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• Unable to Sign in to the Microsoft Online Services Signin application from Windows 7 client located behind ISA firewall

  - by Ravindra Pamidi

  A while ago i helped a customer troubleshoot authentication problem with Microsoft Online Services Signin application.  This customer was evaluating Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services) and was having trouble using the single sign on application behind ISA 2004 firewall.The network structure is fairly simple with single Windows 2003 Active Directory domain and Windows 7 clients. On a successful logon to the Microsoft Online Services Signin application, this application provides single signon functionality to all of Microsoft online services in the BPOS package. Symptoms:When trying to signin it fails with error "The service is currently unavailable. Please try again later. If problems continue, contact your service administrator". If ISA 2004 firewall is removed from the picture the authentication succeeds.Troubleshooting: Enabled ISA Server firewall logging along with Microsoft Network Monitor tool on the Windows 7 Client while reproducing the issue. Analysis of the ISA Server Firewall logs and Microsoft Network capture revealed that the Microsoft Online Services Sign In application when sending request to ISA Server does not send the domain credentials and as a result ISA Server responds with an error code of HTTP 407 Proxy authentication required listing out the supported authentication mechanisms.  The application in question is expected to send the credentials of the domain user in response to this request. However in this case, it fails to send the logged on user's domain credentials. Bit of researching on the Internet revealed that The "Microsoft Online Services Sign In" application by default does not support Outbound Internet Proxy authentication. In order for it to send the logged on user's domain credentials we had to make  changes to its configuration file "SignIn.exe.config" located under "Program Files\Microsoft Online Services\Sign In" folder. Step by Step details to configure the configuration file are documented on Microsoft TechNet website given below.  Configure your outbound authenticating proxy serverhttp://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/helphowto/cc54100d-d149-45a9-8e96-f248ecb1b596.htm After the above problem was addressed we were still not able to use the "Microsoft Online Services Sign In" application and it failed with the same error.  Analysis of another network capture revealed that the application in question is now sending the required credentials and the connection seems to terminate at a later stage. Enabled verbose logging for the "Microsoft Online Services Sign In" application and then reproduced the problem. Analysis of the logs revealed a time difference between the local client and Microsoft Online services server of around seven minutes which is above the acceptable time skew of five minutes. Excerpt from Microsoft Online Services Sign In application verbose log:  1/26/2012 1:57:51 PM Verbose SingleSignOn.GetSSOGenericInterface SSO Interface URL: https://signinservice.apac.microsoftonline.com/ssoservice/UID1/26/2012 1:57:52 PM Exception SSOSignIn.SignIn The security timestamp is invalid because its creation time ('2012-01-26T08:34:52.767Z') is in the future. Current time is '2012-01-26T08:27:52.987Z' and allowed clock skew is '00:05:00'.1/26/2012 1:57:52 PM Exception SSOSignIn.SignIn  Although the Windows 7 Clients successfully synchronized time to the domain controller for the domain, the domain controller was not configured to synchronize time with external NTP servers. This caused a gradual drift in time on the network thus resulting in the above issue. Reconfigured the domain controller holding the PDC FSMO role to synchronize time with external time source ( time.nist.gov ) and edited the system policy on the ISA server firewall to allow NTP traffic to time.nist.gov Configure the time source for the forest:Windows Time Servicehttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794937(WS.10).aspx Forced synchronization of Windows time using the command w32tm /resync on the domain controller and later on the clients each of which had corrected the seven minutes difference. This resolved the problem with logon to Microsoft Online Services Sign In.

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• Google Maps in .NET Problem

  - by H(at)Ni

  Hello, I've been struggling with Google maps till I found that someone implemented a wrapper so that you can use Google Map as an ASP.Net user control which is a great effort indeed. You can download it from this link. However, after using it for a while, I've found out that it is storing the Google map object only once in the session and getting it from there whenever needed which was a problem for me that when you update the map in some page, you'll find it updated on another page. So, I've digged deep in the code and updated it so that it stores the map object with a unique identifier that you set it as a property in the user control object like that: this.googleMapCtrl.ControlID = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); You can download the updated control files from here. Cheers,

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• CLR via C# - first post of many!

  - by TATWORTH

  I am currently reading CLR via C# ISBN 978-0-7356-2704-8. Whilst quite correctly described by the publisher as a "Deep Dive", this is a book that C# developers with 6-18 months plus experiance ought to read. Certainly any serious Microsoft programming shop ought to have a copy.  For our VB.NET bretheren, a book of this quality is a good excuse to learn C#. (And before you ask, my favourite language of C# and VB.NET is the one that gets me the next contract!) When I started programming 31 years ago I went through IBM 360 Orientation - this gave me an comprehension of what worked best at the machine code level - this is the first book I have found that explains the the working of the Dot Net framework to explain why particular choices are good, This is my first blog post here. In the coming weeks, I intend to: Carry on with my review of CLR via C# and bring out practical points from that work. Post details of useful utilities Post some "Tales from the coal face.."

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• Rant - Why is Windows Azure not available in Africa?

  - by Allan Rwakatungu

  Yesterday at the .NET user group meeting in Kampala Uganda  I gave a talk on cloud computing with Windows Azure  (details will be in my next blog post). The guys where excited. Without owning they own inftrastucture and at low cost they can build scalable , highly available applications. Not quite. Azure accounts are only available to people in particular countries - none from Africa. I attended PDC in 2008 when Microsoft unleashed Windows Azure. One of the case studies to show the benefits ofr cloud computing was a project in Africa for an education service in Ethiopia. The point they where making was that the cloud was perfect for scenarios where computing infrastructure is not sophiscated, like Ethiopia. Perfect , i thought. So i got my beta account from PDC and started playing around in the cloud. Then Azure goes live , my beta account does not work any more and I cant pay because am from Uganda. Microsoft , this sucks. I dont know the reasons for Microsoft doing this, but am sure we can work out something. We in Africa need the cloud more than anybody else in the world. Setting up data centers that are higly scalable and available for our startups is not an option we have. But we also cant pay for cloud computing with Microsoft. Microsoft, we know we are a tiny insigficant market for a company your size, but your excluding us only continues to widen the digital divide. Microsoft , how about you have a reseller model for cloud computing. Instead of trying to deal direclty with each client you have local partners who help you sell and bill your cloud services. I think that would lead to Windows Azure being available in Africa. I can help you resell in Uganda.

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• How to add a permanent redirect (301) for an htm file in IIS 7

  - by bconlon

  Looking in Web Analytics I could see several external sites pointing at an old .htm file on my web server that no longer existed, so I thought I would get IIS to redirect to the new .aspx replacement. How hard could it be? This has annoyed me for quite a while today so here is the answer. 1. Install the Http Redirection module - this is not installed by default!! Windows 7 Start->Control Panel->Programs and Features->Turn Windows Features on or off. Internet Information Services->World Wide Web Services->Common Http Features->HTTP Redirection. Windows Server 2008 Start->Administrative Tools->Server Manager. Roles->Web Server (IIS). Role Services->Add Role Services. Common Http Features->HTTP Redirection. 2. Edit your web.config file <configuration>     .....     <location path="oldfile.htm">         <system.webServer>             <httpRedirect enabled="true" destination="/newfile.aspx" exactDestination="true" childOnly="true" httpResponseStatus="Permanent" />         </system.webServer>     </location>     ..... </configuration> When a user clicks or Google crawls ‘oldfile.htm’ it will get a permanent redirect to ‘/newfile.aspx’ - and should take any Page Rank to the new file.  #

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• The Solution

  - by Patrick Liekhus

  So I recently attended a class about time management as well as read the book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey.  Both have been instrumental in helping me get my priorities aligned as well as keep me focused. The reason I bring this up is that it gave me a great idea for a small application with which to create a great technical stack solution that would be easy to demo and explain.  Therefore, the project from this point forward with be the Liekhus.TimeTracker application which will bring some the time management skills that I have acquired into a technical implementation.  The idea is rather simple, but leverages some of the basic principles of Covey along with some of the worksheets that I garnered from class.  The basics are as such: 1) a plan is a must have and 2) write it down!  A plan not written down is just an idea.  How many times have you had an idea that didn’t materialize?  Exactly.  Hence why I am writing it all down now! The worksheet consists of a few simple columns that I will outline below as well as some modifications that I made according to the Covey habits.  The worksheet looks like the following: Status Issue Area CQ Notes P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   The idea is really simple and straightforward; you write down all your tasks and keep track of them along the way.  The status stands for (P)ending, (F)inished or (L)ater.  You write a quick title for the issue and select the CQ (Covey Quadrant) with which the issue occurs.  The notes section is for things that happen while you are working through the issue.  And last, but not least, is the Area column that I added as a way to identify the Role or Area of your life that this task falls within based upon Covey’s teachings. The second part of this application is a simple phone log that allows you to track your phone conversations throughout the day.  All of this is currently done on a sheet of paper, but being involved in technology, I want it to have bells and whistles.  Therefore, this is my simple idea for a project that will allow me to test my theories about coding and implementations.  Stay tuned as the next session will be flushing out the concept and coming up with user stories to begin the SCRUM process. Thanks

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• FormatDate in Display Item Form Webpart

  - by H(at)Ni

  I've faced an issue that I wanted to display the date in the format of ('MMMM dd') that is retrieved from a sharepoint list in an arabic site collection. So, after googling this issue, I've found out that a possible solution to my poblem is using the function ddwrt:FormatDateTime that can be used as long as you'll include the following namespace xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime" My purpose was solved by writing this line of code in my xsl code behind for the webpart : ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(@StartDate),3073,'MMMM dd') but that worked only if the webpart is inserted into an English site . After trying to search but in vain, I started to use my guesses that ended up doing something like that: ddwrt:FormatDateTime(ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(@StartDate),3073,'dd/MM/yyyy'), 3073, 'MMMM dd') And the cause of the problem was that sharepoint parses the date as 'MM/dd/yyyy' which I think could be related to server regional settings, so I had to force it to parse the date in arabic-Egypt format as 'dd/MM/yyyy' in order to get the correct 'Month Day' format as expected.

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• Using LINQ to Twitter OAuth with Windows 8

  - by Joe Mayo

  In previous posts, I explained how to use LINQ to Twitter with Windows 8, but the example was a Twitter Search, which didn’t require authentication. Much of the Twitter API requires authentication, so this post will explain how you can perform OAuth authentication with LINQ to Twitter in a Windows 8 Metro-style application. Getting Started I have earlier posts on how to create a Windows 8 app and add pages, so I’ll assume it isn’t necessary to repeat here. One difference is that I’m using Visual Studio 2012 RC and some of the terminology and/or library code might be slightly different.  Here are steps to get started: Create a new Windows metro style app, selecting the Blank App project template. Create a new Basic Page and name it OAuth.xaml.  Note: You’ll receive a prompt window for adding files and you should click Yes because those files are necessary for this demo. Add a new Basic Page named TweetPage.xaml. Open App.xaml.cs and change !rootFrame.Navigate(typeof(MainPage)) to !rootFrame.Navigate(typeof(TweetPage)). Now that the project is set up you’ll see the reason why authentication is required by setting up the TweetPage. Setting Up to Tweet a Status In this section, I’ll show you how to set up the XAML and code-behind for a tweet.  The tweet logic will check to see if the user is authenticated before performing the tweet. To tweet, I put a TextBox and Button on the XAML page. The following code omits most of the page, concentrating primarily on the elements of interest in this post: <StackPanel Grid.Row="1"> <TextBox Name="TweetTextBox" Margin="15" /> <Button Name="TweetButton" Content="Tweet" Click="TweetButton_Click" Margin="15,0" /> </StackPanel> Given the UI above, the user types the message they want to tweet, and taps Tweet. This invokes TweetButton_Click, which checks to see if the user is authenticated.  If the user is not authenticated, the app navigates to the OAuth page.  If they are authenticated, LINQ to Twitter does an UpdateStatus to post the user’s tweet.  Here’s the TweetButton_Click implementation: void TweetButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { PinAuthorizer auth = null; if (SuspensionManager.SessionState.ContainsKey("Authorizer")) { auth = SuspensionManager.SessionState["Authorizer"] as PinAuthorizer; } if (auth == null || !auth.IsAuthorized) { Frame.Navigate(typeof(OAuthPage)); return; } var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth); Status tweet = twitterCtx.UpdateStatus(TweetTextBox.Text); new MessageDialog(tweet.Text, "Successful Tweet").ShowAsync(); } For authentication, this app uses PinAuthorizer, one of several authorizers available in the LINQ to Twitter library. I’ll explain how PinAuthorizer works in the next section. What’s important here is that LINQ to Twitter needs an authorizer to post a Tweet. The code above checks to see if a valid authorizer is available. To do this, it uses the SuspensionManager class, which is part of the code generated earlier when creating OAuthPage.xaml. The SessionState property is a Dictionary<string, object> and I’m using the Authorizer key to store the PinAuthorizer.  If the user previously authorized during this session, the code reads the PinAuthorizer instance from SessionState and assigns it to the auth variable. If the user is authorized, auth would not be null and IsAuthorized would be true. Otherwise, the app navigates the user to OAuthPage.xaml, which I’ll discuss in more depth in the next section. When the user is authorized, the code passes the authorizer, auth, to the TwitterContext constructor. LINQ to Twitter uses the auth instance to build OAuth signatures for each interaction with Twitter.  You no longer need to write any more code to make this happen. The code above accepts the tweet just posted in the Status instance, tweet, and displays a message with the text to confirm success to the user. You can pull the PinAuthorizer instance from SessionState, instantiate your TwitterContext, and use it as you need. Just remember to make sure you have a valid authorizer, like the code above. As shown earlier, the code navigates to OAuthPage.xaml when a valid authorizer isn’t available. The next section shows how to perform the authorization upon arrival at OAuthPage.xaml. Doing the OAuth Dance This section shows how to authenticate with LINQ to Twitter’s built-in OAuth support. From the user perspective, they must be navigated to the Twitter authentication page, add credentials, be navigated to a Pin number page, and then enter that Pin in the Windows 8 application. The following XAML shows the relevant elements that the user will interact with during this process. <StackPanel Grid.Row="2"> <WebView x:Name="OAuthWebBrowser" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Height="400" Margin="15" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="700" /> <TextBlock Text="Please perform OAuth process (above), enter Pin (below) when ready, and tap Authenticate:" Margin="15,15,15,5" /> <TextBox Name="PinTextBox" Margin="15,0,15,15" Width="432" HorizontalAlignment="Left" IsEnabled="False" /> <Button Name="AuthenticatePinButton" Content="Authenticate" Margin="15" IsEnabled="False" Click="AuthenticatePinButton_Click" /> </StackPanel> The WebView in the code above is what allows the user to see the Twitter authentication page. The TextBox is for entering the Pin, and the Button invokes code that will take the Pin and allow LINQ to Twitter to complete the authentication process. As you can see, there are several steps to OAuth authentication, but LINQ to Twitter tries to minimize the amount of code you have to write. The two important parts of the code to make this happen are the part that starts the authentication process and the part that completes the authentication process. The following code, from OAuthPage.xaml.cs, shows a couple events that are instrumental in making this process happen: public OAuthPage() { this.InitializeComponent(); this.Loaded += OAuthPage_Loaded; OAuthWebBrowser.LoadCompleted += OAuthWebBrowser_LoadCompleted; } The OAuthWebBrowser_LoadCompleted event handler enables UI controls when the browser is done loading – notice that the TextBox and Button in the previous XAML have their IsEnabled attributes set to False. When the Page.Loaded event is invoked, the OAuthPage_Loaded handler starts the OAuth process, shown here: void OAuthPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { auth = new PinAuthorizer { Credentials = new InMemoryCredentials { ConsumerKey = "", ConsumerSecret = "" }, UseCompression = true, GoToTwitterAuthorization = pageLink => Dispatcher.RunAsync(CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal, () => OAuthWebBrowser.Navigate(new Uri(pageLink, UriKind.Absolute))) }; auth.BeginAuthorize(resp => Dispatcher.RunAsync(CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal, () => { switch (resp.Status) { case TwitterErrorStatus.Success: break; case TwitterErrorStatus.RequestProcessingException: case TwitterErrorStatus.TwitterApiError: new MessageDialog(resp.Error.ToString(), resp.Message).ShowAsync(); break; } })); } The PinAuthorizer, auth, a field of this class instantiated in the code above, assigns keys to the Credentials property. These are credentials that come from registering an application with Twitter, explained in the LINQ to Twitter documentation, Securing Your Applications. Notice how I use Dispatcher.RunAsync to marshal the web browser navigation back onto the UI thread. Internally, LINQ to Twitter invokes the lambda expression assigned to GoToTwitterAuthorization when starting the OAuth process.  In this case, we want the WebView control to navigate to the Twitter authentication page, which is defined with a default URL in LINQ to Twitter and passed to the GoToTwitterAuthorization lambda as pageLink. Then you need to start the authorization process by calling BeginAuthorize. This starts the OAuth dance, running asynchronously.  LINQ to Twitter invokes the callback assigned to the BeginAuthorize parameter, allowing you to take whatever action you need, based on the Status of the response, resp. As mentioned earlier, this is where the user performs the authentication process, enters the Pin, and clicks authenticate. The handler for authenticate completes the process and saves the authorizer for subsequent use by the application, as shown below: void AuthenticatePinButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { auth.CompleteAuthorize( PinTextBox.Text, completeResp => Dispatcher.RunAsync(CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal, () => { switch (completeResp.Status) { case TwitterErrorStatus.Success: SuspensionManager.SessionState["Authorizer"] = auth; Frame.Navigate(typeof(TweetPage)); break; case TwitterErrorStatus.RequestProcessingException: case TwitterErrorStatus.TwitterApiError: new MessageDialog(completeResp.Error.ToString(), completeResp.Message).ShowAsync(); break; } })); } The PinAuthorizer CompleteAuthorize method takes two parameters: Pin and callback. The Pin is from what the user entered in the TextBox prior to clicking the Authenticate button that invoked this method. The callback handles the response from completing the OAuth process. The completeResp holds information about the results of the operation, indicated by a Status property of type TwitterErrorStatus. On success, the code assigns auth to SessionState. You might remember SessionState from the previous description of TweetPage – this is where the valid authorizer comes from. After saving the authorizer, the code navigates the user back to TweetPage, where they can type in a message, click the Tweet button, and observe that they have successfully tweeted. Summary You’ve seen how to get started with using LINQ to Twitter in a Metro-style application. The generated code contained a SuspensionManager class with way to manage information across multiple pages via its SessionState property. You also saw how LINQ to Twitter performs authorization in two steps of starting the process and completing the process when the user provides a Pin number. Remember to marshal callback thread back onto the UI – you saw earlier how to use Dispatcher.RunAsync to accomplish this. There were a few steps in the process, but LINQ to Twitter did minimize the amount of code you needed to write to make it happen. You can download the MetroOAuthDemo.zip sample on the LINQ to Twitter Samples Page.   @JoeMayo

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• Hello NHibernate! Quickstart with NHibernate (Part 1)

  - by BobPalmer

  When I first learned NHibernate, I could best describe the experience as less of a learning curve and more like a learning cliff.  A large part of that was the availability of tutorials.  In this first of a series of articles, I will be taking a crack at providing people new to NHibernate the information they need to quickly ramp up with NHibernate. For the first article, I've decided to address the gap of just giving folks enough code to get started.  No UI, no fluff - just enough to connect to a database and do some basic CRUD operations.  In future articles, I will discuss a repository pattern for NHibernate, parent-child relationships, and other more advanced topics. You can find the entire article via this Google Docs link: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AUP-rKyyUMKhZGczejdxeHZfOGMydHNqdGc0&hl=en Enjoy! -Bob

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• SilverlightShow for 20-26 Dec 2010

  - by Dave Campbell

  Check out the Top Five most popular news at SilverlightShow for last week (20 - 26 Dec 2010). The most popular news for last week is Ryan Alford's solution on handling an error in Silverlight 4 when using Entity Framework 4, followed by Jeremy Likness' video on building an RSS Feed Reader in Silverlight. Here is SilverlightShow's weekly top 5: Silverlight 4 - Productivity Power Tools and EF4 A Silverlight MVVM Feed Reader from Scratch in 30 Minutes Resizable Grid Using Thumb Controls A Simplified Grid Markup for Silverlight and WPF Announcing the Winner of Telerik Silverlight controls in SilverlightShow Post-webinar Survey Visit and bookmark SilverlightShow. Stay in the 'Light

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• APress Deal of the Day 11/Dec/2010 - Pro ASP.NET 4 in C# 2010, Fourth Edition

  - by TATWORTH

  Today's Apress Deal of the Days is Pro ASP.NET 4 in C# 2010, Fourth Edition - at $10 for the book, it is a bargain! I am currently reviewing this book and have been impressed by it. I suggest that you go over to http://www.apress.com/info/dailydeal and buy a copy. The book has a brief introduction to C# and then gives a thorough grounding in ASP.NET. The offer will be available to 08:00 Hrs UTC on the 12/Dec.

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• Event notifications for Reporting Systems

  - by Marc Schluper

  The last couple of months I have been working on an application that allows people to browse a data mart. Nice, but nothing new. In this context I have an idea that I want to publish before anyone else patents it: event notifications. You see, reporting systems are not used as much as we’d like. Typically, users don’t know where to look for reports that might interest them. At best, there are some standard reports that people generate every so often, i.e. based on a time trigger. Or some reporting systems can be configured to send monthly reports around, for convenience. But apart from that, the reporting system is just sitting there, waiting for the rare curious user who makes the effort to dig a bit for treasures to be found. Wouldn’t it be great if there were data triggers? Imagine we could configure the reporting system to let us know when something interesting has happened. It would send us a message containing a link that would take us to the relevant section of the reporting system, showing a report with all the data pertaining to that event, preparing us for proper actions. Here in the North West this would really be great. You see, it rains here most of the time from October to June, so why even check the weather forecast? But sometimes, sometimes it snows. And sometimes the sun shines. So rather than me going to the weather site and seeing over and over again that it will be raining, making me think “why bother?” I’d like to configure the weather site so that it lets me know when the rain stops. Now, hopefully nobody has patented this idea already. Let me know.

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• BizTalk 2009 - Error when Testing Map with Flat File Source Schema

  - by StuartBrierley

  I have recently been creating some flat file schemas using the BizTalk Server 2009 Flat File Schema Wizard.  I have then been mapping these flat file schemas to a "normal" xml schema format. I have not previsouly had any cause to map flat files and ran into some trouble when testing the first of these flat file maps; with an instance of the flat file as the source it threw an XSL transform error: Test Map.btm: error btm1050: XSL transform error: Unable to write output instance to the following <file:///C:\Documents and Settings\sbrierley\Local Settings\Temp\_MapData\Test Mapping\Test Map_output.xml>. Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1. Due to the complexity of the map in question I decided to created a small test map using the same source and destination schemas to see if I could pinpoint the problem.  Although the source message instance vaildated correctly against the flat file schema, when I then tested this simplified map I got the same error. After a time of fruitless head scratching and some serious google time I figured out what the problem was. Looking at the map properties I noticed that I had the test map input set to "XML" - for a flat file instance this should be set to "native".

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• Eris Update to 2.1 &ndash; No Problems

  - by Bunch

  I updated my Eris to Android’s 2.1 OS last night and everything went pretty well. I had wanted to update the phone mainly for two reasons. The first was to have the Navigation feature of the Google Maps application and to make YouTube work again. YouTube used to work on the phone and then stopped a few weeks ago. But before I started I looked around various forums and blogs to see what doom and gloom folks were talking about the update. Based on what I read and some common sense I used the following steps: Made sure there was a good charge on the phone. Connected to our WiFi (the download is about 77 megs, not very 3G friendly). Checked that the contacts were synced with the GMail account. As a precaution I copied off any music and pictures from the SD card to my laptop. Started the update process and waited for the download and installation to complete. It took maybe 30 minutes to do everything. After the update I re-synced the contacts and tested out the phone (it does make calls after all). I did need to download the text to speech application to get the Maps Navigation to work but that was easy enough since the application prompted me to download it. And now the YouTube application works again. Technorati Tags: Android

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• Embedded Spark 2010 Summer Challenge

  - by Valter Minute

  If you have a good idea for a cool embedded device based on Windows Embedded 7 and some free time to work on it you can partecipate to the Embedded Spark 2010 Summer Challenge. Just submit a short paper describing your idea and, if your idea is one of the 75 selected by the judges, you’ll receive some hardware to put your idea in practice and a chance to attend ESC Boston for free and win 15.000 dollars. The latest challenge has been won by Marco Bodoira, a fellow Italian embedded developer, so I hope to see many Italian developers (and non developers) presenting their ideas and project for this new challenge! You can find rules, ideas, forums and all the information you need at the challenge web site: http://www.embeddedspark.com/

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• APress Deal of the Day 26/Jul/2013 - Pro Windows Embedded Compact 7

  - by TATWORTH

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/07/26/apress-deal-of-the-day-26jul2013---pro-windows-embedded.aspxToday's $10 deal of the day from APress at http://www.apress.com/9781430241799 is Pro Windows Embedded Compact 7"This book is the natural choice for developers who want to create sophisticated small-footprint devices for both consumer and enterprise use. After significant upgrades from Microsoft, Windows Embedded Compact 7 is more powerful than ever, as you'll discover in this carefully focused deep-dive."

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• .NET Code Evolution

  - by Alois Kraus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/07/24/153504.aspxAt my day job I do look at a lot of code written by other people. Most of the code is quite good and some is even a masterpiece. And there is also code which makes you think WTF… oh it was written by me. Hm not so bad after all. There are many excuses reasons for bad code. Most often it is time pressure followed by not enough ambition (who cares) or insufficient training. Normally I do care about code quality quite a lot which makes me a (perceived) slow worker who does write many tests and refines the code quite a lot because of the design deficiencies. Most of the deficiencies I do find by putting my design under stress while checking for invariants. It does also help a lot to step into the code with a debugger (sometimes also Windbg). I do this much more often when my tests are red. That way I do get a much better understanding what my code really does and not what I think it should be doing. This time I do want to show you how code can evolve over the years with different .NET Framework versions. Once there was  time where .NET 1.1 was new and many C++ programmers did switch over to get rid of not initialized pointers and memory leaks. There were also nice new data structures available such as the Hashtable which is fast lookup table with O(1) time complexity. All was good and much code was written since then. At 2005 a new version of the .NET Framework did arrive which did bring many new things like generics and new data structures. The “old” fashioned way of Hashtable were coming to an end and everyone used the new Dictionary<xx,xx> type instead which was type safe and faster because the object to type conversion (aka boxing) was no longer necessary. I think 95% of all Hashtables and dictionaries use string as key. Often it is convenient to ignore casing to make it easy to look up values which the user did enter. An often followed route is to convert the string to upper case before putting it into the Hashtable. Hashtable Table = new Hashtable(); void Add(string key, string value) { Table.Add(key.ToUpper(), value); } This is valid and working code but it has problems. First we can pass to the Hashtable a custom IEqualityComparer to do the string matching case insensitive. Second we can switch over to the now also old Dictionary type to become a little faster and we can keep the the original keys (not upper cased) in the dictionary. Dictionary<string, string> DictTable = new Dictionary<string, string>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase); void AddDict(string key, string value) { DictTable.Add(key, value); } Many people do not user the other ctors of Dictionary because they do shy away from the overhead of writing their own comparer. They do not know that .NET has for strings already predefined comparers at hand which you can directly use. Today in the many core area we do use threads all over the place. Sometimes things break in subtle ways but most of the time it is sufficient to place a lock around the offender. Threading has become so mainstream that it may sound weird that in the year 2000 some guy got a huge incentive for the idea to reduce the time to process calibration data from 12 hours to 6 hours by using two threads on a dual core machine. Threading does make it easy to become faster at the expense of correctness. Correct and scalable multithreading can be arbitrarily hard to achieve depending on the problem you are trying to solve. Lets suppose we want to process millions of items with two threads and count the processed items processed by all threads. A typical beginners code might look like this: int Counter; void IJustLearnedToUseThreads() { var t1 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t1.Start(); var t2 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t2.Start(); t1.Join(); t2.Join(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception("Hmm " + Counter + " != " + 2 * Increments); } const int Increments = 10 * 1000 * 1000; void ThreadWorkMethod() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counter++; } } It does throw an exception with the message e.g. “Hmm 10.222.287 != 20.000.000” and does never finish. The code does fail because the assumption that Counter++ is an atomic operation is wrong. The ++ operator is just a shortcut for Counter = Counter + 1 This does involve reading the counter from a memory location into the CPU, incrementing value on the CPU and writing the new value back to the memory location. When we do look at the generated assembly code we will see only inc dword ptr [ecx+10h] which is only one instruction. Yes it is one instruction but it is not atomic. All modern CPUs have several layers of caches (L1,L2,L3) which try to hide the fact how slow actual main memory accesses are. Since cache is just another word for redundant copy it can happen that one CPU does read a value from main memory into the cache, modifies it and write it back to the main memory. The problem is that at least the L1 cache is not shared between CPUs so it can happen that one CPU does make changes to values which did change in meantime in the main memory. From the exception you can see we did increment the value 20 million times but half of the changes were lost because we did overwrite the already changed value from the other thread. This is a very common case and people do learn to protect their  data with proper locking.   void Intermediate() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Action acc = ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate; var ar1 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); var ar2 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); ar1.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); ar2.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Intermediate did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { lock (this) { Counter++; } } } This is better and does use the .NET Threadpool to get rid of manual thread management. It does give the expected result but it can result in deadlocks because you do lock on this. This is in general a bad idea since it can lead to deadlocks when other threads use your class instance as lock object. It is therefore recommended to create a private object as lock object to ensure that nobody else can lock your lock object. When you read more about threading you will read about lock free algorithms. They are nice and can improve performance quite a lot but you need to pay close attention to the CLR memory model. It does make quite weak guarantees in general but it can still work because your CPU architecture does give you more invariants than the CLR memory model. For a simple counter there is an easy lock free alternative present with the Interlocked class in .NET. As a general rule you should not try to write lock free algos since most likely you will fail to get it right on all CPU architectures. void Experienced() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Experienced did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Interlocked.Increment(ref Counter); } } Since time does move forward we do not use threads explicitly anymore but the much nicer Task abstraction which was introduced with .NET 4 at 2010. It is educational to look at the generated assembly code. The Interlocked.Increment method must be called which does wondrous things right? Lets see: lock inc dword ptr [eax] The first thing to note that there is no method call at all. Why? Because the JIT compiler does know very well about CPU intrinsic functions. Atomic operations which do lock the memory bus to prevent other processors to read stale values are such things. Second: This is the same increment call prefixed with a lock instruction. The only reason for the existence of the Interlocked class is that the JIT compiler can compile it to the matching CPU intrinsic functions which can not only increment by one but can also do an add, exchange and a combined compare and exchange operation. But be warned that the correct usage of its methods can be tricky. If you try to be clever and look a the generated IL code and try to reason about its efficiency you will fail. Only the generated machine code counts. Is this the best code we can write? Perhaps. It is nice and clean. But can we make it any faster? Lets see how good we are doing currently. Level Time in s IJustLearnedToUseThreads Flawed Code Intermediate 1,5 (lock) Experienced 0,3 (Interlocked.Increment) Master 0,1 (1,0 for int[2]) That lock free thing is really a nice thing. But if you read more about CPU cache, cache coherency, false sharing you can do even better. int[] Counters = new int[12]; // Cache line size is 64 bytes on my machine with an 8 way associative cache try for yourself e.g. 64 on more modern CPUs void Master() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, 0); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, Counters.Length - 1); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); Counter = Counters[0] + Counters[Counters.Length - 1]; if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Master did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Master(object number) { int index = (int) number; for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counters[index]++; } } The key insight here is to use for each core its own value. But if you simply use simply an integer array of two items, one for each core and add the items at the end you will be much slower than the lock free version (factor 3). Each CPU core has its own cache line size which is something in the range of 16-256 bytes. When you do access a value from one location the CPU does not only fetch one value from main memory but a complete cache line (e.g. 16 bytes). This means that you do not pay for the next 15 bytes when you access them. This can lead to dramatic performance improvements and non obvious code which is faster although it does have many more memory reads than another algorithm. So what have we done here? We have started with correct code but it was lacking knowledge how to use the .NET Base Class Libraries optimally. Then we did try to get fancy and used threads for the first time and failed. Our next try was better but it still had non obvious issues (lock object exposed to the outside). Knowledge has increased further and we have found a lock free version of our counter which is a nice and clean way which is a perfectly valid solution. The last example is only here to show you how you can get most out of threading by paying close attention to your used data structures and CPU cache coherency. Although we are working in a virtual execution environment in a high level language with automatic memory management it does pay off to know the details down to the assembly level. Only if you continue to learn and to dig deeper you can come up with solutions no one else was even considering. I have studied particle physics which does help at the digging deeper part. Have you ever tried to solve Quantum Chromodynamics equations? Compared to that the rest must be easy ;-). Although I am no longer working in the Science field I take pride in discovering non obvious things. This can be a very hard to find bug or a new way to restructure data to make something 10 times faster. Now I need to get some sleep ….

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• MySQL - Configuration

  - by Stuart Brierley

  Having previously detailed how to install MySQL Server, the next step is configuring MySQL. The MySQL configuration wizard can either be run immediately following installation from the MySQL installation wizard or manually from the Start Menu. Following the splash screen you can then choose whether to run a detailed or standard configuration. The detailed configuration allows you to create the optimal configuration for your specific machine, whereas the standard configuration creates a general configuration that can then be manually tuned. I chose detailed.   You are then asked to choose the type of server instance that is being configured. In this case it is a developer machine. Following this you are asked to choose the type of database usage that you expect on the server. I opted for multifunctional. You must then specify the location of the InnoDB tablespace.   Next specify the number of concurent connections to the server.   Now you must configure the networking options. I left the Strict mode enabled as this is the recommended option, but I disabled TCP/IP networking as I wanted to restrict this MySQL installation to the local machine only.   Set the character set that is best suited to your use - for me this was the default standard character set. Next up is the option to run MySQL as a service and whether or not to include the mysql dircetories in the windows PATH. I kept the install as a windows service option enabled, but unchecked the Launch MySQL server automatically option. This is because I only wanted MySQL running when I specifically want to use it. I also enabled the include in windows PATH option.   You can then change the security settings for the mysql installation. I opted to change the root password, disable root from local machines and disable annoymous access.   You are now ready to execute the configuration.   Once completed you should hopefully see the completed screen with lots of nice ticks against the various configuration tasks.

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• A quick hello to the Western Kentucky .NET User Group

  - by Muljadi Budiman

  A few days back, I got a chance to speak at the Western Kentucky .NET User Group meeting in Murray, Kentucky.  The opportunity came up because the original speaker, Jeff Blankenburg, had another obligation and was thus unable to come to this meeting.  I volunteered to deliver his presentation, which is an overview of MIX10 conference. It was a great experience for me; got to drive around and do a little bit of sight-seeing – can’t say I’ve ever been to Kentucky before, so first trip ever there.  I got to meet the user group’s current lead, Tom Turner and got to chat and discuss about all kinds of stuff with the other members.  Cheers to Matt Gawarecki and Brandon Sharp! The presentation itself mostly covers new features in Visual Studio 2010, which was recently released on April 12 – got to demonstrate Historical Debugging in IntelliTrace, Parallel Stacks, View Call Hierarchy and show some Extensions.  We also covered some of the new functionalities in Silverlight 4 (using webcams, drag & drop support among others) and I got to show off Scott Guthrie’s Windows Phone 7 Twitter app.  Altogether, it was quite a bit to cover in 70 minutes or so, but I think everyone enjoyed it. Jeff provided me with the presentation slides (which I modify a bit) and demo applications; so I’m putting it up here for those that may be interested in downloading them.  Please keep in mind that all the demos were made with VS2010 RC, so there may be slight tweaks to get it to work on the RTM version.

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• SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio Remote Diag

  - by juanlarios

  I have had some time this week to try out some tools that I have been meaning to try out. This week I am trying out the SP 2010 Diagnostic Studio. I installed it successfully and tried it on my development evironment. I was able to build a report and a snapshot of the environment. I decided to turn my attention to my Employer's intranet environment. This would allow me to analyze it and measure it against benchmarks. I didn't want to install the Diagnostic studio on the Production Envorinment, lucky for me, the Diagnostic studio can be run remotely, well...kind of. Issue My development environment is a stand alone, full installation of SharePoint 2010 Server. It has Office 2010, SQL 2008 Enterprise, a DC...well you get the point, it's jammed packed! But more importantly it's a stand alone, self contained VM environment. Well Microsoft has instructions as to how to connect remotely with Diagnostic Studio here. The deciving part of this is that the SP2010DS prompts you for credentails. So I thought I was getting the right account to run the reports. I tried all the Power Shell commands in the link above but I still ended up getting the following errors: 06/28/2011 12:50:18    Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client cannot process the request...If the SPN exists, but CredSSP cannot use Kerberos to validate the identity of the target computer and you still want to allow the delegation of the user credentials to the target computer, use gpedit.msc and look at the following policy: Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Credentials Delegation -> Allow Fresh Credentials with NTLM-only Server Authentication.  Verify that it is enabled and configured with an SPN appropriate for the target computer. For example, for a target computer name "myserver.domain.com", the SPN can be one of the following: WSMAN/myserver.domain.com or WSMAN/*.domain.com. Try the request again after these changes. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic. 06/28/2011 12:54:47    Access to the path '\\<targetserver>\C$\Users\<account logging in>\AppData\Local\Temp' is denied. You might also get an error message like this: The WinRM client cannot process the request. A computer policy does not allow the delegation of the user credentials to the target computer. Explanation After looking at the event logs on the target environment, I noticed that there were a several Security Exceptions. After looking at the specifics around who was denied access, I was able to see the account that was being denied access, it was the client machine administrator account. Well of course that was never going to work!!! After some quick Googling, the last error message above will lead you to edit the Local Group Policy on the client server. And although there are instructions from microsoft around doing this, it really will not work in this scenario. Notice the Description and how it only applices to authentication mentioned? Resolution I can tell you what I did, but I wish there was a better way but I simply don't know if it's duable any other way. Because my development environment had it's own DC, I didn't really want to mess with Kerberos authentication. I would also not be smart to connect that server to the domain, considering it has it's own DC. I ended up installing SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio on another Windows 7 Dev environment I have, and connected the machien to the domain. I ran all the necesary remote credentials commands mentioned here. Those commands add the group policy for you! Once I did this I was able to authenticate properly and I was able to get the reports. Conclusion   You can run SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio Remotely but it will require some specific scenarions. A couple of things I should mention is that as far as I understand, SP2010 DS, will install agents on your target environment to run tests and retrieve the data. I was a Farm Administrator, and also a Server Admin on SharePoint Server. I am not 100% sure if you need all those permissions but I that's just what I have to my internal intranet.   I deally I would like to have a machine that I can have SharePoint 2010 DIagnostic Studio installed and I can run that against client environments. It appears that I will not be able to do that, unless I enable Kerberos on my Windows 7 Machine now. If you have it installed in the same way I would like to have it, please let me know, I'll keep trying to get what I'm after. Hope this helps someone out there doing the same.

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• Using PreApplicationStartMethod for ASP.NET 4.0 Application to Initialize assemblies

  - by ChrisD

  Sometimes your ASP.NET application needs to hook up some code before even the Application is started. Assemblies supports a custom attribute called PreApplicationStartMethod which can be applied to any assembly that should be loaded to your ASP.NET application, and the ASP.NET engine will call the method you specify within it before actually running any of code defined in the application. Lets discuss how to use it using Steps : 1. Add an assembly to an application and add this custom attribute to the AssemblyInfo.cs. Remember, the method you speicify for initialize should be public static void method without any argument. Lets define a method Initialize. You need to write : [assembly:PreApplicationStartMethod(typeof(MyInitializer.InitializeType), "InitializeApp")] 2. After you define this to an assembly you need to add some code inside InitializeType.InitializeApp method within the assembly. public static class InitializeType {     public static void InitializeApp()     {           // Initialize application     } } 3. You must reference this class library so that when the application starts and ASP.NET starts loading the dependent assemblies, it will call the method InitializeApp automatically. Warning Even though you can use this attribute easily, you should be aware that you can define these kind of method in all of your assemblies that you reference, but there is no guarantee in what order each of the method to be called. Hence it is recommended to define this method to be isolated and without side effect of other dependent assemblies. The method InitializeApp will be called way before the Application_start event or even before the App_code is compiled. This attribute is mainly used to write code for registering assemblies or build providers. Read Documentation I hope this post would come helpful.

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• First Windows Phone 7 &ndash; Mobile LOB App.

  - by Richard Jones

  So I spent a couple of hours yesterday building my first Windows 7 Phone Series. application.   I still can’t get used to saying Windows 7 Phone Series.   So I think I’ll just go with WP7.   I must say I’m really impressed.    Calling web-services a breeze laying out User Interface a very straight forward.   I had made called into Dynamics NAV using web-services in under 10 minutes. Working in XAML takes a bit of getting used to,  I’m not trying to-do anything too clever yet. One thing I will point out to transition from one XAML page to the next use this.NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/Primary.xaml", UriKind.Relative)); Going from Compact Framework this is equivalent of a Window.Show Its so nice to be able to talk nicely again, about Windows Based Mobile Development!

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• Think before you animate

  - by David Paquette

  Animations are becoming more and more common in our applications.  With technologies like WPF, Silverlight and jQuery, animations are becoming easier for developers to use (and abuse).  When used properly, animation can augment the user experience.  When used improperly, animation can degrade the user experience.  Sometimes, the differences can be very subtle. I have recently made use of animations in a few projects and I very quickly realized how easy it is to abuse animation techniques.  Here are a few things I have learned along the way. 1) Don’t animate for the sake of animating We’ve all seen the PowerPoint slides with annoying slide transitions that animate 20 different ways.  It’s distracting and tacky.  The same holds true for your application.  While animations are fun and becoming easy to implement, resist the urge to use the technology just because you think the technology is amazing.   2) Animations should (and do) have meaning I recently built a simple Windows Phone 7 (WP7) application, Steeped (download it here).  The application has 2 pages.  The first page lists a number of tea types.  When the user taps on one of the tea types, the application navigates to the second page with information about that tea type and some options for the user to choose from.       One of the last things I did before submitting Steeped to the marketplace was add a page transition between the 2 pages.  I choose the Slide / Fade Out transition.  When the user selects a tea type, the main page slides to the left and fades out.  At the same time, the details page slides in from the right and fades in.  I tested it and thought it looked great so I submitted the app.  A few days later, I asked a friend to try the app.  He selected a tea type, and I was a little surprised by how he used the app.  When he wanted to navigate back to the main page, instead of pressing the back button on the phone, he tried to use a swiping gesture.  Of course, the swiping gesture did nothing because I had not implemented that feature.  After thinking about it for a while, I realized that the page transition I had chosen implied a particular behaviour.  As a user, if an action I perform causes an item (in this case the page) to move, then my expectation is that I should be able to move it back.  I have since added logic to handle the swipe gesture and I think the app flows much better now. When using animation, it pays to ask yourself:  What story does this animation tell my users?   3) Watch the replay Some animations might seem great initially but can get annoying over time.  When you use an animation in your application, make sure you try using it over and over again to make sure it doesn’t get annoying.  When I add an animation, I try watch it at least 25 times in a row.  After watching the animation repeatedly, I can make a more informed decision whether or not I should keep the animation.  Often, I end up shortening the length of the animations.   4) Don’t get in the users way An animation should never slow the user down.  When implemented properly, an animation can give a perceived bump in performance.  A good example of this is a the page transitions in most of the built in apps on WP7.  Obviously, these page animations don’t make the phone any faster, but they do provide a more responsive user experience.  Why?  Because most of the animations begin as soon as the user has performed some action.  The destination page might not be fully loaded yet, but the system responded immediately to user action, giving the impression that the system is more responsive.  If the user did not see anything happen until after the destination page was fully loaded, the application would feel clumsy and slow.  Also, it is important to make sure the animation does not degrade the performance (or perceived performance) of the application.   Jut a few things to consider when using animations.  As is the case with many technologies, we often learn how to misuse it before we learn how to use it effectively.

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• I Clobbered a Leopard with a Window Last Night

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I’ve had my 15” Mac Book Pro for a little over a year now, and its hands-down the best laptop I’ve ever owned…hardware wise. And I tried, I really really tried, to like OSX. I even bought Parallels so I could run Windows 7 and all my development tools while still trying to live in an OSX world. But in the end, I missed Windows too much. There were just too many shortcomings with OSX that kept me from being productive. For one thing, Office for Mac is *not* Office for Windows. The applications are written by different teams, and Excel on the Mac is just different enough to be painful. The VM experience was adequate, but my MBP would heat up like crazy when running it and the experience trying to get Windows apps to interact with an OSX file system was awkward. And I found I was in the VM more than I thought I’d be. iMovie is not as easy to use for doing simple movie editing as Windows Movie Maker. There’s no free blog editing software for OSX that’s on par with Windows Live Writer. And really, all I was using OSX for was Twitter (which I can use a Windows client for) and web browsing (also something Windows can provide obviously). So I had to ask myself – why am I forcing myself to use an operating system I don’t like, on a laptop that can support Windows 7? And so I paved my MBP and am happily running Windows 7 on it…and its fantastic! All the good stuff with the hardware is still there with the goodness of Win 7. Happy happy. I did run into some snags doing this though, and that’s really what this blog post is about – things to be aware of if you want to install Win 7 directly on your MBP metal. First, Ensure You Have Your Original Mac Install Disk This was a warning my buddy Dylan, who’s been running Win 7 on his MBP for a while now, gave me early on. The reason you need that original disk is that the hardware drivers you need are all located there. Apparently you can’t easily download them, so make sure you have them ahead of time. Second, Forget BootCamp The only reason you need BootCamp is if you still want the option to boot into OSX. If you don’t, then you don’t need BootCamp. In fact, you don’t even need BootCamp to install Win 7. What you *will* need though is a DVD with Win 7 burnt on it. Apple doesn’t support bootable USB drives. Well, actually they do for Mac Book Airs which don’t come with optical drives…but to get it working you’ll need to edit a system file of BootCamp so your make of MBP is included in an XML document, and even then you *still* are using BootCamp meaning you’ll be making an OSX partition. So don’t worry about BootCamp, just burn a Windows 7 disc, put it into the DVD drive, and restart your MBP. Third, Know The Secret Commands So after putting in the Windows 7 DVD and restarting your MBP, you’ll want to hold down the ‘C’ key during boot up. This tells the MBP that it should boot from the DVD drive instead of the hard drive. Interestingly, it appears you don’t have to do this if its the Mac OSX install disc (more on that in a second), but regardless – hold down C and Windows will start the install process. Next up is the partition process. You’ll notice that there’s a partition called ETI or something like that. This has to do with the drive format that Apple uses and how they partition their system drives. What I did – I blew it away! At first I didn’t, but I was told I couldn’t install Windows on the remaining space due to the different drive format. Blowing away the ETI partition (and all other partitions) allowed me to continue the Windows install. *REMEMBER –  No warranty is provided or implied, just telling you what I did and how I got it to work. Ok, so now Windows is installed and I’m rebooting. Everything looks good, but I need drivers! So I put in the OSX install DVD and run the BootCamp assistant which installs all the Windows drivers I need. Fantastic! Oh, I need to restart – no problem. OH NO, PROBLEM! I left the OSX install DVD in the drive and now the MBP wants to boot from the drive and install OSX! I’m not holding down the C key, what the heck?! Ok, well there must be a way to eject this disk…hmm…no physical button on the side…the eject button doesn’t seem to work on the keyboard…no little pin hole to insert something to force the disc out…well what the…?! It turns out, if you want to eject a disc at boot up, you need (and I kid you not) to plug a mouse into the laptop and hold down the right-click button while its booting. This ejected the disc for me. Seriously. Finally, Things You Should Be Aware Of Once you have Windows up and running there’s a few things you need to be aware of, mainly new keyboard shortcuts. For instance, on the Mac keyboard there is no Home, End, PageUp or PageDown. There’s also no obvious way to do something like select large amounts of text (like you would by holding Shift-Home at the end of a line of text for instance). So here’s some shortcuts you need to know: Home – fn + left arrow End – fn + right arrow Select a line of text as you would with the Home key – Shift + fn + left arrow Select a line of text as you would with the End key – Shift + fn + right arrow Page Up – fn + up arrow Page Down – fn + down arrow Also, you’ll notice that the awesome Mac track pad doesn’t respond to taps as clicks. No fear, this is just a setting that needs to be altered in the BootCamp control panel (that controls the Mac Hardware-specific settings within Windows, you can access it easily from the system tray icon) One other thing, battery life seems a bit lower than with OSX, but then again I’m also doing more than Twitter or web browsing on this thing now. Conclusion My laptop runs awesome now that I have Windows 7 on there. It’s obviously up to individual taste, but for me I just didn’t see benefits to living in an OSX world when everything I needed lived in Windows. And also, I finally am back to an operating system that doesn’t require me to eject a USB drive before physically removing it! It’s 2012 folks, how has this not been fixed?! D

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• JSCompress fails to compress my js file - why?

  - by Renso

  Issue: You use the online compression utility jscompress.com to compress your js file but it fails with an error. Why this may be happening and how to fix it. Possible causes: Apparently not using open and closing curly brackets in an IF statement would cause this. Well turns out this is not the case. Look at the following example and see if you can figure out what the issue is :-)   function SetupDeliveredVPRecontactNotes($item, id) {     var theData;     $.ajax({         data: { deliveredVPId: id },         url: $('#ajaxGetDeliveredVPRecontactNotesUrl').val(),         type: "GET",         async: false,         dataType: "html",         success: function(data, result) {             $item.empty();             var input = '<textarea class="recontactNote" rows="4" name="DeliveredVPRecontactNotes_' + id + '" id="DeliveredVPRecontactNotes_' + id + '" cols="115">' + data + '</textarea>';             $item.append(input);             theData = data;         },         error: function(XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) {             $item.empty();             alert("An error occurred: The operation to retrieve the DeliveredVP's Recontact Notes has failed");         }     });                  //ajax     return theData; }     Solution: The name of the method/function is the same as the message in the ALERT message when the spaces are removed: " DeliveredVP Recontact Notes" becomes " DeliveredVPRecontactNotes" and mathes that of the function. So I changed it to " DeliveredVP's Recontact Notes"

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