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• Converting a Visual Studio 2003 Web Project to a Visual Studio 2008 Web Application Project

  - by navaneeth

  This walkthrough describes how to convert a Visual Studio .NET 2002 or Visual Studio .NET 2003 Web project to a Visual Studio 2008 Web application project. The Visual Studio 2008 Web application project model is like the Visual Studio 2005 Web application project model. Therefore, the conversion processes are similar. For more information about Web application projects, see ASP.NET Web Application Projects. You can also convert from a Visual Studio .NET Web project to a Visual Studio 2008 Web site project. However, conversion to a Web application project is the approach that is supported, and gives you the convenience of tools to help with the conversion. For example, when you convert to a Visual Studio 2008 Web application project, you can use the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard to automate part of the process. For information about how to convert a Visual Studio .NET Web project to a Visual Studio 2008 Web site, see Common Web Project Conversion Issues and Solutions. There are two parts involved in converting a Visual Studio 2002 or 2003 Web project to a Visual Studio 2008 Web application project. The parts are as follows: Converting the project. You can use the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard for the initial conversion of the project and Web.config files. You can later use the Convert To Web Application command to update the project's files and structure. Upgrading the .NET Framework version of the project. You must upgrade the project's .NET Framework version to either .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 or to .NET Framework 3.5. This .NET Framework version upgrade is required because Visual Studio 2008 cannot target earlier versions of the .NET Framework. You can perform this upgrade during the project conversion, by using the Conversion Wizard. Alternatively, you can upgrade the .NET Framework version after you convert the project.   NoteYou can change a project's .NET Framework version manually. To do so, in Visual Studio open the property pages for the project, click the Application tab, and then select a new version from the Target Framework list. This walkthrough illustrates the following tasks: Opening the Visual Studio .NET project in Visual Studio 2008 and creating a backup of the project files. Upgrading the .NET Framework version that the project targets. Converting the project file and the Web.config file. Converting ASP.NET code files. Testing the converted project. Prerequisites    To complete this walkthrough, you will need: Visual Studio 2008. A Web site project that was created in Visual Studio .NET version 2002 or 2003 that compiles and runs without errors. Converting the Project and Upgrading the .NET Framework Version    To begin, you open the project in Visual Studio 2008, which starts the conversion. It offers you an opportunity to back up the project before converting it. NoteIt is strongly recommended that you back up the project. The conversion works on the original project files, which cannot be recovered if the conversion is not successful.To convert the project and back up the files In Visual Studio 2008, in the File menu, click Open and then click Project. The Open Project dialog box is displayed. Browse to the folder that contains the project or solution file for the Visual Studio .NET project, select the file, and then click Open. NoteMake sure that you open the project by using the Open Project command. If you use the Open Web Site command, the project will be converted to the Web site project format.The Conversion Wizard opens and prompts you to create a backup before converting the project. To create the backup, click Yes. Click Browse, select the folder in which the backup should be created, and then click Next. Click Finish. The backup starts. NoteThere might be significant delays as the Conversion Wizard copies files, with no updates or progress indicated. Wait until the process finishes before you continue.When the conversion finishes, the wizard prompts you to upgrade the targeted version of the .NET Framework for the project. To upgrade to the .NET Framework 3.5, click Yes. To upgrade the project to target the .NET Framework 2.0 SP1, click No. It is recommended that you leave the check box selected that asks whether you want to upgrade all Webs in the solution. If you upgrade to .NET Framework 3.5, the project's Web.config file is modified at the same time as the project file. When the upgrade and conversion have finished, a message is displayed that indicates that you have completed the first step in converting your project. Click OK. The wizard displays status information about the conversion. Click Close. Testing the Converted Project    After the conversion has finished, you can test the project to make sure that it runs. This will also help you identify code in the project that must be updated. To verify that the project runs If you know about changes that are required for the code to run with the new version of the .NET Framework, make those changes. In the Build menu, click Build. Any missing references or other compilation issues in the project are displayed in the Error List window. The most likely issues are missing assembly references or issues with dynamically generated types. In Solution Explorer, right-click the Web page that will be used to launch the application, and then click Set as Start Page. On the Debug menu, click Start Debugging. If debugging is not enabled, the Debugging Not Enabled dialog box is displayed. Select the option to add a Web.config file that has debugging enabled, and then click OK. Verify that the converted project runs as expected. Do not continue with the conversion process until all build and run-time errors are resolved. Converting ASP.NET Code Files    ASP.NET Web page files and user-control files in Visual Studio 2008 that use the code-behind model have an associated designer file. The files that you just converted will have an associated code-behind file, but no designer file. Therefore, the next step is to generate designer files. NoteOnly ASP.NET Web pages and user controls that have their code in a separate code file require a separate designer file. For pages that have inline code and no associated code file, no designer file will be generated.To convert ASP.NET code files In Solution Explorer, right-click the project node, and then click Convert To Web Application. The files are converted. Verify that the converted code files have a code file and a designer file. Build and run the project to verify the results of the conversion.

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• VS 2010 SP1 (Beta) and IIS Express

  - by ScottGu

  Last month we released the VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Beta.  You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it.  You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here. IIS Express Earlier this summer I blogged about IIS Express.  IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that is optimized for developer scenarios.  We think it combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server (aka Cassini) currently built-into VS today with the full power of IIS.  Specifically: It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all) It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk.  It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for IIS Express – and you can start to take advantage of this starting with last month’s VS 2010 SP1 Beta release. Downloading and Installing IIS Express IIS Express isn’t included as part of the VS 2010 SP1 Beta.  Instead it is a separate ~4MB download which you can download and install using this link (it uses WebPI to install it).  Once IIS Express is installed, VS 2010 SP1 will enable some additional IIS Express commands and dialog options that allow you to easily use it. Enabling IIS Express for Existing Projects Visual Studio today defaults to using the built-in ASP.NET Development Server (aka Cassini) when running ASP.NET Projects: Converting your existing projects to use IIS Express is really easy.  You can do this by opening up the project properties dialog of an existing project, and then by clicking the “web” tab within it and selecting the “Use IIS Express” checkbox. Or even simpler, just right-click on your existing project, and select the “Use IIS Express…” menu command: And now when you run or debug your project you’ll see that IIS Express now starts up and runs automatically as your web-server: You can optionally right-click on the IIS Express icon within your system tray to see/browse all of sites and applications running on it: Note that if you ever want to revert back to using the ASP.NET Development Server you can do this by right-clicking the project again and then select the “Use Visual Studio Development Server” option (or go into the project properties, click the web tab, and uncheck IIS Express).  This will revert back to the ASP.NET Development Server the next time you run the project. IIS Express Properties Visual Studio 2010 SP1 exposes several new IIS Express configuration options that you couldn’t previously set with the ASP.NET Development Server.  Some of these are exposed via the property grid of your project (select the project node in the solution explorer and then change them via the property window): For example, enabling something like SSL support (which is not possible with the ASP.NET Development Server) can now be done simply by changing the “SSL Enabled” property to “True”: Once this is done IIS Express will expose both an HTTP and HTTPS endpoint for the project that we can use: SSL Self Signed Certs IIS Express ships with a self-signed SSL cert that it installs as part of setup – which removes the need for you to install your own certificate to use SSL during development.  Once you change the above drop-down to enable SSL, you’ll be able to browse to your site with the appropriate https:// URL prefix and it will connect via SSL. One caveat with self-signed certificates, though, is that browsers (like IE) will go out of their way to warn you that they aren’t to be trusted: You can mark the certificate as trusted to avoid seeing dialogs like this – or just keep the certificate un-trusted and press the “continue” button when the browser warns you not to trust your local web server. Additional IIS Settings IIS Express uses its own per-user ApplicationHost.config file to configure default server behavior.  Because it is per-user, it can be configured by developers who do not have admin credentials – unlike the full IIS.  You can customize all IIS features and settings via it if you want ultimate server customization (for example: to use your own certificates for SSL instead of self-signed ones). We recommend storing all app specific settings for IIS and ASP.NET within the web.config file which is part of your project – since that makes deploying apps easier (since the settings can be copied with the application content).  IIS (since IIS 7) no longer uses the metabase, and instead uses the same web.config configuration files that ASP.NET has always supported – which makes xcopy/ftp based deployment much easier. Making IIS Express your Default Web Server Above we looked at how we can convert existing sites that use the ASP.NET Developer Web Server to instead use IIS Express.  You can configure Visual Studio to use IIS Express as the default web server for all new projects by clicking the Tools->Options menu  command and opening up the Projects and Solutions->Web Projects node with the Options dialog: Clicking the “Use IIS Express for new file-based web site and projects” checkbox will cause Visual Studio to use it for all new web site and projects. Summary We think IIS Express makes it even easier to build, run and test web applications.  It works with all versions of ASP.NET and supports all ASP.NET application types (including obviously both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications).  Because IIS Express is based on the IIS 7.5 codebase, you have a full web-server feature-set that you can use.  This means you can build and run your applications just like they’ll work on a real production web-server.  In addition to supporting ASP.NET, IIS Express also supports Classic ASP and other file-types and extensions supported by IIS – which also makes it ideal for sites that combine a variety of different technologies. Best of all – you do not need to change any code to take advantage of it.  As you can see above, updating existing Visual Studio web projects to use it is trivial.  You can begin to take advantage of IIS Express today using the VS 2010 SP1 Beta. Hope this helps, Scott

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• SQL Azure Reporting Limited CTP Arrived

  - by Shaun

  It’s about 3 months later when I registered the SQL Azure Reporting CTP on the Microsoft Connect after TechED 2010 China. Today when I checked my mailbox I found that the SQL Azure team had just accepted my request and sent the activation code over to me. So let’s have a look on the new SQL Azure Reporting.   Concept The SQL Azure Reporting provides cloud-based reporting as a service, built on SQL Server Reporting Services and SQL Azure technologies. Cloud-based reporting solutions such as SQL Azure Reporting provide many benefits, including rapid provisioning, cost-effective scalability, high availability, and reduced management overhead for report servers; and secure access, viewing, and management of reports. By using the SQL Azure Reporting service, we can do: Embed the Visual Studio Report Viewer ADO.NET Ajax control or Windows Form control to view the reports deployed on SQL Azure Reporting Service in our web or desktop application. Leverage the SQL Azure Reporting SOAP API to manage and retrieve the report content from any kinds of application. Use the SQL Azure Reporting Service Portal to navigate and view the reports deployed on the cloud. Since the SQL Azure Reporting was built based on the SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Service, we can use any tools we are familiar with, such as the SQL Server Integration Studio, Visual Studio Report Viewer. The SQL Azure Reporting Service runs as a remote SQL Server Reporting Service just on the cloud rather than on a server besides us.   Establish a New SQL Azure Reporting Let’s move to the windows azure deveploer portal and click the Reporting item from the left side navigation bar. If you don’t have the activation code you can click the Sign Up button to send a requirement to the Microsoft Connect. Since I already recieved the received code mail I clicked the Provision button. Then after agree the terms of the service I will select the subscription for where my SQL Azure Reporting CTP should be provisioned. In this case I selected my free Windows Azure Pass subscription. Then the final step, paste the activation code and enter the password of our SQL Azure Reporting Service. The user name of the SQL Azure Reporting will be generated by SQL Azure automatically. After a while the new SQL Azure Reporting Server will be shown on our developer portal. The Reporting Service URL and the user name will be shown as well. We can reset the password from the toolbar button.   Deploy Report to SQL Azure Reporting If you are familiar with SQL Server Reporting Service you will find this part will be very similar with what you know and what you did before. Firstly we open the SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio and create a new Report Server Project. Then we will create a shared data source where the report data will be retrieved from. This data source can be SQL Azure but we can use local SQL Server or other database if it opens the port up. In this case we use a SQL Azure database located in the same data center of our reporting service. In the Credentials tab page we entered the user name and password to this SQL Azure database. The SQL Azure Reporting CTP only available at the North US Data Center now so that the related SQL Server and hosted service might be better to select the same data center to avoid the external data transfer fee. Then we create a very simple report, just retrieve all records from a table named Members and have a table in the report to list them. In the data source selection step we choose the shared data source we created before, then enter the T-SQL to select all records from the Member table, then put all fields into the table columns. The report will be like this as following In order to deploy the report onto the SQL Azure Reporting Service we need to update the project property. Right click the project node from the solution explorer and select the property item. In the Target Server URL item we will specify the reporting server URL of our SQL Azure Reporting. We can go back to the developer portal and select the reporting node from the left side, then copy the Web Service URL and paste here. But notice that we need to append “/reportserver” after pasted. Then just click the Deploy menu item in the context menu of the project, the Visual Studio will compile the report and then upload to the reporting service accordingly. In this step we will be prompted to input the user name and password of our SQL Azure Reporting Service. We can get the user name from the developer portal, just next to the Web Service URL in the SQL Azure Reporting page. And the password is the one we specified when created the reporting service. After about one minute the report will be deployed succeed.   View the Report in Browser SQL Azure Reporting allows us to view the reports which deployed on the cloud from a standard browser. We copied the Web Service URL from the reporting service main page and appended “/reportserver” in HTTPS protocol then we will have the SQL Azure Reporting Service login page. After entered the user name and password of the SQL Azure Reporting Service we can see the directories and reports listed. Click the report will launch the Report Viewer to render the report.   View Report in a Web Role with the Report Viewer The ASP.NET and Windows Form Report Viewer works well with the SQL Azure Reporting Service as well. We can create a ASP.NET Web Role and added the Report Viewer control in the default page. What we need to change to the report viewer are Change the Processing Mode to Remote. Specify the Report Server URL under the Server Remote category to the URL of the SQL Azure Reporting Web Service URL with “/reportserver” appended. Specify the Report Path to the report which we want to display. The report name should NOT include the extension name. For example my report was in the SqlAzureReportingTest project and named MemberList.rdl then the report path should be /SqlAzureReportingTest/MemberList. And the next one is to specify the SQL Azure Reporting Credentials. We can use the following class to wrap the report server credential. 1: private class ReportServerCredentials : IReportServerCredentials 2: { 3: private string _userName; 4: private string _password; 5: private string _domain; 6:  7: public ReportServerCredentials(string userName, string password, string domain) 8: { 9: _userName = userName; 10: _password = password; 11: _domain = domain; 12: } 13:  14: public WindowsIdentity ImpersonationUser 15: { 16: get 17: { 18: return null; 19: } 20: } 21:  22: public ICredentials NetworkCredentials 23: { 24: get 25: { 26: return null; 27: } 28: } 29:  30: public bool GetFormsCredentials(out Cookie authCookie, out string user, out string password, out string authority) 31: { 32: authCookie = null; 33: user = _userName; 34: password = _password; 35: authority = _domain; 36: return true; 37: } 38: } And then in the Page_Load method, pass it to the report viewer. 1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: ReportViewer1.ServerReport.ReportServerCredentials = new ReportServerCredentials( 4: "<user name>", 5: "<password>", 6: "<sql azure reporting web service url>"); 7: } Finally deploy it to Windows Azure and enjoy the report.   Summary In this post I introduced the SQL Azure Reporting CTP which had just available. Likes other features in Windows Azure, the SQL Azure Reporting is very similar with the SQL Server Reporting. As you can see in this post we can use the existing and familiar tools to build and deploy the reports and display them on a website. But the SQL Azure Reporting is just in the CTP stage which means It is free. There’s no support for it. Only available at the North US Data Center. You can get more information about the SQL Azure Reporting CTP from the links following SQL Azure Reporting Limited CTP at MSDN SQL Azure Reporting Samples at TechNet Wiki You can download the solutions and the projects used in this post here.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Getting Started with ASP.NET Membership, Profile and RoleManager

  - by Ben Griswold

  A new ASP.NET MVC project includes preconfigured Membership, Profile and RoleManager providers right out of the box.  Try it yourself – create a ASP.NET MVC application, crack open the web.config file and have a look.  First, you’ll find the ApplicationServices database connection: <connectionStrings>   <add name="ApplicationServices"        connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|aspnetdb.mdf;User Instance=true"        providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/> </connectionStrings>   Notice the connection string is referencing the aspnetdb.mdf database hosted by SQL Express and it’s using integrated security so it’ll just work for you without having to call out a specific database login or anything. Scroll down the file a bit and you’ll find each of the three noted sections: <membership>   <providers>     <clear/>     <add name="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider"          type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"          connectionStringName="ApplicationServices"          enablePasswordRetrieval="false"          enablePasswordReset="true"          requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false"          requiresUniqueEmail="false"          passwordFormat="Hashed"          maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5"          minRequiredPasswordLength="6"          minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0"          passwordAttemptWindow="10"          passwordStrengthRegularExpression=""          applicationName="/"             />   </providers> </membership>   <profile>   <providers>     <clear/>     <add name="AspNetSqlProfileProvider"          type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"          connectionStringName="ApplicationServices"          applicationName="/"             />   </providers> </profile>   <roleManager enabled="false">   <providers>     <clear />     <add connectionStringName="ApplicationServices" applicationName="/" name="AspNetSqlRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />     <add applicationName="/" name="AspNetWindowsTokenRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.WindowsTokenRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />   </providers> </roleManager> Really. It’s all there. Still don’t believe me.  Run the application, walk through the registration process and finally login and logout.  Completely functional – and you didn’t have to do a thing! What else?  Well, you can manage your users via the Configuration Manager which is hiding in Visual Studio behind Projects > ASP.NET Configuration. The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool isn’t MVC-specific (neither is the Membership, Profile or RoleManager stuff) but it’s neat and I hardly ever see anyone using it.  Here you can set up and edit users, roles, and set access permissions for your site. You can manage application settings, establish your SMTP settings, configure debugging and tracing, define default error page and even take your application offline.  The UI is rather plain-Jane but it works great. And here’s the best of all.  Let’s say you, like most of us, don’t want to run your application on top of the aspnetdb.mdf database.  Let’s suppose you want to use your own database and you’d like to add the membership stuff to it.  Well, that’s easy enough. Take a look inside your [drive:]\%windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\ folder.  Here you’ll find a bunch of files.  If you were to run the InstallCommon.sql, InstallMembership.sql, InstallRoles.sql and InstallProfile.sql files against the database of your choices, you’d be installing the same membership, profile and role artifacts which are found in the aspnet.db to your own database.  Too much trouble?  Okay. Run [drive:]\%windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regsql.exe from the command line instead.  This will launch the ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard which walks you through the installation of those same database objects into the new or existing database of your choice. You may not always have the luxury of using this tool on your destination server, but you should use it whenever you can.  Last tip: don’t forget to update the ApplicationServices connectionstring to point to your custom database after the setup is complete. At the risk of sounding like a smarty, everything I’ve mentioned in this post has been around for quite a while. The thing is that not everyone has had the opportunity to use it.  And it makes sense. I know I’ve worked on projects which used custom membership services.  Why bother with the out-of-the-box stuff, right?   And the .NET framework is so massive, who can know it all. Well, eventually you might have a chance to architect your own solution using any implementation you’d like or you will have the time to play around with another aspect of the framework.  When you do, think back to this post.

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• Learning AngularJS by Example – The Customer Manager Application

  - by dwahlin

  I’m always tinkering around with different ideas and toward the beginning of 2013 decided to build a sample application using AngularJS that I call Customer Manager. It’s not exactly the most creative name or concept, but I wanted to build something that highlighted a lot of the different features offered by AngularJS and how they could be used together to build a full-featured app. One of the goals of the application was to ensure that it was approachable by people new to Angular since I’ve never found overly complex applications great for learning new concepts. The application initially started out small and was used in my AngularJS in 60-ish Minutes video on YouTube but has gradually had more and more features added to it and will continue to be enhanced over time. It’ll be used in a new “end-to-end” training course my company is working on for AngularjS as well as in some video courses that will be coming out. Here’s a quick look at what the application home page looks like: In this post I’m going to provide an overview about how the application is organized, back-end options that are available, and some of the features it demonstrates. I’ve already written about some of the features so if you’re interested check out the following posts: Building an AngularJS Modal Service Building a Custom AngularJS Unique Value Directive Using an AngularJS Factory to Interact with a RESTful Service Application Structure The structure of the application is shown to the right. The  homepage is index.html and is located at the root of the application folder. It defines where application views will be loaded using the ng-view directive and includes script references to AngularJS, AngularJS routing and animation scripts, plus a few others located in the Scripts folder and to custom application scripts located in the app folder. The app folder contains all of the key scripts used in the application. There are several techniques that can be used for organizing script files but after experimenting with several of them I decided that I prefer things in folders such as controllers, views, services, etc. Doing that helps me find things a lot faster and allows me to categorize files (such as controllers) by functionality. My recommendation is to go with whatever works best for you. Anyone who says, “You’re doing it wrong!” should be ignored. Contrary to what some people think, there is no “one right way” to organize scripts and other files. As long as the scripts make it down to the client properly (you’ll likely minify and concatenate them anyway to reduce bandwidth and minimize HTTP calls), the way you organize them is completely up to you. Here’s what I ended up doing for this application: Animation code for some custom animations is located in the animations folder. In addition to AngularJS animations (which are defined using CSS in Content/animations.css), it also animates the initial customer data load using a 3rd party script called GreenSock. Controllers are located in the controllers folder. Some of the controllers are placed in subfolders based upon the their functionality while others are placed at the root of the controllers folder since they’re more generic:   The directives folder contains the custom directives created for the application. The filters folder contains the custom filters created for the application that filter city/state and product information. The partials folder contains partial views. This includes things like modal dialogs used in the application. The services folder contains AngularJS factories and services used for various purposes in the application. Most of the scripts in this folder provide data functionality. The views folder contains the different views used in the application. Like the controllers folder, the views are organized into subfolders based on their functionality:   Back-End Services The Customer Manager application (grab it from Github) provides two different options on the back-end including ASP.NET Web API and Node.js. The ASP.NET Web API back-end uses Entity Framework for data access and stores data in SQL Server (LocalDb). The other option on the back-end is Node.js, Express, and MongoDB.   Using the ASP.NET Web API Back-End To run the application using ASP.NET Web API/SQL Server back-end open the .sln file at the root of the project in Visual Studio 2012 or higher (the free Express 2013 for Web version is fine). Press F5 and a browser will automatically launch and display the application. Using the Node.js Back-End To run the application using the Node.js/MongoDB back-end follow these steps: In the CustomerManager directory execute 'npm install' to install Express, MongoDB and Mongoose (package.json). Load sample data into MongoDB by performing the following steps: Execute 'mongod' to start the MongoDB daemon Navigate to the CustomerManager directory (the one that has initMongoCustData.js in it) then execute 'mongo' to start the MongoDB shell Enter the following in the mongo shell to load the seed files that handle seeding the database with initial data: use custmgr load("initMongoCustData.js") load("initMongoSettingsData.js") load("initMongoStateData.js") Start the Node/Express server by navigating to the CustomerManager/server directory and executing 'node app.js' View the application at http://localhost:3000 in your browser. Key Features The Customer Manager application certainly doesn’t cover every feature provided by AngularJS (as mentioned the intent was to keep it as simple as possible) but does provide insight into several key areas: Using factories and services as re-useable data services (see the app/services folder) Creating custom directives (see the app/directives folder) Custom paging (see app/views/customers/customers.html and app/controllers/customers/customersController.js) Custom filters (see app/filters) Showing custom modal dialogs with a re-useable service (see app/services/modalService.js) Making Ajax calls using a factory (see app/services/customersService.js) Using Breeze to retrieve and work with data (see app/services/customersBreezeService.js). Switch the application to use the Breeze factory by opening app/services.config.js and changing the useBreeze property to true. Intercepting HTTP requests to display a custom overlay during Ajax calls (see app/directives/wcOverlay.js) Custom animations using the GreenSock library (see app/animations/listAnimations.js) Creating custom AngularJS animations using CSS (see Content/animations.css) JavaScript patterns for defining controllers, services/factories, directives, filters, and more (see any JavaScript file in the app folder) Card View and List View display of data (see app/views/customers/customers.html and app/controllers/customers/customersController.js) Using AngularJS validation functionality (see app/views/customerEdit.html, app/controllers/customerEditController.js, and app/directives/wcUnique.js) More… Conclusion I’ll be enhancing the application even more over time and welcome contributions as well. Tony Quinn contributed the initial Node.js/MongoDB code which is very cool to have as a back-end option. Access the standard application here and a version that has custom routing in it here. Additional information about the custom routing can be found in this post.

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• Another Marketing Conference, part two – the afternoon

  - by Roger Hart

  In my previous post, I’ve covered the morning sessions at AMC2012. Here’s the rest of the write-up. I’ve skipped Charles Nixon’s session which was a blend of funky futurism and professional development advice, but you can see his slides here. I’ve also skipped the Google presentation, as it was a little thin on insight. 6 – Brand ambassadors: Getting universal buy in across the organisation, Vanessa Northam Slides are here This was the strongest enforcement of the idea that brand and campaign values need to be delivered throughout the organization if they’re going to work. Vanessa runs internal communications at e-on, and shared her experience of using internal comms to align an organization and thereby get the most out of a campaign. She views the purpose of internal comms as: “…to help leaders, to communicate the purpose and future of an organization, and support change.” This (and culture) primes front line staff, which creates customer experience and spreads brand. You ensure a whole organization knows what’s going on with both internal and external comms. If everybody is aligned and informed, if everybody can clearly articulate your brand and campaign goals, then you can turn everybody into an advocate. Alignment is a powerful tool for delivering a consistent experience and message. The pathological counter example is the one in which a marketing message goes out, which creates inbound customer contacts that front line contact staff haven’t been briefed to handle. The NatWest campaign was again mentioned in this context. The good example was e-on’s cheaper tariff campaign. Building a groundswell of internal excitement, and even running an internal launch meant everyone could contribute to a good customer experience. They found that meter readers were excited – not a group they’d considered as obvious in providing customer experience. But they were a group that has a lot of face-to-face contact with customers, and often were asked questions they may not have been briefed to answer. Being able to communicate a simple new message made it easier for them, and also let them become a sales and marketing asset to the organization. 7 – Goodbye Internet, Hello Outernet: the rise and rise of augmented reality, Matt Mills I wasn’t going to write this up, because it was essentially a sales demo for Aurasma. But the technology does merit some discussion. Basically, it replaces QR codes with visual recognition, and provides a simple-looking back end for attaching content. It’s quite sexy. But here’s my beef with it: QR codes had a clear visual language – when you saw one you knew what it was and what to do with it. They were clunky, but they had the “getting started” problem solved out of the box once you knew what you were looking at. However, they fail because QR code reading isn’t native to the platform. You needed an app, which meant you needed to know to download one. Consequentially, you can’t use QR codes with and ubiquity, or depend on them. This means marketers, content providers, etc, never pushed them, and they remained and awkward oddity, a minority sport. Aurasma half solves problem two, and re-introduces problem one, making it potentially half as useful as a QR code. It’s free, and you can apparently build it into your own apps. Add to that the likelihood of it becoming native to the platform if it takes off, and it may have legs. I guess we’ll see. 8 – We all need to code, Helen Mayor Great title – good point. If there was anybody in the room who didn’t at least know basic HTML, and if Helen’s presentation inspired them to learn, that’s fantastic. However, this was a half hour sales pitch for a basic coding training course. Beyond advocating coding skills it contained no useful content. Marketers may also like to consider some of these resources if they’re looking to learn code: Code Academy – free interactive tutorials Treehouse – learn web design, web dev, or app dev WebPlatform.org – tutorials and documentation for web tech  11 – Understanding our inner creativity, Margaret Boden This session was the most theoretical and probably least actionable of the day. It also held my attention utterly. Margaret spoke fluently, fascinatingly, without slides, on the subject of types of creativity and how they work. It was splendid. Yes, it raised a wry smile whenever she spoke of “the content of advertisements” and gave an example from 1970s TV ads, but even without the attempt to meet the conference’s theme this would have been thoroughly engaging. There are, Margaret suggested, three types of creativity: Combinatorial creativity The most common form, and consisting of synthesising ideas from existing and familiar concepts and tropes. Exploratory creativity Less common, this involves exploring the limits and quirks of a particular constraint or style. Transformational creativity This is uncommon, and arises from finding a way to do something that the existing rules would hold to be impossible. In essence, this involves breaking one of the constraints that exploratory creativity is composed from. Combinatorial creativity, she suggested, is particularly important for attaching favourable ideas to existing things. As such is it probably worth developing for marketing. Exploratory creativity may then come into play in something like developing and optimising an idea or campaign that now has momentum. Transformational creativity exists at the edges of this exploration. She suggested that products may often be transformational, but that marketing seemed unlikely to in her experience. This made me wonder about Listerine. Crucially, transformational creativity is characterised by there being some element of continuity with the strictures of previous thinking. Once it has happened, there may be  move from a revolutionary instance into an explored style. Again, from a marketing perspective, this seems to chime well with the thinking in Youngme Moon’s book: Different Talking about the birth of Modernism is visual art, Margaret pointed out that transformational creativity has historically risked a backlash, demanding what is essentially an education of the market. This is best accomplished by referring back to the continuities with the past in order to make the new familiar. Thoughts The afternoon is harder to sum up than the morning. It felt less concrete, and was troubled by a short run of poor presentations in the middle. Mainly, I found myself wrestling with the internal comms issue. It’s one of those things that seems astonishingly obvious in hindsight, but any campaign – particularly any large one – is doomed if the people involved can’t believe in it. We’ve run things here that haven’t gone so well, of course we have; who hasn’t? I’m not going to air any laundry, but people not being informed (much less aligned) feels like a common factor. It’s tough though. Managing and anticipating information needs across an organization of any size can’t be easy. Even the simple things like ensuring sales and support departments know what’s in a product release, and what messages go with it are easy to botch. The thing I like about framing this as a brand and campaign advocacy problem is that it makes it likely to get addressed. Better is always sexier than less-worse. Any technical communicator who’s ever felt crowded out by a content strategist or marketing copywriter  knows this – increasing revenue gets a seat at the table far more readily than reducing support costs, even if the financial impact is identical. So that’s it from AMC. The big thought-provokers were social buying behaviour and eliciting behaviour change, and the value of internal communications in ensuring successful campaigns and continuity of customer experience. I’ll be chewing over that for a while, and I’d definitely return next year.      

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 14, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 14, 2010New ProjectsBD File Hash: BD File Hash is a convenient file hash and hash compare tool for Windows which currently works with MD5, SHA-1, and SHA-256 algorithms. FileScan: This is an application that searches through a drive or directory structure for files matching a filter. This project was converted from VB to ...genesis9: genesis9HeinanOS: HeinanOS is an operating system developed mainly in C++. HeinanOS is a light OS (1.44 MB image) with a lot of capabilites and many more are being ...MediaBrowserWS - Creates a Web Service for the popular MediaBrowser plugin: Creates a web service in Media Center for accessing your MediaBrowser collection. Allows for external devices (Tablets/phones/laptops) to access a ...MME: New Edition of Managed Menu Extensions for Visual Studio 2010 The Main goal of "MME" is to provide easy access to adding Right Click menus in the ...MVMMapper: Generate the ViewModel and its mapping to the Model when implementing MVVM in .NET. Developed using T4 templates. Current version supports Silver...ProjectArDotNet: Si te agarro te parto! Si te agarro te emperno no me importa que seas menor de edad!Scriptagility for DotNetNuke: Scriptagility is a DotNetNuke module for Javascript developers. This module provides dynamic client scripting infrastructure for developing javascr...simpleLinux Distro: SimpleLinux. is a Linux distributions that is easy to use. Simple Linux website: http://simplelinux.tkTag Cloud Control for asp.net: Tag Cloud Control for asp.net allows the user to display the most important keywords to display in tag cloud. Each Tag has it own navigation url to...thefreeimdb: fsadie qwUppityUp: UppityUp is a simple and light-weight tray application which monitors a remote server and shows a notification when it comes online. This is usefu...Vivid3D 2 - DirectX 10 3D ToolKit: The sequel to my first ever engine wrote several years ago. It is not based on it in anyway. VSIDev: VSI DevXTQXK_WORK: Actionscript 3.0东坡博客: 这是一个ASP。net mvc 2博客。New Releases.NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library: Release 2010.08: Added extension methods for Bitmap manipulation (scaling for now): - Bitmap.ScaleToSize() - Bitmap.ScaleToSizeProportional() - Bitmap.ScaleProport...Black Falcon Software's Database Data-Access-Layers: “SQLHELPER”, “ORAHELPER” - Handling Binary Data: See attached document...BTech Networking Library: BTech Networking Library: Same as pervious just new namespace, extended networking coming soon!!!Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V37: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Generic Entity Model 2: GEM2 build 54383: This is second BETA release of GEM2! Please see source code change sets for updates! Following implementation is not included in this release: My...Hades: Projet Hadès - Official Demo - Version 0.1.0 Beta: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Projet Hadès - Official Demo - Version 0.1.0 Beta ------------------...HeinanOS: HeinanOS M1 Source Code: You can download HeinanOS M1 Source Code and contribute to HeinanOS development! Be aware that you should not use this code for your own systems! ...HeinanOS: Milestone 1: This is the first major release for HeinanOS 1.0 Please note this is a PRE-RELEASE! This release includes the following features: -Bootable DOS-...HKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201006131900): New features: (None) Bug fix: Incorrect message submit date of message/ replies. (Note: Showing message submit date is enabled since Build 20100...HKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201006140110): New features: (None) Bug fix: (None) Improvements: (None) Other changes: Set time zone of message date as Hong Kong. Adjusted the format of messa...MediaCoder.NET: MediaCoder.NET v1.0 Beta 1.5: Installer file for MediaCoder.NET v1.0 beta 1.5. Now converts multiple files.MME: First release: Features of this release 1. One installer MME.msi. However you can also install MMEMenuManagerSetup.vsix which installs a project template that e...MSBuild Launch Pad (mPad): 1.1 Beta 1: Platform selection box is added.MVMMapper: MVMMapper Release v 1.0.1: This release has no downloadable documentation. Please use the Documentation section to get started.NginxTray: NginxTray 0.7 RC2: NginxTray 0.7 RC2PowerAuras: PowerAuras-3.0.0K-beta3: New Auras: Item Name Equipment Slot Tracking Changes from beta1 5 new aura textures Fixed Tracking bug Added graphical equipment slot sele...PowerAuras: PowerAuras-3.0.0K-beta4: New Auras: Item Name Equipment Slot Tracking Changes from beta1 5 new aura textures Fixed Tracking bug Added graphical equipment slot sele...Scriptagility for DotNetNuke: Scriptagility 1.0 (Beta): Initial public release please evaluate and feedbackSharpDevelop: SharpDevelop 4.0 Beta 1: Release notes: http://community.sharpdevelop.net/forums/t/11388.aspxsimpleLinux Distro: Project X3: This is an example of download for simpleLinuxSOAPI - StackOverflow API Parser/Wrapper Generator: SOAPI Beta 3: The SOAPI Beta 3 download will be made availabe later today when the initial documentation is complete. The previously available Beta 1 download h...Sofa: Initial release V1.0: This is the first release of Sofa. As it is made of code being previously used, as we tested it is a stable release. But bugs are always possible,...Tag Cloud Control for asp.net: Tag Cloud Control for asp.net: Tag Cloud Control for asp.net allows the user to display the most important keywords to display in tag cloud. Each Tag has it own navigation url to...UppityUp: UppityUp v0.1: First functional version, supports monitoring availability by ping (ICMP) requests. Fit for general use. Consists of one standalone .exe file - no...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30613.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWindStyle ExifInfo for Windows Live Writer: 1.1.0.0: Add: Multiple Language(English and Simplified Chinese); Add: Insert multiple files; Fix: Error when insert pictures without Exif info; Update: Icon...Work Recorder - Hold on own time!: WorkRecorder 1.2: +Add a whole day chartXsltDb - DotNetNuke Module Builder: 01.01.24: Syntax highlighting delivered!New samples for RadControls. On single page you can find RadTreeView, RadRating, RadChart, RadFormDecorator, RadEdito...xUnit.net Contrib: xunitcontrib 0.4 (ReSharper 5.0 RTM + dotCover): xunitcontrib release 0.4 (ReSharper runner) This release provides a test runner plugin for Resharper 5.0, 4.5 and 4.1, targetting all versions of x...Most Popular ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeRIA Services EssentialsNeatUploadBxf (Basic XAML Framework)Agile Personal Development Methodology.NET Transactional File ManagerSOLID by exampleASP.NET MVC Time PlannerWEI ShareSiverlight ProjectMost Active ProjectsjQuery Library for SharePoint Web Servicespatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleRhyduino - Arduino and Managed CodeCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeCassandraemonBlogEngine.NETLightweight Fluent WorkflowMediaCoder.NETAndrew's XNA Helpers

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• WWDC and Tech Ed: A Tale of Two DevCons

  - by andrewbrust

  Next week marks the first full week of June.  Summer will feel in full swing and it will be a pretty big season for technology.  In seeming acknowledgement of that very fact, both Apple and Microsoft will be holding large developers conferences starting Monday.  Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in lovely San Francisco and Microsoft will hold its Tech Ed conference in muggy, oil-laden yet soulful New Orleans.  A brief survey of each show reveals much about the differences in each company’s offerings, strategy, and approach to customers and partners. In the interest of full disclosure, I must explain that I will be speaking at Microsoft’s Tech Ed show, and have done so, on and off, since 2003.  I have never been to an Apple conference and, as readers of this blog may know, I acquired my first ever Apple product 2 months ago when I bought an iPad on the day of that product’s launch.  I think I have keen insights into Microsoft’s conference.  My ability to comment on Apple’s event ranges somewhere between backseat driver and naive observer.  Just so you know. Although both shows cater to their respective company’s developers, there are a number of differences in the events’ purposes and content approaches.  First off, let’s consider each show as a news and PR vehicle.  WWDC will feature Steve Jobs’ keynote address and most likely will be where Apple officially reveals details of its 4th-generation iPhone. Jobs will likely also provide deep background information on the corresponding iPhone OS release.  These presumed announcements will make the show a magnet for the tech press and tech blogger elite.  Apple’s customers will be interested too, especially since the iPhone OS release will likely be made available to owners of existing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. Tech Ed, on the other hand, may not be especially newsworthy at all.  The keynote address will be given by Bob Muglia, who is President of the company’s Server and Tools Division, and he’ll likely be reviewing things more than previewing them. That’s because the company has, in the last 6-8 months, already released new versions of a majority of its products, including Windows, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, its Azure cloud platform, its .NET software development layer, its Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology and its Visual Studio developer suite.  Redmond’s product pipeline has functioned more like a firehose of late, and the company has a ton of work to do to get developers up to speed on everything that’s new. I know I keep saying “developers,” but in Tech Ed’s case, that’s not really accurate.  In North America, Tech Ed caters to both developers and IT pros (i.e. technologists who work with physical IT infrastructure, as well as security and administration of the server software that runs on it).  This pairing has, since its inception, struck some as anomalous and others, including many exhibitors, as very smart. Certainly, it means Tech Ed ends up being a confab for virtually all professionals in Microsoft’s ecosystem.  And this year, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) conference will be co-located with Tech Ed, further enhancing that fusion effect. Clearly then, Microsoft’s show will focus on education, as its name assures us.  Apple’s will serve as both a press event and an opportunity to get its own App Store developer channel synced up with its newest technology advances.  For example, we already know that iPhone OS 4.0 will provide for a limited multitasking capability; that will only work well if people know how to code to it in a capable way.  Apple also told us its iAd advertising platform will be part of the new OS, and Steve Jobs insists that’s to provide a revenue opportunity for developers.  This too, then, needs to be explicated and soaked up buy the faithful. A look at each show’s breakout session lineup provides some interesting takeaways.  WWDC will have very few Mac-specific sessions on offer, and virtually no sessions that at are IT- or “Enterprise-“ related.  It’s all about the phone, music players and tablets.  However, WWDC will have plenty of low-level, hardcore tech coverage of such things as Advanced Memory Analysis and Creating Secure Applications, as well as lots of rich media-related content like Core Animation and Game Design and Development.  Beyond Apple’s proprietary platform, WWDC will also feature an array of sessions on HTML 5 and other Web standards.  In all, WWDC offers over 100 technical sessions and hands-on labs. What about Tech Ed’s editorial content?  Like the target audience, it really runs the gamut.  The show has 21 tracks (versus WWDC’s 5) and more than 745 “learning opportunities” which include breakout sessions, demo stations, hands-on labs and BIrds of a Feather discussion sessions.  Topics range from Architecture talks like Patterns of Parallel Programming to cloud computing talks like Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure to IT-focused topics like Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture.  I also count 19 sessions on Windows Phone 7.  Unfortunately, with regard to Web standards and HTML 5, only a few sessions are offered, all of them specific to Internet Explorer. All-in-all, Apple’s show looks more exciting and “sexier” than Tech Ed. Microsoft’s show seems a lot more enterprise-focused than WWDC. This is, of course, well in sync with each company’s approach and products.  Microsoft’s content is much wider ranging and bests WWDC in sheer volume of sessions and labs.  I suppose some might argue that less is more; others that Apple’s consumer-focused offerings simply don’t provide for the same depth of coverage to a business audience.  Microsoft has a serious focus on the cloud and  a paucity of coverage on client-side Web standards; Apple has virtually no cloud offering at all.  Again, this reflects each tech titan’s go-to-market strategy. My own take is that employees of each company should attend the other’s event.  The amount of mutual exclusivity in content may make sense in terms of corporate philosophy, but the reality is that each company could stand to diversify into the other’s territory, at least somewhat. My own talk at Tech Ed will focus on competitive analysis around Microsoft’s BI products.  Apple does not today figure into that analysis. Maybe one day it will.

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• Launching a WPF Window in a Separate Thread, Part 1

  - by Reed

  Typically, I strongly recommend keeping the user interface within an application’s main thread, and using multiple threads to move the actual “work” into background threads.  However, there are rare times when creating a separate, dedicated thread for a Window can be beneficial.  This is even acknowledged in the MSDN samples, such as the Multiple Windows, Multiple Threads sample.  However, doing this correctly is difficult.  Even the referenced MSDN sample has major flaws, and will fail horribly in certain scenarios.  To ease this, I wrote a small class that alleviates some of the difficulties involved. The MSDN Multiple Windows, Multiple Threads Sample shows how to launch a new thread with a WPF Window, and will work in most cases.  The sample code (commented and slightly modified) works out to the following: // Create a thread Thread newWindowThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart( () => { // Create and show the Window Window1 tempWindow = new Window1(); tempWindow.Show(); // Start the Dispatcher Processing System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run(); })); // Set the apartment state newWindowThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); // Make the thread a background thread newWindowThread.IsBackground = true; // Start the thread newWindowThread.Start(); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This sample creates a thread, marks it as single threaded apartment state, and starts the Dispatcher on that thread. That is the minimum requirements to get a Window displaying and handling messages correctly, but, unfortunately, has some serious flaws. The first issue – the created thread will run continuously until the application shuts down, given the code in the sample.  The problem is that the ThreadStart delegate used ends with running the Dispatcher.  However, nothing ever stops the Dispatcher processing.  The thread was created as a Background thread, which prevents it from keeping the application alive, but the Dispatcher will continue to pump dispatcher frames until the application shuts down. In order to fix this, we need to call Dispatcher.InvokeShutdown after the Window is closed.  This would require modifying the above sample to subscribe to the Window’s Closed event, and, at that point, shutdown the Dispatcher: // Create a thread Thread newWindowThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart( () => { Window1 tempWindow = new Window1(); // When the window closes, shut down the dispatcher tempWindow.Closed += (s,e) => Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvokeShutdown(DispatcherPriority.Background); tempWindow.Show(); // Start the Dispatcher Processing System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run(); })); // Setup and start thread as before This eliminates the first issue.  Now, when the Window is closed, the new thread’s Dispatcher will shut itself down, which in turn will cause the thread to complete. The above code will work correctly for most situations.  However, there is still a potential problem which could arise depending on the content of the Window1 class.  This is particularly nasty, as the code could easily work for most windows, but fail on others. The problem is, at the point where the Window is constructed, there is no active SynchronizationContext.  This is unlikely to be a problem in most cases, but is an absolute requirement if there is code within the constructor of Window1 which relies on a context being in place. While this sounds like an edge case, it’s fairly common.  For example, if a BackgroundWorker is started within the constructor, or a TaskScheduler is built using TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext() with the expectation of synchronizing work to the UI thread, an exception will be raised at some point.  Both of these classes rely on the existence of a proper context being installed to SynchronizationContext.Current, which happens automatically, but not until Dispatcher.Run is called.  In the above case, SynchronizationContext.Current will return null during the Window’s construction, which can cause exceptions to occur or unexpected behavior. Luckily, this is fairly easy to correct.  We need to do three things, in order, prior to creating our Window: Create and initialize the Dispatcher for the new thread manually Create a synchronization context for the thread which uses the Dispatcher Install the synchronization context Creating the Dispatcher is quite simple – The Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher property gets the current thread’s Dispatcher and “creates a new Dispatcher if one is not already associated with the thread.”  Once we have the correct Dispatcher, we can create a SynchronizationContext which uses the dispatcher by creating a DispatcherSynchronizationContext.  Finally, this synchronization context can be installed as the current thread’s context via SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext.  These three steps can easily be added to the above via a single line of code: // Create a thread Thread newWindowThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart( () => { // Create our context, and install it: SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext( new DispatcherSynchronizationContext( Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher)); Window1 tempWindow = new Window1(); // When the window closes, shut down the dispatcher tempWindow.Closed += (s,e) => Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvokeShutdown(DispatcherPriority.Background); tempWindow.Show(); // Start the Dispatcher Processing System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run(); })); // Setup and start thread as before This now forces the synchronization context to be in place before the Window is created and correctly shuts down the Dispatcher when the window closes. However, there are quite a few steps.  In my next post, I’ll show how to make this operation more reusable by creating a class with a far simpler API…

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• How Oracle Data Integration Customers Differentiate Their Business in Competitive Markets

  - by Irem Radzik

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 With data being a central force in driving innovation and competing effectively, data integration has become a key IT approach to remove silos and ensure working with consistent and trusted data. Especially with the release of 12c version, Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate offer easy-to-use and high-performance solutions that help companies with their critical data initiatives, including big data analytics, moving to cloud architectures, modernizing and connecting transactional systems and more. In a recent press release we announced the great momentum and analyst recognition Oracle Data Integration products have achieved in the data integration and replication market. In this press release we described some of the key new features of Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c. In addition, a few from our 4500+ customers explained how Oracle’s data integration platform helped them achieve their business goals. In this blog post I would like to go over what these customers shared about their experience. Land O’Lakes is one of America’s premier member-owned cooperatives, and offers an extensive line of agricultural supplies, as well as production and business services. Rich Bellefeuille, manager, ETL & data warehouse for Land O’Lakes told us how GoldenGate helped them modernize their critical ERP system without impacting service and how they are moving to new projects with Oracle Data Integrator 12c: “With Oracle GoldenGate 11g, we've been able to migrate our enterprise-wide implementation of Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, ERP system, to a new database and application server platform with minimal downtime to our business. Using Oracle GoldenGate 11g we reduced database migration time from nearly 30 hours to less than 30 minutes. Given our quick success, we are considering expansion of our Oracle GoldenGate 12c footprint. We are also in the midst of deploying a solution leveraging Oracle Data Integrator 12c to manage our pricing data to handle orders more effectively and provide a better relationship with our clients. We feel we are gaining higher productivity and flexibility with Oracle's data integration products." ICON, a global provider of outsourced development services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries, highlighted the competitive advantage that a solid data integration foundation brings. Diarmaid O’Reilly, enterprise data warehouse manager, ICON plc said “Oracle Data Integrator enables us to align clinical trials intelligence with the information needs of our sponsors. It helps differentiate ICON’s services in an increasingly competitive drug-development industry."  You can find more info on ICON's implementation here. A popular use case for Oracle GoldenGate’s real-time data integration is offloading operational reporting from critical transaction processing systems. SolarWorld, one of the world’s largest solar-technology producers and the largest U.S. solar panel manufacturer, implemented Oracle GoldenGate for real-time data integration of manufacturing data for fast analysis. Russ Toyama, U.S. senior database administrator for SolarWorld told us real-time data helps their operations and GoldenGate’s solution supports high performance of their manufacturing systems: “We use Oracle GoldenGate for real-time data integration into our decision support system, which performs real-time analysis for manufacturing operations to continuously improve product quality, yield and efficiency. With reliable and low-impact data movement capabilities, Oracle GoldenGate also helps ensure that our critical manufacturing systems are stable and operate with high performance."  You can watch the full interview with SolarWorld's Russ Toyama here. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Starwood Hotels and Resorts is one of the many customers that found out how well Oracle Data Integration products work with Oracle Exadata. Gordon Light, senior director of information technology for StarWood Hotels, says they had notable performance gain in loading Oracle Exadata reporting environment: “We leverage Oracle GoldenGate to replicate data from our central reservations systems and other OLTP databases – significantly decreasing the overall ETL duration. Moving forward, we plan to use Oracle GoldenGate to help the company achieve near-real-time reporting.”You can listen about Starwood Hotels' implementation here. Many companies combine the power of Oracle GoldenGate with Oracle Data Integrator to have a single, integrated data integration platform for variety of use cases across the enterprise. Ufone is another good example of that. The leading mobile communications service provider of Pakistan has improved customer service using timely customer data in its data warehouse. Atif Aslam, head of management information systems for Ufone says: “Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate help us integrate information from various systems and provide up-to-date and real-time CRM data updates hourly, rather than daily. The applications have simplified data warehouse operations and allowed business users to make faster and better informed decisions to protect revenue in the fast-moving Pakistani telecommunications market.” You can read more about Ufone's use case here. In our Oracle Data Integration 12c launch webcast back in November we also heard from BT’s CTO Surren Parthab about their use of GoldenGate for moving to private cloud architecture. Surren also shared his perspectives on Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c releases. You can watch the video here. These are only a few examples of leading companies that have made data integration and real-time data access a key part of their data governance and IT modernization initiatives. They have seen real improvements in how their businesses operate and differentiate in today’s competitive markets. You can read about other customer examples in our Ebook: The Path to the Future and access resources including white papers, data sheets, podcasts and more via our Oracle Data Integration resource kit. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Web Platform Installer bundles for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 - and how you can build your own WebPI bundles

  - by Jon Galloway

  Visual Studio SP1 is  now available via the Web Platform Installer, which means you've got three options: Download the 1.5 GB ISO image Run the 750KB Web Installer (which figures out what you need to download) Install via Web PI Note: I covered some tips for installing VS2010 SP1 last week - including some that apply to all of these, such as removing options you don't use prior to installing the service pack to decrease the installation time and download size. Two Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Web PI packages There are actually two WebPI packages for VS2010 SP1. There's the standard Visual Studio 2010 SP1 package [Web PI link], which includes (quoting ScottGu's post): VS2010 2010 SP1 ASP.NET MVC 3 (runtime + tools support) IIS 7.5 Express SQL Server Compact Edition 4.0 (runtime + tools support) Web Deployment 2.0 The notes on that package sum it up pretty well: Looking for the latest everything? Look no further. This will get you Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 and the RTM releases of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS 7.5 Express, SQL Server Compact 4.0 with tooling, and Web Deploy 2.0. It's the value meal of Microsoft products. Tell your friends! Note: This bundle includes the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 web installer, which will dynamically determine the appropriate service pack components to download and install. This is typically in the range of 200-500 MB and will take 30-60 minutes to install, depending on your machine configuration. There is also a Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Core package [Web PI link], which only includes only the SP without any of the other goodies (MVC3, IIS Express, etc.). If you're doing any web development, I'd highly recommend the main pack since it the other installs are small, simple installs, but if you're working in another space, you might want the core package. Installing via the Web Platform Installer I generally like to go with the Web PI when possible since it simplifies most software installations due to things like: Smart dependency management - installing apps or tools which have software dependencies will automatically figure out which dependencies you don't have and add them to the list (which you can review before install) Simultaneous download and install - if your install includes more than one package, it will automatically pull the dependencies first and begin installing them while downloading the others Lists the latest downloads - no need to search around, as they're all listed based on a live feed Includes open source applications - a lot of popular open source applications are included as well as Microsoft software and tools No worries about reinstallation - WebPI installations detect what you've got installed, so for instance if you've got MVC 3 installed you don't need to worry about the VS2010 SP1 package install messing anything up In addition to the links I included above, you can install the WebPI from http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx, and if you have Web PI installed you can just tap the Windows key and type "Web Platform" to bring it up in the Start search list. You'll see Visual Studio SP1 listed in the spotlight list as shown below. That's the standard package, which includes MVC 3 / IIS 7.5 Express / SQL Compact / Web Deploy. If you just want the core install, you can use the search box in the upper right corner, typing in "Visual Studio SP1" as shown. Core Install: Use Web PI or the Visual Studio Web Installer? I think the big advantage of using Web PI to install VS 2010 SP1 is that it includes the other new bits. If you're going to install the SP1 core, I don't think there's as much advantage to using Web PI, as the Web PI Core install just downloads the Visual Studio Web Installer anyways. I think Web PI makes it a little easier to find the download, but not a lot. The Visual Studio Web Installer checks dependencies, so there's no big advantage there. If you do happen to hit any problems installing Visual Studio SP1 via Web PI, I'd recommend running the Visual Studio Web Installer, then running the Web PI VS 2010 SP1 package to get all the other goodies. I talked to one person who hit some random snag, recommended that, and it worked out. Custom Web Platform Installer bundles You can create links that will launch the Web Platform Installer with a custom list of tools. You can see an example of this by clicking through on the install button at http://asp.net/downloads (cancelling the installation dialog). You'll see this in the address bar: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appsxml=&appid=MVC3;ASPNET;NETFramework4;SQLExpress;VWD Notice that the appid querystring parameter includes a semicolon delimited list, and you can make your own custom Web PI links with your own desired app list. I can think of a lot of cases where that would be handy: linking to a recommended software configuration from a software project or product, setting up a recommended / documented / supported install list for a software development team or IT shop, etc. For instance, here's a link that installs just VS2010 SP1 Core and the SQL CE tools: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appsxml=&appid=VS2010SP1Core;SQLCETools Note: If you've already got all or some of the products installed, the display will reflect that. On my dev box which has the full SP1 package, here's what the above link gives me: Here's another example - on a fresh box I created a link to install MVC 3 and the Web Farm Framework (http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appsxml=&appid=MVC3;WebFarmFramework) and got the following items added to the cart: But where do I get the App ID's? Aha, that's the trick. You can link to a list of cool packages, but you need to know the App ID's to link to them. To figure that out, I turned on tracing in Web Platform Installer  (also handy if you're ever having trouble with a WebPI install) and from the trace logs saw that the list of packages is pulled from an XML file: DownloadManager Information: 0 : Loading product xml from: https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9763242 DownloadManager Verbose: 0 : Connecting to https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9763242 with (partial) headers: Referer: wpi://2.1.0.0/Microsoft Windows NT 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 If-Modified-Since: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:15:27 GMT User-Agent:Platform-Installer/3.0.3.0(Microsoft Windows NT 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1) DownloadManager Information: 0 : https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9763242 responded with 302 DownloadManager Information: 0 : Response headers: HTTP/1.1 302 Found Cache-Control: private Content-Length: 175 Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Expires: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:52:28 GMT Location: https://www.microsoft.com/web/webpi/3.0/webproductlist.xml Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:53:27 GMT Browsing to https://www.microsoft.com/web/webpi/3.0/webproductlist.xml shows the full list. You can search through that in your browser / text editor if you'd like, open it in Excel as an XML table, etc. Here's a list of the App ID's as of today: SMO SMO32 PHP52ForIISExpress PHP53ForIISExpress StaticContent DefaultDocument DirectoryBrowse HTTPErrors HTTPRedirection ASPNET NETExtensibility ASP CGI ISAPIExtensions ISAPIFilters ServerSideIncludes HTTPLogging LoggingTools RequestMonitor Tracing CustomLogging ODBCLogging BasicAuthentication WindowsAuthentication DigestAuthentication ClientCertificateMappingAuthentication IISClientCertificateMappingAuthentication URLAuthorization RequestFiltering IPSecurity StaticContentCompression DynamicContentCompression IISManagementConsole IISManagementScriptsAndTools ManagementService MetabaseAndIIS6Compatibility WASProcessModel WASNetFxEnvironment WASConfigurationAPI IIS6WPICompatibility IIS6ScriptingTools IIS6ManagementConsole LegacyFTPServer FTPServer WebDAV LegacyFTPManagementConsole FTPExtensibility AdminPack AdvancedLogging WebFarmFrameworkNonLoc ExternalCacheNonLoc WebFarmFramework WebFarmFrameworkv2 WebFarmFrameworkv2_beta ExternalCache ECacheUpdate ARRv1 ARRv2Beta1 ARRv2Beta2 ARRv2RC ARRv2NonLoc ARRv2 ARRv2Update MVC MVCBeta MVCRC1 MVCRC2 DBManager DbManagerUpdate DynamicIPRestrictions DynamicIPRestrictionsUpdate DynamicIPRestrictionsLegacy DynamicIPRestrictionsBeta2 FTPOOB IISPowershellSnapin RemoteManager SEOToolkit VS2008RTM MySQL SQLDriverPHP52IIS SQLDriverPHP53IIS SQLDriverPHP52IISExpress SQLDriverPHP53IISExpress SQLExpress SQLManagementStudio SQLExpressAdv SQLExpressTools UrlRewrite UrlRewrite2 UrlRewrite2NonLoc UrlRewrite2RC UrlRewrite2Beta UrlRewrite10 UrlScan MVC3Installer MVC3 MVC3LocInstaller MVC3Loc MVC2 VWD VWD2010SP1Pack NETFramework4 WebMatrix WebMatrix_v1Refresh IISExpress IISExpress_v1 IIS7 AspWebPagesVS AspWebPagesVS_1_0 Plan9 Plan9Loc WebMatrix_WHP SQLCE SQLCETools SQLCEVSTools SQLCEVSTools_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstaller_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerNew_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_EN_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_JA_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_FR_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_DE_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_ES_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_IT_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_RU_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_KO_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_ZH_CN_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_ZH_TW_4_0 VWD2008 WebDAVOOB WDeploy WDeploy_v2 WDeployNoSMO WDeploy11 WinCache52 WinCache53 NETFramework35 WindowsImagingComponent VC9Redist NETFramework20SP2 WindowsInstaller31 PowerShell PowerShellMsu PowerShell2 WindowsInstaller45 FastCGIUpdate FastCGIBackport FastCGIIIS6 IIS51 IIS60 SQLNativeClient SQLNativeClient2008 SQLNativeClient2005 SQLCLRTypes SQLCLRTypes32 SMO_10_1 MySQLConnector PHP52 PHP53 PHPManager VSVWD2010Feature VWD2010WebFeature_0 VWD2010WebFeature_1 VWD2010WebFeature_2 VS2010SP1Prerequisite RIAServicesToolkitMay2010 Silverlight4Toolkit Silverlight4Tools VSLS SSMAMySQL WebsitePanel VS2010SP1Core VS2010SP1Installer VS2010SP1Pack MissingVWDOrVSVWD2010Feature VB2010Beta2Express VCS2010Beta2Express VC2010Beta2Express RIAServicesToolkitApr2010 VS2010Beta1 VS2010RC VS2010Beta2 VS2010Beta2Express VS2k8RTM VSCPP2k8RTM VSVB2k8RTM VSCS2k8RTM VSVWDFeature LegacyWinCache SQLExpress2005 SSMS2005

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• Silverlight for Windows Embedded Tutorial (step 5 and a bit of Windows Phone 7)

  - by Valter Minute

  If you haven’t spent the last week in the middle of the Sahara desert or traveling on a sled in the north pole area you should have heard something about the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series (or Windows Phone Series 7, or Windows Series Phone 7 or something like that). Even if you are in the middle of the desert or somewhere around the north pole you may have been reached by the news, since it seems that WP7S (using the full name will kill my available bandwidth!) is generating a lot of buzz in the development and IT communities. One of the most important aspects of this new platform is that it will be programmed using a new set of tools and frameworks, completely different from the ones used on older releases of Windows Mobile (or SmartPhone, or PocketPC or whatever…). WP7S applications can be developed using Silverlight or XNA. If you want to learn something more about WP7S development you can download the preview of Charles Petzold’s book about it: http://www.charlespetzold.com/phone/index.html Charles Petzold is also the author of “Programming Windows”, the first book I ever read about programming on Windows (it was Windows 3.0 at that time!). The fact that even I was able to learn how to develop Windows application is a proof of the quality of Petzold’s work. This book is up to his standards and the 150pages preview is already rich in technical contents without being boring or complicated to understand. I may be able to become a Windows Phone developer thanks to mr. Petzold. Mr. Petzold uses some nice samples to introduce the basic concepts of Silverlight development on WP7S. On this new platform you’ll use managed code to develop your application, so those samples can’t be ported on Windows CE R3 as they are, but I would like to take one of the first samples (called “SilverlightTapHello1”) and adapt it to Silverlight for Windows Embedded to show that even plain old native code can be used to develop “cool” user interfaces! The sample shows the standard WP7S title header and a textbox with an hello world message inside it. When the user touches the textbox, it will change its color. When the user touches the background (Grid) behind it, its default color (plain old White) will be restored. Let’s see how we can implement the same features on our embedded device! I took the XAML code of the sample (you can download the book samples here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/D/B/1DB49641-3956-41F1-BAFA-A021673C709E/CodeSamples_DRAFTPreview_ProgrammingWindowsPhone7Series.zip) and changed it a little bit to remove references to WP7S or managed runtime. If you compare the resulting files you will see that I was able to keep all the resources inside the App.xaml files and the structure of  MainPage.XAML almost intact. This is the Silverlight for Windows Embedded version of MainPage.XAML: <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightTapHello1.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:phoneNavigation="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Navigation" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="480" d:DesignHeight="800" FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}" FontSize="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}" Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}" Width="640" Height="480">   <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition Height="*"/> </Grid.RowDefinitions>   <!--TitleGrid is the name of the application and page title--> <Grid x:Name="TitleGrid" Grid.Row="0"> <TextBlock Text="SILVERLIGHT TAP HELLO #1" x:Name="textBlockPageTitle" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextPageTitle1Style}"/> <TextBlock Text="main page" x:Name="textBlockListTitle" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextPageTitle2Style}"/> </Grid>   <!--ContentGrid is empty. Place new content here--> <Grid x:Name="ContentGrid" Grid.Row="1" MouseLeftButtonDown="ContentGrid_MouseButtonDown" Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"> <TextBlock x:Name="TextBlock" Text="Hello, Silverlight for Windows Embedded!" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Grid> </Grid> </UserControl> If you compare it to the WP7S sample (not reported here to avoid any copyright issue) you’ll notice that I had to replace the original phoneNavigation:PhoneApplicationPage with UserControl as the root node. This make sense because there is not support for phone applications on CE 6. I also had to specify width and height of my main page (on the WP7S device this will be adjusted by the OS) and I had to replace the multi-touch event handler with the MouseLeftButtonDown event (no multitouch support for Windows CE R3, still). I also changed the hello message, of course. I used XAML2CPP to generate the boring part of our application and then added the initialization code to WinMain: int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPTSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow) { if (!XamlRuntimeInitialize()) return -1;   HRESULT retcode;   IXRApplicationPtr app; if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return -1; XRXamlSource dictsrc;   dictsrc.SetResource(hInstance,TEXT("XAML"),IDR_XAML_App);   if (FAILED(retcode=app->LoadResourceDictionary(&dictsrc,NULL))) return -1;   MainPage page;   if (FAILED(page.Init(hInstance,app))) return -1;   UINT exitcode;   if (FAILED(page.GetVisualHost()->StartDialog(&exitcode))) return -1;   return exitcode; }   You may have noticed that there is something different from the previous samples. I added the code to load a resource dictionary. Resources are an important feature of XAML that allows you to define some values that could be replaced inside any XAML file loaded by the runtime. You can use resources to define custom styles for your fonts, backgrounds, controls etc. and to support internationalization, by providing different strings for different languages. The rest of our WinMain isn’t that different. It creates an instances of our MainPage object and displays it. The MainPage class implements an event handler for the MouseLeftButtonDown event of the ContentGrid: class MainPage : public TMainPage<MainPage> { public:   HRESULT ContentGrid_MouseButtonDown(IXRDependencyObject* source,XRMouseButtonEventArgs* args) { HRESULT retcode; IXRSolidColorBrushPtr brush; IXRApplicationPtr app;   if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateObject(IID_IXRSolidColorBrush,&brush))) return retcode;   COLORREF color=RGBA(0xff,0xff,0xff,0xff);   if (args->pOriginalSource==TextBlock) color=RGBA(rand()&0xFF,rand()&0xFF,rand()&0xFF,0xFF);   if (FAILED(retcode=brush->SetColor(color))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=TextBlock->SetForeground(brush))) return retcode; return S_OK; } }; As you can see this event is generated when a used clicks inside the grid or inside one of the objects it contains. Since our TextBlock is inside the grid, we don’t need to provide an event handler for its MouseLeftButtonDown event. We can just use the pOriginalSource member of the event arguments to check if the event was generated inside the textblock. If the event was generated inside the grid we create a white brush,if it’s inside the textblock we create some randomly colored brush. Notice that we need to use the RGBA macro to create colors, specifying also a transparency value for them. If we use the RGB macro the resulting color will have its Alpha channel set to zero and will be transparent. Using the SetForeground method we can change the color of our control. You can compare this to the managed code that you can find at page 40-41 of Petzold’s preview book and you’ll see that the native version isn’t much more complex than the managed one. As usual you can download the full code of the sample here: http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/SilverlightTapHello1.zip And remember to pre-order Charles Petzold’s “Programming Windows Phone 7 series”, I bet it will be a best-seller! Technorati Tags: Silverlight for Windows Embedded,Windows CE

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• How to deal with a poor team leader and a tester manager from hell? [closed]

  - by Google

  Let me begin by explaining my situation and give a little context to the situation. My company has around 15 developers but we're split up on two different areas. We have a fresh product team and the old product team. The old product team does mostly bug fixes/maintenance and a feature here and there. The fresh product had never been released and was new from the ground up. I am on the fresh product team. The team consists of three developers (myself, another developer and a senior developer). The senior is also our team leader. Our roles are as follows: Myself: building the administration client as well as build/release stuff Other dev: building the primary client Team lead: building the server In addition to the dev team, we interact with the test manager often. By "we" I mean me since I do the build stuff and give him the builds to test. Trial 1: The other developer on my team and I have both tried to talk to our manager about our team leader. About two weeks before release we went in his office and had a closed door meeting before our team lead got to work. We expressed our concerns about the product, its release date and our team leader. We expressed our team leader had a "rosey" image of the product's state. Our manager seemed to listen to what we said and thanked us for taking the initiative to speak with him about it. He got us an extra two weeks before release. The situation with the leader didn't change. In fact, it got a little worse. While we were using the two weeks to fix issues he was slacking off quite a bit. Just to name a few things, he installed Windows 8 on his dev machine during this time (claimed him machine was broke), he wrote a plugin for our office messenger that turned turned messages into speech, and one time when I went in his office he was making a 3D model in Blender (for "fun"). He felt the product was "pretty good" and ready for release. During this time I dealt with the test manager on a daily basis. Every bug or issue that popped up he would pretty much attack me personally (regardless of which component the bug was in). The test manager would often push his "views" of what needed to be done with the product. He virtually ordered me to change text on our installer and to add features to the installer and administration client. I tried to express how his suggestions were "valid ideas" but it was too close to release to do those kinds of things and to make matters worse, our technical writer had already finished documentation and such a change would not only affect the dev team but would affect the technical writer and marketing as well. I expressed I wasn't going to make those changes without marketing's consent as well as the technical writer and my manager's. He pretty much said I don't care about the product and said I don't do my job. I would like to take a moment to say I take my job seriously and I do my best. I am the kind of person that goes to work 30-40 mins early and usually leaves 30 minutes later than everyone else. Saying I don't care or do my job is just insulting. His "attacks" on me grew from day to day. Every bug that popped up he would usually comment on in some manner that jabbed me and the other developer. "Oh that bug! Yeah that should have been fixed by now, figures! If someone would do their job!" and other similar kinds of comments. Keep in mind 8 out of 10 bugs were in the server and had nothing to do with me and the other developer. That didn't seem to matter.. On one occasion they got pretty bad and we almost got into a yelling match so I decided to stop talking to him all together. I carried all communication through office email (with my manager cc'd). He never attacked me via email. He still attempted to get aggressive with me in person but I completely ignore him and my only response to any question is, "Ask my team leader." or "Ask a product manager." The product launched after our two week extension. Trial 2: The day after the product launch our team leader went on vacation (thanks....). At this time we got a lot of questions from the tech support... major issues with the product. All of these issues were bugs marked "resolved" by our lovely team leader (a typical situation that often popped up). This is where we currently are. The other developer has been with the company for about three years (I've been there only five months) and told me he was going to speak with our manager alone and hoped it would help get our concerns across a little better in a one-on-one. He spoke with the manager and directly addressed all of our concerns regarding our team leader and the test manager giving us (mostly me) hell. Our manager basically said he understood how hard we work and said he noticed it and there's no doubt about it. He said he spoke with the test manager about his temper. Regarding the team leader, he didn't say a whole lot. He suggested we sit down with the team leader and address our concerns (isn't that the manager's job?). We're still waiting to see if anything has changed but we doubt it. What can we do next? 1) Talk to the team leader (may stress relationship and make work awkward) I admit the team leader is generally a nice guy. He is just a horrible leader and working closely with him is painful. I still don't believe bringing this directly to the team leader would help at all and may negatively impact the situation. 2) I could quit. Other than this situation the job is pretty fantastic. I really like my other coworkers and we have quite a bit of freedom. 3) I could take the situation with the team leader to one of the owners. I would then be throwing my manager under the bus. 4) I could take the situation with the test manager to HR. Any suggestions? Comments?

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• It's not just “Single Sign-on” by Steve Knott (aurionPro SENA)

  - by Greg Jensen

  It is true that Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-on (Oracle ESSO) started out as purely an application single sign-on tool but as we have seen in the previous articles in this series the product has matured into a suite of tools that can do more than just automated single sign-on and can also provide rapidly deployed, cost effective solution to many demanding password management problems. In the last article of this series I would like to discuss three cases where customers faced password scenarios that required more than just single sign-on and how some of the less well known tools in the Oracle ESSO suite “kitbag” helped solve these challenges. Case #1 One of the issues often faced by our customers is how to keep their applications compliant. I had a client who liked the idea of automated single sign-on for most of his applications but had a key requirement to actually increase the security for one specific SOX application. For the SOX application he wanted to secure access by using two-factor authentication with a smartcard. The problem was that the application did not support two-factor authentication. The solution was to use a feature from the Oracle ESSO suite called authentication manager. This feature enables you to have multiple authentication methods for the same user which in this case was a smartcard and the Windows password.  Within authentication manager each authenticator can be configured with a security grade so we gave the smartcard a high grade and the Windows password a normal grade. Security grading in Oracle ESSO can be configured on a per application basis so we set the SOX application to require the higher grade smartcard authenticator. The end result for the user was that they enjoyed automated single sign-on for most of the applications apart from the SOX application. When the SOX application was launched, the user was required by ESSO to present their smartcard before being given access to the application. Case #2 Another example solving compliance issues was in the case of a large energy company who had a number of core billing applications. New regulations required that users change their password regularly and use a complex password. The problem facing the customer was that the core billing applications did not have any native user password change functionality. The customer could not replace the core applications because of the cost and time required to re-develop them. With a reputation for innovation aurionPro SENA were approached to provide a solution to this problem using Oracle ESSO. Oracle ESSO has a password expiry feature that can be triggered periodically based on the timestamp of the users’ last password creation therefore our strategy here was to leverage this feature to provide the password change experience. The trigger can launch an application change password event however in this scenario there was no native change password feature that could be launched therefore a “dummy” change password screen was created that could imitate the missing change password function and connect to the application database on behalf of the user. Oracle ESSO was configured to trigger a change password event every 60 days. After this period if the user launched the application Oracle ESSO would detect the logon screen and invoke the password expiry feature. Oracle ESSO would trigger the “dummy screen,” detect it automatically as the application change password screen and insert a complex password on behalf of the user. After the password event had completed the user was logged on to the application with their new password. All this was provided at a fraction of the cost of re-developing the core applications. Case #3 Recent popular initiatives such as the BYOD and working from home schemes bring with them many challenges in administering “unmanaged machines” and sometimes “unmanageable users.” In a recent case, a client had a dispersed community of casual contractors who worked for the business using their own laptops to access applications. To improve security the around password management the security goal was to provision the passwords directly to these contractors. In a previous article we saw how Oracle ESSO has the capability to provision passwords through Provisioning Gateway but the challenge in this scenario was how to get the Oracle ESSO agent to the casual contractor on an unmanaged machine. The answer was to use another tool in the suite, Oracle ESSO Anywhere. This component can compile the normal Oracle ESSO functionality into a deployment package that can be made available from a website in a similar way to a streamed application. The ESSO Anywhere agent does not actually install into the registry or program files but runs in a folder within the user’s profile therefore no local administrator rights are required for installation. The ESSO Anywhere package can also be configured to stay persistent or disable itself at the end of the user’s session. In this case the user just needed to be told where the website package was located and download the package. Once the download was complete the agent started automatically and the user was provided with single sign-on to their applications without ever knowing the application passwords. Finally, as we have seen in these series Oracle ESSO not only has great utilities in its own tool box but also has direct integration with Oracle Privileged Account Manager, Oracle Identity Manager and Oracle Access Manager. Integrated together with these tools provides a complete and complementary platform to address even the most complex identity and access management requirements. So what next for Oracle ESSO? “Agentless ESSO available in the cloud” – but that will be a subject for a future Oracle ESSO series!                                                                                                                               

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Integration With Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 11g

  - by Scott Elvington

  In a blog entry earlier this year, we announced the availability of the Ops Center 11g plug-in for Enterprise Manager 12c. In this article I will walk you through the process of deploying the plug-in on your existing Enterprise Manager agents and show you some of the capabilities the plug-in provides. We'll also look at the integration from the Ops Center perspective. I will show you how to set up the connection to Enterprise Manager and give an overview of the information that is available. Installing and Configuring the Ops Center Plug-in The plug-in is available for download from the Self Update page (Setup ? Extensibility ? Self Update). The plug-in name is “Ops Center Infrastructure stack”. Once you have downloaded the plug-in you can navigate to the Plug-In management page (Setup ? Extensibility ? Plug-ins) to begin deployment. The plug-in must first be deployed on the Management Server. You will need to provide the repository password of the SYS user in order to deploy the plug-in to the Management Server. There are a few pre-requisites that need to be completed on the Ops Center side before the plug-in can be deployed and configured on the desired Enterprise Manager agents. Any servers, whether physical or virtual, for which you wish to see metrics and alerts need to be managed by Ops Center. This means that the Operating System needs to have an Ops Center management agent installed as a minimum. The plug-in can provide even more value when Ops Center is also managing the other “layers of the stack”, for example the service processor, the blade chassis or the XSCF of an M-Series server. The more information that Ops Center has about the stack, the more information that will be visible within Enterprise Manager via the plug-in. In order to access the information within Ops Center, the plug-in requires a user to connect as. This user does not require any particular Ops Center permissions or roles, it simply needs to exist. You can create a specific “EMPlugin” user within Ops Center or use an existing user. Oracle recommends creating a specific, non-privileged user account within Ops Center for this purpose. From the Ops Center Administration section, select Enterprise Controller, click the Users tab and finally click the Add User icon to create the desired user account. For the purpose of this article I have discovered and managed the OS and service processor of the server where my Enterprise Manager 12c installation is hosted. With the plug-in deployed to the Management Server and the setup done within Ops Center, we're now ready to deploy the plug-in to the agents and configure the targets to communicate with the Ops Center Enterprise Controller. From the Setup menu select Add Targets then Add Targets Manually. Select the bottom radio button “Add Targets Manually by Specifying Target Monitoring Properties”, select Infrastructure Stack from the Target Type dropdown and finally, select the Monitoring Agent where you wish to deploy the plug-in. Click the Add Manually.... button and fill in the details for the new target using the appropriate hostname for your Enterprise Controller and the user and password details for the plug-in access user. After the target has been added to the agent you will need to allow a few minutes for the initial data collection to complete. Once completed you can see the new target in the All Targets list. All metric collections are enabled by default except one. To enable Infrastructure Stack Alarms collection, navigate to the newly added target and then to Target ? Monitoring ? Metric and Collection Settings. There you can click the “Disabled” link under Collection Schedule to enable collection and set your desired collection frequency. By default, a Warning level alert in Ops Center will equate to a Warning level event in Enterprise Manager and a Critical alert will equate to a Critical event. This mapping can be altered in the Metric and Collection Settings also. The default incident rules in Enterprise Manager only create incidents from Critical events so keep this in mind in case you want to see incidents generated for Warning or Info level alerts from Ops Center. Also, because Enterprise Manager already monitors the OS through it's Host target type, the plug-in does not pull OS alerts from Ops Center so as to prevent duplication. In addition to alert propagation, the plug-in also provides data for several reports detailing the topology and configuration of the stack as well as any hardware sensor data that is available. These are available from the Information Publisher Reports. Navigate there from the Enterprise ? Reports menu or directly from the Infrastructure Stack target of interest. As an example, here is a sample of the Hardware Sensors report showing some of the available sensor data. The report can also be exported to a CSV file format if desired. Connecting Ops Center to Enterprise Manager Repository For an Enterprise Manager user, the plug-in provides a deeper visibility to the state of the infrastructure underlying the databases and middleware. On the Ops Center side, there is also a greater visibility to the targets running on the infrastructure. To set up the Ops Center data collection, just navigate to the Administration section and select the Grid Control link. Select the Configure/Connect action from the right-hand menu and complete the wizard forms to enable the connection to the Enterprise Manager repository and UI. Be sure to use the sysman account when configuring the database connection. Once the job completes and the initial data synchronization is done you will see new Target tabs on your OS assets. The new tab lists all the Enterprise Manager targets and any alerts, availability and performance data specific to the selected target. It is also possible to use the GoTo icon to launch the Enterprise Manager BUI in context of the specific target or alert to drill into more detail. Hopefully this brief overview of the integration between Enterprise Manager and Ops Center has provided a jumpstart to getting a more complete view of the full stack of your enterprise systems.

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• Build an Organization Chart In Visio 2010

  - by Mysticgeek

  With trying to manage a business these days, it’s very important to have an Organization Chart to keep everything manageable. Here we’ll show you how to build one in Visio 2010. This Guest Article was written by our friends over at Office 2010 Club. Need for Organization Charts The need of creating Organization Charts are becoming indispensable these days, as companies start focusing on extensive hiring for far reach availability, increase in productivity and targeting diverse markets. Considering this rigorous change, creating an organization chart can help stakeholders in comprehending the ever growing organization structure & hierarchy with an ease. It shows the basic structure of organization along with defining the relationships between employees working in different departments. Opportunely, Microsoft Visio 2010 offers an easy way to create Organization chart. As before now, orthodox ways of listing organization hierarchy have been used for defining the structure of departments along with communication possible including; horizontal and vertical communications. To transform these lists which defines organizational structure, into a detailed chart, Visio 2010 includes an add-in for importing Excel spreadsheet, which comes in handy for pulling out data from spreadsheet to create an organization chart. Importantly, you don’t need to indulge yourself in maze of defining organizational hierarchies and chalking-out structure, as you just need to specify the column & row headers, along with data you need to import and it will automatically create out chart defining; organizational hierarchies with specified credentials of each employee, categorized in their corresponding departments. Creating Organization Charts in Visio 2010 To start off with, we have created an Excel spreadsheet having fields, Name, Supervisor, Designation, Department and Phone. The Name field contains name of all the employees working in different departments, whereas Supervisor field contains name of supervisors or team leads. This field is vital for creating Organization Chart, as it defines the basic structure & hierarchy in chart. Now launch Visio 2010, head over to View tab, under Add-Ons menu, from Business options, click Organization Chart Wizard. This will start Organization Chart Wizard, in the first step, enable Information that’s already stored in a file or database option, and click Next. As we are importing Excel sheet, select the second option for importing Excel spreadsheet. Specify the Excel file path and click Next to continue. In this step, you need to specify the fields which actually defines the structure of an organization. In our case, these are Name & Supervisor fields. After specifying fields, click Next to Proceed further. As organization chart is primarily for showing the hierarchy of departments/employees working in organization along with how they are linked together, and who supervises whom. Considering this, in this step we will leave out Supervisor field, because it’s inclusion wouldn’t be necessary as Visio automatically chalks-out the basic structure defined in Excel sheet. Add the rest of the fields under Displayed fields category, and click Next. Now choose the fields which you want to include in Organization Chart’s shapes and click Next. This step is about breaking the chart into multiple pages, if you are dealing with 100+ employees, you may want to specify numbers of pages on which Organization Chart will be displayed. But in our case, we are dealing with much less amount of data, so we will enable I want the wizard to automatically break my organization chart across pages option. Specify the name you need to show on the top of the page. If you are having less than 20 hierarchies, enter the name of the highest ranked employee in organization and click Finish to end the wizard. It will instantly create an Organization chart out of specified Excel spreadsheet. Highest ranked employee will be shown on top of the organization chart, supervising various employees from different departments. As shown below, his immediate subordinates further manages other employees and so on. For advance customizations, head over to Org Chart tab, here you will find different groups for setting up the Org Chart’s hierarchy and manage other employees’ positions. Under Arrange group, shapes’ arrangements can be changed and it provides easy navigation through the chart. You can also change the type of the position and hide subordinates of selected employee. From Picture group, you can insert a picture of the employees, departments, etc. From synchronization group, you have the option of creating a synced copy and expanding subordinates of selected employee. Under Organization Data group, you can change whole layout of Organization chart from Display Options including; shape display, show divider, enable/disable imported fields, change block position, and fill colors, etc. If at any point of time, you need to insert new position or announce vacancy, Organization Chart stencil is always available on the left sidebar. Drag the desired Organization Chart shape into main diagram page, to maintain the structure integrity, i.e, for inserting subordinates for a specific employee, drag the position shape over the existing employee shape box. For instance, We have added a consultant in organization, who is directly under CEO, for maintaining this, we have dragged the Consultant box and just dropped it over the CEO box to make the immediate subordinate position. Adding details to new position is a cinch, just right-click new position box and click Properties. This will open up Shape Data dialog, start filling in all the relevant information and click OK. Here you can see the newly created position is easily populated with all the specified information. Now expanding an Organization Chart doesn’t require maintenance of long lists any more. Under Design tab, you can also try out different designs & layouts over organization chart to make it look more flamboyant and professional.  Conclusion An Organization Chart is a great way of showing detailed organizational hierarchies; with defined credentials of employees, departments structure, new vacancies, newly hired employees, recently added departments, and importantly shows most convenient way of interaction between different departments & employees, etc. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Reviews: Using Dia as a Free Replacement for Microsoft VisioMysticgeek Blog: Create Appealing Charts In Excel 2007Create Charts in Excel 2007 the Easy Way with Chart AdvisorCreate a Hyperlink in a Word 2007 Flow Chart and Hide Annoying ScreenTipsCreate A Flow Chart In Word 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account Shop for Music with Windows Media Player 12 Access Free Documentaries at BBC Documentaries Rent Cameras In Bulk At CameraRenter Download Songs From MySpace Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4 Keynote Video

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• Updating a SharePoint master page via a solution (WSP)

  - by Kelly Jones

  In my last blog post, I wrote how to deploy a SharePoint theme using Features and a solution package.  As promised in that post, here is how to update an already deployed master page. There are several ways to update a master page in SharePoint.  You could upload a new version to the master page gallery, or you could upload a new master page to the gallery, and then set the site to use this new page.  Manually uploading your master page to the master page gallery might be the best option, depending on your environment.  For my client, I did these steps in code, which is what they preferred. (Image courtesy of: http://www.joiningdots.net/blog/2007/08/sharepoint-and-quick-launch.html ) Before you decide which method you need to use, take a look at your existing pages.  Are they using the SharePoint dynamic token or the static token for the master page reference?  The wha, huh? SO, there are four ways to tell an .aspx page hosted in SharePoint which master page it should use: “~masterurl/default.master” – tells the page to use the default.master property of the site “~masterurl/custom.master” – tells the page to use the custom.master property of the site “~site/default.master” – tells the page to use the file named “default.master” in the site’s master page gallery “~sitecollection/default.master” – tells the page to use the file named “default.master” in the site collection’s master page gallery For more information about these tokens, take a look at this article on MSDN. Once you determine which token your existing pages are pointed to, then you know which file you need to update.  So, if the ~masterurl tokens are used, then you upload a new master page, either replacing the existing one or adding another one to the gallery.  If you’ve uploaded a new file with a new name, you’ll just need to set it as the master page either through the UI (MOSS only) or through code (MOSS or WSS Feature receiver code – or using SharePoint Designer). If the ~site or ~sitecollection tokens were used, then you’re limited to either replacing the existing master page, or editing all of your existing pages to point to another master page.  In most cases, it probably makes sense to just replace the master page. For my project, I’m working with WSS and the existing pages are set to the ~sitecollection token.  Based on this, I decided to just upload a new version of the existing master page (and not modify the dozens of existing pages). Also, since my client prefers Features and solutions, I created a master page Feature and a corresponding Feature Receiver.  For information on creating the elements and feature files, check out this post: http://sharepointmagazine.net/technical/development/deploying-the-master-page . This works fine, unless you are overwriting an existing master page, which was my case.  You’ll run into errors because the master page file needs to be checked out, replaced, and then checked in.  I wrote code in my Feature Activated event handler to accomplish these steps. Here are the steps necessary in code: Get the file name from the elements file of the Feature Check out the file from the master page gallery Upload the file to the master page gallery Check in the file to the master page gallery Here’s the code in my Feature Receiver: 1: public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) 2: { 3: try 4: { 5:   6: SPElementDefinitionCollection col = properties.Definition.GetElementDefinitions(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); 7:   8: using (SPWeb curweb = GetCurWeb(properties)) 9: { 10: foreach (SPElementDefinition ele in col) 11: { 12: if (string.Compare(ele.ElementType, "Module", true) == 0) 13: { 14: // <Module Name="DefaultMasterPage" List="116" Url="_catalogs/masterpage" RootWebOnly="FALSE"> 15: // <File Url="myMaster.master" Type="GhostableInLibrary" IgnoreIfAlreadyExists="TRUE" 16: // Path="MasterPages/myMaster.master" /> 17: // </Module> 18: string Url = ele.XmlDefinition.Attributes["Url"].Value; 19: foreach (System.Xml.XmlNode file in ele.XmlDefinition.ChildNodes) 20: { 21: string Url2 = file.Attributes["Url"].Value; 22: string Path = file.Attributes["Path"].Value; 23: string fileType = file.Attributes["Type"].Value; 24:   25: if (string.Compare(fileType, "GhostableInLibrary", true) == 0) 26: { 27: //Check out file in document library 28: SPFile existingFile = curweb.GetFile(Url + "/" + Url2); 29:   30: if (existingFile != null) 31: { 32: if (existingFile.CheckOutStatus != SPFile.SPCheckOutStatus.None) 33: { 34: throw new Exception("The master page file is already checked out. Please make sure the master page file is checked in, before activating this feature."); 35: } 36: else 37: { 38: existingFile.CheckOut(); 39: existingFile.Update(); 40: } 41: } 42:   43: //Upload file to document library 44: string filePath = System.IO.Path.Combine(properties.Definition.RootDirectory, Path); 45: string fileName = System.IO.Path.GetFileName(filePath); 46: char slash = Convert.ToChar("/"); 47: string[] folders = existingFile.ParentFolder.Url.Split(slash); 48:   49: if (folders.Length > 2) 50: { 51: Logger.logMessage("More than two folders were detected in the library path for the master page. Only two are supported.", 52: Logger.LogEntryType.Information); //custom logging component 53: } 54:   55: SPFolder myLibrary = curweb.Folders[folders[0]].SubFolders[folders[1]]; 56:   57: FileStream fs = File.OpenRead(filePath); 58:   59: SPFile newFile = myLibrary.Files.Add(fileName, fs, true); 60:   61: myLibrary.Update(); 62: newFile.CheckIn("Updated by Feature", SPCheckinType.MajorCheckIn); 63: newFile.Update(); 64: } 65: } 66: } 67: } 68: } 69: } 70: catch (Exception ex) 71: { 72: string msg = "Error occurred during feature activation"; 73: Logger.logException(ex, msg, ""); 74: } 75:   76: } 77:   78: /// <summary> 79: /// Using a Feature's properties, get a reference to the Current Web 80: /// </summary> 81: /// <param name="properties"></param> 82: public SPWeb GetCurWeb(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) 83: { 84: SPWeb curweb; 85:   86: //Check if the parent of the web is a site or a web 87: if (properties != null && properties.Feature.Parent.GetType().ToString() == "Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb") 88: { 89:   90: //Get web from parent 91: curweb = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent; 92: 93: } 94: else 95: { 96: //Get web from Site 97: using (SPSite cursite = (SPSite)properties.Feature.Parent) 98: { 99: curweb = (SPWeb)cursite.OpenWeb(); 100: } 101: } 102:   103: return curweb; 104: } This did the trick.  It allowed me to update my existing master page, through an easily repeatable process (which is great when you are working with more than one environment and what to do things like TEST it!).  I did run into what I would classify as a strange issue with one of my subsites, but that’s the topic for another blog post.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 15, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 15, 2010New ProjectsApplication Logging Repository (ALR): The ALR is a light-weight logging framework that allows applications to log events and exceptions to a central repository.Arkane.FileProperties.DSS: Arkane.FileProperties.Dss is a library for parsing the file header of a .DSS file (as used by Olympus digital dictaphone systems) to obtain time, v...B in conTrol project: This project enables controling log-in and locking your workstation automatically, identifyng you bluetooth.DarkBook: DarkBook is a personal library project.Direct2D for Microsoft .Net: Direct2D, DirectWrite and Windows Imaging wrappers for .Net. This library allows to access Direct2D, DirectWrite and Windows Imaging Windows API f...DJ Ware: DJ Ware is an extensible music player with plugin support and innovative features to organize and explore music files. It is developed with C#, WPF...gpsMe: gpsMe is a Windows Mobile 6.x mapping solution allowing to place the user on a personnalized map. The screen requirements are VGA or WVGA but, you ...jErrorLog: jErrorLog is an error logging component for use in DotNet 2.0 or later applications. It can log error messages to any of the following: database, e...KEMET_API: Java Library (open - source). This library is a help to study egyptian hieroglyphs.Meadow: A web site project for a Swedish floorball team called Slackers. Home page built with ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX and SQL Server 2005.Mustang Math: Mustang Math makes it easier for young children to practice basic math facts on the computer. No keyboard or mouse required - just say the answer!...Net.Formats.oEmbed: oEmbed format implementation in c#. oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows...Normlize O/R Mapper: Open source O/RM tool that participates with traditional inheritance object models as well as Hibernate/nHibernate style class shells. As I have t...N-Twill Twitter Client for VB.NET: Proyecto de cliente twitter hecho con la libreria TwitterVB2 y hecho en VB.net 2008.SIQM: Spatial Information Quality Management Toolset TIMETABLEASY Web: Under developmentTweetSharp: TweetSharp is a complete .NET library for micro-blogging platforms that allows you to write short and sweet expressions that fly to Twitter, Yammer...UISandbox: UISandbox is a sample C# source code showing how to deal with plugins requiring sandbox, when those plugins must interact with WPF application inte...WinForm SharePoint Web Part Manager: The SharePoint Web Part Manager is a WinForm tool using the SharePoint object model that enables developers and power users to add, update, delete,...WoW Character Viewer: View your World of Warcraft character (or anyone else's character), using this application. Written using Visual Basic Express 2008, then ported t...Xrns2XMod: Xrns2XMod converts from Renoise format (xrns) to mod or xm, which are more compatible formats playable from xmplay or vlc.New ReleasesArkane.FileProperties.DSS: 1.0 stable release: Executables and merge module for 1.0. (See documentation.)Bluetooth Radar: Version 2.0: Add IrDA reference for Bluetooth sending using Obex Add Project icon Add Bluetooth detection mode (Auto close application is there is no blueto...BUtil: BUtil 5.0 Alpha: Backup tasks adding.... in progressChronos WPF: Chronos v1.0 RC 1: Chronos v1.0 RC 1. Development will be feature frozen after this release, only bug fixes will be allowed. Updated nRoute assembly to v0.4 (http:...clipShow: Version 2.5: Release that addresses the canonical syntax issues in search discoverd by Tschachim (thanks again!). Also, the play list and play all menu items s...DarkBook: DarkBook alpha: Hi, here comes the alpha version of Darkbook. It has all the functions already but is still in developing. I hope it's helpful for you, at least it...DirectQ: Release 1.8.3a: Improvements to 1.8.2, which will be shortly be removed. This replaces the original 1.8.3 release from earlier today which had some late-breaking ...Effect Custom Tool for Visual Studio: Effect Custom Tool v1.1: Effect Custom Tool for Visual Studio is a visual studio 2008 extension that helps you generate c# classes from effect (*.fx) files for use with Xna...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.4.3: This is the latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.4.3), with general improvements. It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My...gpsMe: gpsMe v0.3: Required Hardware Windows Mobile 6 .Net Compact Framework 3.5 integrated gps device VGA or WVGA screen (normally works on others)IST435: Lab 4 - Enterprise Level CMS with DotNetNuke: Lab 4 - Enterprise Level CMS with DotNetNukeThis is the "starter kit" that you must base your Lab 4 on. This lab must be completed in-class.Mouse Jiggler: MouseJiggle-1.1: 1.1 release of Mouse Jiggler, now with x64 compatibility and the ability to start jiggling on run with the --jiggle or -j command-line switch.Mustang Math: MustangMath.exe: This is a quick and dirty "0.1" prototype to demonstrate the speech recognition idea. It starts asking you questions automatically on launch and k...MvcContrib: a Codeplex Foundation project: 2.0.36.0 for MVC2 (RTW): Please see the Change Log for a complete list of changes. MVC BootCamp Description of the releases: MvcContrib.Release.zip MvcContrib.dll MvcC...Nito.LINQ: Beta (v0.3): New features for this release: Several new supported platforms (see below). PDBs that are source-indexed to the appropriate CodePlex changeset. ...OpenIdPortableArea: 0.1.0.2 OpenIdPortableArea: OpenIdPortableArea.Release: DotNetOpenAuth.dll DotNetOpenAuth.xml MvcContrib.dll MvcContrib.xml OpenIdPortableArea.dll OpenIdPortableAre...PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn Sample with Library v0.2: New version of PokeIn library with sample. v0.2 There are new features in this release and no bug detected yet.Project Tru Tiên: Elements-test V1-fix (v2): Là EL test được fix tiếp theo bản fix V1, tạm gọi đây là bản fix V2 của ELtest Trong bản fix này EL được fix thêm vụ Quest, Quest chỉnh sửa đúng t...Rule 18 - Love your clipboard: Rule 18: This is the third public beta for the first version of Rule 18. This version has been updated to support Visual Studio 2010 RTM and .NET 4.0 RTM. ...SevenZipSharp: SevenZipSharp 0.62: Added: Extraction from SFX archives. Now it is possible to unrar RAR self-extractors, unzip ZIP self-extractors, etc. Extraction from DOC, XLS, (...SharePoint Labs: SPLab3001A-FRA-Level200: SPLab3001A-FRA-Level200 This SharePoint Lab will teach the persistence object layer that SharePoint uses to centraly store configuration data and o...TTXPathNavigator: TTXPathNavigator for VS2010: Version for Visual Studio 2010turing machine simulator: SDS: SDS documentVecDraw: VecDraw_0.2.25: Alpha release for test purposesWinForm SharePoint Web Part Manager: Beta 1: First release of the WinForm SharePoitn web part manager toolXrns2XMod: Xrns2XMod 0.5.1: Mod and XM conversion format - No sample data conversion at momentZip Solution: ZipSolution 5.3: Features: 1. Added WaitMsec for visual studio support with getting access to files in post build event; 2. Added ShowTextInToolbars to app.config ...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationFarseer Physics EngineIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDotRasFacebook Developer Toolkit

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• The APEX of Business Value...or...the Business Value of APEX? Oracle Cloud Takes Oracle APEX to New Heights!

  - by Gene Eun

  The attraction of Oracle Application Express (APEX) has increased tremendously with the recent launch of the Oracle Cloud. APEX already supported departmental development and deployment of business applications with minimal involvement from the IT department. Positioned as the ideal replacement for MS Access, APEX probably has managed better to capture the eye of developers and was used for enterprise application development at least as much as for the kind of tactical applications that Oracle strategically positioned it for. With APEX as PaaS from the Oracle Cloud, a leap is made to a much higher level of business value. Now the IT department is not even needed to make infrastructure available with a database running  on it. All the business needs is a credit card. And the business application that is developed, managed and used from the cloud through a standard browser can now just as easily be accessed by users from around the world as by users from the business department itself. As a bonus – the development of the APEX application is also done in the cloud – with no special demands on the location or the enterprise access privileges of the developers. To sum it up: APEX from Oracle Cloud Database Service get the development environment up and running in minutes no involvement from the internal IT department required (not for infrastructure, platform, or development) superior availability and scalability is offered by Oracle users from anywhere in the world can be invited to access the application developers from anywhere in the world can participate in creating and maintaining the application In addition: because the Oracle Cloud platform is the same as the on-premise platform, you can still decide to move the APEX application between the cloud and the local environment – and back again. The REST-ful services that are available through APEX allow programmatic interaction with the database under the APEX application. That means that this database can be synchronized with on premise databases or data stores in (other) clouds. Through the Oracle Cloud Messaging Service, the APEX application can easily enter into asynchronous conversations with other APEX applications, Fusion Middleware applications (ADF, SOA, BPM) and any other type of REST-enabled application. In my opinion, now, for the first time perhaps, APEX offers the attraction to the business that has been suggested before: because of the cloud, all the business needs is  a credit card (a budget of $175 per month), an internet-connection and a browser. Not like before, with a PC hidden under a desk or a database running somewhere in the data center. No matter how unattended: equipment is needed, power is consumed, the database needs to be kept running and if Oracle Database XE does not suffice, software licenses are required as well. And this set up always has a security challenge associated with it. The cloud fee for the Oracle Cloud Database Service includes infrastructure, power, licenses, availability, platform upgrades, a collection of reusable application components and the development and runtime environments containing the APEX platform. Of course this not only means that business departments can move quickly without having to convince their IT colleagues to move along – it also means that small organizations that do not even have IT colleagues can do the same. Getting tailored applications or applications up and running to get in touch with users and customers all over the world is now within easy reach for small outfits – without any investment. My misunderstanding For a long time, I was under the impression that the essence of APEX was that the business could create applications themselves – meaning that business ‘people’ would actually go into APEX to create the application. To me APEX was too much of a developers’ tool to see that happen – apart from the odd business analyst who missed his or her calling as an IT developer. Having looked at various other cloud based development offerings – including Force.com, Mendix, WaveMaker, WorkXpress, OrangeScape, Caspio and Cordys- I have come to realize my mistake. All these platforms are positioned for 'the business' but require a fair amount of coding and technical expertise. However, they make the business happy nevertheless, because they allow the  business to completely circumvent the IT department. That is the essence. Not having to go through the red tape, not having to wait for IT staff who (justifiably) need weeks or months to provide an environment, not having to deal with administrators (again, justifiably) refusing to take on that 'strange environment'. Being able to think of an initiative and turn into action right away. The business does not have to build the application - it can easily hire some external developers or even that nerdy boy next door. They can get started, get an application up and running and invite users in – especially external users such as customers. They will worry later about upgrades and life cycle management and integration. To get applications up and running quickly and start turning ideas into action and results rightaway. That is the key selling point for all these cloud offerings, including APEX from the Cloud. And it is a compelling story. For APEX probably even more so than for the others. While I consider APEX a somewhat proprietary framework compared with ‘regular’ Java/JEE web development (or even .NET and PHP  development), it is still far more open than most cloud environments. APEX is SQL and PL/SQL based – nothing special about those languages – and can run just as easily on site as in the cloud. It has been around since 2004 (that is not including several predecessors that fed straight into APEX) so it can be considered pretty mature. Oracle as a company seems pretty stable – so investments in its technology are bound to last for some time to come. By the way: neither APEX nor the other Cloud DevaaS offerings are targeted at creating applications with enormous life times. They fit into a trend of agile development and rapid life cycle management, with fairly light weight user interfaces that quickly adapt to taste, technology trends and functional requirements and that are easily replaced. APEX and ADF – a match made in heaven?! (or at least in the sky) Note that using APEX only for cloud based database with REST-ful Services is also a perfectly viable scenario: any UI – mobile or browser based – capable of consuming REST-ful services can be created against such a business tier. Creating an ADF Mobile application for example that runs aginst REST-ful services is a best practice for mobile development. Such REST-ful services can be consumed from any service provider – including the Cloud based APEX powered REST-ful services running against the Oracle Cloud Database Service! The ADF Mobile architecture overview can easily be morphed to fit the APEX services in – allowing for a cloud based mobile app: Want to learn more about Oracle Database Cloud Service or Oracle Cloud, just visit cloud.oracle.com  or oracle.com/cloud. Repost of a blog entry by Rick Greenwald, Director of Product Management, Oracle Database Cloud Service.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 16, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 16, 2010New Projects3D Calculator: 3D Calc is a simple calculator application for Windows Phone 7, the purpose of this project is to demo the 3D animations capabilities of WP7 and sh...azaleas: AzaleasBlueset Studio Opensource Projects: Only for Opensource projects form Blueset Studio.Breck: A Phoenix and Jumper Moneky Production: Breck is a first person non-violent shooter developed in C++ and Dark GDK. After the main game is developed we are looking into making a sequel or...Discuz! Forum SDK: This project is use to login in and post or reply topic on discuz forum.Dominion.NET: Evolving Dominion source code originally written in VB6 and posted by "jatill" on Collectible Card Game Headquarters. Migration of the design and s...EkspSys2010-ITR: A mini project for the course Experimental System devolopment in spring 2010Facebook Graph Toolkit: This project is a .Net implementation of the Facebook Graph API. The aim of this project is to be a replacement to the existing Facebook Toolkit (h...iFree: This is a solution for Vietnamese network socialInfoPath Editor for Developer: InfoPath Editor for developer allows user to modify the html text directly inside InfoPath designer or filler and push the change back to InfoPath ...iZeit: Run your own online calendar, with blog integration, recurrence, todo list and categories.machgos dotNet Tests: Just some little test-projects for learningmim: TBAMinePost: MinePost is a game made for the first 48 hour Reddit Game Jam.Mockina: Mockina is a mock framework. Expression tree syntax is used to specify which members to mock, both public and non-public. The code is easy to under...MSBuild Launch Pad (mPad): This is just another shell extension for MSBuild to enable quick execution of MSBuild scripts via Windows Explorer context menu. (C) 2010 Lex LiPeacock: A browser like tabbed applicationPrimeCalculation: PrimeCalculation is a .NET app to calculate primes in a given range. Speed on Core2Duo 2,4GHZ: Found all primes from 0 to 1 billion in 35 seconds (...Slightly Silverlight: A Framework that leverages Silverlight for processing, business logic but standard HTML for the presentation layer.Stopwatch: Stopwatch is a tool for measuring the time. To start and pause stopwatch you only need to press a key on the keyboard. An additional context menu a...YAXLib: Yet Another XML Serialization Library for the .NET Framework: YAXLib is an XML Serialization library which helps you structure freely the XML result, choose among private and public fields to be serialized, an...New ReleasesActivate Your Glutes: v1.0.3.0: This release is a migration to VS2010, .Net 4, MVC2 and Entity Framework 4. The code has also been considerably cleaned up - taking advantage of E...AnyCAD: AnyCAD.Free.ENU.v1.1: http://www.anycad.net Modeling •2D: Line, Rectangle, Arc, Arch, Circle, Spline, Polygon •Feature: Extrude, Loft, Chamfer, Sweep, Revol •Boolean: ...Blueset Studio Opensource Projects: 多功能计算器 3.5: 稳定版本。Code for Rapid C# Windows Development eBook: LLBLGen LINQPad Data Context Driver Ver 1.0.0.0: First release of a Static LLBLGen Pro Data Context Driver for LINQPad I recommend LINQPad 4 as it seems more stable with this driver than LINQPad 2.DSQLT - Dynamic SQL Templates: Release 1.2. Some behaviour has changed!!: Attention. Some behaviour has changed! Now its necessary to use WildCards in the pattern-parameter for DSQLT.AllSourceContains DSQLT.Databases DSQ...FDS AutoCAD plug-in: FDS to AutoCAD plug-in: Basic functionality was implemented. Some routines like setting fds executable location are still not automated.Feature Builder Guidance Extensions: FBGX 2 - Standalone FX: Background: The Feature Builder Guidance is extensible and displays guidance content supplied by all the Feature Builder Guidance Extensions (FBGX...Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R3: - You can now right click on the input box to get options for toggling bold, underline, colors, etc. - The size of the nickname column is now saved...Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R4: - A user's channel status now appears next to their nick when they talk (e.g. @Nick or +Nick) - Fixed an error where certain kinds of network probl...HD-Trailers.NET Downloader: HD-Trailers.NET Downloader v1.0: Version 1.0 Thanks to Wolfgang for all his help. I let this project languish for too long while focusing on other things, but his involvement has ...InfoPath Editor for Developer: InfoPath Editor Beta 1: Intial Release: Can load InfoPath inner html. Can edit InfoPath inner html. InfoPath 2007 only.LinkSharp: LinkSharp 0.1.0: First release of LinkSharp. Set up iis, and use the sql script to create a new database.PowerAuras: PowerAuras V3.0.0F: This version adds better integration with GTFO New Flags Added PvP flag In 5-Man Instance In Raid Instance In Battleground In ArenaRx Contrib: V1.4: Add the ability to catch internal exception and the ability to publish error by queue adaptersSEO SiteMap: SEO SiteMap RC1: -SevenZipLib Library: v9.13.2: Stable release associated with 7z.dll 9.13 beta. Ability to create and update archives not implemente yet.Silverlight / WPF Controls: Upload, FlipPanel, DeepZoom, Animation, Encryption: Code Camp Demonstration: This code example demonstrates MVVM/MEF with WPF with attached properties,security and custom ICommand class.SQL Data Capture - Black Box Application Testing: SQLDataCapture V1.2: Added Entity Framework Support to CRUD generator (Insert Stored Procedure) and switched to VS 2010 for development.Stopwatch: Stopwatch 0.1: Stopwatch Release 0.1VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30515.0: Automatic drop of latest buildYet another developer blog - Examples: Asynchronous TreeView in ASP.NET MVC: This sample application shows how to use jQuery TreeView plugin for creating an asynchronous TreeView in ASP.NET MVC. This application is accompani...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrPHPExcelBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMWindows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP DevelopersMirror Testing SystemN2 CMSStyleCop

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• Documenting C# Library using GhostDoc and SandCastle

  - by sreejukg

  Documentation is an essential part of any IT project, especially when you are creating reusable components that will be used by other developers (such as class libraries). Without documentation re-using a class library is almost impossible. Just think of coding .net applications without MSDN documentation (Ooops I can’t think of it). Normally developers, who know the bits and pieces of their classes, see this as a boring work to write details again to generate the documentation. Also the amount of work to make this and manage it changes made the process of manual creation of Documentation impossible or tedious. So what is the effective solution? Let me divide this into two steps 1. Generate comments for your code while you are writing the code. 2. Create documentation file using these comments. Now I am going to examine these processes. Step 1: Generate XML Comments automatically Most of the developers write comments for their code. The best thing is that the comments will be entered during the development process. Additionally comments give a good reference to the code, make your code more manageable/readable. Later these comments can be converted into documentation, along with your source code by identifying properties and methods I found an add-in for visual studio, GhostDoc that automatically generates XML documentation comments for C#. The add-in is available in Visual Studio Gallery at MSDN. You can download this from the url http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/46A20578-F0D5-4B1E-B55D-F001A6345748. I downloaded the free version from the above url. The free version suits my requirement. There is a professional version (you need to pay some $ for this) available that gives you some more features. I found the free version itself suits my requirements. The installation process is straight forward. A couple of clicks will do the work for you. The best thing with GhostDoc is that it supports multiple versions of visual studio such as 2005, 2008 and 2010. After Installing GhostDoc, when you start Visual studio, the GhostDoc configuration dialog will appear. The first screen asks you to assign a hot key, pressing this hotkey will enter the comment to your code file with the necessary structure required by GhostDoc. Click Assign to go to the next step where you configure the rules for generating the documentation from the code file. Click Create to start creating the rules. Click finish button to close this wizard. Now you performed the necessary configuration required by GhostDoc. Now In Visual Studio tools menu you can find the GhostDoc that gives you some options. Now let us examine how GhostDoc generate comments for a method. I have write the below code in my code behind file. public Char GetChar(string str, int pos) { return str[pos]; } Now I need to generate the comments for this function. Select the function and enter the hot key assigned during the configuration. GhostDoc will generate the comments as follows. /// <summary> /// Gets the char. /// </summary> /// <param name="str">The STR.</param> /// <param name="pos">The pos.</param> /// <returns></returns> public Char GetChar(string str, int pos) { return str[pos]; } So this is a very handy tool that helps developers writing comments easily. You can generate the xml documentation file separately while compiling the project. This will be done by the C# compiler. You can enable the xml documentation creation option (checkbox) under Project properties -> Build tab. Now when you compile, the xml file will created under the bin folder. Step 2: Generate the documentation from the XML file Now you have generated the xml file documentation. Sandcastle is the tool from Microsoft that generates MSDN style documentation from the compiler produced XML file. The project is available in codeplex http://sandcastle.codeplex.com/. Download and install Sandcastle to your computer. Sandcastle is a command line tool that doesn’t have a rich GUI. If you want to automate the documentation generation, definitely you will be using the command line tools. Since I want to generate the documentation from the xml file generated in the previous step, I was expecting a GUI where I can see the options. There is a GUI available for Sandcastle called Sandcastle Help File Builder. See the link to the project in codeplex. http://www.codeplex.com/wikipage?ProjectName=SHFB. You need to install Sandcastle and then the Sandcastle Help file builder. From here I assume that you have installed both sandcastle and Sandcastle help file builder successfully. Once you installed the help file builder, it will be available in your all programs list. Click on the Sandcastle Help File Builder GUI, will launch application. First you need to create a project. Click on File -> New project The New project dialog will appear. Choose a folder to store your project file and give a name for your documentation project. Click the save button. Now you will see your project properties. Now from the Project explorer, right click on the Documentation Sources, Click on the Add Documentation Source link. A documentation source is a file such as an assembly or a Visual Studio solution or project from which information will be extracted to produce API documentation. From the Add Documentation source dialog, I have selected the XML file generated by my project. Once you add the xml file to the project, you will see the dll file automatically added by the help file builder. Now click on the build button. Now the application will generate the help file. The Build window gives to the result of each steps. Once the process completed successfully, you will have the following output in the build window. Now navigate to your Help Project (I have selected the folder My Documents\Documentation), inside help folder, you can find the chm file. Open the chm file will give you MSDN like documentation. Documentation is an important part of development life cycle. Sandcastle with GhostDoc make this process easier so that developers can implement the documentation in the projects with simple to use steps.

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• Process.Start() and ShellExecute() fails with URLs on Windows 8

  - by Rick Strahl

  Since I installed Windows 8 I've noticed that a number of my applications appear to have problems opening URLs. That is when I click on a link inside of a Windows application, either nothing happens or there's an error that occurs. It's happening both to my own applications and a host of Windows applications I'm running. At first I thought this was an issue with my default browser (Chrome) but after switching the default browser to a few others and experimenting a bit I noticed that the errors occur - oddly enough - only when I run an application as an Administrator. I also tried switching to FireFox and Opera as my default browser and saw exactly the same behavior. The scenario for this is a bit bizarre: Running on Windows 8 Call Process.Start() (or ShellExecute() in Win32 API) with a URL or an HTML file Run 'As Administrator' (works fine under non-elevated user account!) or with UAC off A browser other than Internet Explorer is set as your Default Web Browser Talk about a weird scenario: Something that doesn't work when you run as an Administrator which is supposed to have rights to everything on the system! Instead running under an Admin account - either elevated with a User Account Control prompt or even when running as a full Administrator fails. It appears that this problem does not occur for everyone, but when I looked for a solution to this, I saw quite a few posts in relation to this with no clear resolutions. I have three Windows 8 machines running here in the office and all three of them showed this behavior. Lest you think this is just a programmer's problem - this can affect any software running on your system that needs to run under administrative rights. Try it out Now, in order for this next example to fail, any browser but Internet Explorer has to be your default browser and even then it may not fail depending on how you installed your browser. To see if this is a problem create a small Console application and call Process.Start() with a URL in it:namespace Win8ShellBugConsole { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Launching Url..."); Process.Start("http://microsoft.com"); Console.Write("Press any key to continue..."); Console.ReadKey(); Console.WriteLine("\r\n\r\nLaunching image..."); Process.Start(Path.GetFullPath(@"..\..\sailbig.jpg")); Console.Write("Press any key to continue..."); Console.ReadKey(); } } } Compile this code. Then execute the code from Explorer (not from Visual Studio because that may change the permissions). If you simply run the EXE and you're not running as an administrator, you'll see the Web page pop up in the browser as well as the image loading. Now run the same thing with Run As Administrator: Now when you run it you get a nice error when Process.Start() is fired: The same happens if you are running with User Account Control off altogether - ie. you are running as a full admin account. Now if you comment out the URL in the code above and just fire the image display - that works just fine in any user mode. As does opening any other local file type or even starting a new EXE locally (ie. Process.Start("c:\windows\notepad.exe"). All that works, EXCEPT for URLs. The code above uses Process.Start() in .NET but the same happens in Win32 Applications that use the ShellExecute API. In some of my older Fox apps ShellExecute returns an error code of 31 - which is No Shell Association found. What's the Deal? It turns out the problem has to do with the way browsers are registering themselves on Windows. Internet Explorer - being a built-in application in Windows 8 - apparently does this correctly, but other browsers possibly don't or at least didn't at the time I installed them. So even Chrome, which continually updates itself, has a recent version that apparently has this registration issue fixed, I was unable to simply set IE as my default browser then use Chrome to 'Set as Default Browser'. It still didn't work. Neither did using the Set Program Associations dialog which lets you assign what extensions are mapped to by a given application. Each application provides a set of extension/moniker mappings that it supports and this dialog lets you associate them on a system wide basis. This also did not work for Chrome or any of the other browsers at first. However, after repeated retries here eventually I did manage to get FireFox to work, but not any of the others. What Works? Reinstall the Browser In the end I decided on the hard core pull the plug solution: Totally uninstall and re-install Chrome in this case. And lo and behold, after reinstall everything was working fine. Now even removing the association for Chrome, switching to IE as the default browser and then back to Chrome works. But, even though the version of Chrome I was running before uninstalling and reinstalling is the same as I'm running now after the reinstall now it works. Of course I had to find out the hard way, before Richard commented with a note regarding what the issue is with Chrome at least: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=156400 As expected the issue is a registration issue - with keys not being registered at the machine level. Reading this I'm still not sure why this should be a problem - an elevated account still runs under the same user account (ie. I'm still rickstrahl even if I Run As Administrator), so why shouldn't an app be able to read my Current User registry hive? And also that doesn't quite explain why if I register the extensions using Run As Administrator in Chrome when using Set as Default Browser). But in the end it works… Not so fast It's now a couple of days later and still there are some oddball problems although this time they appear to be purely Chrome issues. After the reinstall Chrome seems to pop up properly with ShellExecute() calls both in regular user and Admin mode. However, it now looks like Chrome is actually running two completely separate user profiles for each. For example, when I run Visual Studio in Admin mode and go to View in browser, Chrome complains that it was installed in Admin mode and can't launch (WTF?). Then you retry a few times later and it ends up working. When launched that way some of the plug-ins installed don't show up with the effect that sometimes they're visible sometimes they're not. Also Chrome seems to loose my configuration and Google sign in between sessions now, presumably when switching user modes. Add-ins installed in admin mode don't show up in user mode and vice versa. Ah, this is lovely. Did I mention that I freaking hate UAC precisely because of this kind of bullshit. You can never tell exactly what account your app is running under, and apparently apps also have a hard time trying to put data into the right place that works for both scenarios. And as my recent post on using Windows Live accounts shows it's yet another level of abstraction ontop of the underlying system identity that can cause all sort of small side effect headaches like this. Hopefully, most of you are skirting this issue altogether - having installed more recent versions of your favorite browsers. If not, hopefully this post will take you straight to reinstallation to fix this annoying issue.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Windows  .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• SQL SERVER – SSMS: Disk Usage Report

  - by Pinal Dave

  Let us start with humor!  I think we the series on various reports, we come to a logical point. We covered all the reports at server level. This means the reports we saw were targeted towards activities that are related to instance level operations. These are mostly like how a doctor diagnoses a patient. At this point I am reminded of a dialog which I read somewhere: Patient: Doc, It hurts when I touch my head. Doc: Ok, go on. What else have you experienced? Patient: It hurts even when I touch my eye, it hurts when I touch my arms, it even hurts when I touch my feet, etc. Doc: Hmmm … Patient: I feel it hurts when I touch anywhere in my body. Doc: Ahh … now I get it. You need a plaster to your finger John. Sometimes the server level gives an indicator to what is happening in the system, but we need to get to the root cause for a specific database. So, this is the first blog in series where we would start discussing about database level reports. To launch database level reports, expand selected server in Object Explorer, expand the Databases folder, and then right-click any database for which we want to look at reports. From the menu, select Reports, then Standard Reports, and then any of database level reports. In this blog, we would talk about four “disk” reports because they are similar: Disk Usage Disk Usage by Top Tables Disk Usage by Table Disk Usage by Partition Disk Usage This report shows multiple information about the database. Let us discuss them one by one.  We have divided the output into 5 different sections. Section 1 shows the high level summary of the database. It shows the space used by database files (mdf and ldf). Under the hood, the report uses, various DMVs and DBCC Commands, it is using sys.data_spaces and DBCC SHOWFILESTATS. Section 2 and 3 are pie charts. One for data file allocation and another for the transaction log file. Pie chart for “Data Files Space Usage (%)” shows space consumed data, indexes, allocated to the SQL Server database, and unallocated space which is allocated to the SQL Server database but not yet filled with anything. “Transaction Log Space Usage (%)” used DBCC SQLPERF (LOGSPACE) and shows how much empty space we have in the physical transaction log file. Section 4 shows the data from Default Trace and looks at Event IDs 92, 93, 94, 95 which are for “Data File Auto Grow”, “Log File Auto Grow”, “Data File Auto Shrink” and “Log File Auto Shrink” respectively. Here is an expanded view for that section. If default trace is not enabled, then this section would be replaced by the message “Trace Log is disabled” as highlighted below. Section 5 of the report uses DBCC SHOWFILESTATS to get information. Here is the enhanced version of that section. This shows the physical layout of the file. In case you have In-Memory Objects in the database (from SQL Server 2014), then report would show information about those as well. Here is the screenshot taken for a different database, which has In-Memory table. I have highlighted new things which are only shown for in-memory database. The new sections which are highlighted above are using sys.dm_db_xtp_checkpoint_files, sys.database_files and sys.data_spaces. The new type for in-memory OLTP is ‘FX’ in sys.data_space. The next set of reports is targeted to get information about a table and its storage. These reports can answer questions like: Which is the biggest table in the database? How many rows we have in table? Is there any table which has a lot of reserved space but its unused? Which partition of the table is having more data? Disk Usage by Top Tables This report provides detailed data on the utilization of disk space by top 1000 tables within the Database. The report does not provide data for memory optimized tables. Disk Usage by Table This report is same as earlier report with few difference. First Report shows only 1000 rows First Report does order by values in DMV sys.dm_db_partition_stats whereas second one does it based on name of the table. Both of the reports have interactive sort facility. We can click on any column header and change the sorting order of data. Disk Usage by Partition This report shows the distribution of the data in table based on partition in the table. This is so similar to previous output with the partition details now. Here is the query taken from profiler. SELECT row_number() OVER (ORDER BY a1.used_page_count DESC, a1.index_id) AS row_number ,      (dense_rank() OVER (ORDER BY a5.name, a2.name))%2 AS l1 ,      a1.OBJECT_ID ,      a5.name AS [schema] ,       a2.name ,       a1.index_id ,       a3.name AS index_name ,       a3.type_desc ,       a1.partition_number ,       a1.used_page_count * 8 AS total_used_pages ,       a1.reserved_page_count * 8 AS total_reserved_pages ,       a1.row_count FROM sys.dm_db_partition_stats a1 INNER JOIN sys.all_objects a2  ON ( a1.OBJECT_ID = a2.OBJECT_ID) AND a1.OBJECT_ID NOT IN (SELECT OBJECT_ID FROM sys.tables WHERE is_memory_optimized = 1) INNER JOIN sys.schemas a5 ON (a5.schema_id = a2.schema_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN  sys.indexes a3  ON ( (a1.OBJECT_ID = a3.OBJECT_ID) AND (a1.index_id = a3.index_id) ) WHERE (SELECT MAX(DISTINCT partition_number) FROM sys.dm_db_partition_stats a4 WHERE (a4.OBJECT_ID = a1.OBJECT_ID)) >= 1 AND a2.TYPE <> N'S' AND  a2.TYPE <> N'IT' ORDER BY a5.name ASC, a2.name ASC, a1.index_id, a1.used_page_count DESC, a1.partition_number Using all of the above reports, you should be able to get the usage of database files and also space used by tables. I think this is too much disk information for a single blog and I hope you have used them in the past to get data. Do let me know if you found anything interesting using these reports in your environments. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Reports

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• Rockmelt, the technology adoption model, and Facebook's spare internet

  - by Roger Hart

  Regardless of how good it is, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to make snide remarks about Rockmelt. After all, on the surface it looks a lot like some people spent two years building a browser instead of just bashing out a Chrome extension over a wet weekend. It probably does some more stuff. I don't know for sure because artificial scarcity is cool, apparently, so the "invitation" is still in the post*. I may in fact never know for sure, because I'm not wild about Facebook sign-in as a prerequisite for anything. From the video, and some initial reviews, my early reaction was: I have a browser, I have a Twitter client; what on earth is this for? The answer, of course, is "not me". Rockmelt is, in a way, quite audacious. Oh, sure, on launch day it's Bay Area bar-chat for the kids with no lenses in their retro specs and trousers that give you deep-vein thrombosis, but it's not really about them. Likewise,  Facebook just launched Google Wave, or something. And all the tech snobbery and scorn packed into describing it that way is irrelevant next to what they're doing with their platform. Here's something I drew in MS Paint** because I don't want to get sued: (see: The technology adoption lifecycle) A while ago in the Guardian, John Lanchester dusted off the idiom that "technology is stuff that doesn't work yet". The rest of the article would be quite interesting if it wasn't largely about MySpace, and he's sort of got a point. If you bolt on the sentiment that risk-averse businessmen like things that work, you've got the essence of Crossing the Chasm. Products for the mainstream market don't look much like technology. Think for  a second about early (1980s ish) hi-fi systems, with all the knobs and fiddly bits, their ostentatious technophile aesthetic. Then consider their sleeker and less (or at least less conspicuously) functional successors in the 1990s. The theory goes that innovators and early adopters like technology, it's a hobby in itself. The rest of the humans seem to like magic boxes with very few buttons that make stuff happen and never trouble them about why. Personally, I consider Apple's maddening insistence that iTunes is an acceptable way to move files around to be more or less morally unacceptable. Most people couldn't care less. Hence Rockmelt, and hence Facebook's continued growth. Rockmelt looks pointless to me, because I aggregate my social gubbins with Digsby, or use TweetDeck. But my use case is different and so are my enthusiasms. If I want to share photos, I'll use Flickr - but Facebook has photo sharing. If I want a short broadcast message, I'll use Twitter - Facebook has status updates. If I want to sell something with relatively little hassle, there's eBay - or Facebook marketplace. YouTube - check, FB Video. Email - messaging. Calendaring apps, yeah there are loads, or FB Events. What if I want to host a simple web page? Sure, they've got pages. Also Notes for blogging, and more games than I can count. This stuff is right there, where millions and millions of users are already, and for what they need it just works. It's not about me, because I'm not in the big juicy area under the curve. It's what 1990s portal sites could never have dreamed of achieving. Facebook is AOL on speed, crack, and some designer drugs it had specially imported from the future. It's a n00b-friendly gateway to the internet that just happens to serve up all the things you want to do online, right where you are. Oh, and everybody else is there too. The price of having all this and the social graph too is that you have all of this, and the social graph too. But plenty of folks have more incisive things to say than me about the whole privacy shebang, and it's not really what I'm talking about. Facebook is maintaining a vast, and fairly fully-featured training-wheels internet. And it makes up a large proportion of the online experience for a lot of people***. It's the entire web (2.0?) experience for the early and late majority. And sure, no individual bit of it is quite as slick or as fully-realised as something like Flickr (which wows me a bit every time I use it. Those guys are good at the web), but it doesn't have to be. It has to be unobtrusively good enough for the regular humans. It has to not feel like technology. This is what Rockmelt sort of is. You're online, you want something nebulously social, and you don't want to faff about with, say, Twitter clients. Wow! There it is on a really distracting sidebar, right in your browser. No effort! Yeah - fish nor fowl, much? It might work, I guess. There may be a demographic who want their social web experience more simply than tech tinkering, and who aren't just getting it from Facebook (or, for that matter, mobile devices). But I'd be surprised. Rockmelt feels like an attempt to grab a slice of Facebook-style "Look! It's right here, where you already are!", but it's still asking the mature market to install a new browser. Presumably this is where that Facebook sign-in predicate comes in handy, though it'll take some potent awareness marketing to make it fly. Meanwhile, Facebook quietly has the entire rest of the internet as a product management resource, and can continue to give most of the people most of what they want. Something that has not gone un-noticed in its potential to look a little sinister. But heck, they might even make Google Wave popular.     *This was true last week when I drafted this post. I got an invite subsequently, hence the screenshot. **MS Paint is no fun any more. It's actually good in Windows 7. Farewell ironically-shonky diagrams. *** It's also behind a single sign-in, lending a veneer of confidence, and partially solving the problem of usernames being crummy unique identifiers. I'll be blogging about that at some point.

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• Beginner Geek: How to Use Bookmarklets on Any Device

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Web browser bookmarklets allow you to perform actions on the current page with just a click or tap. They’re a lightweight alternative to browser extensions. They even work on mobile browsers that don’t support traditional extensions. To use bookmarklets, all you need is a web browser that supports bookmarks — that’s it! Bookmarklets Explained Web pages you view in your browser use JavaScript code. That’s why web pages aren’t just static documents anymore — they’re dynamic. A bookmarklet is a normal bookmark with a piece of JavaScript code instead of a web address. When you click or tap the bookmarklet, it will execute the JavaScript code on the current page instead of loading a different page, as most bookmarks do. Bookmarklets can be used to do something to a web page with a single click. For example, you’ll find bookmarklets associated with web services like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pocket, and LastPass. When you click the bookmarklet, it will run code that lets you easily share the current page with that service. Bookmarklets don’t just have to be  associated with web services. A bookmarklet you click could modify the appearance of the page, stripping away most of the junk and giving you a clean “reading mode.” It could alter fonts, remove images, or insert other content. It can access anything the web page could access. For example, you could use a bookmarklet to reveal a password that just appears as ******* on the page. Unlike browser extensions, bookmarklets don’t run in the background and bog down your browser. They don’t do anything at all until you click them. Because they just use the standard bookmark system, they can also be used in mobile browsers where you couldn’t run extensions. For example, you could install the Pocket bookmarklet in Safari on an iPad and get an “Add to Pocket” option in Safari. Safari doesn’t offer browsing extensions and Apple’s iOS doesn’t offer a “Share” feature like Android and Windows 8 do, so this is the only way to get this direct integration. You could even use the LastPass bookmarklets in Safari on an iPad to integrate LastPass with the Safari web browser. Where to Find Bookmarklets If you’re looking for a bookmarklet for a particular service, you’ll generally find the bookmarklet on that service’s site. Websites like Twitter, Facebook, and Pocket host pages where they provide bookmarklets along with browser extensions. Bookmarklets aren’t like programs. They’re really just a piece of text that you can put in a bookmarklet, so you don’t have to download them a specific site. You can get them from practically anywhere — installing them just involves copying a bit of text off of a web page. For example, you can just search the web for “reveal password bookmarklet” if you wanted a bookmarklet that will reveal passwords. We’ve covered many of the must-have bookmarklets — and our readers have chimed in too — so take a look at our lists for more examples. How to Install a Bookmarklet Bookmarklets are simple to install. When you hover over a bookmarklet on a web page, you’ll see its address begins with “javascript:”. If you have your web browser’s bookmark or favorites toolbar visible, the easiest way to install a bookmarklet is with drag-and-drop. Press Ctrl+Shift+B to show your bookmarks toolbar if you’re using Chrome or Internet Explorer. In Firefox, right-click the toolbar and click Bookmarks Toolbar. Just drag and drop this link to your bookmark toolbar. The bookmarklet is now installed. You can also install bookmarklets manually. Select the bookmarklet’s code and copy it to your clipboard. If the bookmarklet is a link, right-click or long-press the link and copy its address to your clipboard. Open your browser’s bookmarks manager, add a bookmark, and paste the JavaScript code directly into the address box. Give your bookmarklet a name and save it. How to Use a Bookmarklet Bookmarklets are easiest to use if you have your browser’s bookmarks toolbar enabled. Just click the bookmarklet and your browser will run it on the current page. If you don’t have a bookmarks toolbar — such as on Safari on an iPad or another mobile browser — just open your browser’s bookmarks pane and tap or click the bookmark. In mobile Chrome, you’ll need to launch the bookmarklet from the location bar. Open the web page you want to run the bookmarklet on, tap your location bar, and start searching for the name of the bookmarklet. Tap the bookmarklet’s name to run it on the current page. Note that the bookmarklet only appears here because we have it saved as a bookmark in Chrome. You’ll need to add the bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks before you can use it in this way. The location bar approach may also be necessary in other browsers. The trick is loading the bookmark so that it will be associated with your current tab. You can’t just open your bookmarks in a separate browser tab and run the bookmarklet from there — it will run on that other browser tab. Bookmarklets are powerful and flexible. While they’re not as flashy as browser extensions, they’re much more lightweight and allow you to get extension-like features in more limited mobile browsers.

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