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• Microsoft Declares the Future of ASP.NET is Web API

  - by sbwalker

  Sitting on a plane on my way home from Tech Ed 2012 in Orlando, I thought it would be a good time to jot down some key takeaways from this year’s conference. Some of these items I have known since the Microsoft MVP Summit which occurred in Redmond in late February ( but due to NDA restrictions I could not share them with the developer community at large ) and some of them are a result of insightful conversations with a wide variety of industry insiders and Microsoft employees at the conference. First, let’s travel back in time 4 years to the Microsoft MVP Summit in 2008. Microsoft was facing some heat from market newcomer Ruby on Rails and responded with a new web development framework of its own, ASP.NET MVC. At the Summit they estimated that MVC would only be applicable for ~10% of all new web development projects. Based on that prediction I questioned why they were investing such considerable resources for such a relative edge case, but my guess is that they felt it was an important edge case at the time as some of the more vocal .NET evangelists as well as some very high profile start-ups ( ie. Twitter ) had publicly announced their intent to use Rails. Microsoft made a lot of noise about MVC. In fact, they focused so much of their messaging and marketing hype around MVC that it appeared that WebForms was essentially dead. Yes, it may have been true that Microsoft continued to invest in WebForms, but from an outside perspective it really appeared that MVC was the only framework getting any real attention. As a result, MVC started to gain market share. An inside source at Microsoft told me that MVC usage has grown at a rate of about 5% per year and now sits at ~30%. Essentially by focusing so much marketing effort on MVC, Microsoft actually created a larger market demand for it.  This is because in the Microsoft ecosystem there is somewhat of a bandwagon mentality amongst developers. If Microsoft spends a lot of time talking about a specific technology, developers get the perception that it must be really important. So rather than choosing the right tool for the job, they often choose the tool with the most marketing hype and then try to sell it to the customer. In 2010, I blogged about the fact that MVC did not make any business sense for the DotNetNuke platform. This was because our ecosystem relied on third party extensions which were dependent on the WebForms model. If we migrated the core to MVC it would mean that all of the third party extensions would no longer be compatible, which would be an irresponsible business decision for us to make at the expense of our users and customers. However, this did not stop the debate from continuing to occur in our ecosystem. Clearly some developers had drunk Microsoft’s Kool-Aid about MVC and were of the mindset, to paraphrase an old Scottish saying, “If its not MVC, it’s crap”. Now, this is a rather ignorant position to take as most of the benefits of MVC can be achieved in WebForms with solid architecture and responsible coding practices. Clean separation of concerns, unit testing, and direct control over page output are all possible in the WebForms model – it just requires diligence and discipline. So over the past few years some horror stories have begun to bubble to the surface of software development projects focused on ground-up rewrites of web applications for the sole purpose of migrating from WebForms to MVC. These large scale rewrites were typically initiated by engineering teams with only a single argument driving the business decision, that Microsoft was promoting MVC as “the future”. These ill-fated rewrites offered no benefit to end users or customers and in fact resulted in a less stable, less scalable and more complicated systems – basically taking one step forward and two full steps back. A case in point is the announcement earlier this week that a popular open source .NET CMS provider has decided to pull the plug on their new MVC product which has been under active development for more than 18 months and revert back to WebForms. The availability of multiple server-side development models has deeply fragmented the Microsoft developer community. Some folks like to compare it to the age-old VB vs. C# language debate. However, the VB vs. C# language debate was ultimately more of a religious war because at least the two dominant programming languages were compatible with one another and could be used interchangeably. The issue with WebForms vs. MVC is much more challenging. This is because the messaging from Microsoft has positioned the two solutions as being incompatible with one another and as a result web developers feel like they are forced to choose one path or another. Yes, it is true that it has always been technically possible to use WebForms and MVC in the same project, but the tooling support has always made this feel “dirty”. The fragmentation has also made it difficult to attract newcomers as the perceived barrier to entry for learning ASP.NET has become higher. As a result many new software developers entering the market are gravitating to environments where the development model seems more simple and intuitive ( ie. PHP or Ruby ). At the same time that the Web Platform team was busy promoting ASP.NET MVC, the Microsoft Office team has been promoting Sharepoint as a platform for building internal enterprise web applications. Sharepoint has great penetration in the enterprise and over time has been enhanced with improved extensibility capabilities for software developers. But, like many other mature enterprise ASP.NET web applications, it is built on the WebForms development model. Similar to DotNetNuke, Sharepoint leverages a rich third party ecosystem for both generic web controls and more specialized WebParts – both of which rely on WebForms. So basically this resulted in a situation where the Web Platform group had headed off in one direction and the Office team had gone in another direction, and the end customer was stuck in the middle trying to figure out what to do with their existing investments in Microsoft technology. It really emphasized the perception that the left hand was not speaking to the right hand, as strategically speaking there did not seem to be any high level plan from Microsoft to ensure consistency and continuity across the different product lines. With the introduction of ASP.NET MVC, it also made some of the third party control vendors scratch their heads, and wonder what the heck Microsoft was thinking. The original value proposition of ASP.NET over Classic ASP was the ability for web developers to emulate the highly productive desktop development model by using abstract components for creating rich, interactive web interfaces. Web control vendors like Telerik, Infragistics, DevExpress, and ComponentArt had all built sizable businesses offering powerful user interface components to WebForms developers. And even after MVC was introduced these vendors continued to improve their products, offering greater productivity and a superior user experience via AJAX to what was possible in MVC. And since many developers were comfortable and satisfied with these third party solutions, the demand remained strong and the third party web control market continued to prosper despite the availability of MVC. While all of this was going on in the Microsoft ecosystem, there has also been a fundamental shift in the general software development industry. Driven by the explosion of Internet-enabled devices, the focus has now centered on service-oriented architecture (SOA). Service-oriented architecture is all about defining a public API for your product that any client can consume; whether it’s a native application running on a smart phone or tablet, a web browser taking advantage of HTML5 and Javascript, or a rich desktop application running on a PC. REST-based services which utilize the less verbose characteristics of JSON as a transport mechanism, have become the preferred approach over older, more bloated SOAP-based techniques. SOA also has the benefit of producing a cross-platform API, as every major technology stack is able to interact with standard REST-based web services. And for web applications, more and more developers are turning to robust Javascript libraries like JQuery and Knockout for browser-based client-side development techniques for calling web services and rendering content to end users. In fact, traditional server-side page rendering has largely fallen out of favor, resulting in decreased demand for server-side frameworks like Ruby on Rails, WebForms, and (gasp) MVC. In response to these new industry trends, Microsoft did what it always does – it immediately poured some resources into developing a solution which will ensure they remain relevant and competitive in the web space. This work culminated in a new framework which was branded as Web API. It is convention-based and designed to embrace native HTTP standards without copious layers of abstraction. This framework is designed to be the ultimate replacement for both the REST aspects of WCF and ASP.NET MVC Web Services. And since it was developed out of band with a dependency only on ASP.NET 4.0, it means that it can be used immediately in a variety of production scenarios. So at Tech Ed 2012 it was made abundantly clear in numerous sessions that Microsoft views Web API as the “Future of ASP.NET”. In fact, one Microsoft PM even went as far as to say that if we look 3-4 years into the future, that all ASP.NET web applications will be developed using the Web API approach. This is a fairly bold prediction and clearly telegraphs where Microsoft plans to allocate its resources going forward. Currently Web API is being delivered as part of the MVC4 package, but this is only temporary for the sake of convenience. It also sounds like there are still internal discussions going on in terms of how to brand the various aspects of ASP.NET going forward – perhaps the moniker of “ASP.NET Web Stack” coined a couple years ago by Scott Hanselman and utilized as part of the open source release of ASP.NET bits on Codeplex a few months back will eventually stick. Web API is being positioned as the unification of ASP.NET – the glue that is able to pull this fragmented mess back together again. The  “One ASP.NET” strategy will promote the use of all frameworks - WebForms, MVC, and Web API, even within the same web project. Basically the message is utilize the appropriate aspects of each framework to solve your business problems. Instead of navigating developers to a fork in the road, the plan is to educate them that “hybrid” applications are a great strategy for delivering solutions to customers. In addition, the service-oriented approach coupled with client-side development promoted by Web API can effectively be used in both WebForms and MVC applications. So this means it is also relevant to application platforms like DotNetNuke and Sharepoint, which means that it starts to create a unified development strategy across all ASP.NET product lines once again. And so what about MVC? There have actually been rumors floated that MVC has reached a stage of maturity where, similar to WebForms, it will be treated more as a maintenance product line going forward ( MVC4 may in fact be the last significant iteration of this framework ). This may sound alarming to some folks who have recently adopted MVC but it really shouldn’t, as both WebForms and MVC will continue to play a vital role in delivering solutions to customers. They will just not be the primary area where Microsoft is spending the majority of its R&D resources. That distinction will obviously go to Web API. And when the question comes up of why not enhance MVC to make it work with Web API, you must take a step back and look at this from the higher level to see that it really makes no sense. MVC is a server-side page compositing framework; whereas, Web API promotes client-side page compositing with a heavy focus on web services. In order to make MVC work well with Web API, would require a complete rewrite of MVC and at the end of the day, there would be no upgrade path for existing MVC applications. So it really does not make much business sense. So what does this have to do with DotNetNuke? Well, around 8-12 months ago we recognized the software industry trends towards web services and client-side development. We decided to utilize a “hybrid” model which would provide compatibility for existing modules while at the same time provide a bridge for developers who wanted to utilize more modern web techniques. Customers who like the productivity and familiarity of WebForms can continue to build custom modules using the traditional approach. However, in DotNetNuke 6.2 we also introduced a new Service Framework which is actually built on top of MVC2 ( we chose to leverage MVC because it had the most intuitive, light-weight REST implementation in the .NET stack ). The Services Framework allowed us to build some rich interactive features in DotNetNuke 6.2, including the Messaging and Notification Center and Activity Feed. But based on where we know Microsoft is heading, it makes sense for the next major version of DotNetNuke ( which is expected to be released in Q4 2012 ) to migrate from MVC2 to Web API. This will likely result in some breaking changes in the Services Framework but we feel it is the best approach for ensuring the platform remains highly modern and relevant. The fact that our development strategy is perfectly aligned with the “One ASP.NET” strategy from Microsoft means that our customers and developer community can be confident in their current and future investments in the DotNetNuke platform.

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• Pain Comes Instantly

  - by user701213

  When I look back at recent blog entries – many of which are not all that current (more on where my available writing time is going later) – I am struck by how many of them focus on public policy or legislative issues instead of, say, the latest nefarious cyberattack or exploit (or everyone’s favorite new pastime: coining terms for the Coming Cyberpocalypse: “digital Pearl Harbor” is so 1941). Speaking of which, I personally hope evil hackers from Malefactoria will someday hack into my bathroom scale – which in a future time will be connected to the Internet because, gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have absolutely everything in your life Internet-enabled? – and recalibrate it so I’m 10 pounds thinner. The horror. In part, my focus on public policy is due to an admitted limitation of my skill set. I enjoy reading technical articles about exploits and cybersecurity trends, but writing a blog entry on those topics would take more research than I have time for and, quite honestly, doesn’t play to my strengths. The first rule of writing is “write what you know.” The bigger contributing factor to my recent paucity of blog entries is that more and more of my waking hours are spent engaging in “thrust and parry” activity involving emerging regulations of some sort or other. I’ve opined in earlier blogs about what constitutes good and reasonable public policy so nobody can accuse me of being reflexively anti-regulation. That said, you have so many cycles in the day, and most of us would rather spend it slaying actual dragons than participating in focus groups on whether dragons are really a problem, whether lassoing them (with organic, sustainable and recyclable lassos) is preferable to slaying them – after all, dragons are people, too - and whether we need lasso compliance auditors to make sure lassos are being used correctly and humanely. (A point that seems to evade many rule makers: slaying dragons actually accomplishes something, whereas talking about “approved dragon slaying procedures and requirements” wastes the time of those who are competent to dispatch actual dragons and who were doing so very well without the input of “dragon-slaying theorists.”) Unfortunately for so many of us who would just get on with doing our day jobs, cybersecurity is rapidly devolving into the “focus groups on dragon dispatching” realm, which actual dragons slayers have little choice but to participate in. The general trend in cybersecurity is that powers-that-be – which encompasses groups other than just legislators – are often increasingly concerned and therefore feel they need to Do Something About Cybersecurity. Many seem to believe that if only we had the right amount of regulation and oversight, there would be no data breaches: a breach simply must mean Someone Is At Fault and Needs Supervision. (Leaving aside the fact that we have lots of home invasions despite a) guard dogs b) liberal carry permits c) alarm systems d) etc.) Also note that many well-managed and security-aware organizations, like the US Department of Defense, still get hacked. More specifically, many powers-that-be feel they must direct industry in a multiplicity of ways, up to and including how we actually build and deploy information technology systems. The more prescriptive the requirement, the more regulators or overseers a) can be seen to be doing something b) feel as if they are doing something regardless of whether they are actually doing something useful or cost effective. Note: an unfortunate concomitant of Doing Something is that often the cure is worse than the ailment. That is, doing what overseers want creates unfortunate byproducts that they either didn’t foresee or worse, don’t care about. After all, the logic goes, we Did Something. Prescriptive practice in the IT industry is problematic for a number of reasons. For a start, prescriptive guidance is really only appropriate if: • It is cost effective• It is “current” (meaning, the guidance doesn’t require the use of the technical equivalent of buggy whips long after horse-drawn transportation has become passé)*• It is practical (that is, pragmatic, proven and effective in the real world, not theoretical and unproven)• It solves the right problem With the above in mind, heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. A little background on PCI before I get too wound up. In 2008, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council (SSC) introduced the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). That standard requires vendors of payment applications to ensure that their products implement specific requirements and undergo security assessment procedures. In order to have an application listed as a Validated Payment Application (VPA) and available for use by merchants, software vendors are required to execute the PCI Payment Application Vendor Release Agreement (VRA). (Are you still with me through all the acronyms?) Beginning in August 2010, the VRA imposed new obligations on vendors that are extraordinary and extraordinarily bad, short-sighted and unworkable. Specifically, PCI requires vendors to disclose (dare we say “tell all?”) to PCI any known security vulnerabilities and associated security breaches involving VPAs. ASAP. Think about the impact of that. PCI is asking a vendor to disclose to them: • Specific details of security vulnerabilities • Including exploit information or technical details of the vulnerability • Whether or not there is any mitigation available (as in a patch) PCI, in turn, has the right to blab about any and all of the above – specifically, to distribute all the gory details of what is disclosed - to the PCI SSC, qualified security assessors (QSAs), and any affiliate or agent or adviser of those entities, who are in turn permitted to share it with their respective affiliates, agents, employees, contractors, merchants, processors, service providers and other business partners. This assorted crew can’t be more than, oh, hundreds of thousands of entities. Does anybody believe that several hundred thousand people can keep a secret? Or that several hundred thousand people are all equally trustworthy? Or that not one of the people getting all that information would blab vulnerability details to a bad guy, even by accident? Or be a bad guy who uses the information to break into systems? (Wait, was that the Easter Bunny that just hopped by? Bringing world peace, no doubt.) Sarcasm aside, common sense tells us that telling lots of people a secret is guaranteed to “unsecret” the secret. Notably, being provided details of a vulnerability (without a patch) is of little or no use to companies running the affected application. Few users have the technological sophistication to create a workaround, and even if they do, most workarounds break some other functionality in the application or surrounding environment. Also, given the differences among corporate implementations of any application, it is highly unlikely that a single workaround is going to work for all corporate users. So until a patch is developed by the vendor, users remain at risk of exploit: even more so if the details of vulnerability have been widely shared. Sharing that information widely before a patch is available therefore does not help users, and instead helps only those wanting to exploit known security bugs. There’s a shocker for you. Furthermore, we already know that insider information about security vulnerabilities inevitably leaks, which is why most vendors closely hold such information and limit dissemination until a patch is available (and frequently limit dissemination of technical details even with the release of a patch). That’s the industry norm, not that PCI seems to realize or acknowledge that. Why would anybody release a bunch of highly technical exploit information to a cast of thousands, whose only “vetting” is that they are members of a PCI consortium? Oracle has had personal experience with this problem, which is one reason why information on security vulnerabilities at Oracle is “need to know” (we use our own row level access control to limit access to security bugs in our bug database, and thus less than 1% of development has access to this information), and we don’t provide some customers with more information than others or with vulnerability information and/or patches earlier than others. Failure to remember “insider information always leaks” creates problems in the general case, and has created problems for us specifically. A number of years ago, one of the UK intelligence agencies had information about a non-public security vulnerability in an Oracle product that they circulated among other UK and Commonwealth defense and intelligence entities. Nobody, it should be pointed out, bothered to report the problem to Oracle, even though only Oracle could produce a patch. The vulnerability was finally reported to Oracle by (drum roll) a US-based commercial company, to whom the information had leaked. (Note: every time I tell this story, the MI-whatever agency that created the problem gets a bit shirty with us. I know they meant well and have improved their vulnerability handling/sharing processes but, dudes, next time you find an Oracle vulnerability, try reporting it to us first before blabbing to lots of people who can’t actually fix the problem. Thank you!) Getting back to PCI: clearly, these new disclosure obligations increase the risk of exploitation of a vulnerability in a VPA and thus, of misappropriation of payment card data and customer information that a VPA processes, stores or transmits. It stands to reason that VRA’s current requirement for the widespread distribution of security vulnerability exploit details -- at any time, but particularly before a vendor can issue a patch or a workaround -- is very poor public policy. It effectively publicizes information of great value to potential attackers while not providing compensating benefits - actually, any benefits - to payment card merchants or consumers. In fact, it magnifies the risk to payment card merchants and consumers. The risk is most prominent in the time before a patch has been released, since customers often have little option but to continue using an application or system despite the risks. However, the risk is not limited to the time before a patch is issued: customers often need days, or weeks, to apply patches to systems, based upon the complexity of the issue and dependence on surrounding programs. Rather than decreasing the available window of exploit, this requirement increases the available window of exploit, both as to time available to exploit a vulnerability and the ease with which it can be exploited. Also, why would hackers focus on finding new vulnerabilities to exploit if they can get “EZHack” handed to them in such a manner: a) a vulnerability b) in a payment application c) with exploit code: the “Hacking Trifecta!“ It’s fair to say that this is probably the exact opposite of what PCI – or any of us – would want. Established industry practice concerning vulnerability handling avoids the risks created by the VRA’s vulnerability disclosure requirements. Specifically, the norm is not to release information about a security bug until the associated patch (or a pretty darn good workaround) has been issued. Once a patch is available, the notice to the user community is a high-level communication discussing the product at issue, the level of risk associated with the vulnerability, and how to apply the patch. The notices do not include either the specific customers affected by the vulnerability or forensic reports with maps of the exploit (both of which are required by the current VRA). In this way, customers have the tools they need to prioritize patching and to help prevent an attack, and the information released does not increase the risk of exploit. Furthermore, many vendors already use industry standards for vulnerability description: Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE) and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). CVE helps ensure that customers know which particular issues a patch addresses and CVSS helps customers determine how severe a vulnerability is on a relative scale. Industry already provides the tools customers need to know what the patch contains and how bad the problem is that the patch remediates. So, what’s a poor vendor to do? Oracle is reaching out to other vendors subject to PCI and attempting to enlist then in a broad effort to engage PCI in rethinking (that is, eradicating) these requirements. I would therefore urge all who care about this issue, but especially those in the vendor community whose applications are subject to PCI and who may not have know they were being asked to tell-all to PCI and put their customers at risk, to do one of the following: • Contact PCI with your concerns• Contact Oracle (we are looking for vendors to sign our statement of concern)• And make sure you tell your customers that you have to rat them out to PCI if there is a breach involving the payment application I like to be charitable and say “PCI meant well” but in as important a public policy issue as what you disclose about vulnerabilities, to whom and when, meaning well isn’t enough. We need to do well. PCI, as regards this particular issue, has not done well, and has compounded the error by thus far being nonresponsive to those of us who have labored mightily to try to explain why they might want to rethink telling the entire planet about security problems with no solutions. By Way of Explanation… Non-related to PCI whatsoever, and the explanation for why I have not been blogging a lot recently, I have been working on Other Writing Venues with my sister Diane (who has also worked in the tech sector, inflicting upgrades on unsuspecting and largely ungrateful end users). I am pleased to note that we have recently (self-)published the first in the Miss Information Technology Murder Mystery series, Outsourcing Murder. The genre might best be described as “chick lit meets geek scene.” Our sisterly nom de plume is Maddi Davidson and (shameless plug follows): you can order the paper version of the book on Amazon, or the Kindle or Nook versions on www.amazon.com or www.bn.com, respectively. From our book jacket: Emma Jones, a 20-something IT consultant, is working on an outsourcing project at Tahiti Tacos, a restaurant chain offering Polynexican cuisine: refried poi, anyone? Emma despises her boss Padmanabh, a brilliant but arrogant partner in GD Consulting. When Emma discovers His-Royal-Padness’s body (verdict: death by cricket bat), she becomes a suspect.With her overprotective family and her best friend Stacey providing endless support and advice, Emma stumbles her way through an investigation of Padmanabh’s murder, bolstered by fusion food feeding frenzies, endless cups of frou-frou coffee and serious surfing sessions. While Stacey knows a PI who owes her a favor, landlady Magda urges Emma to tart up her underwear drawer before the next cute cop with a search warrant arrives. Emma’s mother offers to fix her up with a PhD student at Berkeley and showers her with self-defense gizmos while her old lover Keoni beckons from Hawai’i. And everyone, even Shaun the barista, knows a good lawyer. Book 2, Denial of Service, is coming out this summer. * Given the rate of change in technology, today’s “thou shalts” are easily next year’s “buggy whip guidance.”

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• Solving embarassingly parallel problems using Python multiprocessing

  - by gotgenes

  How does one use multiprocessing to tackle embarrassingly parallel problems? Embarassingly parallel problems typically consist of three basic parts: Read input data (from a file, database, tcp connection, etc.). Run calculations on the input data, where each calculation is independent of any other calculation. Write results of calculations (to a file, database, tcp connection, etc.). We can parallelize the program in two dimensions: Part 2 can run on multiple cores, since each calculation is independent; order of processing doesn't matter. Each part can run independently. Part 1 can place data on an input queue, part 2 can pull data off the input queue and put results onto an output queue, and part 3 can pull results off the output queue and write them out. This seems a most basic pattern in concurrent programming, but I am still lost in trying to solve it, so let's write a canonical example to illustrate how this is done using multiprocessing. Here is the example problem: Given a CSV file with rows of integers as input, compute their sums. Separate the problem into three parts, which can all run in parallel: Process the input file into raw data (lists/iterables of integers) Calculate the sums of the data, in parallel Output the sums Below is traditional, single-process bound Python program which solves these three tasks: #!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*- # basicsums.py """A program that reads integer values from a CSV file and writes out their sums to another CSV file. """ import csv import optparse import sys def make_cli_parser(): """Make the command line interface parser.""" usage = "\n\n".join(["python %prog INPUT_CSV OUTPUT_CSV", __doc__, """ ARGUMENTS: INPUT_CSV: an input CSV file with rows of numbers OUTPUT_CSV: an output file that will contain the sums\ """]) cli_parser = optparse.OptionParser(usage) return cli_parser def parse_input_csv(csvfile): """Parses the input CSV and yields tuples with the index of the row as the first element, and the integers of the row as the second element. The index is zero-index based. :Parameters: - `csvfile`: a `csv.reader` instance """ for i, row in enumerate(csvfile): row = [int(entry) for entry in row] yield i, row def sum_rows(rows): """Yields a tuple with the index of each input list of integers as the first element, and the sum of the list of integers as the second element. The index is zero-index based. :Parameters: - `rows`: an iterable of tuples, with the index of the original row as the first element, and a list of integers as the second element """ for i, row in rows: yield i, sum(row) def write_results(csvfile, results): """Writes a series of results to an outfile, where the first column is the index of the original row of data, and the second column is the result of the calculation. The index is zero-index based. :Parameters: - `csvfile`: a `csv.writer` instance to which to write results - `results`: an iterable of tuples, with the index (zero-based) of the original row as the first element, and the calculated result from that row as the second element """ for result_row in results: csvfile.writerow(result_row) def main(argv): cli_parser = make_cli_parser() opts, args = cli_parser.parse_args(argv) if len(args) != 2: cli_parser.error("Please provide an input file and output file.") infile = open(args[0]) in_csvfile = csv.reader(infile) outfile = open(args[1], 'w') out_csvfile = csv.writer(outfile) # gets an iterable of rows that's not yet evaluated input_rows = parse_input_csv(in_csvfile) # sends the rows iterable to sum_rows() for results iterable, but # still not evaluated result_rows = sum_rows(input_rows) # finally evaluation takes place as a chain in write_results() write_results(out_csvfile, result_rows) infile.close() outfile.close() if __name__ == '__main__': main(sys.argv[1:]) Let's take this program and rewrite it to use multiprocessing to parallelize the three parts outlined above. Below is a skeleton of this new, parallelized program, that needs to be fleshed out to address the parts in the comments: #!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*- # multiproc_sums.py """A program that reads integer values from a CSV file and writes out their sums to another CSV file, using multiple processes if desired. """ import csv import multiprocessing import optparse import sys NUM_PROCS = multiprocessing.cpu_count() def make_cli_parser(): """Make the command line interface parser.""" usage = "\n\n".join(["python %prog INPUT_CSV OUTPUT_CSV", __doc__, """ ARGUMENTS: INPUT_CSV: an input CSV file with rows of numbers OUTPUT_CSV: an output file that will contain the sums\ """]) cli_parser = optparse.OptionParser(usage) cli_parser.add_option('-n', '--numprocs', type='int', default=NUM_PROCS, help="Number of processes to launch [DEFAULT: %default]") return cli_parser def main(argv): cli_parser = make_cli_parser() opts, args = cli_parser.parse_args(argv) if len(args) != 2: cli_parser.error("Please provide an input file and output file.") infile = open(args[0]) in_csvfile = csv.reader(infile) outfile = open(args[1], 'w') out_csvfile = csv.writer(outfile) # Parse the input file and add the parsed data to a queue for # processing, possibly chunking to decrease communication between # processes. # Process the parsed data as soon as any (chunks) appear on the # queue, using as many processes as allotted by the user # (opts.numprocs); place results on a queue for output. # # Terminate processes when the parser stops putting data in the # input queue. # Write the results to disk as soon as they appear on the output # queue. # Ensure all child processes have terminated. # Clean up files. infile.close() outfile.close() if __name__ == '__main__': main(sys.argv[1:]) These pieces of code, as well as another piece of code that can generate example CSV files for testing purposes, can be found on github. I would appreciate any insight here as to how you concurrency gurus would approach this problem. Here are some questions I had when thinking about this problem. Bonus points for addressing any/all: Should I have child processes for reading in the data and placing it into the queue, or can the main process do this without blocking until all input is read? Likewise, should I have a child process for writing the results out from the processed queue, or can the main process do this without having to wait for all the results? Should I use a processes pool for the sum operations? If yes, what method do I call on the pool to get it to start processing the results coming into the input queue, without blocking the input and output processes, too? apply_async()? map_async()? imap()? imap_unordered()? Suppose we didn't need to siphon off the input and output queues as data entered them, but could wait until all input was parsed and all results were calculated (e.g., because we know all the input and output will fit in system memory). Should we change the algorithm in any way (e.g., not run any processes concurrently with I/O)?

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• error executing aapt, all of the sudden

  - by pjv

  I know there are a lot of these topics around but none seem to help in my case, nor describe it exactly. The best similar one is aapt not found under the right path. My problem is that I can be using Eclipse for a whole evening programming, compiling and using my device, and then suddenly I get "error executing aapt" for my current project and ofcourse R.java isn't (properly) generated anymore. I then restart Eclipse and everything goes away. I'm seeing this once a day on average however. I've recently switched to amd64 and installed the latest Android-2.3 SDK and matching tools. I know that there is now a platform-tools folder that has an aapt version that should work SDK version independently. At first I had added this directory to my PATH, as instructed on the SDK website. I've also tried not adding it to my path and making a link platforms/android-9/tools so that every SDK version might use it's own old copy. Needless to say, platform-tools/aapt is there and has the right permissions, and I have been able to execute it on the command-line at any time. When I do write a faulty xml file or sorts, and appropriately get an error, I see an extra line that says "aapt: /lib32/libz.so.1: no version information available". I'm running a recent Gentoo linux system. I have everything installed to support x86 on amd64, but have re-emerged emul-linux-x86-baselibs and zlib just to be sure. The problem persists. I do see some pages that spell horror over some zlib bugs, but I'm not sure if that's related. I realize I'm not on the reference Ubuntu platform, but surely the difference cannot be that great? It might very well be a bug in aapt or the tools itself. Why would it suddenly stop working? I also experience that the ids in R.java were incorrect, namely that simple findViewById() code would give ClassCastExceptions because of mixed ids the one time, and then work perfectly without any changes bu only a "clean project", in the aftermath of a failing aapt. Finally, I've run a few commands on aapt, that don't seem to add any extra information: #ldd aapt ./aapt: /lib32/libz.so.1: no version information available (required by ./aapt) linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000) librt.so.1 => /lib32/librt.so.1 (0x4f864000) libpthread.so.0 => /lib32/libpthread.so.0 (0x4f849000) libz.so.1 => /lib32/libz.so.1 (0xf7707000) libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/4.4.4/32/libstdc++.so.6 (0x415e9000) libm.so.6 => /lib32/libm.so.6 (0x4f876000) libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib32/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x4fac6000) libc.so.6 => /lib32/libc.so.6 (0x4f5ed000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x4f5ca000) #file aapt aapt: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, not stripped Can anybody tell anything wrong with my configuration? Does it smell like a bug perhaps (otherwise let's report it (again))? Update 2010-01-06: I've gained some more knowledge. When I recently was trying to export a signed apk, I ran into another error message (full details from the Eclipse error view) regarding aapt I hadn't seen before. Note here too, that I can just restart Eclipse and can export apks again without problems, at least for a little while. I'm starting to think it is related to lack of memory on my system. The message "onvoldoende geheugen beschikbaar" means "insufficient memory available". I have also been seeing insufficient memory errors in DDMS when I'm dumping HPROF files. Here is the error log (shortened): !ENTRY com.android.ide.eclipse.adt 4 0 2011-01-05 23:11:16.097 !MESSAGE Export Wizard Error !STACK 1 org.eclipse.core.runtime.CoreException: Failed to export application at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.project.ExportHelper.exportReleaseApk(Unknown Source) at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.wizards.export.ExportWizard.doExport(Unknown Source) at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.wizards.export.ExportWizard.access$0(Unknown Source) at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.wizards.export.ExportWizard$1.run(Unknown Source) at org.eclipse.jface.operation.ModalContext$ModalContextThread.run(ModalContext.java:121) Caused by: com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.build.AaptExecException: Error executing aapt. Please check aapt is present at /opt/android-sdk/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.6_r1/platform-tools/aapt at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.build.BuildHelper.executeAapt(Unknown Source) at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.build.BuildHelper.packageResources(Unknown Source) ... 5 more Caused by: java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "/opt/android-sdk/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.6_r1/platform-tools/aapt": java.io.IOException: error=12, Onvoldoende geheugen beschikbaar ... Caused by: java.io.IOException: java.io.IOException: error=12, Onvoldoende geheugen beschikbaar ... !SUBENTRY 1 com.android.ide.eclipse.adt 4 0 2011-01-05 23:11:16.098 !MESSAGE Failed to export application !STACK 0 com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.build.AaptExecException: Error executing aapt. Please check aapt is present at /opt/android-sdk/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.6_r1/platform-tools/aapt at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.build.BuildHelper.executeAapt(Unknown Source) at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.build.BuildHelper.packageResources(Unknown Source) at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.project.ExportHelper.exportReleaseApk(Unknown Source) at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.wizards.export.ExportWizard.doExport(Unknown Source) at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.wizards.export.ExportWizard.access$0(Unknown Source) at com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.internal.wizards.export.ExportWizard$1.run(Unknown Source) at org.eclipse.jface.operation.ModalContext$ModalContextThread.run(ModalContext.java:121) Caused by: java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "/opt/android-sdk/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.6_r1/platform-tools/aapt": java.io.IOException: error=12, Onvoldoende geheugen beschikbaar ... Caused by: java.io.IOException: java.io.IOException: error=12, Onvoldoende geheugen beschikbaar

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• Incorrectly formatted html inconsistencies between DOM and what's displayed in firefox plugin

  - by deadalnix

  I'm currently developing a firefox plugin. This plugin has to handle very crappy website that is really incorrectly formatted. I cannot modify these websites, so I have to handle them. I reduced the bug I'm facing to a short sample of html (if this appellation is appropriate for an horror like this) : <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>Some title.</title> <!-- Oh fuck yes ! --> <div style="visability:hidden;"> <a href="//example.com"> </a> </div> <!-- If meta are reduced, then the bug disapears ! --> <meta name="description" content="Homepage of Company.com, Company's corporate Web site" /> <meta name="keywords" content="Company, Company & Co., Inc., blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-US" /> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> </head> <body class="homePage"> <div class="globalWrapper"><a href="/page.html">My gorgeous link !</a></div> </body> </html> When opening the webpage, « My gorgeous link ! » if displayed and clickable. However, when I'm exploring the DOM with Javascript into my plugin, everything behaves (DOM exploration and innerHTML property) like the code was this one : <html> <head> <title>Some title.</title> <!-- Oh fuck yes ! --> </head><body><div style="visability:hidden;"> <a href="//example.com"> </a> </div> <!-- If meta are reduced, then the bug disapears ! --> <meta name="description" content="Homepage of Company.com, Company's corporate Web site"> <meta name="keywords" content="Company, Company &amp; Co., Inc., blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla, blablabla"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-US"> </body> </html> So, when exploring the DOM within the plugin, the document is somehow fixed by firefox. But this fixed DOM is inconsistent with what is in the webpage. Thus, my plugin doesn't behave as expected. I'm really puzzled with that issue. The problem exists in both firefox 3.6 and firefox 4 (didn't tested firefox 5 yet). For example, reducing the meta, will fix the issue. Where does this discrepancy come from ? How can I handle it ? EDIT: With the answer I get, I think I should be a little more precise. I do know what firefow is doing when modifying the webpage in the second code snippet. The problem is the following one : « In the fixed DOM that I get into my plugin, the gorgeous link doesn't appear anywhere, but this link is actually visible on the webpage, and works. So the DOM I'm manipulating, and the DOM in the webpage are different - they are fixed in a different manner. » . So where does the difference come in the fixing behaviour, and how can I handle that, or, in other terms, how can I be aware, in my plugin, of the existance of the gorgeous link ?

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• Which programming idiom to choose for this open source library?

  - by Walkman

  I have an interesting question about which programming idiom is easier to use for beginner developers writing concrete file parsing classes. I'm developing an open source library, which one of the main functionality is to parse plain text files and get structured information from them. All of the files contains the same kind of information, but can be in different formats like XML, plain text (each of them is structured differently), etc. There are a common set of information pieces which is the same in all (e.g. player names, table names, some id numbers) There are formats which are very similar to each other, so it's possible to define a common Base class for them to facilitate concrete format parser implementations. So I can clearly define base classes like SplittablePlainTextFormat, XMLFormat, SeparateSummaryFormat, etc. Each of them hints the kind of structure they aim to parse. All of the concrete classes should have the same information pieces, no matter what. To be useful at all, this library needs to define at least 30-40 of these parsers. A couple of them are more important than others (obviously the more popular formats). Now my question is, which is the best programming idiom to choose to facilitate the development of these concrete classes? Let me explain: I think imperative programming is easy to follow even for beginners, because the flow is fixed, the statements just come one after another. Right now, I have this: class SplittableBaseFormat: def parse(self): "Parses the body of the hand history, but first parse header if not yet parsed." if not self.header_parsed: self.parse_header() self._parse_table() self._parse_players() self._parse_button() self._parse_hero() self._parse_preflop() self._parse_street('flop') self._parse_street('turn') self._parse_street('river') self._parse_showdown() self._parse_pot() self._parse_board() self._parse_winners() self._parse_extra() self.parsed = True So the concrete parser need to define these methods in order in any way they want. Easy to follow, but takes longer to implement each individual concrete parser. So what about declarative? In this case Base classes (like SplittableFormat and XMLFormat) would do the heavy lifting based on regex and line/node number declarations in the concrete class, and concrete classes have no code at all, just line numbers and regexes, maybe other kind of rules. Like this: class SplittableFormat: def parse_table(): "Parses TABLE_REGEX and get information" # set attributes here def parse_players(): "parses PLAYER_REGEX and get information" # set attributes here class SpecificFormat1(SplittableFormat): TABLE_REGEX = re.compile('^(?P<table_name>.*) other info \d* etc') TABLE_LINE = 1 PLAYER_REGEX = re.compile('^Player \d: (?P<player_name>.*) has (.*) in chips.') PLAYER_LINE = 16 class SpecificFormat2(SplittableFormat): TABLE_REGEX = re.compile(r'^Tournament #(\d*) (?P<table_name>.*) other info2 \d* etc') TABLE_LINE = 2 PLAYER_REGEX = re.compile(r'^Seat \d: (?P<player_name>.*) has a stack of (\d*)') PLAYER_LINE = 14 So if I want to make it possible for non-developers to write these classes the way to go seems to be the declarative way, however, I'm almost certain I can't eliminate the declarations of regexes, which clearly needs (senior :D) programmers, so should I care about this at all? Do you think it matters to choose one over another or doesn't matter at all? Maybe if somebody wants to work on this project, they will, if not, no matter which idiom I choose. Can I "convert" non-programmers to help developing these? What are your observations? Other considerations: Imperative will allow any kind of work; there is a simple flow, which they can follow but inside that, they can do whatever they want. It would be harder to force a common interface with imperative because of this arbitrary implementations. Declarative will be much more rigid, which is a bad thing, because formats might change over time without any notice. Declarative will be harder for me to develop and takes longer time. Imperative is already ready to release. I hope a nice discussion will happen in this thread about programming idioms regarding which to use when, which is better for open source projects with different scenarios, which is better for wide range of developer skills. TL; DR: Parsing different file formats (plain text, XML) They contains same kind of information Target audience: non-developers, beginners Regex probably cannot be avoided 30-40 concrete parser classes needed Facilitate coding these concrete classes Which idiom is better?

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• June 26th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, .NET and NuGet

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my Best of 2010 Summary for links to 100+ other posts I’ve done in the last year. [I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET Introducing new ASP.NET Universal Providers: Great post from Scott Hanselman on the new System.Web.Providers we are working on.  This release delivers new ASP.NET Membership, Role Management, Session, Profile providers that work with SQL Server, SQL CE and SQL Azure. CSS Sprites and the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Library: Great post from Scott Mitchell that talks about a free library for ASP.NET that you can use to optimize your CSS and images to reduce HTTP requests and speed up your site. Better HTML5 Support for the VS 2010 Editor: Another great post from Scott Hanselman on an update several people on my team did that enables richer HTML5 editing support within Visual Studio 2010. Install the Ajax Control Toolkit from NuGet: Nice post by Stephen Walther on how you can now use NuGet to install the Ajax Control Toolkit within your applications.  This makes it much easier to reference and use. May 2011 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit: Another great post from Stephen Walther that talks about the May release of the Ajax Control Toolkit. It includes a bunch of nice enhancements and fixes. SassAndCoffee 0.9 Released: Paul Betts blogs about the latest release of his SassAndCoffee extension (available via NuGet). It enables you to easily use Sass and Coffeescript within your ASP.NET applications (both MVC and Webforms). ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC Mini-Profiler: The folks at StackOverflow.com (a great site built with ASP.NET MVC) have released a nice (free) profiler they’ve built that enables you to easily profile your ASP.NET MVC 3 sites and tune them for performance.  Globalization, Internationalization and Localization in ASP.NET MVC 3: Great post from Scott Hanselman on how to enable internationalization, globalization and localization support within your ASP.NET MVC 3 and jQuery solutions. Precompile your MVC Razor Views: Great post from David Ebbo that discusses a new Razor Generator tool that enables you to pre-compile your razor view templates as assemblies – which enables a bunch of cool scenarios. Unit Testing Razor Views: Nice post from David Ebbo that shows how to use his new Razor Generator to enable unit testing of razor view templates with ASP.NET MVC. Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVC 3: Nice post by Phil Haack that covers a cool feature added to VS 2010 SP1 that makes it really easy to \bin deploy ASP.NET MVC and Razor within your application. This enables you to easily deploy the app to servers that don’t have ASP.NET MVC 3 installed. .NET Table Splitting with EF 4.1 Code First: Great post from Morteza Manavi that discusses how to split up a single database table across multiple EF entity classes.  This shows off some of the power behind EF 4.1 and is very useful when working with legacy database schemas. Choosing the Right Collection Class: Nice post from James Michael Hare that talks about the different collection class options available within .NET.  A nice overview for people who haven’t looked at all of the support now built into the framework. Little Wonders: Empty(), DefaultIfEmpty() and Count() helper methods: Another in James Michael Hare’s excellent series on .NET/C# “Little Wonders”.  This post covers some of the great helper methods now built-into .NET that make coding even easier. NuGet NuGet 1.4 Released: Learn all about the latest release of NuGet – which includes a bunch of cool new capabilities.  It takes only seconds to update to it – go for it! NuGet in Depth: Nice presentation from Scott Hanselman all about NuGet and some of the investments we are making to enable a better open source ecosystem within .NET. NuGet for the Enterprise – NuGet in a Continuous Integration Automated Build System: Great post from Scott Hanselman on how to integrate NuGet within enterprise build environments and enable it with CI solutions. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Control to Control Binding in WPF/Silverlight

  - by psheriff

  In the past if you had two controls that you needed to work together, you would have to write code. For example, if you want a label control to display any text a user typed into a text box you would write code to do that. If you want turn off a set of controls when a user checks a check box, you would also have to write code. However, with XAML, these operations become very easy to do. Bind Text Box to Text Block As a basic example of this functionality, let’s bind a TextBlock control to a TextBox. When the user types into a TextBox the value typed in will show up in the TextBlock control as well. To try this out, create a new Silverlight or WPF application in Visual Studio. On the main window or user control type in the following XAML. <StackPanel>  <TextBox Margin="10" x:Name="txtData" />  <TextBlock Margin="10"              Text="{Binding ElementName=txtData,                             Path=Text}" /></StackPanel> Now run the application and type into the TextBox control. As you type you will see the data you type also appear in the TextBlock control. The {Binding} markup extension is responsible for this behavior. You set the ElementName attribute of the Binding markup to the name of the control that you wish to bind to. You then set the Path attribute to the name of the property of that control you wish to bind to. That’s all there is to it! Bind the IsEnabled Property Now let’s apply this concept to something that you might use in a business application. Consider the following two screen shots. The idea is that if the Add Benefits check box is un-checked, then the IsEnabled property of the three “Benefits” check boxes will be set to false (Figure 1). If the Add Benefits check box is checked, then the IsEnabled property of the “Benefits” check boxes will be set to true (Figure 2). Figure 1: Uncheck Add Benefits and the Benefits will be disabled. Figure 2: Check Add Benefits and the Benefits will be enabled. To accomplish this, you would write XAML to bind to each of the check boxes in the “Benefits To Add” section to the check box named chkBenefits. Below is a fragment of the XAML code that would be used. <CheckBox x:Name="chkBenefits" /> <CheckBox Content="401k"           IsEnabled="{Binding ElementName=chkBenefits,                               Path=IsChecked}" /> Since the IsEnabled property is a boolean type and the IsChecked property is also a boolean type, you can bind these two together. If they were different types, or if you needed them to set the IsEnabled property to the inverse of the IsChecked property then you would need to use a ValueConverter class. SummaryOnce you understand the basics of data binding in XAML, you can eliminate a lot code. Connecting controls together is as easy as just setting the ElementName and Path properties of the Binding markup extension. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "SL – Basic Control Binding" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free eBook on "Fundamentals of N-Tier".

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• A basic T4 template for generating Model Metadata in ASP.NET MVC2

  - by rajbk

  I have been learning about T4 templates recently by looking at the awesome ADO.NET POCO entity generator. By using the POCO entity generator template as a base, I created a T4 template which generates metadata classes for a given Entity Data Model. This speeds coding by reducing the amount of typing required when creating view specific model and its metadata. To use this template, Download the template provided at the bottom. Set two values in the template file. The first one should point to the EDM you wish to generate metadata for. The second is used to suffix the namespace and classes that get generated. string inputFile = @"Northwind.edmx"; string suffix = "AutoMetadata"; Add the template to your MVC 2 Visual Studio 2010 project. Once you add it, a number of classes will get added to your project based on the number of entities you have.    One of these classes is shown below. Note that the DisplayName, Required and StringLength attributes have been added by the t4 template. //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // <auto-generated> // This code was generated from a template. // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // </auto-generated> //------------------------------------------------------------------------------   using System; using System.ComponentModel; using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;   namespace NorthwindSales.ModelsAutoMetadata { public partial class CustomerAutoMetadata { [DisplayName("Customer ID")] [Required] [StringLength(5)] public string CustomerID { get; set; } [DisplayName("Company Name")] [Required] [StringLength(40)] public string CompanyName { get; set; } [DisplayName("Contact Name")] [StringLength(30)] public string ContactName { get; set; } [DisplayName("Contact Title")] [StringLength(30)] public string ContactTitle { get; set; } [DisplayName("Address")] [StringLength(60)] public string Address { get; set; } [DisplayName("City")] [StringLength(15)] public string City { get; set; } [DisplayName("Region")] [StringLength(15)] public string Region { get; set; } [DisplayName("Postal Code")] [StringLength(10)] public string PostalCode { get; set; } [DisplayName("Country")] [StringLength(15)] public string Country { get; set; } [DisplayName("Phone")] [StringLength(24)] public string Phone { get; set; } [DisplayName("Fax")] [StringLength(24)] public string Fax { get; set; } } } The gen’d class can be used from your project by creating a partial class with the entity name and setting the MetadataType attribute.namespace MyProject.Models{ [MetadataType(typeof(CustomerAutoMetadata))] public partial class Customer { }} You can also copy the code in the metadata class generated and create your own ViewModel class. Note that the template is super basic  and does not take into account complex properties. I have tested it with the Northwind database. This is a work in progress. Feel free to modify the template to suite your requirements. Standard disclaimer follows: Use At Your Own Risk, Works on my machine running VS 2010 RTM/ASP.NET MVC 2 AutoMetaData.zip Mr. Incredible: Of course I have a secret identity. I don't know a single superhero who doesn't. Who wants the pressure of being super all the time?

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• Start Learning Ruby with IronRuby – Setting up the Environment

  - by kazimanzurrashid

  Recently I have decided to learn Ruby and for last few days I am playing with IronRuby. Learning a new thing is always been a fun and when it comes to adorable language like Ruby it becomes more entertaining. Like any other language, first we have to create the development environment. In order to run IronRuby we have to download the binaries form the IronRuby CodePlex project. IronRuby supports both .NET 2.0 and .NET 4, but .NET 4 is the recommended version, you can download either the installation or the zip file. If you download the zip file make sure you added the bin directory in the environment path variable. Once you are done, open up the command prompt and type : ir –v It should print message like: IronRuby 1.0.0.0 on .NET 4.0.30319.1 The ir is 32bit version of IronRuby, if you want to use 64bit you can try ir64. Next, we have to find a editor where we can write our Ruby code as there is currently no integration story of IronRuby with Visual Studio like its twin Iron Python. Among the free IDEs only SharpDevelop has the IronRuby support but it does not have auto complete or debugging built into it, only thing that it supports is the syntax highlighting, so using a text editor which has the same features is nothing different comparing to it. To play with the IronRuby we will be using Notepad++, which can be downloaded from its sourceforge download page. The Notepad++ does have a nice syntax highlighting support : I am using the Vibrant Ink with some little modification. The next thing we have to do is configure the Notepad++ that we can run the Ruby script in IronRuby inside the Notepad++. Lets create a batch(.bat) file in the IronRuby bin directory, which will have the following content: @echo off  cls call ir %1 pause This will make sure that the console will be paused once we run the script. Now click Run->Run in the Notepad++, it will bring up the run dialog and put the following command in the textbox: riir.bat "$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)" Click the save which will bring another dialog. Type Iron Ruby and assign the shortcut to ctrl + f5 (Same as Visual Studio Start without Debugging) and click ok. Once you are done you will find the IronRuby in the Run menu. Now press ctrl + f5, we will find the ruby script running in the IronRuby. Now there are one last thing that we would like to add which is poor man’s context sensitive help. First, download the ruby language help file from the Ruby Installer site and extract into a directory. Next we will have to install the Language Help Plug-in of Notepad++, click Plugins->Plugin Manger –>Show Plugin Manager and scroll down until you find the plug-in the list, now check the plug-in and click install. Once it is installed it will prompt you to restart the Notepad++, click yes. When the Notepad++ restarts, click the Plugins –> Language Help –> Options –> add and enter the following details and click ok: The chm file location can be different depending upon where you extracted it. Now when you put your in any of ruby keyword and press ctrl + f1 it will take you to the help topic of that keyword. For example, when my caret is in the each of the following code and I press ctrl + f1, it will take me to the each api doc of Array. def loop_demo (1..10).each{ |n| puts n} end loop_demo That’s it for today. Happy Ruby coding.

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• XNA Notes 008

  - by George Clingerman

  This week has been a rough one. I’ve been sick and then in some kind of slump for my afternoon coding sessions. It could be from the cold, could be I’m still tired from writing that Windows Phone 7 game development book (which is out now!) or it could just be I’m tired of winter and want some sunshine. All I know is that even while I’m stick, the XNA world keeps going along at it’s whirlwind pace. Below are the things I caught in between my coughing fits.. Time Critical XNA News: The 2011 MVP summit is almost here so pass along your feelings and thoughts so the MVPs can take them and share them with the team in person http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/76317/464136.aspx#464136 Dream Build Play - there’s no new announcement yet, but you can’t get much more to the end of February than this! http://www.dreambuildplay.com/Main/Home.aspx XNA Team: Dean Johnson from the XNA team shares an excellent way of handling Guide.IsTrialMode on WP7 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dejohn/archive/2011/02/21/calling-guide-istrialmode-on-windows-phone-7.aspx Nick Gravelyn tries a new tactic in deciding if there’s enough interest to develop a sequel or not. Don’t YOU want Pixel Man 2 to come out? http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ XNA MVPs: Andy “The ZMan” Dunn finally shares what he’s been secretly working on these past 4 months http://twitter.com/#!/The_Zman/status/40590269392887808 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg8Z0ZdYbvg&feature=youtu.be Joel Martinez lets developers around NYC know they should by signing up for Game Hack Day http://twitter.com/joelmartinez/statuses/41118590862102528 http://gamehackday.org/71fdk XNA Developers: Michael McLaughlin shares an XNA RenderTarget2D Sample http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/18/xna-rendertarget2d-sample.aspx Martin Caine starts a new series on Deferred Rendering in XNA 4.0 http://twitter.com/#!/MartinCaine/status/39735221339291648 http://martincaine.com/xna/deferred_rendering_in_xna_4_introduction ElemenyCy posts about his fun time with the IntermediateSerializer http://www.ubergamermonkey.com/xna/holy-bloated-xml-batman/ Ben Kane releases a narrated dev diary video for Project Splice. Let him know if you’d like to see more! (I know I do!) http://twitter.com/#!/benkane/status/39846959498002432 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EmziXZUo08&feature=youtu.be Jason Swearingen (of Novaleaf) posts his part 1 of Spatial Partitioning solutions http://altdevblogaday.org/2011/02/21/spatial-partitioning-part-1-survey-of-spatial-partitioning-solutions/ Brian Lawson of Dark Flow Studios shares what his been up to lately with lots of pretty screenshots and hints of announcements from Microsoft... http://www.darkflowstudios.com/entry/short-and-sweet-part-1 Luke Avery starts a new blog where he plans on making XNA tutorials for beginners (and he’s got a few started already!) http://programmingwithovery.wordpress.com/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): GameMarx Episode 10 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/24/ep-10-february-18-2010.aspx Minecraft clone FortressCraft coming to XBLIG http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-02-23-minecraft-clone-fortresscraft-hits-xblig ezMuze+ starts an IndieGoGo fundraiser campaign to help fund their second game and get it onto even more devices! http://www.indiegogo.com/ezmuze Gamergeddon XBLIG round up http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/20/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-20th/?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter JForce Games loses their Ego http://jforcegames.com/blog/index.php?itemid=121&catid=4 XNA Game Development: @BallerIndustry reminds all XNA developers that the Maths are important ;) http://twitter.com/#!/BallerIndustry/status/39317618280243200 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjV3XDFsjP4&feature=player_embedded#at=106 @suhinini stumbles on an older but extremely useful post on XNA Content Pipeline debugging http://twitter.com/#!/suhinini/status/39270189476352000 http://badcorporatelogo.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/xna-content-pipeline-debugging-4-0/ XNA Game Development Workshops at Singapore Universities http://innovativesingapore.com/2011/02/xna-game-development-workshops-at-singapore-universities/ Indiefreaks announces that IGF v0.3 is out with Xbox 360 support, SunBurn 2.0.12 and it’s now Open Source! http://twitter.com/#!/indiefreaks/status/39391953971982336 @liotral announces a new series on properly designing a game http://twitter.com/#!/liortal53/status/39466905081217024 http://liortalblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/hello-cosmos/ Indies and XNA at CodeStock 2011 http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/20/indies-and-xna-at-codestock-2011.aspx Train Frontier Express posts about XNA Content Hotloading http://trainfrontierexpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/xna-content-hotloading-overview.html Slyprid announces a new character editor in Transmute http://twitter.com/#!/slyprid/status/40146992818696192 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKhFAc78LDs&feature=youtu.be The XNA 2D from the ground up tutorial series http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/23/recap-the-xna-2d-from-the-ground-up-tutorial-series.aspx Sgt.Conker posts a “Clingerman” (hey that’s me!) to stay relevant http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/posting-a-clingerman-to-stay-relevant/

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• Travelling MVP #1: Visit to SharePoint User Group Finland

  - by DigiMortal

  My first self organized trip this autumn was visit to SharePoint User Group Finland community evening. As active community leaders who make things like these possible they are worth mentioning and on spug.fi side there was Jussi Roine the one who invited me. Here is my short review about my trip to Helsinki. User group meeting As Helsinki is near Tallinn I went there using ship. It was easy to get from sea port to venue and I had also some minutes of time to visit academic book store. Community evening was held on the ground floor of one city center hotel and room was conveniently located near hotel bar and restaurant. Here is the meeting schedule: Welcome (Jussi Roine) OpenText application archiving and governance for SharePoint (Bernd Hennicke, OpenText) Using advanced C# features in SharePoint development (Alexey Sadomov, NED Consulting) Optimizing public-facing internet sites for SharePoint (Gunnar Peipman) After meeting, of course, local dudes doesn’t walk away but continue with some beers and discussion. Sessions After welcome words by Jussi there was session by Bernd Hennicke who spoke about OpenText. His session covered OpenText history and current moment. After this introduction he spoke about OpenText products for SharePoint and gave the audience good overview about where their SharePoint extensions fit in big picture. I usually don’t like those vendors sessions but this one was good. I mean vendor dudes were not aggressively selling something. They were way different – kind people who introduced their stuff and later answered questions. They acted like good guests. Second speaker was Alexey Sadomov who is working on SharePoint development projects. He introduced some ways how to get over some limitations of SharePoint. I don’t go here deeply with his session but it’s worth to mention that this session was strong one. It is not rear case when developers have to make nasty hacks to SharePoint. I mean really nasty hacks. Often these hacks are long blocks of code that uses terrible techniques to achieve the result. Alexey introduced some very much civilized ways about how to apply hacks. Alex Sadomov, SharePoint MVP, speaking about SharePoint coding tips and tricks on C# I spoke about how I optimized caching of Estonian Microsoft community portal that runs on SharePoint Server and that uses publishing infrastructure. I made no actual demos on SharePoint because I wanted to focus on optimizing process and share some experiences about how to get caches optimized and how to measure caches. Networking After official part there was time to talk and discuss with people. Finns are cool – they have beers and they are glad. It was not big community event but people were like one good family. Developers there work often for big companies and it was very interesting to me to hear about their experiences with SharePoint. One thing was a little bit surprising for me – SharePoint guys in Finland are talking actively also about Office 365 and online SharePoint. It doesn’t happen often here in Estonia. I had to leave a little bit 21:00 to get to my ship back to Tallinn. I am sure spug.fi dudes continued nice evening and they had at least same good time as I did. Do I want to go back to Finland and meet these guys again? Yes, sure, let’s do it again! :)

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• Code snippets for ASP.NET MVC2 in VS 2010

  - by rajbk

  VS 2010 comes with ready made snippets which helps you save time while coding. You insert a snippet by typing the name of the code snippet and hitting the Tab key twice. You can also use the following method if you wish to see a listing of snippets available. Press Ctrl + K, Ctrl + X Select ASP.NET MVC2 with the arrow keys and hit enter to see a list of snippets available.   The MVC related snippets you get out of the box (for C#) are listed below: HTML actionlink Markup snippet for an ASP.NET MVC action link helper <%= Html.ActionLink("linktext", "actionname") %>   beginformajaxcs Markup snippet for an ASP.NET MVC AJAX-enabled form helper in C# <% using (Ajax.BeginForm("actionname", new AjaxOptions {UpdateTargetId= "elementid" })) { %> <% } %>   beginformcs Markup snippet for an ASP.NET MVC form helper in C# <% using (Html.BeginForm()) { %> <% } %>   displayforcs Markup snippet for an ASP.NET MVC templated helper. <%= Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Property) %>   editorforcs Markup snippet for an ASP.NET MVC templated helper. <%= Html.EditorFor(x => x.Property) %>   foreachcs Markup snippet for an ASP.NET MVC foreach statement in C# <% foreach (var item in collection) { %> <% } %>   ifcs Markup snippet for a code-nugget if else statement in C# <% if (true) { %> <% } %>   ifelsecs Markup snippet for a code-nugget if else statement in C# <% if (true) { %> <% } else { %> <% } %>   renderpartialcs Markup snippet for an ASP.NET MVC partial view rendering in C# <% Html.RenderPartial("viewname"); %>   textboxmvc Markup snippet for an ASP.NET MVC textbox helper <%= Html.TextBox("name") %>   validationsummarymvc Markup snippet for an ASP.NET MVC validation summary helper <%= Html.ValidationSummary() %> CS mvcaction Code snippet for an action. public ActionResult Action() {     return View(); }   mvcpostaction Code snippet for an action via http post. [HttpPost] public ActionResult Action() {     return View(); }   Enjoy!

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• Crop, Edit, and Print Photos in Windows 7 Media Center

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Windows Media Center is a nice application for managing and displaying your personal photos, but you may occasionally need to make some basic edits to your pictures. Today we’ll take a look at how to crop, edit, and print photos right from Windows 7 Media Center. From within the Picture Library in Windows Media Center, choose a photo to work with, right-click and select Picture Details. You can also access this option with a Media Center remote by clicking the “i” button. Note: You’ll notice you have the option to rotate the picture from this menu. It is also available on the next screen.  Rotate a picture Now you’ll see more options on the Picture Details screen. From here you can rotate, Print, or Touch Up, Delete, or Burn a CD/DVD. To rotate the picture, simple select Rotate. Note: If you want your photo saved with the new orientation, you’ll need to select Save from the Touch Up screen that we will look at later in the article.   Each click will rotate the picture 90 degrees clockwise. You’ll see the new orientation of the picture displayed on the Picture Details screen after you have clicked Rotate. Print a picture From the Picture Details screen, select Print. Click Print again. Media Center automatically prints to your default printer, so make sure your desired target printer is set as default. Crop and Edit Photos To edit or crop your photo, select Touch Up. Touch Up options includes, Crop, Contrast, and Red Eye removal. First, we’ll select the Crop button to crop our photo.   You will see a cropping area overlay appear on your photo. Select one of the buttons below to adjust the location, size, and orientation of the area to be cropped. When you’re happy with your selection, click Save. You’ll be prompted to confirm your save. Click Yes to permanently save your edits. You can also apply Contrast or Red Eye adjustments to your photos. There aren’t any advanced settings for these options. You merely toggle the Contrast or Red Eye on or off by selecting the option. Be sure to click Save before exiting to if you’ve made any changes you wish to permanently apply to the photos. This includes rotating the images. While this method is not likely to be replace your favorite image editing software, it does give you the ability to make basic edits and print photos directly from Windows Media Center. With a Media Center remote, you can even do all your edits from the comfort of your recliner. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Schedule Updates for Windows Media CenterIntegrate Hulu Desktop and Windows Media Center in Windows 7Add Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program GuideIntegrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird

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• Silverlight Cream for March 25, 2010 -- #820

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: René Schulte, Jeremy Likness, Hassan, Victor Gaudioso, SilverLaw, Mike Taulty, Phani Raj, Tim Heuer, Christian Schormann, Brad Abrams, David Anson, Diptimaya Patra, and Daniel Vaughan. Shoutouts: Last week, Koen Zwikstra announced Silverlight Spy at MIX10 Anand Iyer announced this for students on the Windows Team Blog: Be a Windows Phone 7 “Rockstar” Justin Angel blogged that Silverlight Isn't Fully Cross-Platform ... let him know if you think it's a yawn or important. On behalf of SilverlightShow, Cigdem Patlak posted MIX10: Laurent Bugnion on Silverlight adoption, WP7 and the EcoContest From SilverlightCream.com: Coding4Fun - Silverlight Real Time Face Detection René Schulte has a Coding 4 Fun article posted on facial recognition. Who better to be manipulating graphics like this than René? Sequential Asynchronous Workflows Part 2: Simplified Jeremy Likness follows up his previous post with another one that is 'simplified'. Remember his previous post began with a post on the Silverlight.net forum and Rob Eisenburg's MVVM presentation from MIX10 Windows Phone 7 Video Tutorial Hassan has a new video up on his AfricanGeek site, and that's a continuation of his previous WP7 video tutorial, adding a listbox and databinding it to the selected index of another listbox. The Los Angeles Silverlight Usergorup will be Streaming its March Meeting LIVE in Silverlight – Tonight! Victor Gaudioso used his Live Streaming knowledge to stream his User Group meeting last night from LA where Michael Washington presented on MVVM followed by Victor himself. That was last night. Today he has a couple of the videos up to view. Shining 3D Font Design - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has a "Shining 3D Font" tutorial up, and a video on it here: New Video: How to create a 3D effect on a Silverlight 3 Textblock ... this is also available in the Expression Gallery. Silverlight 4 RC – Signing trusted apps with home made certificates Mike Taulty has a post up about building a hand-rolled cert to test out the XAP signing features, and then gives a nod to John Papa with a link to the Silverlight White Paper I've posted about before, because this info is in there as well. Developing a Windows Phone 7 Application that consumes OData Phani Raj has a tutorial up on consuming the NetFlix OData catalog on the WP7 emulator ... now *that* is cool! Make your Silverlight applications Speak to you with Microsoft Translator Tim Heuer used Silverlight to demonstrate Microsoft Translator as a speech synthesis tool using the Speak API included ... pretty cool, Tim ... lots of external links and code. Blend 4: About Path Layout, Sidebar – More About ListBox Than You Ever Wanted To Know Christian Schormann has another outstanding tutorial up on the ListBox and PathLayout in Expression Blend ... just check out the screen shots and you'll wanna read it! Silverlight 4 + RIA Services: Ready for Business: Updating Data in the Client This is the continuation of Brad Abrams' series on WCF RIA Services and is a tutorial on setting up to deal with updating the data. Tip: The CLR wrapper for a DependencyProperty should do its job and nothing more David Anson is posting some "Development Tips", and this is the first ... discussing making sure your DependencyProperty CLR wrapper stays on point... Create and Apply Theme Silverlight Application Diptimaya Patra has a tutorial up on creating and using themes. He states that "Themes are nothing but some predefined styles" ... check it out and see if it's really that easy :) Building a Windows Phone 7 Puzzle Game Daniel Vaughan has a great post up starting with installing all the tools and ending with a maze game for WP7 using XNA for sound... this is the first I've seen that integrates XNA (I think). Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone    MIX10

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• Subterranean IL: Pseudo custom attributes

  - by Simon Cooper

  Custom attributes were designed to make the .NET framework extensible; if a .NET language needs to store additional metadata on an item that isn't expressible in IL, then an attribute could be applied to the IL item to represent this metadata. For instance, the C# compiler uses DecimalConstantAttribute and DateTimeConstantAttribute to represent compile-time decimal or datetime constants, which aren't allowed in pure IL, and FixedBufferAttribute to represent fixed struct fields. How attributes are compiled Within a .NET assembly are a series of tables containing all the metadata for items within the assembly; for instance, the TypeDef table stores metadata on all the types in the assembly, and MethodDef does the same for all the methods and constructors. Custom attribute information is stored in the CustomAttribute table, which has references to the IL item the attribute is applied to, the constructor used (which implies the type of attribute applied), and a binary blob representing the arguments and name/value pairs used in the attribute application. For example, the following C# class: [Obsolete("Please use MyClass2", true)] public class MyClass { // ... } corresponds to the following IL class definition: .class public MyClass { .custom instance void [mscorlib]System.ObsoleteAttribute::.ctor(string, bool) = { string('Please use MyClass2' bool(true) } // ... } and results in the following entry in the CustomAttribute table: TypeDef(MyClass) MemberRef(ObsoleteAttribute::.ctor(string, bool)) blob -> {string('Please use MyClass2' bool(true)} However, there are some attributes that don't compile in this way. Pseudo custom attributes Just like there are some concepts in a language that can't be represented in IL, there are some concepts in IL that can't be represented in a language. This is where pseudo custom attributes come into play. The most obvious of these is SerializableAttribute. Although it looks like an attribute, it doesn't compile to a CustomAttribute table entry; it instead sets the serializable bit directly within the TypeDef entry for the type. This flag is fully expressible within IL; this C#: [Serializable] public class MySerializableClass {} compiles to this IL: .class public serializable MySerializableClass {} For those interested, a full list of pseudo custom attributes is available here. For the rest of this post, I'll be concentrating on the ones that deal with P/Invoke. P/Invoke attributes P/Invoke is built right into the CLR at quite a deep level; there are 2 metadata tables within an assembly dedicated solely to p/invoke interop, and many more that affect it. Furthermore, all the attributes used to specify p/invoke methods in C# or VB have their own keywords and syntax within IL. For example, the following C# method declaration: [DllImport("mscorsn.dll", SetLastError = true)] [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U1)] private static extern bool StrongNameSignatureVerificationEx( [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)] string wszFilePath, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U1)] bool fForceVerification, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U1)] ref bool pfWasVerified); compiles to the following IL definition: .method private static pinvokeimpl("mscorsn.dll" lasterr winapi) bool marshal(unsigned int8) StrongNameSignatureVerificationEx( string marshal(lpwstr) wszFilePath, bool marshal(unsigned int8) fForceVerification, bool& marshal(unsigned int8) pfWasVerified) cil managed preservesig {} As you can see, all the p/invoke and marshal properties are specified directly in IL, rather than using attributes. And, rather than creating entries in CustomAttribute, a whole bunch of metadata is emitted to represent this information. This single method declaration results in the following metadata being output to the assembly: A MethodDef entry containing basic information on the method Four ParamDef entries for the 3 method parameters and return type An entry in ModuleRef to mscorsn.dll An entry in ImplMap linking ModuleRef and MethodDef, along with the name of the function to import and the pinvoke options (lasterr winapi) Four FieldMarshal entries containing the marshal information for each parameter. Phew! Applying attributes Most of the time, when you apply an attribute to an element, an entry in the CustomAttribute table will be created to represent that application. However, some attributes represent concepts in IL that aren't expressible in the language you're coding in, and can instead result in a single bit change (SerializableAttribute and NonSerializedAttribute), or many extra metadata table entries (the p/invoke attributes) being emitted to the output assembly.

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• ODI 11g – Insight to the SDK

  - by David Allan

  This post is a useful index into the ODI SDK that cross references the type names from the user interface with the SDK class and also the finder for how to get a handle on the object or objects. The volume of content in the SDK might seem a little ominous, there is a lot there, but there is a general pattern to the SDK that I will describe here. Also I will illustrate some basic CRUD operations so you can see how the SDK usage pattern works. The examples are written in groovy, you can simply run from the groovy console in ODI 11.1.1.6. Entry to the Platform   Object Finder SDK odiInstance odiInstance (groovy variable for console) OdiInstance Topology Objects Object Finder SDK Technology IOdiTechnologyFinder OdiTechnology Context IOdiContextFinder OdiContext Logical Schema IOdiLogicalSchemaFinder OdiLogicalSchema Data Server IOdiDataServerFinder OdiDataServer Physical Schema IOdiPhysicalSchemaFinder OdiPhysicalSchema Logical Schema to Physical Mapping IOdiContextualSchemaMappingFinder OdiContextualSchemaMapping Logical Agent IOdiLogicalAgentFinder OdiLogicalAgent Physical Agent IOdiPhysicalAgentFinder OdiPhysicalAgent Logical Agent to Physical Mapping IOdiContextualAgentMappingFinder OdiContextualAgentMapping Master Repository IOdiMasterRepositoryInfoFinder OdiMasterRepositoryInfo Work Repository IOdiWorkRepositoryInfoFinder OdiWorkRepositoryInfo Project Objects Object Finder SDK Project IOdiProjectFinder OdiProject Folder IOdiFolderFinder OdiFolder Interface IOdiInterfaceFinder OdiInterface Package IOdiPackageFinder OdiPackage Procedure IOdiUserProcedureFinder OdiUserProcedure User Function IOdiUserFunctionFinder OdiUserFunction Variable IOdiVariableFinder OdiVariable Sequence IOdiSequenceFinder OdiSequence KM IOdiKMFinder OdiKM Load Plans and Scenarios   Object Finder SDK Load Plan IOdiLoadPlanFinder OdiLoadPlan Load Plan and Scenario Folder IOdiScenarioFolderFinder OdiScenarioFolder Model Objects Object Finder SDK Model IOdiModelFinder OdiModel Sub Model IOdiSubModel OdiSubModel DataStore IOdiDataStoreFinder OdiDataStore Column IOdiColumnFinder OdiColumn Key IOdiKeyFinder OdiKey Condition IOdiConditionFinder OdiCondition Operator Objects   Object Finder SDK Session Folder IOdiSessionFolderFinder OdiSessionFolder Session IOdiSessionFinder OdiSession Schedule OdiSchedule How to Create an Object? Here is a simple example to create a project, it uses IOdiEntityManager.persist to persist the object. import oracle.odi.domain.project.OdiProject; import oracle.odi.core.persistence.transaction.support.DefaultTransactionDefinition; txnDef = new DefaultTransactionDefinition(); tm = odiInstance.getTransactionManager() txnStatus = tm.getTransaction(txnDef) project = new OdiProject("Project For Demo", "PROJECT_DEMO") odiInstance.getTransactionalEntityManager().persist(project) tm.commit(txnStatus) How to Update an Object? This update example uses the methods on the OdiProject object to change the project’s name that was created above, it is then persisted. import oracle.odi.domain.project.OdiProject; import oracle.odi.domain.project.finder.IOdiProjectFinder; import oracle.odi.core.persistence.transaction.support.DefaultTransactionDefinition; txnDef = new DefaultTransactionDefinition(); tm = odiInstance.getTransactionManager() txnStatus = tm.getTransaction(txnDef) prjFinder = (IOdiProjectFinder)odiInstance.getTransactionalEntityManager().getFinder(OdiProject.class); project = prjFinder.findByCode("PROJECT_DEMO"); project.setName("A Demo Project"); odiInstance.getTransactionalEntityManager().persist(project) tm.commit(txnStatus) How to Delete an Object? Here is a simple example to delete all of the sessions, it uses IOdiEntityManager.remove to delete the object. import oracle.odi.domain.runtime.session.finder.IOdiSessionFinder; import oracle.odi.domain.runtime.session.OdiSession; import oracle.odi.core.persistence.transaction.support.DefaultTransactionDefinition; txnDef = new DefaultTransactionDefinition(); tm = odiInstance.getTransactionManager() txnStatus = tm.getTransaction(txnDef) sessFinder = (IOdiSessionFinder)odiInstance.getTransactionalEntityManager().getFinder(OdiSession.class); sessc = sessFinder.findAll(); sessItr = sessc.iterator() while (sessItr.hasNext()) {   sess = (OdiSession) sessItr.next()   odiInstance.getTransactionalEntityManager().remove(sess) } tm.commit(txnStatus) This isn't an all encompassing summary of the SDK, but covers a lot of the content to give you a good handle on the objects and how they work. For details of how specific complex objects are created via the SDK, its best to look at postings such as the interface builder posting here. Have fun, happy coding!

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• SQLAuthority News – Public Training Classes In Hyderabad 12-14 May – Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008

  - by pinaldave

  After successfully delivering many corporate trainings as well as the private training Solid Quality Mentors, India is launching the Public Training in Hyderabad for SQL Server 2008 and SharePoint 2010. This is going to be one of the most unique and one-of-a-kind events in India where Solid Quality Mentors are offering public classes. I will be leading the training on Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Query Optimization & Performance Tuning. This intensive, 3-day course intends to give attendees an in-depth look at Query Optimization and Performance Tuning in SQL Server 2005 and 2008. Designed to prepare SQL Server developers and administrators for a transition into SQL Server 2005 or 2008, the course covers the best practices for a variety of essential tasks in order to maximize the performance. At the end of the course, there would be daily discussions about your real-world problems and find appropriate solutions. Note: Scroll down for course fees, discount, dates and location. Do not forget to take advantage of Discount code ‘SQLAuthority‘. The training premises are very well-equipped as they will be having 1:1 computers. Every participant will be provided with printed course materials. I will pick up your entire lunch tab and we will have lots of SQL talk together. The best participant will receive a special gift at the end of the course. Even though the quality of the material to be delivered together with the course will be of extremely high standard, the course fees are set at a very moderate rate. The fee for the course is INR 14,000/person for the whole 3-day convention. At the rate of 1 USD = 44 INR, this fee converts to less than USD 300. At this rate, it is totally possible to fly from anywhere from the world to India and take the training and still save handsome pocket money. It would be even better if you register using the discount code “SQLAuthority“, for you will instantly get an INR 3000 discount, reducing the total cost of the training to INR 11,000/person for whole 3 days course. This is a onetime offer and will not be available in the future. Please note that there will be a 10.3% service tax on course fees. To register, either send an email to [email protected] or call +91 95940 43399. Feel free to drop me an email at [email protected] for any additional information and clarification. Training Date and Time: May 12-14, 2010 10 AM- 6 PM. Training Venue: Abridge Solutions, #90/B/C/3/1, Ganesh GHR & MSY Plaza, Vittalrao Nagar, Near Image Hospital, Madhapur, Hyderabad – 500 081. The details of the course is as listed below. Day 1 : Strengthen the basics along with SQL Server 2005/2008 New Features Module 01: Subqueries, Ranking Functions, Joins and Set Operations Module 02: Table Expressions Module 03: TOP and APPLY Module 04: SQL Server 2008 Enhancements Day 2: Query Optimization & Performance Tuning 1 Module 05: Logical Query Processing Module 06: Query Tuning Module 07:  Introduction to the Query Processor Module 08:  Review of common query coding which causes poor performance Day 3: Query Optimization & Performance Tuning 2 Module 09:  SQL Server Indexing and index maintenance Module 10:  Plan Guides, query hints, UDFs, and Computed Columns Module 11:  Understanding SQL Server Execution Plans Module 12: Real World Index and Optimization Tips Download the complete PDF brochure. We are also going to have SharePoint 2010 training by Joy Rathnayake on 10-11 May. All the details for discount applies to the same as well. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• &lsquo;Publish&hellip;&rsquo; Resulting in Directory With No Files

  - by ToStringTheory

  I was pulling my hair out with this one…  Which isn’t good considering I have so little of it left!  I had just upgraded to the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK the day before with no problems, and used the upgraded ‘Publish…’ dialog to successfully publish a website to my hard disk for hosting on an internal development server.  However, when trying to deploy another project to my file system, it said it was successful, but there were no files in the directory.  The only difference, the first project was an Azure project, the second was a standard ASP.Net Web Application.  If you installed the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK, you may want to read this. The Problem At first it appears that there is no problem: However you may remember that when publishing a web application, the output window will generally iterate through each of the directories as it copies the files from that directory over.  Sure enough, when looking at the output directory – there are no files, no bin directory, no nothing… Troubleshooting Since one site published and the other did not, I believed that the failure may have been to a failed SQL Server 2012 installation that happened between publish.  I rolled back the installation, however that did not work either.  I also checked the Configuration Manager dialog, and ensured that the projects were selected to actually build (just checking, even though the output said it built them..)  I checked the properties of the solution and the projects, and a selection of files in the project to make sure that they were selected for content…  Nothing seemed to work. I then decided to uninstall the Azure 1.7 SDK to see if that was the culprit.  When I opened the Windows 7 ‘Uninstall a Program’ dialog, I noticed that the Azure SDK came with 2 extra packages that just so happen to be in a Release Candidate state from Microsoft – ‘Microsoft Web Deploy 3.0’ and ‘Microsoft Web Publish – Visual Studio 2010’.  It dawned on me that the publish dialog must not be just for Azure, since it appeared when I tried to deploy the regular web application as well.  Therefore, it must have been an upgrade to the publish mechanism in Visual Studio.  I uninstalled both of the programs and received my old publish dialog once again, and was able to successfully publish the solution above as I had done before. After celebrating solving the problem, I tried reinstalling the Azure package, to see if it would repair the publishing process. Even though it brought back the updated dialogs, it did not publish any files. Instead of uninstalling and retreating, I now KNEW what the cause was, and these were packages not just for Azure. I now knew a product name to search for. The Solution Sure enough, with the correct search term in Google – ‘microsoft web publish no files’, and setting the timeline to 1 week, I found what I needed - Microsoft Connect - Publish Web Application FAILS! (by Andrew Rits). I am surprised that I missed something that ended up being so simple…  In the Configuration Manager, I had the following settings: This is how I had been building and debugging the solution always…  However, apparently when installing the new Web Publishing package, it does things a little differently in its configuration for publishing: You see the difference?  The configuration here is set to ‘x86’ instead of ‘Any CPU’.  Sure enough, as soon as I switched the configuration to ‘Release – Any CPU’, the deployment built and published all of my files as I expected. Conclusion It was a small change, but apparently the new ‘Publish web application’ defaults to the x86 configuration, thereby not copying any of the project/bin files to the publish target directory.  I spent forever trying things, but this small drop down eluded me until I was able to target that the dialog was actually working apparently, I just didn’t have the correct configuration. I hope that this saves you the hours of frustration and hastened hair loss that it caused me…  I also hope that before Microsoft brings this publishing package out of RC status, that they change the behavior of that menu to default to the settings of the old publish menu for the first time. Happy Coding!

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• A Few of My Favorite HTML5 and CSS3 Online Tools

  - by dwahlin

  I really enjoy coding up HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript applications but there are some things that I’m better off writing with the help of a development tool. For example, CSS3 gradients aren’t exactly the most fun thing to write by hand and the same could be said for animations, transforms, or styles that require various vendor extensions. There are a lot of online tools that can simplify building HTML5/CSS3 sites and increase productivity in the process so I thought I’d put together a post on a few of my favorites tools. HTML5 Boilerplate HTML5 Boilerplate provides a great way to get started building HTML5 sites. It includes many best practices out of the box and even includes a few tricks that many people don’t even know about. The custom download option allows you to pick the features that you want to include in the files that’s generated. You can read more about it here.   Initializr Although HTML5 Boilerplate provides a great foundation for starting HTML5 sites, it focuses on providing a starting shell structure (namely an html page, JavaScript files, and a CSS stylesheet) and doesn’t include much in the way of page content to get started with. Initializer builds on HTML5 Boilerplate and provides an initial test page that can be tweaked to meet your needs. It also provides several different customization options to include/exclude features. CSS3 Maker CSS3 provides a lot of great features ranging from gradient support to rounded corners. Although many of the features are fairly straightforward there are some that are pretty involved such as gradients, animations, and really any styles that require custom vendor extensions to use across browsers. Sure, you can type everything by hand, but sites such as CSS3 Maker provide a visual way to generate CSS3 styles. CSS3, Please! CSS3, Please! is a code generation tool that can be used to generate cross-browser CSS3 styles quickly and easily. All of the main things you can do with CSS3 are available including a clever way to visually generate CSS3 transform styles.       Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator CSS3 Maker (above) has a gradient generator built-in but my favorite tool for creating CSS3 gradients is the Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator. If you’ve created gradients in tools like Photoshop then you’ll love what this tool has to offer especially since it makes it extremely straightforward to work with different gradient stops. @font-face Fonts Although @font-face has been available for awhile, I think fonts are cool and wanted to mention a site that provides a lot of font choices. When used correctly fonts can really enhance a page and when used incorrectly (think Comic Sans) they can absolutely ruin a page. Several sites exist that provide fonts that can be used with @font-face definitions in CSS style sheets. One of my favorites is Font Squirrel.   HTML5 & CSS3 Support and Tests Interested in knowing what HTML5 and CSS3 features a given browser supports? Want to know how various browsers stack up with each other as far as HTML5/CSS3 support. Look no further than the HTML5 & CSS3 Support page or the HTML5 Test page.   CSS3 Easing Animation Tool CSS3 animations aren’t widely supported across browsers right now (I’m not really using them at this point) but they do offer a lot of promise. Creating easings for animations can definitely be a challenge but they’re something that are critical for adding that “professional touch” to your animations. Fortunately you can use the Ceaser CSS Easing Animation Tool to simplify the process and handle animation easing with…...ease.   There are several other online tools that I like but these are some of the ones I find myself using the most. If you have any favorite online tools that simplify working with HTML5 or CSS3 let me know.     For more information about onsite or online training, mentoring and consulting solutions for HTML5, jQuery, .NET, SharePoint or Silverlight please visit http://www.thewahlingroup.com.

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• SQL SERVER – 3 Challenges for DBA and Smart Solutions

  - by Pinal Dave

  Developer’s life is never easy. DBA’s life is even crazier. DBA’s Life When a developer wakes up in the morning, most of the time have no idea what different challenges they are going to face that day. Of course, most of the developers know the project and roadmap, which they are working on. However, developers have no clue what coding challenges which they are going face for that day. DBA’s life is even crazier. When DBA wakes up in the morning – they often thank that they were not disturbed during the night due to server issues. The very next thing they wish is that they do not want to challenge which they can’t solve for that day. The problems DBA face every single day are mostly unpredictable and they just have to solve them as they come during the day. Though the life of DBA is not always bad. There are always ways and methods how one can overcome various challenges. Let us see three of the challenges and how a DBA can use various tools to overcome them. Challenge #1 Synchronize Data Across Server A Very common challenge DBA receive is that they have to synchronize the data across the servers. If you try to manually write that up, it may take forever to accomplish the task. It is nearly impossible to do the same with the help of the T-SQL. However, thankfully there are tools like dbForge Studio which can save a day and synchronize data across servers. Read my detailed blog post about the same over here: SQL SERVER – Synchronize Data Exclusively with T-SQL. Challenge #2 SQL Report Builder DBA’s are often asked to build reports on the go. It really annoys DBA’s, but hardly people care about it. No matter how busy a DBA is, they are just called upon to build reports on things on very short notice. I personally like to avoid any task which is given to me accidently and personally building report can be boring. I rather spend time with High Availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning rather than building report. I use SQL third party tool when I have to work with SQL Report. Others have extended reporting capabilities. The latter group of products includes the SQL report builder built-in todbForge Studio for SQL Server. I have blogged about this earlier over here: SQL SERVER – SQL Report Builder in dbForge Studio for SQL Server. Challenge #3 Work with the OTHER Database The manager does not understand that MySQL is different from SQL Server and SQL Server is different from Oracle. For them everything is same. In my career hundreds of times I have faced a situation that I am given a database to manage or do some task when their regular DBA is on vacation or leave. When I try to explain I do not understand the underlying the technology, I have been usually told that my manager has trust on me and I can do anything. Honestly, I can’t but I hardly dare to argue. I fall back on the third party tool to manage database when it is not in my comfort zone. For example, I was once given MySQL performance tuning task (at that time I did not know MySQL so well). To simplify search for a problem query let us use MySQL Profiler in dbForge Studio for MySQL. It provides such commands as a Query Profiling Mode and Generate Execution Plan. Here is the blog post discussing about the same: MySQL – Profiler : A Simple and Convenient Tool for Profiling SQL Queries. Well, that’s it! There were many different such occasions when I have been saved by the tool. May be some other day I will write part 2 of this blog post. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL Tagged: Devart, SQL Tool

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• The dislikes of TDD

  - by andrewstopford

  I enjoy debates about TDD and Brian Harrys blog post is no exception. Brian sounds out what he likes and dislikes about TDD and it's the dislikes I'll focus on. The idea of having unit tests that cover virtually every line of code that I’ve written that I have to refactor every time I refactor my code makes me shudder.  Doing this way makes me take nearly twice as long as it would otherwise take and I don’t feel like I get sufficient benefits from it. Refactoring your tests to match your refactored code sounds like the tests are suffering. Too many hard dependencies with no SOLID concerns are a sure fire reason you would do this. Maybe at the start of a TDD cycle you would need to do this as your design evolves and you remove these dependencies but this should quickly be resolved as you refactor. If you find your self still doing it then stop and look back at your design. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of unit tests.  I just prefer to write them after the code has stopped shaking a bit.  In fact most of my early testing is “manual”.  Either I write a small UI on top of my service that allows me to plug in values and try it or write some quick API tests that I throw away as soon as I have validated them. The problem with this is that a UI can make assumptions on your code that then just unit test around and very quickly the design becomes bad and you technical debt sweeps in. If you want to blackbox test your code with a UI then do so after your TDD cycles not before. This is probably by biggest issue with a literal TDD interpretation.  TDD says you never write a line of code without a failing test to show you need it.  I find it leads developers down a dangerous path.  Without any help from a methodology, I have met way too many developers in my life that “back into a solution”.  By this, I mean they write something, it mostly works and they discover a new requirement so they tack it on, and another and another and when they are done, they’ve got a monstrosity of special cases each designed to handle one specific scenario.  There’s way more code than there should be and it’s way too complicated to understand. I believe in finding general solutions to problems from which all the special cases naturally derive rather than building a solution of special cases.  In my mind, to do this, you have to start by conceptualizing and coding the framework of the general algorithm.  For me, that’s a relatively monolithic exercise. TDD is an development pratice not a methodology, the danger is that the solution becomes a mass of different things that violate DRY. TDD won't solve these problems, only good communication and practices like pairing will help. Above all else an assumption that TDD replaces a methodology is a mistake, combine it with what ever works for your team\business but only good communication will help. A good naming scheme\structure for folders, files and tests can help you and your team isolate what tests are for what.

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• Calling Web Services in classic ASP

  - by cabhilash

    Last day my colleague asked me the provide her a solution to call the Web service from classic ASP. (Yes Classic ASP. still people are using this :D ) We can call web service SOAP toolkit also. But invoking the service using the XMLHTTP object was more easier & fast. To create the Service I used the normal Web Service in .Net 2.0 with [Webmethod] public class WebService1 : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public string HelloWorld(string name){return name + " Pay my dues :) "; // a reminder to pay my consultation fee :D} } In Web.config add the following entry in System.web<webServices><protocols><add name="HttpGet"/><add name="HttpPost"/></protocols></webServices> Alternatively, you can enable these protocols for all Web services on the computer by editing the <protocols> section in Machine.config. The following example enables HTTP GET, HTTP POST, and also SOAP and HTTP POST from localhost: <protocols> <add name="HttpSoap"/> <add name="HttpPost"/> <add name="HttpGet"/> <add name="HttpPostLocalhost"/> <!-- Documentation enables the documentation/test pages --> <add name="Documentation"/> </protocols> By adding these entries I am enabling the HTTPGET & HTTPPOST (After .Net 1.1 by default HTTPGET & HTTPPOST is disabled because of security concerns)The .NET Framework 1.1 defines a new protocol that is named HttpPostLocalhost. By default, this new protocol is enabled. This protocol permits invoking Web services that use HTTP POST requests from applications on the same computer. This is true provided the POST URL uses http://localhost, not http://hostname. This permits Web service developers to use the HTML-based test form to invoke the Web service from the same computer where the Web service resides. Classic ASP Code to call Web service <%Option Explicit Dim objRequest, objXMLDoc, objXmlNode Dim strRet, strError, strNome Dim strName strName= "deepa" Set objRequest = Server.createobject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP") With objRequest .open "GET", "http://localhost:3106/WebService1.asmx/HelloWorld?name=" & strName, False .setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "text/xml" .setRequestHeader "SOAPAction", "http://localhost:3106/WebService1.asmx/HelloWorld" .send End With Set objXMLDoc = Server.createobject("MSXML2.DOMDocument") objXmlDoc.async = false Response.ContentType = "text/xml" Response.Write(objRequest.ResponseText) %> In Line 6 I created an MSXML XMLHTTP object. Line 9 Using the HTTPGET protocol I am openinig connection to WebService Line 10:11 – setting the Header for the service In line 15, I am getting the output from the webservice in XML Doc format & reading the responseText(line 18). In line 9 if you observe I am passing the parameter strName to the Webservice You can pass multiple parameters to the Web service by just like any other QueryString Parameters. In similar fashion you can invoke the Web service using HTTPPost. Only you have to ensure that the form contains all th required parameters for webmethod.  Happy coding !!!!!!!

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• Don&rsquo;t Kill the Password

  - by Anthony Trudeau

  A week ago Mr. Honan from Wired.com penned an article on security he titled “Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore.” He asserts that the password is not effective and a new solution is needed. Unfortunately, Mr. Honan was a victim of hacking. As a result he has a victim’s vendetta. His conclusion is ill conceived even though there are smatterings of truth and good advice. The password is a security barrier much like a lock on your door. In of itself it’s not guaranteeing protection. You can have a good password akin to a steel reinforced door with the best lock money can buy, or you can have a poor password like “password” which is like a sliding lock like on a bathroom stall. But, just like in the real world a lock isn’t always enough. You can have a lock, security system, video cameras, guard dogs, and even armed security guards; but none of that guarantees your protection. Even top secret government agencies can be breached by someone who is just that good (as dramatized in movies like Mission Impossible). And that’s the crux of it. There are real hackers out there that are that good. Killer coding ninja monkeys do exist! We still have locks on our doors, because they still serve their role. Passwords are no different. Security doesn’t end with the password. Most people would agree that stuffing your mattress with your life savings isn’t a good idea even if you have the best locks and security system. Most people agree its safest to have the money in a bank. Essentially this is compartmentalization. Compartmentalization extends to the online world as well. You’re at risk if your online banking accounts are linked to the same account as your social networks. This is especially true if you’re lackadaisical about linking those social networks to outside sources including apps. The object here is to minimize the damage that can be done. An attacker should not be able to get into your bank account, because they breached your Twitter account. It’s time to prioritize once you’ve compartmentalized. This simply means deciding how much security you want for the different compartments which I’ll call security zones. Social networking applications like Facebook provide a lot of security features. However, security features are almost always a compromise with privacy and convenience. It’s similar to an engineering adage, but in this case it’s security, convenience, and privacy – pick two. For example, you might use a safe instead of bank to store your money, because the convenience of having your money closer or the privacy of not having the bank records is more important than the added security. The following are lists of security do’s and don’ts (these aren’t meant to be exhaustive and each could be an article in of themselves): Security Do’s: Use strong passwords based on a phrase Use encryption whenever you can (e.g. HTTPS in Facebook) Use a firewall (and learn to use it properly) Configure security on your router (including port blocking) Keep your operating system patched Make routine backups of important files Realize that if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product Security Don’ts Link accounts if at all possible Reuse passwords across your security zones Use real answers for security questions (e.g. mother’s maiden name) Trust anything you download Ignore message boxes shown by your system or browser Forget to test your backups Share your primary email indiscriminately Only you can decide your comfort level between convenience, privacy, and security. Attackers are going to find exploits in software. Software is complex and depends on other software. The exploits are the responsibility of the software company. But your security is always your responsibility. Complete security is an illusion. But, there is plenty you can do to minimize the risk online just like you do in the physical world. Be safe and enjoy what the Internet has to offer. I expect passwords to be necessary just as long as locks.

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• Introducing functional programming constructs in non-functional programming languages

  - by Giorgio

  This question has been going through my mind quite a lot lately and since I haven't found a convincing answer to it I would like to know if other users of this site have thought about it as well. In the recent years, even though OOP is still the most popular programming paradigm, functional programming is getting a lot of attention. I have only used OOP languages for my work (C++ and Java) but I am trying to learn some FP in my free time because I find it very interesting. So, I started learning Haskell three years ago and Scala last summer. I plan to learn some SML and Caml as well, and to brush up my (little) knowledge of Scheme. Well, a lot of plans (too ambitious?) but I hope I will find the time to learn at least the basics of FP during the next few years. What is important for me is how functional programming works and how / whether I can use it for some real projects. I have already developed small tools in Haskell. In spite of my strong interest for FP, I find it difficult to understand why functional programming constructs are being added to languages like C#, Java, C++, and so on. As a developer interested in FP, I find it more natural to use, say, Scala or Haskell, instead of waiting for the next FP feature to be added to my favourite non-FP language. In other words, why would I want to have only some FP in my originally non-FP language instead of looking for a language that has a better support for FP? For example, why should I be interested to have lambdas in Java if I can switch to Scala where I have much more FP concepts and access all the Java libraries anyway? Similarly: why do some FP in C# instead of using F# (to my knowledge, C# and F# can work together)? Java was designed to be OO. Fine. I can do OOP in Java (and I would like to keep using Java in that way). Scala was designed to support OOP + FP. Fine: I can use a mix of OOP and FP in Scala. Haskell was designed for FP: I can do FP in Haskell. If I need to tune the performance of a particular module, I can interface Haskell with some external routines in C. But why would I want to do OOP with just some basic FP in Java? So, my main point is: why are non-functional programming languages being extended with some functional concept? Shouldn't it be more comfortable (interesting, exciting, productive) to program in a language that has been designed from the very beginning to be functional or multi-paradigm? Don't different programming paradigms integrate better in a language that was designed for it than in a language in which one paradigm was only added later? The first explanation I could think of is that, since FP is a new concept (it isn't new at all, but it is new for many developers), it needs to be introduced gradually. However, I remember my switch from imperative to OOP: when I started to program in C++ (coming from Pascal and C) I really had to rethink the way in which I was coding, and to do it pretty fast. It was not gradual. So, this does not seem to be a good explanation to me. Or can it be that many non-FP programmers are not really interested in understanding and using functional programming, but they find it practically convenient to adopt certain FP-idioms in their non-FP language? IMPORTANT NOTE Just in case (because I have seen several language wars on this site): I mentioned the languages I know better, this question is in no way meant to start comparisons between different programming languages to decide which is better / worse. Also, I am not interested in a comparison of OOP versus FP (pros and cons). The point I am interested in is to understand why FP is being introduced one bit at a time into existing languages that were not designed for it even though there exist languages that were / are specifically designed to support FP.

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