7: get 8: { 9: // if current is null, we need to create new instance 10: if (_instance == null) 11: { 12: // attempt create, it will only set if previous was null 13: Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _instance, new T(), (T)null); 14: } 15: 16: return _instance; 17: } 18: } 19: } So, if _instance == null, this will create a new T() and attempt to exchange it with _instance. If _instance is not null, then it does nothing and we discard the new T() we created. This is a way to create lazy instances of a type where we are more concerned about locking overhead than creating an accidental duplicate which is not used. In fact, the BCL implementation of Lazy<T> offers a similar thread-safety choice for Publication thread safety, where it will not guarantee only one instance was created, but it will guarantee that all readers get the same instance. Another possible use would be in concurrent collections. Let’s say, for example, that you are creating your own brand new super stack that uses a linked list paradigm and is “lock free”. We could use Interlocked.CompareExchange() to be able to do a lockless Push() which could be more efficient in multi-threaded applications where several threads are pushing and popping on the stack concurrently. Yes, there are already concurrent collections in the BCL (in .NET 4.0 as part of the TPL), but it’s a fun exercise! So let’s assume we have a node like this: 1: public sealed class Node<T> 2: { 3: // the data for this node 4: public T Data { get; set; } 5: 6: // the link to the next instance 7: internal Node<T> Next { get; set; } 8: } Then, perhaps, our stack’s Push() operation might look something like: 1: public sealed class SuperStack<T> 2: { 3: private volatile T _head; 4: 5: public void Push(T value) 6: { 7: var newNode = new Node<int> { Data = value, Next = _head }; 8: 9: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _head, newNode, newNode.Next) != newNode.Next) 10: { 11: var spinner = new SpinWait(); 12: 13: do 14: { 15: spinner.SpinOnce(); 16: newNode.Next = _head; 17: } 18: while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _head, newNode, newNode.Next) != newNode.Next); 19: } 20: } 21: 22: // ... 23: } Notice a similar paradigm here as with adding our doubles before. What we are doing is creating the new Node with the data to push, and with a Next value being the original node referenced by _head. This will create our stack behavior (LIFO – Last In, First Out). Now, we have to set _head to now refer to the newNode, but we must first make sure it hasn’t changed! So we check to see if _head has the same value we saved in our snapshot as newNode.Next, and if so, we set _head to newNode. This is all done atomically, and the result is _head’s original value, as long as the original value was what we assumed it was with newNode.Next, then we are good and we set it without a lock! If not, we SpinWait and try again. Once again, this is much lighter than locking in highly parallelized code with lots of contention. If I compare the method above with a similar class using lock, I get the following results for pushing 100,000 items: 1: Locked SuperStack average time: 6 ms 2: Interlocked SuperStack average time: 4.5 ms So, once again, we can get more efficient than a lock, though there is the cost of added code complexity. Fortunately for you, most of the concurrent collection you’d ever need are already created for you in the System.Collections.Concurrent (here) namespace – for more information, see my Little Wonders – The Concurent Collections Part 1 (here), Part 2 (here), and Part 3 (here). Summary We’ve seen before how the Interlocked class can be used to safely and efficiently add, increment, decrement, read, and exchange values in a multi-threaded environment. In addition to these, Interlocked CompareExchange() can be used to perform more complex logic without the need of a lock when lock contention is a concern. The added efficiency, though, comes at the cost of more complex code. As such, the standard lock is often sufficient for most thread-safety needs. But if profiling indicates you spend a lot of time waiting for locks, or if you just need a lock for something simple such as an increment, decrement, read, exchange, etc., then consider using the Interlocked class’s methods to reduce wait. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Interlocked,CompareExchange,threading,concurrency

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