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• How can i clear a SQLite database each time i start my app

  - by AndroidUser99

  Hi, i want that each time i start my app my SQLite database get's cleaned for this, i need to make a method on my class MyDBAdapter.java code examples are welcome, i have no idea how to do it this is the dbadapter/helper i'm using: public class MyDbAdapter { private static final String TAG = "NotesDbAdapter"; private DatabaseHelper mDbHelper; private SQLiteDatabase mDb; private static final String DATABASE_NAME = "gpslocdb"; private static final String PERMISSION_TABLE_CREATE = "CREATE TABLE permission ( fk_email1 varchar, fk_email2 varchar, validated tinyint, hour1 time default '08:00:00', hour2 time default '20:00:00', date1 date, date2 date, weekend tinyint default '0', fk_type varchar, PRIMARY KEY (fk_email1,fk_email2))"; private static final String USER_TABLE_CREATE = "CREATE TABLE user ( email varchar, password varchar, fullName varchar, mobilePhone varchar, mobileOperatingSystem varchar, PRIMARY KEY (email))"; private static final int DATABASE_VERSION = 2; private final Context mCtx; private static class DatabaseHelper extends SQLiteOpenHelper { DatabaseHelper(Context context) { super(context, DATABASE_NAME, null, DATABASE_VERSION); } @Override public void onCreate(SQLiteDatabase db) { db.execSQL(PERMISSION_TABLE_CREATE); db.execSQL(USER_TABLE_CREATE); } @Override public void onUpgrade(SQLiteDatabase db, int oldVersion, int newVersion) { db.execSQL("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS user"); db.execSQL("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS permission"); onCreate(db); } } /** * Constructor - takes the context to allow the database to be * opened/created * * @param ctx the Context within which to work */ public MyDbAdapter(Context ctx) { this.mCtx = ctx; } /** * Open the database. If it cannot be opened, try to create a new * instance of the database. If it cannot be created, throw an exception to * signal the failure * * @return this (self reference, allowing this to be chained in an * initialization call) * @throws SQLException if the database could be neither opened or created */ public MyDbAdapter open() throws SQLException { mDbHelper = new DatabaseHelper(mCtx); mDb = mDbHelper.getWritableDatabase(); return this; } public void close() { mDbHelper.close(); } public long createUser(String email, String password, String fullName, String mobilePhone, String mobileOperatingSystem) { ContentValues initialValues = new ContentValues(); initialValues.put("email",email); initialValues.put("password",password); initialValues.put("fullName",fullName); initialValues.put("mobilePhone",mobilePhone); initialValues.put("mobileOperatingSystem",mobileOperatingSystem); return mDb.insert("user", null, initialValues); } public Cursor fetchAllUsers() { return mDb.query("user", new String[] {"email", "password", "fullName", "mobilePhone", "mobileOperatingSystem"}, null, null, null, null, null); } public Cursor fetchUser(String email) throws SQLException { Cursor mCursor = mDb.query(true, "user", new String[] {"email", "password", "fullName", "mobilePhone", "mobileOperatingSystem"} , "email" + "=" + email, null, null, null, null, null); if (mCursor != null) { mCursor.moveToFirst(); } return mCursor; } public List<Friend> retrieveAllUsers() { List <Friend> friends=new ArrayList<Friend>(); Cursor result=fetchAllUsers(); if( result.moveToFirst() ){ do{ //note.getString(note.getColumnIndexOrThrow(NotesDbAdapter.KEY_TITLE))); friends.add(new Friend(result.getString(result.getColumnIndexOrThrow("email")), "","","","")); }while( result.moveToNext() ); } return friends; } }

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• Setting a DataGrid background color based on the previous row

  - by Zipper

  I'm trying to setup a grid where I do column sorting, but I wanted to do zebra striping, only rather than every other row or every x rows, I want it to be based on the value of cells. i.e. All cells that contain 0 have a blue background, the next value would have a white background, the next value would be blue, etc.... The problem I have is that I can't seem to find where to actually do the setting of the background colors. I'm using a custom sorter and I tried setting it in there after I re-order the list and set the data source, but it appears that when the data source is set, that the rows don't exist yet. I tried using the DataContextChanged, but that event doesn't seem to be firing. Here is what I have now. namespace Foo.Bar { public partial class FooBar { List<Bla> ResultList { get; set; } SolidColorBrush stripeOneColor = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Gold); SolidColorBrush stripeTwoColor = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.White); //********************************************************************************************* public Consistency() { InitializeComponent(); } //********************************************************************************************* override protected void PopulateTabWithData() { ResultList = GetBlas(); SortAndGroup("Source"); } //********************************************************************************************* private void SortAndGroup(string colName) { IOrderedEnumerable <Bla> ordered = null; switch (colName) { case "Source": case "ID": ordered = ResultList.OrderBy(r => r.Source).ThenBy(r => r.ID); break; case "Name": ordered = ResultList.OrderBy(r => r.Source).ThenBy(r => r.Name); break; case "Message": ordered = ResultList.OrderBy(r => r.Message); break; default: throw new Exception(colName); } ResultList = ordered.ThenBy(r => r.Source).ThenBy(r => r.ID).ToList(); // tie-breakers consistencyDataGrid.ItemsSource = null; consistencyDataGrid.ItemsSource = ResultList; ColorRows(); } //********************************************************************************************* private void consistencyDataGrid_Sorting(object sender, System.Windows.Controls.DataGridSortingEventArgs e) { SortAndGroup(e.Column.Header.ToString()); e.Handled = true; } private void ColorRows() { for (var i = 0; i < ResultList.Count; i++) { var currentItem = ResultList[i]; var row = myDataGrid.ItemContainerGenerator.ContainerFromItem(currentItem) as DataGridRow; if (row == null) { continue; } if (i > 0) { var previousItem = ResultList[i - 1]; var previousRow = myDataGrid.ItemContainerGenerator.ContainerFromItem(previousItem) as DataGridRow; if (currentItem.Source == previousItem.Source) { row.Background = previousRow.Background; } else { if (previousRow.Background == stripeOneColor) { row.Background = stripeTwoColor; } else { row.Background = stripeOneColor; } } } else { row.Background = stripeOneColor; } } } } } }

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• How to reserve public API to internal usage in .NET?

  - by mark

  Dear ladies and sirs. Let me first present the case, which will explain my question. This is going to be a bit long, so I apologize in advance :-). I have objects and collections, which should support the Merge API (it is my custom API, the signature of which is immaterial for this question). This API must be internal, meaning only my framework should be allowed to invoke it. However, derived types should be able to override the basic implementation. The natural way to implement this pattern as I see it, is this: The Merge API is declared as part of some internal interface, let us say IMergeable. Because the interface is internal, derived types would not be able to implement it directly. Rather they must inherit it from a common base type. So, a common base type is introduced, which would implement the IMergeable interface explicitly, where the interface methods delegate to respective protected virtual methods, providing the default implementation. This way the API is only callable by my framework, but derived types may override the default implementation. The following code snippet demonstrates the concept: internal interface IMergeable { void Merge(object obj); } public class BaseFrameworkObject : IMergeable { protected virtual void Merge(object obj) { // The default implementation. } void IMergeable.Merge(object obj) { Merge(obj); } } public class SomeThirdPartyObject : BaseFrameworkObject { protected override void Merge(object obj) { // A derived type implementation. } } All is fine, provided a single common base type suffices, which is usually true for non collection types. The thing is that collections must be mergeable as well. Collections do not play nicely with the presented concept, because developers do not develop collections from the scratch. There are predefined implementations - observable, filtered, compound, read-only, remove-only, ordered, god-knows-what, ... They may be developed from scratch in-house, but once finished, they serve wide range of products and should never be tailored to some specific product. Which means, that either: they do not implement the IMergeable interface at all, because it is internal to some product the scope of the IMergeable interface is raised to public and the API becomes open and callable by all. Let us refer to these collections as standard collections. Anyway, the first option screws my framework, because now each possible standard collection type has to be paired with the respective framework version, augmenting the standard with the IMergeable interface implementation - this is so bad, I am not even considering it. The second option breaks the framework as well, because the IMergeable interface should be internal for a reason (whatever it is) and now this interface has to open to all. So what to do? My solution is this. make IMergeable public API, but add an extra parameter to the Merge method, I call it a security token. The interface implementation may check that the token references some internal object, which is never exposed to the outside. If this is the case, then the method was called from within the framework, otherwise - some outside API consumer attempted to invoke it and so the implementation can blow up with a SecurityException. Here is the modified code snippet demonstrating this concept: internal static class InternalApi { internal static readonly object Token = new object(); } public interface IMergeable { void Merge(object obj, object token); } public class BaseFrameworkObject : IMergeable { protected virtual void Merge(object obj) { // The default implementation. } public void Merge(object obj, object token) { if (!object.ReferenceEquals(token, InternalApi.Token)) { throw new SecurityException("bla bla bla"); } Merge(obj); } } public class SomeThirdPartyObject : BaseFrameworkObject { protected override void Merge(object obj) { // A derived type implementation. } } Of course, this is less explicit than having an internally scoped interface and the check is moved from the compile time to run time, yet this is the best I could come up with. Now, I have a gut feeling that there is a better way to solve the problem I have presented. I do not know, may be using some standard Code Access Security features? I have only vague understanding of it, but can LinkDemand attribute be somehow related to it? Anyway, I would like to hear other opinions. Thanks.

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• C++ linked list based tree structure. Sanely copy nodes between lists.

  - by krunk

  edit Clafification: The intention is not to remove the node from the original list. But to create an identical node (data and children wise) to the original and insert that into the new list. In other words, a "move" does not imply a "remove" from the original. endedit The requirements: Each Node in the list must contain a reference to its previous sibling Each Node in the list must contain a reference to its next sibling Each Node may have a list of child nodes Each child Node must have a reference to its parent node Basically what we have is a tree structure of arbitrary depth and length. Something like: -root(NULL) --Node1 ----ChildNode1 ------ChildOfChild --------AnotherChild ----ChildNode2 --Node2 ----ChildNode1 ------ChildOfChild ----ChildNode2 ------ChildOfChild --Node3 ----ChildNode1 ----ChildNode2 Given any individual node, you need to be able to either traverse its siblings. the children, or up the tree to the root node. A Node ends up looking something like this: class Node { Node* previoius; Node* next; Node* child; Node* parent; } I have a container class that stores these and provides STL iterators. It performs your typical linked list accessors. So insertAfter looks like: void insertAfter(Node* after, Node* newNode) { Node* next = after->next; after->next = newNode; newNode->previous = after; next->previous = newNode; newNode->next = next; newNode->parent = after->parent; } That's the setup, now for the question. How would one move a node (and its children etc) to another list without leaving the previous list dangling? For example, if Node* myNode exists in ListOne and I want to append it to listTwo. Using pointers, listOne is left with a hole in its list since the next and previous pointers are changed. One solution is pass by value of the appended Node. So our insertAfter method would become: void insertAfter(Node* after, Node newNode); This seems like an awkward syntax. Another option is doing the copying internally, so you'd have: void insertAfter(Node* after, const Node* newNode) { Node *new_node = new Node(*newNode); Node* next = after->next; after->next = new_node; new_node->previous = after; next->previous = new_node; new_node->next = next; new_node->parent = after->parent; } Finally, you might create a moveNode method for moving and prevent raw insertion or appending of a node that already has been assigned siblings and parents. // default pointer value is 0 in constructor and a operator bool(..) // is defined for the Node bool isInList(const Node* node) const { return (node->previous || node->next || node->parent); } // then in insertAfter and friends if(isInList(newNode) // throw some error and bail I thought I'd toss this out there and see what folks came up with.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 - New Features

  - by imran_ku07

  Introduction:          ASP.NET MVC 3 just released by ASP.NET MVC team which includes some new features, some changes, some improvements and bug fixes. In this article, I will show you the new features of ASP.NET MVC 3. This will help you to get started using the new features of ASP.NET MVC 3. Full details of this announcement is available at Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix.   Description:       New Razor View Engine:              Razor view engine is one of the most coolest new feature in ASP.NET MVC 3. Razor is speeding things up just a little bit more. It is much smaller and lighter in size. Also it is very easy to learn. You can say ' write less, do more '. You can get start and learn more about Razor at Introducing “Razor” – a new view engine for ASP.NET.         Granular Request Validation:             Another biggest new feature in ASP.NET MVC 3 is Granular Request Validation. Default request validator will throw an exception when he see < followed by an exclamation(like <!) or < followed by the letters a through z(like <s) or & followed by a pound sign(like &#123) as a part of querystring, posted form, headers and cookie collection. In previous versions of ASP.NET MVC, you can control request validation using ValidateInputAttriubte. In ASP.NET MVC 3 you can control request validation at Model level by annotating your model properties with a new attribute called AllowHtmlAttribute. For details see Granular Request Validation in ASP.NET MVC 3.       Sessionless Controller Support:             Sessionless Controller is another great new feature in ASP.NET MVC 3. With Sessionless Controller you can easily control your session behavior for controllers. For example, you can make your HomeController's Session as Disabled or ReadOnly, allowing concurrent request execution for single user. For details see Concurrent Requests In ASP.NET MVC and HowTo: Sessionless Controller in MVC3 – what & and why?.       Unobtrusive Ajax and  Unobtrusive Client Side Validation is Supported:             Another cool new feature in ASP.NET MVC 3 is support for Unobtrusive Ajax and Unobtrusive Client Side Validation.  This feature allows separation of responsibilities within your web application by separating your html with your script. For details see Unobtrusive Ajax in ASP.NET MVC 3 and Unobtrusive Client Validation in ASP.NET MVC 3.       Dependency Resolver:             Dependency Resolver is another great feature of ASP.NET MVC 3. It allows you to register a dependency resolver that will be used by the framework. With this approach your application will not become tightly coupled and the dependency will be injected at run time. For details see ASP.NET MVC 3 Service Location.       New Helper Methods:             ASP.NET MVC 3 includes some helper methods of ASP.NET Web Pages technology that are used for common functionality. These helper methods includes: Chart, Crypto, WebGrid, WebImage and WebMail. For details of these helper methods, please see ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Notes. For using other helper methods of ASP.NET Web Pages see Using ASP.NET Web Pages Helpers in ASP.NET MVC.       Child Action Output Caching:             ASP.NET MVC 3 also includes another feature called Child Action Output Caching. This allows you to cache only a portion of the response when you are using Html.RenderAction or Html.Action. This cache can be varied by action name, action method signature and action method parameter values. For details see this.       RemoteAttribute:             ASP.NET MVC 3 allows you to validate a form field by making a remote server call through Ajax. This makes it very easy to perform remote validation at client side and quickly give the feedback to the user. For details see How to: Implement Remote Validation in ASP.NET MVC.       CompareAttribute:             ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a new validation attribute called CompareAttribute. CompareAttribute allows you to compare the values of two different properties of a model. For details see CompareAttribute in ASP.NET MVC 3.       Miscellaneous New Features:                    ASP.NET MVC 2 includes FormValueProvider, QueryStringValueProvider, RouteDataValueProvider and HttpFileCollectionValueProvider. ASP.NET MVC 3 adds two additional value providers, ChildActionValueProvider and JsonValueProvider(JsonValueProvider is not physically exist).  ChildActionValueProvider is used when you issue a child request using Html.Action and/or Html.RenderAction methods, so that your explicit parameter values in Html.Action and/or Html.RenderAction will always take precedence over other value providers. JsonValueProvider is used to model bind JSON data. For details see Sending JSON to an ASP.NET MVC Action Method Argument.           In ASP.NET MVC 3, a new property named FileExtensions added to the VirtualPathProviderViewEngine class. This property is used when looking up a view by path (and not by name), so that only views with a file extension contained in the list specified by this new property is considered. For details see VirtualPathProviderViewEngine.FileExtensions Property .           ASP.NET MVC 3 installation package also includes the NuGet Package Manager which will be automatically installed when you install ASP.NET MVC 3. NuGet makes it easy to install and update open source libraries and tools in Visual Studio. See this for details.           In ASP.NET MVC 2, client side validation will not trigger for overridden model properties. For example, if have you a Model that contains some overridden properties then client side validation will not trigger for overridden properties in ASP.NET MVC 2 but client side validation will work for overridden properties in ASP.NET MVC 3.           Client side validation is not supported for StringLengthAttribute.MinimumLength property in ASP.NET MVC 2. In ASP.NET MVC 3 client side validation will work for StringLengthAttribute.MinimumLength property.           ASP.NET MVC 3 includes new action results like HttpUnauthorizedResult, HttpNotFoundResult and HttpStatusCodeResult.           ASP.NET MVC 3 includes some new overloads of LabelFor and LabelForModel methods. For details see LabelExtensions.LabelForModel and LabelExtensions.LabelFor.           In ASP.NET MVC 3, IControllerFactory includes a new method GetControllerSessionBehavior. This method is used to get controller's session behavior. For details see IControllerFactory.GetControllerSessionBehavior Method.           In ASP.NET MVC 3, Controller class includes a new property ViewBag which is of type dynamic. This property allows you to access ViewData Dictionary using C # 4.0 dynamic features. For details see ControllerBase.ViewBag Property.           ModelMetadata includes a property AdditionalValues which is of type Dictionary. In ASP.NET MVC 3 you can populate this property using AdditionalMetadataAttribute. For details see AdditionalMetadataAttribute Class.           In ASP.NET MVC 3 you can also use MvcScaffolding to scaffold your Views and Controller. For details see Scaffold your ASP.NET MVC 3 project with the MvcScaffolding package.           If you want to convert your application from ASP.NET MVC 2 to ASP.NET MVC 3 then there is an excellent tool that automatically converts ASP.NET MVC 2 application to ASP.NET MVC 3 application. For details see MVC 3 Project Upgrade Tool.           In ASP.NET MVC 2 DisplayAttribute is not supported but in ASP.NET MVC 3 DisplayAttribute will work properly.           ASP.NET MVC 3 also support model level validation via the new IValidatableObject interface.           ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a new helper method Html.Raw. This helper method allows you to display unencoded HTML.     Summary:          In this article I showed you the new features of ASP.NET MVC 3. This will help you a lot when you start using ASP MVC 3. I also provide you the links where you can find further details. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.  

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• Ajax Control Toolkit July 2011 Release and the New HTML Editor Extender

  - by Stephen Walther

  I’m happy to announce the July 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which includes important bug fixes and a completely new HTML Editor Extender control. You can download the July 2011 Release by visiting the Ajax Control Toolkit CodePlex site at: http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com Using the New HTML Editor Extender Control You can use the new HTML Editor Extender to extend any standard ASP.NET TextBox control so that it supports rich formatting such as bold, italics, bulleted lists, numbered lists, typefaces and different foreground and background colors. The following code illustrates how you can extend a standard ASP.NET TextBox control with the HtmlEditorExtender: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Simple.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.Simple" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="asp" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title>Simple</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager runat="Server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtComments" TextMode="MultiLine" Columns="60" Rows="8" runat="server" /> <asp:HtmlEditorExtender TargetControlID="txtComments" runat="server" /> </form> </body> </html> This page has the following three controls: ToolkitScriptManager – The ToolkitScriptManager renders all of the scripts required by the Ajax Control Toolkit. TextBox – The TextBox control is a standard ASP.NET TextBox which is set to display multiple lines (a TextArea instead of an Input element). HtmlEditorExtender – The HtmlEditorExtender is set to extend the TextBox control. You can use the standard TextBox Text property to read the rich text entered into the TextBox control on the server. Lightweight and HTML5 The HTML Editor Extender works on all modern browsers including the most recent versions of Mozilla Firefox (Firefox 5), Google Chrome (Chrome 12), and Apple Safari (Safari 5). Furthermore, the HTML Editor Extender is compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and newer. The HTML Editor Extender is very lightweight. It takes advantage of the HTML5 ContentEditable attribute so it does not require an iframe or complex browser workarounds. If you select View Source in your browser while using the HTML Editor Extender, we hope that you will be pleasantly surprised by how little markup and script is generated by the HTML Editor Extender. Customizable Toolbar Buttons Depending on the web application that you are building, you will want to display different toolbar buttons with the HTML Editor Extender. One of the design goals of the HTML Editor Extender was to make it very easy for you to customize the toolbar buttons. Imagine, for example, that you want to use the HTML Editor Extender when accepting comments on blog posts. In that case, you might want to restrict the type of formatting that a user can display. You might want to enable a user to format text as bold or italic but you do not want the user to make any other formatting changes. The following page illustrates how you can customize the HTML Editor Extender toolbar: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="CustomToolbar.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.CustomToolbar" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="asp" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <html> <head runat="server"> <title>Custom Toolbar</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager Runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtComments" TextMode="MultiLine" Columns="50" Rows="10" Text="Hello <b>world!</b>" Runat="server" /> <asp:HtmlEditorExtender TargetControlID="txtComments" runat="server"> <Toolbar> <asp:Bold /> <asp:Italic /> </Toolbar> </asp:HtmlEditorExtender> </form> </body> </html> Notice that the HTML Editor Extender in the page above has a Toolbar subtag. You can list the toolbar buttons which you want to appear within the subtag. In the case above, only Bold and Italic buttons are displayed. Here is a complete list of the Toolbar buttons currently supported by the HTML Editor Extender: Undo Redo Bold Italic Underline StrikeThrough Subscript Superscript JustifyLeft JustifyCenter JustifyRight JustifyFull InsertOrderedList InsertUnorderedList CreateLink UnLink RemoveFormat SelectAll UnSelect Delete Cut Copy Paste BackgroundColorSelector ForeColorSelector FontNameSelector FontSizeSelector Indent Outdent InsertHorizontalRule HorizontalSeparator Of course the HTML Editor Extender was designed to be extensible. You can create your own buttons and add them to the control. Compatible with the AntiXSS Library When using the HTML Editor Extender on a public facing website, we strongly recommend that you use the HTML Editor Extender with the AntiXSS Library. If you allow users to submit arbitrary HTML, and you don’t take any action to strip out malicious markup, then you are opening your website to Cross-Site Scripting Attacks (XSS attacks). The HTML Editor Extender uses the Provider Model to support different Sanitizer Providers. The July 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit ships with a single Sanitizer Provider which uses the AntiXSS library (see http://AntiXss.CodePlex.com ). A Sanitizer Provider is responsible for sanitizing HTML markup by removing any malicious elements, attributes, and attribute values. For example, the AntiXss Sanitizer Provider will take the following block of HTML: <b><a href=""javascript:doEvil()"">Visit Grandma</a></b> <script>doEvil()</script> And return the following sanitized block of HTML: <b><a href="">Visit Grandma</a></b> Notice that the JavaScript href and <SCRIPT> tag are both stripped out. Be aware that there are a depressingly large number of ways to sneak evil markup into your HTML. You definitely want a Sanitizer as a safety net. Before you can use the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider, you must add three assemblies to your web application: AntiXSSLibrary.dll, HtmlSanitizationLibrary.dll, and SanitizerProviders.dll. All three assemblies are included with the CodePlex download of the Ajax Control Toolkit in the SanitizerProviders folder. Here’s how you modify your web.config file to use the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider: <configuration> <configSections> <sectionGroup name="system.web"> <section name="sanitizer" requirePermission="false" type="AjaxControlToolkit.Sanitizer.ProviderSanitizerSection, AjaxControlToolkit"/> </sectionGroup> </configSections> <system.web> <compilation targetFramework="4.0" debug="true"/> <sanitizer defaultProvider="AntiXssSanitizerProvider"> <providers> <add name="AntiXssSanitizerProvider" type="AjaxControlToolkit.Sanitizer.AntiXssSanitizerProvider"></add> </providers> </sanitizer> </system.web> </configuration> You can detect whether the HTML Editor Extender is using the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider by checking the HtmlEditorExtender SanitizerProvider property like this: if (MyHtmlEditorExtender.SanitizerProvider == null) { throw new Exception("Please enable the AntiXss Sanitizer!"); } When the SanitizerProvider property has the value null, you know that a Sanitizer Provider has not been configured in the web.config file. Because the AntiXSS library requires Full Trust, you cannot use the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider with most shared website hosting providers. Because most shared hosting providers only support Medium Trust and not Full Trust, we do not recommend using the HTML Editor Extender with a public website hosted with a shared hosting provider. Why a New HTML Editor Control? The Ajax Control Toolkit now includes two HTML Editor controls. Why did we introduce a new HTML Editor control when there was already an existing HTML Editor? We think you will like the new HTML Editor much more than the previous one. We had several goals with the new HTML Editor Extender: Lightweight – We wanted to leverage HTML5 to create a lightweight HTML Editor. The new HTML Editor generates much less markup and script than the previous HTML Editor. Secure – We wanted to make it easy to integrate the AntiXSS library with the HTML Editor. If you are creating a public facing website, we strongly recommend that you use the AntiXSS Provider. Customizable – We wanted to make it easy for users to customize the toolbar buttons displayed by the HTML Editor. Compatibility – We wanted to ensure that the HTML Editor will work with the latest versions of the most popular browsers (including Internet Explorer 6 and higher). The old HTML Editor control is still included in the Ajax Control Toolkit and continues to live in the AjaxControlToolkit.HTMLEditor namespace. We have not modified the control and you can continue to use the control in the same way as you have used it in the past. However, we hope that you will consider migrating to the new HTML Editor Extender for the reasons listed above. Summary We’ve introduced a new Ajax Control Toolkit control with this release. I want to thank the developers and testers on the Superexpert team for the huge amount of work which they put into this control. It was a non-trivial task to build an entirely new control which has the complexity of the HTML Editor in less than 6 weeks. Please let us know what you think! We want to hear your feedback. If you discover issues with the new HTML Editor Extender control, or you have questions about the control, or you have ideas for how it can be improved, then please post them to this blog. Tomorrow starts a new sprint

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• Version Assemblies with TFS 2010 Continuous Integration

  - by Steve Michelotti

  When I first heard that TFS 2010 had moved to Workflow Foundation for Team Build, I was *extremely* skeptical. I’ve loved MSBuild and didn’t quite understand the reasons for this change. In fact, given that I’ve been exclusively using Cruise Control for Continuous Integration (CI) for the last 5+ years of my career, I was skeptical of TFS for CI in general. However, after going through the learning process for TFS 2010 recently, I’m starting to become a believer. I’m also starting to see some of the benefits with Workflow Foundation for the overall processing because it gives you constructs not available in MSBuild such as parallel tasks, better control flow constructs, and a slightly better customization story. The first customization I had to make to the build process was to version the assemblies of my solution. This is not new. In fact, I’d recommend reading Mike Fourie’s well known post on Versioning Code in TFS before you get started. This post describes several foundational aspects of versioning assemblies regardless of your version of TFS. The main points are: 1) don’t use source control operations for your version file, 2) use a schema like <Major>.<Minor>.<IncrementalNumber>.0, and 3) do not keep AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion in sync. To do this in TFS 2010, the best post I’ve found has been Jim Lamb’s post of building a custom TFS 2010 workflow activity. Overall, this post is excellent but the primary issue I have with it is that the assembly version numbers produced are based in a date and look like this: “2010.5.15.1”. This is definitely not what I want. I want to be able to communicate to the developers and stakeholders that we are producing the “1.1 release” or “1.2 release” – which would have an assembly version number of “1.1.317.0” for example. In this post, I’ll walk through the process of customizing the assembly version number based on this method – customizing the concepts in Lamb’s post to suit my needs. I’ll also be combining this with the concepts of Fourie’s post – particularly with regards to the standards around how to version the assemblies. The first thing I’ll do is add a file called SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs to the root of my solution that looks like this: 1: using System; 2: using System.Reflection; 3: [assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.1.0.0")] 4: [assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.1.0.0")] I’ll then add that file as a Visual Studio link file to each project in my solution by right-clicking the project, “Add – Existing Item…” then when I click the SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs file, making sure I “Add As Link”: Now the Solution Explorer will show our file. We can see that it’s a “link” file because of the black arrow in the icon within all our projects. Of course you’ll need to remove the AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion attributes from the AssemblyInfo.cs files to avoid the duplicate attributes since they now leave in the SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs file. This is an extremely common technique so that all the projects in our solution can be versioned as a unit. At this point, we’re ready to write our custom activity. The primary consideration is that I want the developer and/or tech lead to be able to easily be in control of the Major.Minor and then I want the CI process to add the third number with a unique incremental number. We’ll leave the fourth position always “0” for now – it’s held in reserve in case the day ever comes where we need to do an emergency patch to Production based on a branched version.   Writing the Custom Workflow Activity Similar to Lamb’s post, I’m going to write two custom workflow activities. The “outer” activity (a xaml activity) will be pretty straight forward. It will check if the solution version file exists in the solution root and, if so, delegate the replacement of version to the AssemblyVersionInfo activity which is a CodeActivity highlighted in red below:   Notice that the arguments of this activity are the “solutionVersionFile” and “tfsBuildNumber” which will be passed in. The tfsBuildNumber passed in will look something like this: “CI_MyApplication.4” and we’ll need to grab the “4” (i.e., the incremental revision number) and put that in the third position. Then we’ll need to honor whatever was specified for Major.Minor in the SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs file. For example, if the SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs file had “1.1.0.0” for the AssemblyVersion (as shown in the first code block near the beginning of this post), then we want to resulting file to have “1.1.4.0”. Before we do anything, let’s put together a unit test for all this so we can know if we get it right: 1: [TestMethod] 2: public void Assembly_version_should_be_parsed_correctly_from_build_name() 3: { 4: // arrange 5: const string versionFile = "SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs"; 6: WriteTestVersionFile(versionFile); 7: var activity = new VersionAssemblies(); 8: var arguments = new Dictionary<string, object> { 9: { "tfsBuildNumber", "CI_MyApplication.4"}, 10: { "solutionVersionFile", versionFile} 11: }; 12:   13: // act 14: var result = WorkflowInvoker.Invoke(activity, arguments); 15:   16: // assert 17: Assert.AreEqual("1.2.4.0", (string)result["newAssemblyFileVersion"]); 18: var lines = File.ReadAllLines(versionFile); 19: Assert.IsTrue(lines.Contains("[assembly: AssemblyVersion(\"1.2.0.0\")]")); 20: Assert.IsTrue(lines.Contains("[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion(\"1.2.4.0\")]")); 21: } 22: 23: private void WriteTestVersionFile(string versionFile) 24: { 25: var fileContents = "using System.Reflection;\n" + 26: "[assembly: AssemblyVersion(\"1.2.0.0\")]\n" + 27: "[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion(\"1.2.0.0\")]"; 28: File.WriteAllText(versionFile, fileContents); 29: }   At this point, the code for our AssemblyVersion activity is pretty straight forward: 1: [BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.Agent)] 2: public class AssemblyVersionInfo : CodeActivity 3: { 4: [RequiredArgument] 5: public InArgument<string> FileName { get; set; } 6:   7: [RequiredArgument] 8: public InArgument<string> TfsBuildNumber { get; set; } 9:   10: public OutArgument<string> NewAssemblyFileVersion { get; set; } 11:   12: protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context) 13: { 14: var solutionVersionFile = this.FileName.Get(context); 15: 16: // Ensure that the file is writeable 17: var fileAttributes = File.GetAttributes(solutionVersionFile); 18: File.SetAttributes(solutionVersionFile, fileAttributes & ~FileAttributes.ReadOnly); 19:   20: // Prepare assembly versions 21: var majorMinor = GetAssemblyMajorMinorVersionBasedOnExisting(solutionVersionFile); 22: var newBuildNumber = GetNewBuildNumber(this.TfsBuildNumber.Get(context)); 23: var newAssemblyVersion = string.Format("{0}.{1}.0.0", majorMinor.Item1, majorMinor.Item2); 24: var newAssemblyFileVersion = string.Format("{0}.{1}.{2}.0", majorMinor.Item1, majorMinor.Item2, newBuildNumber); 25: this.NewAssemblyFileVersion.Set(context, newAssemblyFileVersion); 26:   27: // Perform the actual replacement 28: var contents = this.GetFileContents(newAssemblyVersion, newAssemblyFileVersion); 29: File.WriteAllText(solutionVersionFile, contents); 30:   31: // Restore the file's original attributes 32: File.SetAttributes(solutionVersionFile, fileAttributes); 33: } 34:   35: #region Private Methods 36:   37: private string GetFileContents(string newAssemblyVersion, string newAssemblyFileVersion) 38: { 39: var cs = new StringBuilder(); 40: cs.AppendLine("using System.Reflection;"); 41: cs.AppendFormat("[assembly: AssemblyVersion(\"{0}\")]", newAssemblyVersion); 42: cs.AppendLine(); 43: cs.AppendFormat("[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion(\"{0}\")]", newAssemblyFileVersion); 44: return cs.ToString(); 45: } 46:   47: private Tuple<string, string> GetAssemblyMajorMinorVersionBasedOnExisting(string filePath) 48: { 49: var lines = File.ReadAllLines(filePath); 50: var versionLine = lines.Where(x => x.Contains("AssemblyVersion")).FirstOrDefault(); 51:   52: if (versionLine == null) 53: { 54: throw new InvalidOperationException("File does not contain [assembly: AssemblyVersion] attribute"); 55: } 56:   57: return ExtractMajorMinor(versionLine); 58: } 59:   60: private static Tuple<string, string> ExtractMajorMinor(string versionLine) 61: { 62: var firstQuote = versionLine.IndexOf('"') + 1; 63: var secondQuote = versionLine.IndexOf('"', firstQuote); 64: var version = versionLine.Substring(firstQuote, secondQuote - firstQuote); 65: var versionParts = version.Split('.'); 66: return new Tuple<string, string>(versionParts[0], versionParts[1]); 67: } 68:   69: private string GetNewBuildNumber(string buildName) 70: { 71: return buildName.Substring(buildName.LastIndexOf(".") + 1); 72: } 73:   74: #endregion 75: }   At this point the final step is to incorporate this activity into the overall build template. Make a copy of the DefaultTempate.xaml – we’ll call it DefaultTemplateWithVersioning.xaml. Before the build and labeling happens, drag the VersionAssemblies activity in. Then set the LabelName variable to “BuildDetail.BuildDefinition.Name + "-" + newAssemblyFileVersion since the newAssemblyFileVersion was produced by our activity.   Configuring CI Once you add your solution to source control, you can configure CI with the build definition window as shown here. The main difference is that we’ll change the Process tab to reflect a different build number format and choose our custom build process file:   When the build completes, we’ll see the name of our project with the unique revision number:   If we look at the detailed build log for the latest build, we’ll see the label being created with our custom task:     We can now look at the history labels in TFS and see the project name with the labels (the Assignment activity I added to the workflow):   Finally, if we look at the physical assemblies that are produced, we can right-click on any assembly in Windows Explorer and see the assembly version in its properties:   Full Traceability We now have full traceability for our code. There will never be a question of what code was deployed to Production. You can always see the assembly version in the properties of the physical assembly. That can be traced back to a label in TFS where the unique revision number matches. The label in TFS gives you the complete snapshot of the code in your source control repository at the time the code was built. This type of process for full traceability has been used for many years for CI – in fact, I’ve done similar things with CCNet and SVN for quite some time. This is simply the TFS implementation of that pattern. The new features that TFS 2010 give you to make these types of customizations in your build process are quite easy once you get over the initial curve.

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• Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths

  - by Rick Strahl

  ASP.Net includes quite a plethora of properties to retrieve path information about the current request, control and application. There's a ton of information available about paths on the Request object, some of it appearing to overlap and some of it buried several levels down, and it can be confusing to find just the right path that you are looking for. To keep things straight I thought it a good idea to summarize the path options along with descriptions and example paths. I wrote a post about this a long time ago in 2004 and I find myself frequently going back to that page to quickly figure out which path I’m looking for in processing the current URL. Apparently a lot of people must be doing the same, because the original post is the second most visited even to this date on this blog to the tune of nearly 500 hits per day. So, I decided to update and expand a bit on the original post with a little more information and clarification based on the original comments. Request Object Paths Available Here's a list of the Path related properties on the Request object (and the Page object). Assume a path like http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx for the paths below where webstore is the name of the virtual. .blackborder td { border-bottom: solid 1px silver; border-left: solid 1px silver; } Request Property Description and Value ApplicationPath Returns the web root-relative logical path to the virtual root of this app. /webstore/ PhysicalApplicationPath Returns local file system path of the virtual root for this app. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore PhysicalPath Returns the local file system path to the current script or path. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore\admin\paths.aspx Path FilePath CurrentExecutionFilePath All of these return the full root relative logical path to the script page including path and scriptname. CurrentExcecutionFilePath will return the ‘current’ request path after a Transfer/Execute call while FilePath will always return the original request’s path. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath Returns an ASP.NET root relative virtual path to the script or path for the current request. If in  a Transfer/Execute call the transferred Path is returned. ~/admin/paths.aspx PathInfo Returns any extra path following the script name. If no extra path is provided returns the root-relative path (returns text in red below). string.Empty if no PathInfo is available. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx/ExtraPathInfo RawUrl Returns the full root relative URL including querystring and extra path as a string. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 Url Returns a fully qualified URL including querystring and extra path. Note this is a Uri instance rather than string. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 UrlReferrer The fully qualified URL of the page that sent the request. This is also a Uri instance and this value is null if the page was directly accessed by typing into the address bar or using an HttpClient based Referrer client Http header. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/default.aspx?Info Control.TemplateSourceDirectory Returns the logical path to the folder of the page, master or user control on which it is called. This is useful if you need to know the path only to a Page or control from within the control. For non-file controls this returns the Page path. /webstore/admin/ As you can see there’s a ton of information available there for each of the three common path formats: Physical Path is an OS type path that points to a path or file on disk. Logical Path is a Web path that is relative to the Web server’s root. It includes the virtual plus the application relative path. ~/ (Root-relative) Path is an ASP.NET specific path that includes ~/ to indicate the virtual root Web path. ASP.NET can convert virtual paths into either logical paths using Control.ResolveUrl(), or physical paths using Server.MapPath(). Root relative paths are useful for specifying portable URLs that don’t rely on relative directory structures and very useful from within control or component code. You should be able to get any necessary format from ASP.NET from just about any path or script using these mechanisms. ~/ Root Relative Paths and ResolveUrl() and ResolveClientUrl() ASP.NET supports root-relative virtual path syntax in most of its URL properties in Web Forms. So you can easily specify a root relative path in a control rather than a location relative path: <asp:Image runat="server" ID="imgHelp" ImageUrl="~/images/help.gif" /> ASP.NET internally resolves this URL by using ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif") to arrive at the root-relative URL of /webstore/images/help.gif which uses the Request.ApplicationPath as the basepath to replace the ~. By convention any custom Web controls also should use ResolveUrl() on URL properties to provide the same functionality. In your own code you can use Page.ResolveUrl() or Control.ResolveUrl() to accomplish the same thing: string imgPath = this.ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif"); imgHelp.ImageUrl = imgPath; Unfortunately ResolveUrl() is limited to WebForm pages, so if you’re in an HttpHandler or Module it’s not available. ASP.NET Mvc also has it’s own more generic version of ResolveUrl in Url.Decode: <script src="<%= Url.Content("~/scripts/new.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script> which is part of the UrlHelper class. In ASP.NET MVC the above sort of syntax is actually even more crucial than in WebForms due to the fact that views are not referencing specific pages but rather are often path based which can lead to various variations on how a particular view is referenced. In a Module or Handler code Control.ResolveUrl() unfortunately is not available which in retrospect seems like an odd design choice – URL resolution really should happen on a Request basis not as part of the Page framework. Luckily you can also rely on the static VirtualPathUtility class: string path = VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/admin/paths.aspx"); VirtualPathUtility also many other quite useful methods for dealing with paths and converting between the various kinds of paths supported. One thing to watch out for is that ToAbsolute() will throw an exception if a query string is provided and doesn’t work on fully qualified URLs. I wrote about this topic with a custom solution that works fully qualified URLs and query strings here (check comments for some interesting discussions too). Similar to ResolveUrl() is ResolveClientUrl() which creates a fully qualified HTTP path that includes the protocol and domain name. It’s rare that this full resolution is needed but can be useful in some scenarios. Mapping Virtual Paths to Physical Paths with Server.MapPath() If you need to map root relative or current folder relative URLs to physical URLs or you can use HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(). Inside of a Page you can do the following: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("~/scripts/ww.jquery.js")); MapPath is pretty flexible and it understands both ASP.NET style virtual paths as well as plain relative paths, so the following also works. string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("scripts/silverlight.js"); as well as dot relative syntax: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("../scripts/jquery.js"); Once you have the physical path you can perform standard System.IO Path and File operations on the file. Remember with physical paths and IO or copy operations you need to make sure you have permissions to access files and folders based on the Web server user account that is active (NETWORK SERVICE, ASPNET typically). Note the Server.MapPath will not map up beyond the virtual root of the application for security reasons. Server and Host Information Between these settings you can get all the information you may need to figure out where you are at and to build new Url if necessary. If you need to build a URL completely from scratch you can get access to information about the server you are accessing: Server Variable Function and Example SERVER_NAME The of the domain or IP Address wwww.west-wind.com or 127.0.0.1 SERVER_PORT The port that the request runs under. 80 SERVER_PORT_SECURE Determines whether https: was used. 0 or 1 APPL_MD_PATH ADSI DirectoryServices path to the virtual root directory. Note that LM typically doesn’t work for ADSI access so you should replace that with LOCALHOST or the machine’s NetBios name. /LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT/webstore Request.Url and Uri Parsing If you still need more control over the current request URL or  you need to create new URLs from an existing one, the current Request.Url Uri property offers a lot of control. Using the Uri class and UriBuilder makes it easy to retrieve parts of a URL and create new URLs based on existing URL. The UriBuilder class is the preferred way to create URLs – much preferable over creating URIs via string concatenation. Uri Property Function Scheme The URL scheme or protocol prefix. http or https Port The port if specifically specified. DnsSafeHost The domain name or local host NetBios machine name www.west-wind.com or rasnote LocalPath The full path of the URL including script name and extra PathInfo. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx Query The query string if any ?id=1 The Uri class itself is great for retrieving Uri parts, but most of the properties are read only if you need to modify a URL in order to change it you can use the UriBuilder class to load up an existing URL and modify it to create a new one. Here are a few common operations I’ve needed to do to get specific URLs: Convert the Request URL to an SSL/HTTPS link For example to take the current request URL and converted  it to a secure URL can be done like this: UriBuilder build = new UriBuilder(Request.Url); build.Scheme = "https"; build.Port = -1; // don't inject port Uri newUri = build.Uri; string newUrl = build.ToString(); Retrieve the fully qualified URL without a QueryString AFAIK, there’s no native routine to retrieve the current request URL without the query string. It’s easy to do with UriBuilder however: UriBuilder builder = newUriBuilder(Request.Url); builder.Query = ""; stringlogicalPathWithoutQuery = builder.ToString(); What else? I took a look through the old post’s comments and addressed as many of the questions and comments that came up in there. With a few small and silly exceptions this update post handles most of these. But I’m sure there are a more things that go in here. What else would be useful to put onto this post so it serves as a nice all in one place to go for path references? If you think of something leave a comment and I’ll try to update the post with it in the future.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• ASP.NET GZip Encoding Caveats

  - by Rick Strahl

  GZip encoding in ASP.NET is pretty easy to accomplish using the built-in GZipStream and DeflateStream classes and applying them to the Response.Filter property.  While applying GZip and Deflate behavior is pretty easy there are a few caveats that you have watch out for as I found out today for myself with an application that was throwing up some garbage data. But before looking at caveats let’s review GZip implementation for ASP.NET. ASP.NET GZip/Deflate Basics Response filters basically are applied to the Response.OutputStream and transform it as data is written to it through the ASP.NET Response object. So a Response.Write eventually gets written into the output stream which if a filter is also written through the filter stream’s interface. To perform the actual GZip (and Deflate) encoding typically used by Web pages .NET includes the GZipStream and DeflateStream stream classes which can be readily assigned to the Repsonse.OutputStream. With these two stream classes in place it’s almost trivially easy to create a couple of reusable methods that allow you to compress your HTTP output. In my standard WebUtils utility class (from the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit) created two static utility methods – IsGZipSupported and GZipEncodePage – that check whether the client supports GZip encoding and then actually encodes the current output (note that although the method includes ‘Page’ in its name this code will work with any ASP.NET output). /// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } } } As you can see the actual assignment of the Filter is as simple as: Response.Filter = new DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); which applies the filter to the OutputStream. You also need to ensure that your response reflects the new GZip or Deflate encoding and ensure that any pages that are cached in Proxy servers can differentiate between pages that were encoded with the various different encodings (or no encoding). To use this utility function now is trivially easy: In any ASP.NET code that wants to compress its Response output you simply use: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); Entry = WebLogFactory.GetEntry(); var entries = Entry.GetLastEntries(App.Configuration.ShowEntryCount, "pk,Title,SafeTitle,Body,Entered,Feedback,Location,ShowTopAd", "TEntries"); if (entries == null) throw new ApplicationException("Couldn't load WebLog Entries: " + Entry.ErrorMessage); this.repEntries.DataSource = entries; this.repEntries.DataBind(); } Here I use an ASP.NET page, but the above WebUtils.GZipEncode() method call will work in any ASP.NET application type including HTTP Handlers. The only requirement is that the filter needs to be applied before any other output is sent to the OutputStream. For example, in my CallbackHandler service implementation by default output over a certain size is GZip encoded. The output that is generated is JSON or XML and if the output is over 5k in size I apply WebUtils.GZipEncode(): if (sbOutput.Length > GZIP_ENCODE_TRESHOLD) WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); Response.ContentType = ControlResources.STR_JsonContentType; HttpContext.Current.Response.Write(sbOutput.ToString()); Ok, so you probably get the idea: Encoding GZip/Deflate content is pretty easy. Hold on there Hoss –Watch your Caching Or is it? There are a few caveats that you need to watch out for when dealing with GZip content. The fist issue is that you need to deal with the fact that some clients don’t support GZip or Deflate content. Most modern browsers support it, but if you have a programmatic Http client accessing your content GZip/Deflate support is by no means guaranteed. For example, WinInet Http clients don’t support GZip out of the box – it has to be explicitly implemented. Other low level HTTP clients on other platforms too don’t support GZip out of the box. The problem is that your application, your Web Server and Proxy Servers on the Internet might be caching your generated content. If you return content with GZip once and then again without, either caching is not applied or worse the wrong type of content is returned back to the client from a cache or proxy. The result is an unreadable response for *some clients* which is also very hard to debug and fix once in production. You already saw the issue of Proxy servers addressed in the GZipEncodePage() function: // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); This ensures that any Proxy servers also check for the Content-Encoding HTTP Header to cache their content – not just the URL. The same thing applies if you do OutputCaching in your own ASP.NET code. If you generate output for GZip on an OutputCached page the GZipped content will be cached (either by ASP.NET’s cache or in some cases by the IIS Kernel Cache). But what if the next client doesn’t support GZip? She’ll get served a cached GZip page that won’t decode and she’ll get a page full of garbage. Wholly undesirable. To fix this you need to add some custom OutputCache rules by way of the GetVaryByCustom() HttpApplication method in your global_ASAX file: public override string GetVaryByCustomString(HttpContext context, string custom) { // Override Caching for compression if (custom == "GZIP") { string acceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Response.Headers["Content-Encoding"]; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(acceptEncoding)) return ""; else if (acceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) return "GZIP"; else if (acceptEncoding.Contains("deflate")) return "DEFLATE"; return ""; } return base.GetVaryByCustomString(context, custom); } In a page that use Output caching you then specify: <%@ OutputCache Duration="180" VaryByParam="none" VaryByCustom="GZIP" %> To use that custom rule. It’s all Fun and Games until ASP.NET throws an Error Ok, so you’re up and running with GZip, you have your caching squared away and your pages that you are applying it to are jamming along. Then BOOM, something strange happens and you get a lovely garbled page that look like this: Lovely isn’t it? What’s happened here is that I have WebUtils.GZipEncode() applied to my page, but there’s an error in the page. The error falls back to the ASP.NET error handler and the error handler removes all existing output (good) and removes all the custom HTTP headers I’ve set manually (usually good, but very bad here). Since I applied the Response.Filter (via GZipEncode) the output is now GZip encoded, but ASP.NET has removed my Content-Encoding header, so the browser receives the GZip encoded content without a notification that it is encoded as GZip. The result is binary output. Here’s what Fiddler says about the raw HTTP header output when an error occurs when GZip encoding was applied: HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2011 22:21:08 GMT Content-Length: 2138 Connection: close ?`I?%&/m?{J?J??t??` … binary output striped here Notice: no Content-Encoding header and that’s why we’re seeing this garbage. ASP.NET has stripped the Content-Encoding header but left our filter intact. So how do we fix this? In my applications I typically have a global Application_Error handler set up and in this case I’ve been using that. One thing that you can do in the Application_Error handler is explicitly clear out the Response.Filter and set it to null at the top: protected void Application_Error(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Remove any special filtering especially GZip filtering Response.Filter = null; … } And voila I get my Yellow Screen of Death or my custom generated error output back via uncompressed content. BTW, the same is true for Page level errors handled in Page_Error or ASP.NET MVC Error handling methods in a controller. Another and possibly even better solution is to check whether a filter is attached just before the headers are sent to the client as pointed out by Adam Schroeder in the comments: protected void Application_PreSendRequestHeaders() { // ensure that if GZip/Deflate Encoding is applied that headers are set // also works when error occurs if filters are still active HttpResponse response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (response.Filter is GZipStream && response.Headers["Content-encoding"] != "gzip") response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding", "gzip"); else if (response.Filter is DeflateStream && response.Headers["Content-encoding"] != "deflate") response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding", "deflate"); } This uses the Application_PreSendRequestHeaders() pipeline event to check for compression encoding in a filter and adjusts the content accordingly. This is actually a better solution since this is generic – it’ll work regardless of how the content is cleaned up. For example, an error Response.Redirect() or short error display might get changed and the filter not cleared and this code actually handles that. Sweet, thanks Adam. It’s unfortunate that ASP.NET doesn’t natively clear out Response.Filters when an error occurs just as it clears the Response and Headers. I can’t see where leaving a Filter in place in an error situation would make any sense, but hey - this is what it is and it’s easy enough to fix as long as you know where to look. Riiiight! IIS and GZip I should also mention that IIS 7 includes good support for compression natively. If you can defer encoding to let IIS perform it for you rather than doing it in your code by all means you should do it! Especially any static or semi-dynamic content that can be made static should be using IIS built-in compression. Dynamic caching is also supported but is a bit more tricky to judge in terms of performance and footprint. John Forsyth has a great article on the benefits and drawbacks of IIS 7 compression which gives some detailed performance comparisons and impact reviews. I’ll post another entry next with some more info on IIS compression since information on it seems to be a bit hard to come by. Related Content Built-in GZip/Deflate Compression in IIS 7.x HttpWebRequest and GZip Responses © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

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• Integrate Bing Search API into ASP.Net application

  - by sreejukg

  Couple of months back, I wrote an article about how to integrate Bing Search engine (API 2.0) with ASP.Net website. You can refer the article here http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2012/04/07/integrate-bing-api-for-search-inside-asp-net-web-application.aspx Things are changing rapidly in the tech world and Bing has also changed! The Bing Search API 2.0 will work until August 1, 2012, after that it will not return results. Shocked? Don’t worry the API has moved to Windows Azure market place and available for you to sign up and continue using it and there is a free version available based on your usage. In this article, I am going to explain how you can integrate the new Bing API that is available in the Windows Azure market place with your website. You can access the Windows Azure market place from the below link https://datamarket.azure.com/ There is lot of applications available for you to subscribe and use. Bing is one of them. You can find the new Bing Search API from the below link https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/5BA839F1-12CE-4CCE-BF57-A49D98D29A44 To get access to Bing Search API, first you need to register an account with Windows Azure market place. Sign in to the Windows Azure market place site using your windows live account. Once you sign in with your windows live account, you need to register to Windows Azure Market place account. From the Windows Azure market place, you will see the sign in button it the top right of the page. Clicking on the sign in button will take you to the Windows live ID authentication page. You can enter a windows live ID here to login. Once logged in you will see the Registration page for the Windows Azure market place as follows. You can agree or disagree for the email address usage by Microsoft. I believe selecting the check box means you will get email about what is happening in Windows Azure market place. Click on continue button once you are done. In the next page, you should accept the terms of use, it is not optional, you must agree to terms and conditions. Scroll down to the page and select the I agree checkbox and click on Register Button. Now you are a registered member of Windows Azure market place. You can subscribe to data applications. In order to use BING API in your application, you must obtain your account Key, in the previous version of Bing you were required an API key, the current version uses Account Key instead. Once you logged in to the Windows Azure market place, you can see “My Account” in the top menu, from the Top menu; go to “My Account” Section. From the My Account section, you can manage your subscriptions and Account Keys. Account Keys will be used by your applications to access the subscriptions from the market place. Click on My Account link, you can see Account Keys in the left menu and then Add an account key or you can use the default Account key available. Creating account key is very simple process. Also you can remove the account keys you create if necessary. The next step is to subscribe to BING Search API. At this moment, Bing Offers 2 APIs for search. The available options are as follows. 1. Bing Search API - https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/5ba839f1-12ce-4cce-bf57-a49d98d29a44 2. Bing Search API – Web Results only - https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/8818f55e-2fe5-4ce3-a617-0b8ba8419f65 The difference is that the later will give you only web results where the other you can specify the source type such as image, video, web, news etc. Carefully choose the API based on your application requirements. In this article, I am going to use Web Results Only API, but the steps will be similar to both. Go to the API page https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/8818f55e-2fe5-4ce3-a617-0b8ba8419f65, you can see the subscription options in the right side. And in the bottom of the page you can see the free option Since I am going to use the free options, just Click the Sign Up link for that. Just select I agree check box and click on the Sign Up button. You will get a recipt pagethat detail your subscription. Now you are ready Bing Search API – Web results. The next step is to integrate the API into your ASP.Net application. Now if you go to the Search API page (as well as in the Receipt page), you can see a .Net C# Class Library link, click on the link, you will get a code file named “BingSearchContainer.cs”. In the following sections I am going to demonstrate the use of Bing Search API from an ASP.Net application. Create an empty ASP.Net web application. In the solution explorer, the application will looks as follows. Now add the downloaded code file (“BingSearchContainer.cs”) to the project. Right click your project in solution explorer, Add -> existing item, then browse to the downloaded location, select the “BingSearchContainer.cs” file and add it to the project. To build the code file you need to add reference to the following library. System.Data.Services.Client You can find the library in the .Net tab, when you select Add -> Reference Try to build your project now; it should build without any errors. Add an ASP.Net page to the project. I have included a text box and a button, then a Grid View to the page. The idea is to Search the text entered and display the results in the gridview. The page will look in the Visual Studio Designer as follows. The markup of the page is as follows. In the button click event handler for the search button, I have used the following code. Now run your project and enter some text in the text box and click the Search button, you will see the results coming from Bing, cool. I entered the text “Microsoft” in the textbox and clicked on the button and I got the following results. Searching Specific Websites If you want to search a particular website, you pass the site url with site:<site url name> and if you have more sites, use pipe (|). e.g. The following search query site:microsoft.com | site:adobe.com design will search the word design and return the results from Microsoft.com and Adobe.com See the sample code that search only Microsoft.com for the text entered for the above sample. var webResults = bingContainer.Web("site:www.Microsoft.com " + txtSearch.Text, null, null, null, null, null, null); Paging the results returned by the API By default the BING API will return 100 results based on your query. The default code file that you downloaded from BING doesn’t include any option for this. You can modify the downloaded code to perform this paging. The BING API supports two parameters $top (for number of results to return) and $skip (for number of records to skip). So if you want 3rd page of results with page size = 10, you need to pass $top = 10 and $skip=20. Open the BingSearchContainer.cs in the editor. You can see the Web method in it as follows. public DataServiceQuery<WebResult> Web(String Query, String Market, String Adult, Double? Latitude, Double? Longitude, String WebFileType, String Options) {  In the method signature, I have added two more parameters public DataServiceQuery<WebResult> Web(String Query, String Market, String Adult, Double? Latitude, Double? Longitude, String WebFileType, String Options, int resultCount, int pageNo) { and in the method, you need to pass the parameters to the query variable. query = query.AddQueryOption("$top", resultCount); query = query.AddQueryOption("$skip", (pageNo -1)*resultCount); return query; Note that I didn’t perform any validation, but you need to check conditions such as resultCount and pageCount should be greater than or equal to 1. If the parameters are not valid, the Bing Search API will throw the error. The modified method is as follows. The changes are highlighted. Now see the following code in the SearchPage.aspx.cs file protected void btnSearch_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {     var bingContainer = new Bing.BingSearchContainer(new Uri(https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Bing/SearchWeb/));     // replace this value with your account key     var accountKey = "your key";     // the next line configures the bingContainer to use your credentials.     bingContainer.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(accountKey, accountKey);     var webResults = bingContainer.Web("site:microsoft.com" +txtSearch.Text , null, null, null, null, null, null,3,2);     lstResults.DataSource = webResults;     lstResults.DataBind(); } The following code will return 3 results starting from second page (by skipping first 3 results). See the result page as follows. Bing provides complete integration to its offerings. When you develop search based applications, you can use the power of Bing to perform the search. Integrating Bing Search API to ASP.Net application is a simple process and without investing much time, you can develop a good search based application. Make sure you read the terms of use before designing the application and decide which API usage is suitable for you. Further readings BING API Migration Guide http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=248077 Bing API FAQ http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=252146 Bing API Schema Guide http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=252151

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• Ten - oh, wait, eleven - Eleven things you should know about the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update

  - by Jon Galloway

  Today, just a little over two months after the big ASP.NET 4.5 / ASP.NET MVC 4 / ASP.NET Web API / Visual Studio 2012 / Web Matrix 2 release, the first preview of the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update is out. Here's what you need to know: There are no new framework bits in this release - there's no change or update to ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC or Web Forms features. This means that you can start using it without any updates to your server, upgrade concerns, etc. This update is really an update to the project templates and Visual Studio tooling, conceptually similar to the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update. It's a relatively lightweight install. It's a 41MB download. I've installed it many times and usually takes 5-7 minutes; it's never required a reboot. It adds some new project templates to ASP.NET MVC: Facebook Application and Single Page Application templates. It adds a lot of cool enhancements to ASP.NET Web API. It adds some tooling that makes it easy to take advantage of features like SignalR, Friendly URLs, and Windows Azure Authentication. Most of the new features are installed via NuGet packages. Since ASP.NET is open source, nightly NuGet packages are available, and the roadmap is published, most of this has really been publicly available for a while. The official name of this drop is the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update BUILD Prerelease. Please do not attempt to say that ten times fast. While the EULA doesn't prohibit it, it WILL legally change your first name to Scott. As with all new releases, you can find out everything you need to know about the Fall Update at http://asp.net/vnext (especially the release notes!) I'm going to be showing all of this off, assisted by special guest code monkey Scott Hanselman, this Friday at BUILD: Bleeding edge ASP.NET: See what is next for MVC, Web API, SignalR and more… (and I've heard it will be livestreamed). Let's look at some of those things in more detail. No new bits ASP.NET 4.5, MVC 4 and Web API have a lot of great core features. I see the goal of this update release as making it easier to put those features to use to solve some useful scenarios by taking advantage of NuGet packages and template code. If you create a new ASP.NET MVC application using one of the new templates, you'll see that it's using the ASP.NET MVC 4 RTM NuGet package (4.0.20710.0): This means you can install and use the Fall Update without any impact on your existing projects and no worries about upgrading or compatibility. New Facebook Application Template ASP.NET MVC 4 (and ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms) included the ability to authenticate your users via OAuth and OpenID, so you could let users log in to your site using a Facebook account. One of the new changes in the Fall Update is a new template that makes it really easy to create full Facebook applications. You could create Facebook application in ASP.NET already, you'd just need to go through a few steps: Search around to find a good Facebook NuGet package, like the Facebook C# SDK (written by my friend Nathan Totten and some other Facebook SDK brainiacs). Read the Facebook developer documentation to figure out how to authenticate and integrate with them. Write some code, debug it and repeat until you got something working. Get started with the application you'd originally wanted to write. What this template does for you: eliminate steps 1-3. Erik Porter, Nathan and some other experts built out the Facebook Application template so it automatically pulls in and configures the Facebook NuGet package and makes it really easy to take advantage of it in an ASP.NET MVC application. One great example is the the way you access a Facebook user's information. Take a look at the following code in a File / New / MVC / Facebook Application site. First, the Home Controller Index action: [FacebookAuthorize(Permissions = "email")] public ActionResult Index(MyAppUser user, FacebookObjectList<MyAppUserFriend> userFriends) { ViewBag.Message = "Modify this template to jump-start your Facebook application using ASP.NET MVC."; ViewBag.User = user; ViewBag.Friends = userFriends.Take(5); return View(); } First, notice that there's a FacebookAuthorize attribute which requires the user is authenticated via Facebook and requires permissions to access their e-mail address. It binds to two things: a custom MyAppUser object and a list of friends. Let's look at the MyAppUser code: using Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Facebook.Attributes; using Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Facebook.Models; // Add any fields you want to be saved for each user and specify the field name in the JSON coming back from Facebook // https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/ namespace MvcApplication3.Models { public class MyAppUser : FacebookUser { public string Name { get; set; } [FacebookField(FieldName = "picture", JsonField = "picture.data.url")] public string PictureUrl { get; set; } public string Email { get; set; } } } You can add in other custom fields if you want, but you can also just bind to a FacebookUser and it will automatically pull in the available fields. You can even just bind directly to a FacebookUser and check for what's available in debug mode, which makes it really easy to explore. For more information and some walkthroughs on creating Facebook applications, see: Deploying your first Facebook App on Azure using ASP.NET MVC Facebook Template (Yao Huang Lin) Facebook Application Template Tutorial (Erik Porter) Single Page Application template Early releases of ASP.NET MVC 4 included a Single Page Application template, but it was removed for the official release. There was a lot of interest in it, but it was kind of complex, as it handled features for things like data management. The new Single Page Application template that ships with the Fall Update is more lightweight. It uses Knockout.js on the client and ASP.NET Web API on the server, and it includes a sample application that shows how they all work together. I think the real benefit of this application is that it shows a good pattern for using ASP.NET Web API and Knockout.js. For instance, it's easy to end up with a mess of JavaScript when you're building out a client-side application. This template uses three separate JavaScript files (delivered via a Bundle, of course): todoList.js - this is where the main client-side logic lives todoList.dataAccess.js - this defines how the client-side application interacts with the back-end services todoList.bindings.js - this is where you set up events and overrides for the Knockout bindings - for instance, hooking up jQuery validation and defining some client-side events This is a fun one to play with, because you can just create a new Single Page Application and hit F5. Quick, easy install (with one gotcha) One of the cool engineering changes for this release is a big update to the installer to make it more lightweight and efficient. I've been running nightly builds of this for a few weeks to prep for my BUILD demos, and the install has been really quick and easy to use. The install takes about 5 minutes, has never required a reboot for me, and the uninstall is just as simple. There's one gotcha, though. In this preview release, you may hit an issue that will require you to uninstall and re-install the NuGet VSIX package. The problem comes up when you create a new MVC application and see this dialog: The solution, as explained in the release notes, is to uninstall and re-install the NuGet VSIX package: Start Visual Studio 2012 as an Administrator Go to Tools->Extensions and Updates and uninstall NuGet. Close Visual Studio Navigate to the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update installation folder: For Visual Studio 2012: Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Stack\Visual Studio 2012 For Visual Studio 2012 Express for Web: Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Stack\Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web Double click on the NuGet.Tools.vsix to reinstall NuGet This took me under a minute to do, and I was up and running. ASP.NET Web API Update Extravaganza! Uh, the Web API team is out of hand. They added a ton of new stuff: OData support, Tracing, and API Help Page generation. OData support Some people like OData. Some people start twitching when you mention it. If you're in the first group, this is for you. You can add a [Queryable] attribute to an API that returns an IQueryable<Whatever> and you get OData query support from your clients. Then, without any extra changes to your client or server code, your clients can send filters like this: /Suppliers?$filter=Name eq ‘Microsoft’ For more information about OData support in ASP.NET Web API, see Alex James' mega-post about it: OData support in ASP.NET Web API ASP.NET Web API Tracing Tracing makes it really easy to leverage the .NET Tracing system from within your ASP.NET Web API's. If you look at the \App_Start\WebApiConfig.cs file in new ASP.NET Web API project, you'll see a call to TraceConfig.Register(config). That calls into some code in the new \App_Start\TraceConfig.cs file: public static void Register(HttpConfiguration configuration) { if (configuration == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("configuration"); } SystemDiagnosticsTraceWriter traceWriter = new SystemDiagnosticsTraceWriter() { MinimumLevel = TraceLevel.Info, IsVerbose = false }; configuration.Services.Replace(typeof(ITraceWriter), traceWriter); } As you can see, this is using the standard trace system, so you can extend it to any other trace listeners you'd like. To see how it works with the built in diagnostics trace writer, just run the application call some API's, and look at the Visual Studio Output window: iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Request, Method=GET, Url=http://localhost:11147/api/Values, Message='http://localhost:11147/api/Values' iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Values', Operation=DefaultHttpControllerSelector.SelectController iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='WebAPI.Controllers.ValuesController', Operation=DefaultHttpControllerActivator.Create iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='WebAPI.Controllers.ValuesController', Operation=HttpControllerDescriptor.CreateController iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Selected action 'Get()'', Operation=ApiControllerActionSelector.SelectAction iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=HttpActionBinding.ExecuteBindingAsync iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=QueryableAttribute.ActionExecuting iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Action returned 'System.String[]'', Operation=ReflectedHttpActionDescriptor.ExecuteAsync iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Will use same 'JsonMediaTypeFormatter' formatter', Operation=JsonMediaTypeFormatter.GetPerRequestFormatterInstance iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Selected formatter='JsonMediaTypeFormatter', content-type='application/json; charset=utf-8'', Operation=DefaultContentNegotiator.Negotiate iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=ApiControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionAsync, Status=200 (OK) iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=QueryableAttribute.ActionExecuted, Status=200 (OK) iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=ValuesController.ExecuteAsync, Status=200 (OK) iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Response, Status=200 (OK), Method=GET, Url=http://localhost:11147/api/Values, Message='Content-type='application/json; charset=utf-8', content-length=unknown' iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=JsonMediaTypeFormatter.WriteToStreamAsync iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=ValuesController.Dispose API Help Page When you create a new ASP.NET Web API project, you'll see an API link in the header: Clicking the API link shows generated help documentation for your ASP.NET Web API controllers: And clicking on any of those APIs shows specific information: What's great is that this information is dynamically generated, so if you add your own new APIs it will automatically show useful and up to date help. This system is also completely extensible, so you can generate documentation in other formats or customize the HTML help as much as you'd like. The Help generation code is all included in an ASP.NET MVC Area: SignalR SignalR is a really slick open source project that was started by some ASP.NET team members in their spare time to add real-time communications capabilities to ASP.NET - and .NET applications in general. It allows you to handle long running communications channels between your server and multiple connected clients using the best communications channel they can both support - websockets if available, falling back all the way to old technologies like long polling if necessary for old browsers. SignalR remains an open source project, but now it's being included in ASP.NET (also open source, hooray!). That means there's real, official ASP.NET engineering work being put into SignalR, and it's even easier to use in an ASP.NET application. Now in any ASP.NET project type, you can right-click / Add / New Item... SignalR Hub or Persistent Connection. And much more... There's quite a bit more. You can find more info at http://asp.net/vnext, and we'll be adding more content as fast as we can. Watch my BUILD talk to see as I demonstrate these and other features in the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update, as well as some other even futurey-er stuff!

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• Data Profiling without SSIS

  Strangely enough for a predominantly SSIS blog, this post is all about how to perform data profiling without using SSIS. Whilst the Data Profiling Task is a worthy addition, there are a couple of limitations I’ve encountered of late. The first is that it requires SQL Server 2008, and not everyone is there yet. The second is that it can only target SQL Server 2005 and above. What about older systems, which are the ones that we probably need to investigate the most, or other vendor databases such as Oracle? With these limitations in mind I did some searching to find a quick and easy alternative to help me perform some data profiling for a project I was working on recently. I only had SQL Server 2005 available, and anyway most of my target source systems were Oracle, and of course I had short timescales. I looked at several options. Some never got beyond the download stage, they failed to install or just did not run, and others provided less than I could have produced myself by spending 2 minutes writing some basic SQL queries. In the end I settled on an open source product called DataCleaner. To quote from their website: DataCleaner is an Open Source application for profiling, validating and comparing data. These activities help you administer and monitor your data quality in order to ensure that your data is useful and applicable to your business situation. DataCleaner is the free alternative to software for master data management (MDM) methodologies, data warehousing (DW) projects, statistical research, preparation for extract-transform-load (ETL) activities and more. DataCleaner is developed in Java and licensed under LGPL. As quoted above it claims to support profiling, validating and comparing data, but I didn’t really get past the profiling functions, so won’t comment on the other two. The profiling whilst not prefect certainly saved some time compared to the limited alternatives. The ability to profile heterogeneous data sources is a big advantage over the SSIS option, and I found it overall quite easy to use and performance was good. I could see it struggling at times, but actually for what it does I was impressed. It had some data type niggles with Oracle, and some metrics seem a little strange, although thankfully they were easy to augment with some SQL queries to ensure a consistent picture. The report export options didn’t do it for me, but copy and paste with a bit of Excel magic was sufficient. One initial point for me personally is that I have had limited exposure to things of the Java persuasion and whilst I normally get by fine, sometimes the simplest things can throw me. For example installing a JDBC driver, why do I have to copy files to make it all work, has nobody ever heard of an MSI? In case there are other people out there like me who have become totally indoctrinated with the Microsoft software paradigm, I’ve written a quick start guide that details every step required. Steps 1- 5 are the key ones, the rest is really an excuse for some screenshots to show you the tool. Quick Start Guide Step 1  - Download Data Cleaner. The Microsoft Windows zipped exe option, and I chose the latest stable build, currently DataCleaner 1.5.3 (final). Extract the files to a suitable location. Step 2 - Download Java. If you try and run datacleaner.exe without Java it will warn you, and then open your default browser and take you to the Java download site. Follow the installation instructions from there, normally just click Download Java a couple of times and you’re done. Step 3 - Download Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver. You may have SQL Server installed, but you won’t have a JDBC driver. Version 3.0 is the latest as of April 2010. There is no real installer, we are in the Java world here, but run the exe you downloaded to extract the files. The default Unzip to folder is not much help, so try a fully qualified path such as C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver 3.0\ to ensure you can find the files afterwards. Step 4 - If you wish to use Windows Authentication to connect to your SQL Server then first we need to copy a file so that Data Cleaner can find it. Browse to the JDBC extract location from Step 3 and drill down to the file sqljdbc_auth.dll. You will have to choose the correct directory for your processor architecture. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver 3.0\sqljdbc_3.0\enu\auth\x86\sqljdbc_auth.dll. Now copy this file to the Data Cleaner extract folder you chose in Step 1. An alternative method is to edit datacleaner.cmd in the data cleaner extract folder as detailed in this data cleaner wiki topic, but I find copying the file simpler. Step 5 – Now lets run Data Cleaner, just run datacleaner.exe from the extract folder you chose in Step 1. Step 6 – Complete or skip the registration screen, and ignore the task window for now. In the main window click settings. Step 7 – In the Settings dialog, select the Database drivers tab, then click Register database driver and select the Local JAR file option. Step 8 – Browse to the JDBC driver extract location from Step 3 and drill down to select sqljdbc4.jar. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver 3.0\sqljdbc_3.0\enu\sqljdbc4.jar Step 9 – Select the Database driver class as com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver, and then click the Test and Save database driver button. Step 10 - You should be back at the Settings dialog with a the list of drivers that includes SQL Server. Just click Save Settings to persist all your hard work. Step 11 – Now we can start to profile some data. In the main Data Cleaner window click New Task, and then Profile from the task window. Step 12 – In the Profile window click Open Database Step 13 – Now choose the SQL Server connection string option. Selecting a connection string gives us a template like jdbc:sqlserver://<hostname>:1433;databaseName=<database>, but obviously it requires some details to be entered for example  jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:1433;databaseName=SQLBits. This will connect to the database called SQLBits on my local machine. The port may also have to be changed if using such as when you have a multiple instances of SQL Server running. If using SQL Server Authentication enter a username and password as required and then click Connect to database. You can use Window Authentication, just add integratedSecurity=true to the end of your connection string. e.g jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:1433;databaseName=SQLBits;integratedSecurity=true.  If you didn’t complete Step 4 above you will need to do so now and restart Data Cleaner before it will work. Manually setting the connection string is fine, but creating a named connection makes more sense if you will be spending any length of time profiling a specific database. As highlighted in the left-hand screen-shot, at the bottom of the dialog it includes partial instructions on how to create named connections. In the folder shown C:\Users\<Username>\.datacleaner\1.5.3, open the datacleaner-config.xml file in your editor of choice add your own details. You’ll see a sample connection in the file already, just add yours following the same pattern. e.g. <!-- Darren's Named Connections --> <bean class="dk.eobjects.datacleaner.gui.model.NamedConnection"> <property name="name" value="SQLBits Local Connection" /> <property name="driverClass" value="com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver" /> <property name="connectionString" value="jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:1433;databaseName=SQLBits;integratedSecurity=true" /> <property name="tableTypes"> <list> <value>TABLE</value> <value>VIEW</value> </list> </property> </bean> Step 14 – Once back at the Profile window, you should now see your schemas, tables and/or views listed down the left hand side. Browse this tree and double-click a table to select it for profiling. You can then click Add profile, and choose some profiling options, before finally clicking Run profiling. You can see below a sample output for three of the most common profiles, click the image for full size.   I hope this has given you a taster for DataCleaner, and should help you get up and running pretty quickly.

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• Entity Framework v1 &hellip; Brief Synopsis and Tips &ndash; Part 2

  - by Rohit Gupta

  Using Entity Framework with ASMX Web sErvices and WCF Web Service: If you use ASMX WebService to expose Entity objects from Entity Framework... then the ASMX Webservice does not  include object graphs, one work around is to use Facade pattern or to use WCF Service. The other important aspect of using ASMX Web Services along with Entity Framework is that the ASMX Client is not aware of the existence of EF v1 since the client solely deals with C# objects (not EntityObjects or ObjectContext). Since the client is not aware of the ObjectContext hence the client cannot participate in change tracking since the client only receives the Current Values and not the Orginal values when the service sends the the Entity objects to the client. Thus there are 2 drawbacks to using EntityFramework with ASMX Web Service: 1. Object state is not maintained... so to overcome this limitation we need insert/update single entity at a time and retrieve the original values for the entity being updated on the server/service end before calling Save Changes. 2. ASMX does not maintain object graphs... i.e. Customer.Reservations or Customer.Reservations.Trip relationships are not maintained. Thus you need to send these relationships separately from service to client. WCF Web Service overcomes the object graph limitation of ASMX Web Service, but we need to insure that we are populating all the non-null scalar properties of all the objects in the object graph before calling Update. WCF Web service still cannot overcome the second limitation of tracking changes to entities at the client end. Also note that the "Customer" class in the Client is very different from the "Customer" class in the Entity Framework Model Entities. They are incompatible with each other hence we cannot cast one to the other. However the .NET Framework translates the client "Customer" Entity to the EFv1 Model "customer" Entity once the entity is serialzed back on the ASMX server end. If you need change tracking enabled on the client then we need to use WCF Data Services which is available with VS 2010. ====================================================================================================== In WCF when adding an object that has relationships, the framework assumes that every object in the object graph needs to be added to store. for e.g. in a Customer.Reservations.Trip object graph, when a Customer Entity is added to the store, the EFv1 assumes that it needs to a add a Reservations collection and also Trips for each Reservation. Thus if we need to use existing Trips for reservations then we need to insure that we null out the Trip object reference from Reservations and set the TripReference to the EntityKey of the desired Trip instead. ====================================================================================================== Understanding Relationships and Associations in EFv1 The Golden Rule of EF is that it does not load entities/relationships unless you ask it to explicitly do so. However there is 1 exception to this rule. This exception happens when you attach/detach entities from the ObjectContext. If you detach an Entity in a ObjectGraph from the ObjectContext, then the ObjectContext removes the ObjectStateEntry for this Entity and all the relationship Objects associated with this Entity. For e.g. in a Customer.Order.OrderDetails if the Customer Entity is detached from the ObjectContext then you cannot traverse to the Order and OrderDetails Entities (that still exist in the ObjectContext) from the Customer Entity(which does not exist in the Object Context) Conversely, if you JOIN a entity that is not in the ObjectContext with a Entity that is in the ObjContext then the First Entity will automatically be added to the ObjContext since relationships for the 2 Entities need to exist in the ObjContext. ========================================================= You cannot attach an EntityCollection to an entity through its navigation property for e.g. you cannot code myContact.Addresses = myAddressEntityCollection ========================================================== Cascade Deletes in EDM: The Designer does not support specifying cascase deletes for a Entity. To enable cascasde deletes on a Entity in EDM use the Association definition in CSDL for the Entity. for e.g. SalesOrderDetail (SOD) has a Foreign Key relationship with SalesOrderHeader (SalesOrderHeader 1 : SalesOrderDetail *) if you specify a cascade Delete on SalesOrderHeader Entity then calling deleteObject on SalesOrderHeader (SOH) Entity will send delete commands for SOH record and all the SOD records that reference the SOH record. ========================================================== As a good design practise, if you use Cascade Deletes insure that Cascade delete facet is used both in the EDM as well as in the database. Even though it is not absolutely mandatory to have Cascade deletes on both Database and EDM (since you can see that just the Cascade delete spec on the SOH Entity in EDM will insure that SOH record and all related SOD records will be deleted from the database ... even though you dont have cascade delete configured in the database in the SOD table) ============================================================== Maintaining relationships in Code When Setting a Navigation property of a Entity (for e.g. setting the Contact Navigation property of Address Entity) the following rules apply : If both objects are detached, no relationship object will be created. You are simply setting a property the CLR way. If both objects are attached, a relationship object will be created. If only one of the objects is attached, the other will become attached and a relationship object will be created. If that detached object is new, when it is attached to the context its EntityState will be Added. One important rule to remember regarding synchronizing the EntityReference.Value and EntityReference.EntityKey properties is that when attaching an Entity which has a EntityReference (e.g. Address Entity with ContactReference) the Value property will take precedence and if the Value and EntityKey are out of sync, the EntityKey will be updated to match the Value. ====================================================== If you call .Load() method on a detached Entity then the .Load() operation will throw an exception. There is one exception to this rule. If you load entities using MergeOption.NoTracking, you will be able to call .Load() on such entities since these Entities are accessible by the ObjectContext. So the bottomline is that we need Objectontext to be able to call .Load() method to do deffered loading on EntityReference or EntityCollection. Another rule to remember is that you cannot call .Load() on entities that have a EntityState.Added State since the ObjectContext uses the EntityKey of the Primary (Parent) Entity when loading the related (Child) Entity (and not the EntityKey of the child (even if the EntityKey of the child is present before calling .Load()) ====================================================== You can use ObjContext.Add() to add a entity to the ObjContext and set the EntityState of the new Entity to EntityState.Added. here no relationships are added/updated. You can also use EntityCollection.Add() method to add an entity to another entity's related EntityCollection for e.g. contact has a Addresses EntityCollection so to add a new address use contact.Addresses.Add(newAddress) to add a new address to the Addresses EntityCollection. Note that if the entity does not already exist in the ObjectContext then calling contact.Addresses.Add(myAddress) will cause a new Address Entity to be added to the ObjContext with EntityState.Added and it will also add a RelationshipEntry (a relationship object) with EntityState.Added which connects the Contact (contact) with the new address newAddress. Note that if the entity already exists in the Objectcontext (being part theOtherContact.Addresses Collection), then calling contact.Addresses.Add(existingAddress) will add 2 RelationshipEntry objects to the ObjectStateEntry Collection, one with EntityState.Deleted and the other with EntityState.Added. This implies that the existingAddress Entity is removed from the theOtherContact.Addresses Collection and Added to the contact.Addresses Collection..effectively reassigning the address entity from the theOtherContact to "contact". This is called moving an existing entity to a new object graph. ====================================================== You usually use ObjectContext.Attach() and EntityCollection.Attach() methods usually when you need to reconstruct the ObjectGraph after deserializing the objects as received from a ASMX Web Service Client. Attach is usually used to connect existing Entities in the ObjectContext. When EntityCollection.Attach() is called the EntityState of the RelationshipEntry (the relationship object) remains as EntityState.unchanged whereas when EntityCollection.Add() method is called the EntityState of the relationship object changes to EntityState.Added or EntityState.Deleted as the situation demands. ========================================================= LINQ To Entities Tips: Select Many does Inner Join by default.   for e.g. from c in Contact from a in c.Address select c ... this will do a Inner Join between the Contacts and Addresses Table and return only those Contacts that have a Address. ======================================================== Group Joins Do LEFT Join by default. e.g. from a in Address join c in Contact ON a.Contact.ContactID == c.ContactID Into g WHERE a.CountryRegion == "US" select g; This query will do a left join on the Contact table and return contacts that have a address in "US" region The following query : from c in Contact join a in Address.Where(a1 => a1.CountryRegion == "US") on c.ContactID  equals a.Contact.ContactID into addresses select new {c, addresses} will do a left join on the Address table and return All Contacts. In these Contacts only those will have its Address EntityCollection Populated which have a Address in the "US" region, the other contacts will have 0 Addresses in the Address collection (even if addresses for those contacts exist in the database but are in a different region) ======================================================== Linq to Entities does not support DefaultIfEmpty().... instead use .Include("Address") Query Builder method to do a Left JOIN or use Group Joins if you need more control like Filtering on the Address EntityCollection of Contact Entity =================================================================== Use CreateSourceQuery() on the EntityReference or EntityCollection if you need to add filters during deferred loading of Entities (Deferred loading in EFv1 happens when you call Load() method on the EntityReference or EntityCollection. for e.g. var cust=context.Contacts.OfType<Customer>().First(); var sq = cust.Reservations.CreateSourceQuery().Where(r => r.ReservationDate > new DateTime(2008,1,1)); cust.Reservations.Attach(sq); This populates only those reservations that are older than Jan 1 2008. This is the only way (in EFv1) to Attach a Range of Entities to a EntityCollection using the Attach() method ================================================================== If you need to get the Foreign Key value for a entity e.g. to get the ContactID value from a Address Entity use this :                                address.ContactReference.EntityKey.EntityKeyValues.Where(k=> k.Key == "ContactID")

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• Exam 70-480 Study Material: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3

  - by Stacy Vicknair

  Here’s a list of sources of information for the different elements that comprise the 70-480 exam: General Resources http://www.w3schools.com (As pointed out in David Pallmann’s blog some of this content is unverified, but it is a decent source of information. For more about when it isn’t decent, see http://www.w3fools.com ) http://www.bloggedbychris.com/2012/09/19/microsoft-exam-70-480-study-guide/ (A guy who did a lot of what I did already, sadly I found this halfway through finishing my resources list. This list is expertly put together so I would recommend checking it out.) http://davidpallmann.blogspot.com/2012/08/microsoft-certification-exam-70-480.html http://pluralsight.com/training/Courses (Yes, this isn’t free, but if you look at the course listing there is an entire section on HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. You can always try the trial!)   Some of the links I put below will overlap with the other resources above, but I tried to find explanations that looked beneficial to me on links outside those already mentioned.   Test Breakdown Implement and Manipulate Document Structures and Objects (24%) Create the document structure. o This objective may include but is not limited to: structure the UI by using semantic markup, including for search engines and screen readers (Section, Article, Nav, Header, Footer, and Aside); create a layout container in HTML http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_new_elements.asp   Write code that interacts with UI controls. o This objective may include but is not limited to: programmatically add and modify HTML elements; implement media controls; implement HTML5 canvas and SVG graphics http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_canvas.asp http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_svg.asp   Apply styling to HTML elements programmatically. o This objective may include but is not limited to: change the location of an element; apply a transform; show and hide elements   Implement HTML5 APIs. o This objective may include but is not limited to: implement storage APIs, AppCache API, and Geolocation API http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_geolocation.asp http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_webstorage.asp http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_app_cache.asp   Establish the scope of objects and variables. o This objective may include but is not limited to: define the lifetime of variables; keep objects out of the global namespace; use the “this” keyword to reference an object that fired an event; scope variables locally and globally http://robertnyman.com/2008/10/09/explaining-javascript-scope-and-closures/ http://www.quirksmode.org/js/this.html   Create and implement objects and methods. o This objective may include but is not limited to: implement native objects; create custom objects and custom properties for native objects using prototypes and functions; inherit from an object; implement native methods and create custom methods http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/object.shtml http://www.crockford.com/javascript/inheritance.html http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1635116/javascript-class-method-vs-class-prototype-method http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/proto.shtml     Implement Program Flow (25%) Implement program flow. o This objective may include but is not limited to: iterate across collections and array items; manage program decisions by using switch statements, if/then, and operators; evaluate expressions http://www.javascriptkit.com/jsref/looping.shtml http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/varshort.shtml http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/switch.shtml   Raise and handle an event. o This objective may include but is not limited to: handle common events exposed by DOM (OnBlur, OnFocus, OnClick); declare and handle bubbled events; handle an event by using an anonymous function http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/DOM-Level-3-Events/html/DOM3-Events.html http://javascript.info/tutorial/bubbling-and-capturing   Implement exception handling. o This objective may include but is not limited to: set and respond to error codes; throw an exception; request for null checks; implement try-catch-finally blocks http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/trycatch.shtml   Implement a callback. o This objective may include but is not limited to: receive messages from the HTML5 WebSocket API; use jQuery to make an AJAX call; wire up an event; implement a callback by using anonymous functions; handle the “this” pointer http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-websockets-20110419/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/websockets/basics/ http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/   Create a web worker process. o This objective may include but is not limited to: start and stop a web worker; pass data to a web worker; configure timeouts and intervals on the web worker; register an event listener for the web worker; limitations of a web worker https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/Using_web_workers http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/workers/basics/   Access and Secure Data (26%) Validate user input by using HTML5 elements. o This objective may include but is not limited to: choose the appropriate controls based on requirements; implement HTML input types and content attributes (for example, required) to collect user input http://diveintohtml5.info/forms.html   Validate user input by using JavaScript. o This objective may include but is not limited to: evaluate a regular expression to validate the input format; validate that you are getting the right kind of data type by using built-in functions; prevent code injection http://www.regular-expressions.info/javascript.html http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/66ztdbe6(v=vs.94).aspx https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/typeof http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/06/safe-html-and-xss/ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/942011/how-to-prevent-javascript-injection-attacks-within-user-generated-html   Consume data. o This objective may include but is not limited to: consume JSON and XML data; retrieve data by using web services; load data or get data from other sources by using XMLHTTPRequest http://www.erichynds.com/jquery/working-with-xml-jquery-and-javascript/ http://www.webdevstuff.com/86/javascript-xmlhttprequest-object.html http://www.json.org/ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4935632/how-to-parse-json-in-javascript   Serialize, deserialize, and transmit data. o This objective may include but is not limited to: binary data; text data (JSON, XML); implement the jQuery serialize method; Form.Submit; parse data; send data by using XMLHTTPRequest; sanitize input by using URI/form encoding http://api.jquery.com/serialize/ http://www.javascript-coder.com/javascript-form/javascript-form-submit.phtml http://stackoverflow.com/questions/327685/is-there-a-way-to-read-binary-data-into-javascript https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/encodeURI     Use CSS3 in Applications (25%) Style HTML text properties. o This objective may include but is not limited to: apply styles to text appearance (color, bold, italics); apply styles to text font (WOFF and @font-face, size); apply styles to text alignment, spacing, and indentation; apply styles to text hyphenation; apply styles for a text drop shadow http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_text.asp http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_font.asp http://nicewebtype.com/notes/2009/10/30/how-to-use-css-font-face/ http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningcss/p/aacss5text.htm http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/ http://www.css3.info/preview/box-shadow/   Style HTML box properties. o This objective may include but is not limited to: apply styles to alter appearance attributes (size, border and rounding border corners, outline, padding, margin); apply styles to alter graphic effects (transparency, opacity, background image, gradients, shadow, clipping); apply styles to establish and change an element’s position (static, relative, absolute, fixed) http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/10-css3-properties-you-need-to-be-familiar-with/ http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_image_transparency.asp http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_background-image.asp http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/graphics/cssgradientbackgroundmaker/default.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visufx.html http://www.barelyfitz.com/screencast/html-training/css/positioning/ http://davidwalsh.name/css-fixed-position   Create a flexible content layout. o This objective may include but is not limited to: implement a layout using a flexible box model; implement a layout using multi-column; implement a layout using position floating and exclusions; implement a layout using grid alignment; implement a layout using regions, grouping, and nesting http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/flexbox/quick/ http://www.css3.info/preview/multi-column-layout/ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh673558(v=vs.85).aspx http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-grid-layout/ http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-regions/   Create an animated and adaptive UI. o This objective may include but is not limited to: animate objects by applying CSS transitions; apply 3-D and 2-D transformations; adjust UI based on media queries (device adaptations for output formats, displays, and representations); hide or disable controls http://www.bloggedbychris.com/2012/09/19/microsoft-exam-70-480-study-guide/   Find elements by using CSS selectors and jQuery. o This objective may include but is not limited to: choose the correct selector to reference an element; define element, style, and attribute selectors; find elements by using pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes (for example, :before, :first-line, :first-letter, :target, :lang, :checked, :first-child) http://www.bloggedbychris.com/2012/09/19/microsoft-exam-70-480-study-guide/   Structure a CSS file by using CSS selectors. o This objective may include but is not limited to: reference elements correctly; implement inheritance; override inheritance by using !important; style an element based on pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes (for example, :before, :first-line, :first-letter, :target, :lang, :checked, :first-child) http://www.bloggedbychris.com/2012/09/19/microsoft-exam-70-480-study-guide/   Technorati Tags: 70-480,CSS3,HTML5,HTML,CSS,JavaScript,Certification

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• Time Warp

  - by Jesse

  It’s no secret that daylight savings time can wreak havoc on systems that rely heavily on dates. The system I work on is centered around recording dates and times, so naturally my co-workers and I have seen our fair share of date-related bugs. From time to time, however, we come across something that we haven’t seen before. A few weeks ago the following error message started showing up in our logs: “The supplied DateTime represents an invalid time. For example, when the clock is adjusted forward, any time in the period that is skipped is invalid.” This seemed very cryptic, especially since it was coming from areas of our application that are typically only concerned with capturing date-only (no explicit time component) from the user, like reports that take a “start date” and “end date” parameter. For these types of parameters we just leave off the time component when capturing the date values, so midnight is used as a “placeholder” time. How is midnight an “invalid time”? Globalization Is Hard Over the last couple of years our software has been rolled out to users in several countries outside of the United States, including Brazil. Brazil begins and ends daylight savings time at midnight on pre-determined days of the year. On October 16, 2011 at midnight many areas in Brazil began observing daylight savings time at which time their clocks were set forward one hour. This means that at the instant it became midnight on October 16, it actually became 1:00 AM, so any time between 12:00 AM and 12:59:59 AM never actually happened. Because we store all date values in the database in UTC, always adjust any “local” dates provided by a user to UTC before using them as filters in a query. The error we saw was thrown by .NET when trying to convert the Brazilian local time of 2011-10-16 12:00 AM to UTC since that local time never actually existed. We hadn’t experienced this same issue with any of our US customers because the daylight savings time changes in the US occur at 2:00 AM which doesn’t conflict with our “placeholder” time of midnight. Detecting Invalid Times In .NET you might use code similar to the following for converting a local time to UTC: var localDate = new DateTime(2011, 10, 16); //2011-10-16 @ midnight const string timeZoneId = "E. South America Standard Time"; //Windows system timezone Id for "Brasilia" timezone. var localTimeZone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(timeZoneId); var convertedDate = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc(localDate, localTimeZone); The code above throws the “invalid time” exception referenced above. We could try to detect whether or not the local time is invalid with something like this: var localDate = new DateTime(2011, 10, 16); //2011-10-16 @ midnight const string timeZoneId = "E. South America Standard Time"; //Windows system timezone Id for "Brasilia" timezone. var localTimeZone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(timeZoneId); if (localTimeZone.IsInvalidTime(localDate)) localDate = localDate.AddHours(1); var convertedDate = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc(localDate, localTimeZone); This code works in this particular scenario, but it hardly seems robust. It also does nothing to address the issue that can arise when dealing with the ambiguous times that fall around the end of daylight savings. When we roll the clocks back an hour they record the same hour on the same day twice in a row. To continue on with our Brazil example, on February 19, 2012 at 12:00 AM, it will immediately become February 18, 2012 at 11:00 PM all over again. In this scenario, how should we interpret February 18, 2011 11:30 PM? Enter Noda Time I heard about Noda Time, the .NET port of the Java library Joda Time, a little while back and filed it away in the back of my mind under the “sounds-like-it-might-be-useful-someday” category.  Let’s see how we might deal with the issue of invalid and ambiguous local times using Noda Time (note that as of this writing the samples below will only work using the latest code available from the Noda Time repo on Google Code. The NuGet package version 0.1.0 published 2011-08-19 will incorrectly report unambiguous times as being ambiguous) : var localDateTime = new LocalDateTime(2011, 10, 16, 0, 0); const string timeZoneId = "Brazil/East"; var timezone = DateTimeZone.ForId(timeZoneId); var localDateTimeMaping = timezone.MapLocalDateTime(localDateTime); ZonedDateTime unambiguousLocalDateTime; switch (localDateTimeMaping.Type) { case ZoneLocalMapping.ResultType.Unambiguous: unambiguousLocalDateTime = localDateTimeMaping.UnambiguousMapping; break; case ZoneLocalMapping.ResultType.Ambiguous: unambiguousLocalDateTime = localDateTimeMaping.EarlierMapping; break; case ZoneLocalMapping.ResultType.Skipped: unambiguousLocalDateTime = new ZonedDateTime( localDateTimeMaping.ZoneIntervalAfterTransition.Start, timezone); break; default: throw new InvalidOperationException(string.Format("Unexpected mapping result type: {0}", localDateTimeMaping.Type)); } var convertedDateTime = unambiguousLocalDateTime.ToInstant().ToDateTimeUtc(); Let’s break this sample down: I’m using the Noda Time ‘LocalDateTime’ object to represent the local date and time. I’ve provided the year, month, day, hour, and minute (zeros for the hour and minute here represent midnight). You can think of a ‘LocalDateTime’ as an “invalidated” date and time; there is no information available about the time zone that this date and time belong to, so Noda Time can’t make any guarantees about its ambiguity. The ‘timeZoneId’ in this sample is different than the ones above. In order to use the .NET TimeZoneInfo class we need to provide Windows time zone ids. Noda Time expects an Olson (tz / zoneinfo) time zone identifier and does not currently offer any means of mapping the Windows time zones to their Olson counterparts, though project owner Jon Skeet has said that some sort of mapping will be publicly accessible at some point in the future. I’m making use of the Noda Time ‘DateTimeZone.MapLocalDateTime’ method to disambiguate the original local date time value. This method returns an instance of the Noda Time object ‘ZoneLocalMapping’ containing information about the provided local date time maps to the provided time zone.  The disambiguated local date and time value will be stored in the ‘unambiguousLocalDateTime’ variable as an instance of the Noda Time ‘ZonedDateTime’ object. An instance of this object represents a completely unambiguous point in time and is comprised of a local date and time, a time zone, and an offset from UTC. Instances of ZonedDateTime can only be created from within the Noda Time assembly (the constructor is ‘internal’) to ensure to callers that each instance represents an unambiguous point in time. The value of the ‘unambiguousLocalDateTime’ might vary depending upon the ‘ResultType’ returned by the ‘MapLocalDateTime’ method. There are three possible outcomes: If the provided local date time is unambiguous in the provided time zone I can immediately set the ‘unambiguousLocalDateTime’ variable from the ‘Unambiguous Mapping’ property of the mapping returned by the ‘MapLocalDateTime’ method. If the provided local date time is ambiguous in the provided time zone (i.e. it falls in an hour that was repeated when moving clocks backward from Daylight Savings to Standard Time), I can use the ‘EarlierMapping’ property to get the earlier of the two possible local dates to define the unambiguous local date and time that I need. I could have also opted to use the ‘LaterMapping’ property in this case, or even returned an error and asked the user to specify the proper choice. The important thing to note here is that as the programmer I’ve been forced to deal with what appears to be an ambiguous date and time. If the provided local date time represents a skipped time (i.e. it falls in an hour that was skipped when moving clocks forward from Standard Time to Daylight Savings Time),  I have access to the time intervals that fell immediately before and immediately after the point in time that caused my date to be skipped. In this case I have opted to disambiguate my local date and time by moving it forward to the beginning of the interval immediately following the skipped period. Again, I could opt to use the end of the interval immediately preceding the skipped period, or raise an error depending on the needs of the application. The point of this code is to convert a local date and time to a UTC date and time for use in a SQL Server database, so the final ‘convertedDate’  variable (typed as a plain old .NET DateTime) has its value set from a Noda Time ‘Instant’. An 'Instant’ represents a number of ticks since 1970-01-01 at midnight (Unix epoch) and can easily be converted to a .NET DateTime in the UTC time zone using the ‘ToDateTimeUtc()’ method. This sample is admittedly contrived and could certainly use some refactoring, but I think it captures the general approach needed to take a local date and time and convert it to UTC with Noda Time. At first glance it might seem that Noda Time makes this “simple” code more complicated and verbose because it forces you to explicitly deal with the local date disambiguation, but I feel that the length and complexity of the Noda Time sample is proportionate to the complexity of the problem. Using TimeZoneInfo leaves you susceptible to overlooking ambiguous and skipped times that could result in run-time errors or (even worse) run-time data corruption in the form of a local date and time being adjusted to UTC incorrectly. I should point out that this research is my first look at Noda Time and I know that I’ve only scratched the surface of its full capabilities. I also think it’s safe to say that it’s still beta software for the time being so I’m not rushing out to use it production systems just yet, but I will definitely be tinkering with it more and keeping an eye on it as it progresses.

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• Restful Services, oData, and Rest Sharp

  - by jkrebsbach

  After a great presentation by Jason Sheehan at MDC about RestSharp, I decided to implement it. RestSharp is a .Net framework for consuming restful data sources via either Json or XML. My first step was to put together a Restful data source for RestSharp to consume.  Staying entirely withing .Net, I decided to use Microsoft's oData implementation, built on System.Data.Services.DataServices.  Natively, these support Json, or atom+pub xml.  (XML with a few bells and whistles added on) There are three main steps for creating an oData data source: 1)  override CreateDSPMetaData This is where the metadata data is returned.  The meta data defines the structure of the data to return.  The structure contains the relationships between data objects, along with what properties the objects expose.  The meta data can and should be somehow cached so that the structure is not rebuild with every data request. 2) override CreateDataSource The context contains the data the data source will publish.  This method is the conduit which will populate the metadata objects to be returned to the requestor. 3) implement static InitializeService At this point we can set up security, along with setting up properties of the web service (versioning, etc)   Here is a web service which publishes stock prices for various Products (stocks) in various Categories. namespace RestService {     public class RestServiceImpl : DSPDataService<DSPContext>     {         private static DSPContext _context;         private static DSPMetadata _metadata;         /// <summary>         /// Populate traversable data source         /// </summary>         /// <returns></returns>         protected override DSPContext CreateDataSource()         {             if (_context == null)             {                 _context = new DSPContext();                 Category utilities = new Category(0);                 utilities.Name = "Electric";                 Category financials = new Category(1);                 financials.Name = "Financial";                                 IList products = _context.GetResourceSetEntities("Products");                 Product electric = new Product(0, utilities);                 electric.Name = "ABC Electric";                 electric.Description = "Electric Utility";                 electric.Price = 3.5;                 products.Add(electric);                 Product water = new Product(1, utilities);                 water.Name = "XYZ Water";                 water.Description = "Water Utility";                 water.Price = 2.4;                 products.Add(water);                 Product banks = new Product(2, financials);                 banks.Name = "FatCat Bank";                 banks.Description = "A bank that's almost too big";                 banks.Price = 19.9; // This will never get to the client                 products.Add(banks);                 IList categories = _context.GetResourceSetEntities("Categories");                 categories.Add(utilities);                 categories.Add(financials);                 utilities.Products.Add(electric);                 utilities.Products.Add(electric);                 financials.Products.Add(banks);             }             return _context;         }         /// <summary>         /// Setup rules describing published data structure - relationships between data,         /// key field, other searchable fields, etc.         /// </summary>         /// <returns></returns>         protected override DSPMetadata CreateDSPMetadata()         {             if (_metadata == null)             {                 _metadata = new DSPMetadata("DemoService", "DataServiceProviderDemo");                 // Define entity type product                 ResourceType product = _metadata.AddEntityType(typeof(Product), "Product");                 _metadata.AddKeyProperty(product, "ProductID");                 // Only add properties we wish to share with end users                 _metadata.AddPrimitiveProperty(product, "Name");                 _metadata.AddPrimitiveProperty(product, "Description");                 EntityPropertyMappingAttribute att = new EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Name",                     SyndicationItemProperty.Title, SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true);                 product.AddEntityPropertyMappingAttribute(att);                 att = new EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Description",                     SyndicationItemProperty.Summary, SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true);                 product.AddEntityPropertyMappingAttribute(att);                 // Define products as a set of product entities                 ResourceSet products = _metadata.AddResourceSet("Products", product);                 // Define entity type category                 ResourceType category = _metadata.AddEntityType(typeof(Category), "Category");                 _metadata.AddKeyProperty(category, "CategoryID");                 _metadata.AddPrimitiveProperty(category, "Name");                 _metadata.AddPrimitiveProperty(category, "Description");                 // Define categories as a set of category entities                 ResourceSet categories = _metadata.AddResourceSet("Categories", category);                 att = new EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Name",                     SyndicationItemProperty.Title, SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true);                 category.AddEntityPropertyMappingAttribute(att);                 att = new EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Description",                     SyndicationItemProperty.Summary, SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true);                 category.AddEntityPropertyMappingAttribute(att);                 // A product has a category, a category has products                 _metadata.AddResourceReferenceProperty(product, "Category", categories);                 _metadata.AddResourceSetReferenceProperty(category, "Products", products);             }             return _metadata;         }         /// <summary>         /// Based on the requesting user, can set up permissions to Read, Write, etc.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="config"></param>         public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config)         {             config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All);             config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2;             config.DataServiceBehavior.AcceptProjectionRequests = true;         }     } }     The objects prefixed with DSP come from the samples on the oData site: http://www.odata.org/developers The products and categories objects are POCO business objects with no special modifiers. Three main options are available for defining the MetaData of data sources in .Net: 1) Generate Entity Data model (Potentially directly from SQL Server database).  This requires the least amount of manual interaction, and uses the edmx WYSIWYG editor to generate a data model.  This can be directly tied to the SQL Server database and generated from the database if you want a data access layer tightly coupled with your database. 2) Object model decorations.  If you already have a POCO data layer, you can decorate your objects with properties to statically inform the compiler how the objects are related.  The disadvantage is there are now tags strewn about your business layer that need to be updated as the business rules change.  3) Programmatically construct metadata object.  This is the object illustrated above in CreateDSPMetaData.  This puts all relationship information into one central programmatic location.  Here business rules are constructed when the DSPMetaData response object is returned.   Once you have your service up and running, RestSharp is designed for XML / Json, along with the native Microsoft library.  There are currently some differences between how Jason made RestSharp expect XML with how atom+pub works, so I found better results currently with the Json implementation - modifying the RestSharp XML parser to make an atom+pub parser is fairly trivial though, so use what implementation works best for you. I put together a sample console app which calls the RestSvcImpl.svc service defined above (and assumes it to be running on port 2000).  I used both RestSharp as a client, and also the default Microsoft oData client tools. namespace RestConsole {     class Program     {         private static DataServiceContext _ctx;         private enum DemoType         {             Xml,             Json         }         static void Main(string[] args)         {             // Microsoft implementation             _ctx = new DataServiceContext(new System.Uri("http://localhost:2000/RestServiceImpl.svc"));             var msProducts = RunQuery<Product>("Products").ToList();             var msCategory = RunQuery<Category>("/Products(0)/Category").AsEnumerable().Single();             var msFilteredProducts = RunQuery<Product>("/Products?$filter=length(Name) ge 4").ToList();             // RestSharp implementation                          DemoType demoType = DemoType.Json;             var client = new RestClient("http://localhost:2000/RestServiceImpl.svc");             client.ClearHandlers(); // Remove all available handlers             // Set up handler depending on what situation dictates             if (demoType == DemoType.Json)                 client.AddHandler("application/json", new RestSharp.Deserializers.JsonDeserializer());             else if (demoType == DemoType.Xml)             {                 client.AddHandler("application/atom+xml", new RestSharp.Deserializers.XmlDeserializer());             }                          var request = new RestRequest();             if (demoType == DemoType.Json)                 request.RootElement = "d"; // service root element for json             else if (demoType == DemoType.Xml)             {                 request.XmlNamespace = "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom";             }                              // Return all products             request.Resource = "/Products?$orderby=Name";             RestResponse<List<Product>> productsResp = client.Execute<List<Product>>(request);             List<Product> products = productsResp.Data;             // Find category for product with ProductID = 1             request.Resource = string.Format("/Products(1)/Category");             RestResponse<Category> categoryResp = client.Execute<Category>(request);             Category category = categoryResp.Data;             // Specialized queries             request.Resource = string.Format("/Products?$filter=ProductID eq {0}", 1);             RestResponse<Product> productResp = client.Execute<Product>(request);             Product product = productResp.Data;                          request.Resource = string.Format("/Products?$filter=Name eq '{0}'", "XYZ Water");             productResp = client.Execute<Product>(request);             product = productResp.Data;         }         private static IEnumerable<TElement> RunQuery<TElement>(string queryUri)         {             try             {                 return _ctx.Execute<TElement>(new Uri(queryUri, UriKind.Relative));             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 throw ex;             }         }              } }   Feel free to step through the code a few times and to attach a debugger to the service as well to see how and where the context and metadata objects are constructed and returned.  Pay special attention to the response object being returned by the oData service - There are several properties of the RestRequest that can be used to help troubleshoot when the structure of the response is not exactly what would be expected.

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• Oracle Coherence & Oracle Service Bus: REST API Integration

  - by Nino Guarnacci

  This post aims to highlight one of the features found in Oracle Coherence which allows it to be easily added and integrated inside a wider variety of projects.  The features in question are the REST API exposed by the Coherence nodes, with which you can interact in the wider mode in memory data grid.Oracle Coherence and Oracle Service Bus are natively integrated through a feature found in the Oracle Service Bus, which allows you to use the coherence grid cache during the configuration phase of a business service. This feature allows you to use an intermediate layer of cache to retrieve the answers from previous invocations of the same service, without necessarily having to invoke the real business service again. Directly from the web console of Oracle Service Bus, you can decide the policies of eviction of the objects / answers and define the discriminating parameters that identify their uniqueness.The coherence REST APIs, however, allow you to integrate both products for other necessities enabling realization of new architectures design.  Consider coherence’s node as a simple service which interoperates through the stardard services and in particular REST (with JSON and XML). Thinking of coherence as a company’s shared service, able to have an implementation of a centralized “map and reduce” which you can access  by a huge variety of protocols (transport and envelopes).An amazing step forward for those who still imagine connectors and code. This type of integration does not require writing custom code or complex implementation to be self-supported. The added value is made unique by the incredible value of both products independently, and still more out of their simple and robust integration.As already mentioned this scenario discovers a hidden new door behind the columns of these two products. The door leads to new ideas and perspectives for enterprise architectures that increasingly wink to next-generation applications: simple and dynamic, perhaps towards the mobile and web 2.0.Below, a small and simple demo useful to demonstrate how easily is to integrate these two products using the Coherence REST API. This demo is also intended to imagine new enterprise architectures using this approach.The idea is to create a centralized system of alerting, fed easily from any company’s application, regardless of the technology with which they were built . Then use a representation standard protocol: RSS, using a service exposed by the service bus; So you can browse and search only the alerts that you are interested on, by category, author, title, date, etc etc.. The steps needed to implement this system are very simple and very few. Here they are listed below and described to be easily replicated within your environment. I would remind you that the demo is only meant to demonstrate how easily is to integrate Oracle Coherence and the Oracle Service Bus, and stimulate your imagination to new technological approaches.1) Install the two products: In this demo used (if necessary, consult the installation guides of 2 products)  - Oracle Service Bus ver. 11.1.1.5.0 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/service-bus/downloads/index.html - Oracle Coherence ver. 3.7.1 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/coherence/downloads/index.html 2) Because you choose to create a centralized alerting system, we need to define a structure type containing some alerting attributes useful to preserve and organize the information of the various alerts sent by the different applications. Here, then it was built a java class named Alert containing the canonical properties of an alarm information:- Title- Description- System- Time- Severity 3) Therefore, we need to create two configuration files for the coherence node, in order to save the Alert objects within the grid, through the rest/http protocol (more than the native API for Java, C + +, C,. Net). Here are the two minimal configuration files for Coherence:coherence-rest-config.xml resty-server-config.xml This minimum configuration allows me to use a distributed cache named "alerts" that can  also be accessed via http - rest on the host "localhost" over port "8080", objects are of type “oracle.cohsb.Alert”. 4) Below  a simple Java class that represents the type of alert messages: 5) At this point we just need to startup our coherence node, able to listen on http protocol to manage the “alerts” cache, which will receive incoming XML or JSON objects of type Alert. Remember to include in the classpath of the coherence node, the Alert java class and the following coherence libraries and configuration files:  At this point, just run the coherence class node “com.tangosol.net.DefaultCacheServer”advising you to set the following parameters:-Dtangosol.coherence.log.level=9 -Dtangosol.coherence.log=stdout -Dtangosol.coherence.cacheconfig=[PATH_TO_THE_FILE]\resty-server-config.xml 6) Let's create a procedure to test our configuration of Coherence and in order to insert some custom alerts in our cache. The technology with which you want to achieve this functionality is fully not considerable: Javascript, Python, Ruby, Scala, C + +, Java.... Because the protocol to communicate with Coherence is simply HTTP / JSON or XML. For this little demo i choose Java: A method to send/put the alert to the cache: A method to query and view the content of the cache: Finally the main method that execute our methods:  No special library added in the classpath for our class (json struct static defined), when it will be executed, it asks some information such as title, description,... in order to compose and send an alert to the cache and then it will perform an inquiry, to the same cache. At this point, a good exercise at this point, may be to create the same procedure using other technologies, such as a simple html page containing some JavaScript code, and then using Python, Ruby, and so on.7) Now we are ready to start configuring the Oracle Service Bus in order to integrate the two products. First integrate the internal alerting system of Oracle Service Bus with our centralized alerting system based on coherence node. This ensures that by monitoring, or directly from within our Proxy Message Flow, we can throw alerts and save them directly into the Coherence node. To do this I choose to use the jms technology, natively present inside the Oracle Weblogic / Service Bus. Access to the Oracle WebLogic Administration console and create and configure a new JMS connection factory and a new jms destination (queue). Now we should create a new resource of type “alert destination” within our Oracle Service Bus project. The new “alert destination” resource should be configured using the newly created connection factory jms and jms destination. Finally, in order to withdraw the message alert enqueued in our JMS destination and send it to our coherence node, we just need to create a new business service and proxy service within our Oracle Service Bus project.Our business service is responsible for sending a message to our REST service Coherence using as a method action: PUT Finally our proxy service have to collect all messages enqueued on the destination, execute an xquery transformation on those messages  in order to translate them into valid XML / alert objects useful to be sent to our coherence service, through the newly created business service. The message flow pipeline containing the xquery transformation: Incredibly,  we just did a basic first integration between the native alerting system of Oracle Service Bus and our centralized alerting system by simply configuring our coherence node without developing anything.It's time to test it out. To do this I create a proxy service able to generate an alert using our "alert destination", whenever the proxy is invoked. After some invocation to our proxy that generates fake alerts, we could open an Internet browser and type the URL  http://localhost: 8080/alerts/  so we could see what has been inserted within the coherence node. 8) We are ready for the final step.  We would create a new message flow, that can be used to search and display the results in standard mode. To do this I choosen the standard representation of RSS, to display a formatted result on a huge variety of devices such as readers for the iPhone and Android. The inquiry may be defined already at the time of the request able to return only feed / items related to our needs. To do this we need to create a new business service, a new proxy service, and finally a new XQuery Transformation to take care of translating the collection of alerts that will be return from our coherence node in a nicely formatted RSS standard document.So we start right from this resource (xquery), which has the task of transforming a collection of alerts / xml returned from the node coherence in a type well-formatted feed RSS 2.0 our new business service that will search the alerts on our coherence node using the Rest API. And finally, our last resource, the proxy service that will be exposed as an RSS / feeds to various mobile devices and traditional web readers, in which we will intercept any search query, and transform the result returned by the business service in an RSS feed 2.0. The message flow with the transformation phase (Alert TO Feed Items): Finally some little tricks to follow during the routing to the business service, - check for any queries present in the url to require a subset of alerts  - the http header "Accept" to help get an answer XML instead of JSON: In our little demo we also static added some coherence parameters to the request:sort=time:desc;start=0;count=100I would like to get from Coherence that the results will be sorted by date, and starting from 1 up to a maximum of 100.Done!!Just incredible, our centralized alerting system is ready. Inheriting all the qualities and capabilities of the two products involved Oracle Coherence & Oracle Service Bus: - RASP (Reliability, Availability, Scalability, Performance)Now try to use your mobile device, or a normal Internet browser by accessing the RSS just published: Some urls you may test: Search for the last 100 alerts : http://localhost:7001/alarmsSearch for alerts that do not have time set to null (time is not null):http://localhost:7001/alarms?q=time+is+not+nullSearch for alerts that the system property is “Web Browser” (system = ‘Web Browser’):http://localhost:7001/alarms?q=system+%3D+%27Web+Browser%27Search for alerts that the system property is “Web Browser” and the severity property is “Fatal” and the title property contain the word “Javascript”  (system = ‘Web Broser’ and severity = ‘Fatal’ and title like ‘%Javascript%’)http://localhost:8080/alerts?q=system+%3D+%27Web+Browser%27+AND+severity+%3D+%27Fatal%27+AND+title+LIKE+%27%25Javascript%25%27 To compose more complex queries about your need I would suggest you to read the chapter in the coherence documentation inherent the Cohl language (Coherence Query Language) http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E24290_01/coh.371/e22837/api_cq.htm . Some useful links: - Oracle Coherence REST API Documentation http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E24290_01/coh.371/e22839/rest_intro.htm - Oracle Service Bus Documentation http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/soa.htm#osb - REST explanation from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer At this URL could be downloaded the whole materials of this demo http://blogs.oracle.com/slc/resource/cosb/coh-sb-demo.zip Author: Nino Guarnacci.

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• PASS Summit Feedback

  - by Rob Farley

  PASS Feedback came in last week. I also saw my dentist for some fillings... At the PASS Summit this year, I delivered a couple of regular sessions and a Lightning Talk. People told me they enjoyed it, but when the rankings came out, they showed that I didn’t score particularly well. Brent Ozar was keen to discuss it with me. Brent: PASS speaker feedback is out. You did two sessions and a Lightning Talk. How did you go? Rob: Not so well actually, thanks for asking. Brent: Ha! Sorry. Of course you know that's why I wanted to discuss this with you. I was in one of your sessions at SQLBits in the UK a month before PASS, and I thought you rocked. You've got a really good and distinctive delivery style.  Then I noticed your talks were ranked in the bottom quarter of the Summit ratings and wanted to discuss it. Rob: Yeah, I know. You did ask me if we could do this...  I should explain – my presentation style is not the stereotypical IT conference one. I throw in jokes, and try to engage the audience thoroughly. I find many talks amazingly dry, and I guess I try to buck that trend. I also run training courses, and find that I get a lot of feedback from people thanking me for keeping things interesting. That said, I also get feedback criticising me for my style, and that’s basically what’s happened here. For the rest of this discussion, let’s focus on my talk about the Incredible Shrinking Execution Plan, which I considered to be my main talk. Brent: I thought that session title was the very best one at the entire Summit, and I had it on my recommended sessions list.  In four words, you managed to sum up the topic and your sense of humor.  I read that and immediately thought, "People need to be in this session," and then it didn't score well.  Tell me about your scores. Rob: The questions on the feedback form covered the usefulness of the information, the speaker’s presentation skills, their knowledge of the subject, how well the session was described, the amount of time allocated, and the quality of the presentation materials. Brent: Presentation materials? But you don’t do slides.  Did they rate your thong? Rob: No-one saw my flip-flops in this talk, Brent. I created a script in Management Studio, and published that afterwards, but I think people will have scored that question based on the lack of slides. I wasn’t expecting to do particularly well on that one. That was the only section that didn’t have 5/5 as the most popular score. Brent: See, that sucks, because cookbook-style scripts are often some of my favorites.  Adam Machanic's Service Broker workbench series helped me immensely when I was prepping for the MCM.  As an attendee, I'd rather have a commented script than a slide deck.  So how did you rank so low? Rob: When I look at the scores that you got (based on your blog post), you got very few scores below 3 – people that felt strong enough about your talk to post a negative score. In my scores, between 5% and 10% were below 3 (except on the question about whether I knew my stuff – I guess I came as knowledgeable). Brent: Wow – so quite a few people really didn’t like your talk then? Rob: Yeah. Mind you, based on the comments, some people really loved it. I’d like to think that there would be a certain portion of the room who may have rated the talk as one of the best of the conference. Some of my comments included “amazing!”, “Best presentation so far!”, “Wow, best session yet”, “fantastic” and “Outstanding!”. I think lots of talks can be “Great”, but not so many talks can be “Outstanding” without the word losing its meaning. One wrote “Pretty amazing presentation, considering it was completely extemporaneous.” Brent: Extemporaneous, eh? Rob: Yeah. I guess they don’t realise how much preparation goes into coming across as unprepared. In many ways it’s much easier to give a written speech than to deliver a presentation without slides as a prompt. Brent: That delivery style, the really relaxed, casual, college-professor approach was one of the things I really liked about your presentation at SQLbits.  As somebody who presents a lot, I "get" it - I know how hard it is to come off as relaxed and comfortable with your own material.  It's like improv done by jazz players and comedians - if you've never tried it, you don't realize how hard it is.  People also don't realize how hard it is to make a tough subject fun. Rob: Yeah well... There will be people writing comments on this post that say I wasn't trying to make the subject fun, and that I was making it all about me. Sometimes the style works, sometimes it doesn't. Most of the comments mentioned the fact that I tell jokes, some in a nice way, but some not so much (and it wasn't just a PASS thing - that's the mix of feedback I generally get). One comment at PASS was: “great stand up comedian - not what I'm looking for at pass”, and there were certainly a few that said “too many jokes”. I’m not trying to do stand-up – jokes are my way of engaging with the audience while I demonstrate some of the amazing things that the Query Optimizer can do if you write your queries the right way. Some people didn’t think it was technical enough, but I’ve also had some people tell me that the concepts I’m explaining are deep and profound. Brent: To me, that's a hallmark of a great explanation - when someone says, "But of course it has to work that way - how could it work any other way?  It seems so simple and logical."  Well, sure it does when it's explained correctly, but now pick up any number of thick SQL Server books and try to understand the Redundant Joins concept.  I guarantee it'll take more than 45 minutes. Rob: Some people in my audiences realise that, but definitely not everyone. There's only so much you can tell someone that something is profound. Generally it's something that they either have an epiphany on or not. I like to lull my audience into knowing what's going on, and do something that surprises them. Gain their trust, build a rapport, and then show them the deeper truth of what just happened. Brent: So you've learned your lesson about presentation scores, right?  From here on out, you're going to be dry, humorless, and all your presentations will consist of you reading bullet points off the screen. Rob: No Brent, I’m not. I'm also not going to suggest that most presentations at PASS are like that. No-one tries to present like that. There's a big space to occupy between what "dry and humourless" and me. My difference is to focus on the relationship I have with the crowd, rather than focussing on delivering the perfect session. I want to see people smiling and know they're relaxed. I think most presenters focus on the material, which is completely reasonable and safe. I remember once hearing someone talking about product creation. They talked about mediocrity. They said that one of the worst things that people can ever say about your product is that it’s “good”. What you want is for 10% of the world to love it enough to want to buy it. If 10% the world gave me a dollar, I’d have more money than I could ever use (assuming it wasn’t the SAME dollar they were giving me I guess). Brent: It's the Raving Fans theory.  It's better to have a small number of raving customers than a large number of almost-but-not-really customers who don't care that much about your product or service.  I know exactly how you feel - when I got survey feedback from my Quest video presentation when I was dressed up in a Richard Simmons costume, some of the attendees said I was unprofessional and distracting.  Some of the attendees couldn't get enough and Photoshopped all kinds of stuff into the screen captures.  On a whole, I probably didn't score that well, and I'm fine with that.  It sucks to look at the scores though - do those lower scores bother you? Rob: Of course they do. It hurts deeply. I open myself up and give presentations in a very personal way. All presenters do that, and we all feel the pain of negative feedback. I hate coming 146th & 162nd out of 185, but have to acknowledge that many sessions did worse still. Plus, once I feel the wounds have healed, I’ll be able to remember that there are people in the world that rave about my presentation style, and figure that people will hopefully talk about me. One day maybe those people that don’t like my presentation style will stay away and I might be able to score better. You don’t pay to hear country music if you prefer western... Lots of people find chili too spicy, but it’s still a popular food. Brent: But don’t you want to appeal to everyone? Rob: I do, but I don’t want to be lukewarm as in Revelation 3:16. I’d rather disgust and be discussed. Well, maybe not ‘disgust’, but I don’t want to conform. Conformity just isn’t the same any more. I’m not sure I’ve ever been one to do that. I try not to offend, but definitely like to be different. Brent: Count me among your raving fans, sir.  Where can we see you next? Rob: Considering I live in Adelaide in Australia, I’m not about to appear at anyone’s local SQL Saturday. I’m still trying to plan which events I’ll get to in 2011. I’ve submitted abstracts for TechEd North America, but won’t hold my breath. I’m also considering the SQLBits conferences in the UK in April, PASS in October, and I’m sure I’ll do some LiveMeeting presentations for user groups. Online, people download some of my recent SQLBits presentations at http://bit.ly/RFSarg and http://bit.ly/Simplification though. And they can download a 5-minute MP3 of my Lightning Talk at http://www.lobsterpot.com.au/files/Collation.mp3, in which I try to explain the idea behind collation, using thongs as an example. Brent: I was in the audience for http://bit.ly/RFSarg. That was a great presentation. Rob: Thanks, Brent. Now where’s my dollar?

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• Announcing ASP.NET MVC 3 (Release Candidate 2)

  - by ScottGu

  Earlier today the ASP.NET team shipped the final release candidate (RC2) for ASP.NET MVC 3.  You can download and install it here. Almost there… Today’s RC2 release is the near-final release of ASP.NET MVC 3, and is a true “release candidate” in that we are hoping to not make any more code changes with it.  We are publishing it today so that people can do final testing with it, let us know if they find any last minute “showstoppers”, and start updating their apps to use it.  We will officially ship the final ASP.NET MVC 3 “RTM” build in January. Works with both VS 2010 and VS 2010 SP1 Beta Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 release works with both the shipping version of Visual Studio 2010 / Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, as well as the newly released VS 2010 SP1 Beta.  This means that you do not need to install VS 2010 SP1 (or the SP1 beta) in order to use ASP.NET MVC 3.  It works just fine with the shipping Visual Studio 2010.  I’ll do a blog post next week, though, about some of the nice additional feature goodies that come with VS 2010 SP1 (including IIS Express and SQL CE support within VS) which make the dev experience for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC even better. Bugs and Perf Fixes Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 build contains many bug fixes and performance optimizations.  Our latest performance tests indicate that ASP.NET MVC 3 is now faster than ASP.NET MVC 2, and that existing ASP.NET MVC applications will experience a slight performance increase when updated to run using ASP.NET MVC 3. Final Tweaks and Fit-N-Finish In addition to bug fixes and performance optimizations, today’s RC2 build contains a number of last-minute feature tweaks and “fit-n-finish” changes for the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features.  The feedback and suggestions we’ve received during the public previews has been invaluable in guiding these final tweaks, and we really appreciate people’s support in sending this feedback our way.  Below is a short-list of some of the feature changes/tweaks made between last month’s ASP.NET MVC 3 RC release and today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 release: jQuery updates and addition of jQuery UI The default ASP.NET MVC 3 project templates have been updated to include jQuery 1.4.4 and jQuery Validation 1.7.  We are also excited to announce today that we are including jQuery UI within our default ASP.NET project templates going forward.  jQuery UI provides a powerful set of additional UI widgets and capabilities.  It will be added by default to your project’s \scripts folder when you create new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects. Improved View Scaffolding The T4 templates used for scaffolding views with the Add-View dialog now generates views that use Html.EditorFor instead of helpers such as Html.TextBoxFor. This change enables you to optionally annotate models with metadata (using data annotation attributes) to better customize the output of your UI at runtime. The Add View scaffolding also supports improved detection and usage of primary key information on models (including support for naming conventions like ID, ProductID, etc).  For example: the Add View dialog box uses this information to ensure that the primary key value is not scaffold as an editable form field, and that links between views are auto-generated correctly with primary key information. The default Edit and Create templates also now include references to the jQuery scripts needed for client validation.  Scaffold form views now support client-side validation by default (no extra steps required).  Client-side validation with ASP.NET MVC 3 is also done using an unobtrusive javascript approach – making pages fast and clean. [ControllerSessionState] –> [SessionState] ASP.NET MVC 3 adds support for session-less controllers.  With the initial RC you used a [ControllerSessionState] attribute to specify this.  We shortened this in RC2 to just be [SessionState]: Note that in addition to turning off session state, you can also set it to be read-only (which is useful for webfarm scenarios where you are reading but not updating session state on a particular request). [SkipRequestValidation] –> [AllowHtml] ASP.NET MVC includes built-in support to protect against HTML and Cross-Site Script Injection Attacks, and will throw an error by default if someone tries to post HTML content as input.  Developers need to explicitly indicate that this is allowed (and that they’ve hopefully built their app to securely support it) in order to enable it. With ASP.NET MVC 3, we are also now supporting a new attribute that you can apply to properties of models/viewmodels to indicate that HTML input is enabled, which enables much more granular protection in a DRY way.  In last month’s RC release this attribute was named [SkipRequestValidation].  With RC2 we renamed it to [AllowHtml] to make it more intuitive: Setting the above [AllowHtml] attribute on a model/viewmodel will cause ASP.NET MVC 3 to turn off HTML injection protection when model binding just that property. Html.Raw() helper method The new Razor view engine introduced with ASP.NET MVC 3 automatically HTML encodes output by default.  This helps provide an additional level of protection against HTML and Script injection attacks. With RC2 we are adding a Html.Raw() helper method that you can use to explicitly indicate that you do not want to HTML encode your output, and instead want to render the content “as-is”: ViewModel/View –> ViewBag ASP.NET MVC has (since V1) supported a ViewData[] dictionary within Controllers and Views that enables developers to pass information from a Controller to a View in a late-bound way.  This approach can be used instead of, or in combination with, a strongly-typed model class.  The below code demonstrates a common use case – where a strongly typed Product model is passed to the view in addition to two late-bound variables via the ViewData[] dictionary: With ASP.NET MVC 3 we are introducing a new API that takes advantage of the dynamic type support within .NET 4 to set/retrieve these values.  It allows you to use standard “dot” notation to specify any number of additional variables to be passed, and does not require that you create a strongly-typed class to do so.  With earlier previews of ASP.NET MVC 3 we exposed this API using a dynamic property called “ViewModel” on the Controller base class, and with a dynamic property called “View” within view templates.  A lot of people found the fact that there were two different names confusing, and several also said that using the name ViewModel was confusing in this context – since often you create strongly-typed ViewModel classes in ASP.NET MVC, and they do not use this API.  With RC2 we are exposing a dynamic property that has the same name – ViewBag – within both Controllers and Views.  It is a dynamic collection that allows you to pass additional bits of data from your controller to your view template to help generate a response.  Below is an example of how we could use it to pass a time-stamp message as well as a list of all categories to our view template: Below is an example of how our view template (which is strongly-typed to expect a Product class as its model) can use the two extra bits of information we passed in our ViewBag to generate the response.  In particular, notice how we are using the list of categories passed in the dynamic ViewBag collection to generate a dropdownlist of friendly category names to help set the CategoryID property of our Product object.  The above Controller/View combination will then generate an HTML response like below.    Output Caching Improvements ASP.NET MVC 3’s output caching system no longer requires you to specify a VaryByParam property when declaring an [OutputCache] attribute on a Controller action method.  MVC3 now automatically varies the output cached entries when you have explicit parameters on your action method – allowing you to cleanly enable output caching on actions using code like below: In addition to supporting full page output caching, ASP.NET MVC 3 also supports partial-page caching – which allows you to cache a region of output and re-use it across multiple requests or controllers.  The [OutputCache] behavior for partial-page caching was updated with RC2 so that sub-content cached entries are varied based on input parameters as opposed to the URL structure of the top-level request – which makes caching scenarios both easier and more powerful than the behavior in the previous RC. @model declaration does not add whitespace In earlier previews, the strongly-typed @model declaration at the top of a Razor view added a blank line to the rendered HTML output. This has been fixed so that the declaration does not introduce whitespace. Changed "Html.ValidationMessage" Method to Display the First Useful Error Message The behavior of the Html.ValidationMessage() helper was updated to show the first useful error message instead of simply displaying the first error. During model binding, the ModelState dictionary can be populated from multiple sources with error messages about the property, including from the model itself (if it implements IValidatableObject), from validation attributes applied to the property, and from exceptions thrown while the property is being accessed. When the Html.ValidationMessage() method displays a validation message, it now skips model-state entries that include an exception, because these are generally not intended for the end user. Instead, the method looks for the first validation message that is not associated with an exception and displays that message. If no such message is found, it defaults to a generic error message that is associated with the first exception. RemoteAttribute “Fields” -> “AdditionalFields” ASP.NET MVC 3 includes built-in remote validation support with its validation infrastructure.  This means that the client-side validation script library used by ASP.NET MVC 3 can automatically call back to controllers you expose on the server to determine whether an input element is indeed valid as the user is editing the form (allowing you to provide real-time validation updates). You can accomplish this by decorating a model/viewmodel property with a [Remote] attribute that specifies the controller/action that should be invoked to remotely validate it.  With the RC this attribute had a “Fields” property that could be used to specify additional input elements that should be sent from the client to the server to help with the validation logic.  To improve the clarity of what this property does we have renamed it to “AdditionalFields” with today’s RC2 release. ViewResult.Model and ViewResult.ViewBag Properties The ViewResult class now exposes both a “Model” and “ViewBag” property off of it.  This makes it easier to unit test Controllers that return views, and avoids you having to access the Model via the ViewResult.ViewData.Model property. Installation Notes You can download and install the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 build here.  It can be installed on top of the previous ASP.NET MVC 3 RC release (it should just replace the bits as part of its setup). The one component that will not be updated by the above setup (if you already have it installed) is the NuGet Package Manager.  If you already have NuGet installed, please go to the Visual Studio Extensions Manager (via the Tools –> Extensions menu option) and click on the “Updates” tab.  You should see NuGet listed there – please click the “Update” button next to it to have VS update the extension to today’s release. If you do not have NuGet installed (and did not install the ASP.NET MVC RC build), then NuGet will be installed as part of your ASP.NET MVC 3 setup, and you do not need to take any additional steps to make it work. Summary We are really close to the final ASP.NET MVC 3 release, and will deliver the final “RTM” build of it next month.  It has been only a little over 7 months since ASP.NET MVC 2 shipped, and I’m pretty amazed by the huge number of new features, improvements, and refinements that the team has been able to add with this release (Razor, Unobtrusive JavaScript, NuGet, Dependency Injection, Output Caching, and a lot, lot more).  I’ll be doing a number of blog posts over the next few weeks talking about many of them in more depth. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths

  - by Renso

  Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths ASP.Net includes quite a plethora of properties to retrieve path information about the current request, control and application. There's a ton of information available about paths on the Request object, some of it appearing to overlap and some of it buried several levels down, and it can be confusing to find just the right path that you are looking for. To keep things straight I thought it a good idea to summarize the path options along with descriptions and example paths. I wrote a post about this a long time ago in 2004 and I find myself frequently going back to that page to quickly figure out which path I’m looking for in processing the current URL. Apparently a lot of people must be doing the same, because the original post is the second most visited even to this date on this blog to the tune of nearly 500 hits per day. So, I decided to update and expand a bit on the original post with a little more information and clarification based on the original comments. Request Object Paths Available Here's a list of the Path related properties on the Request object (and the Page object). Assume a path like http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx for the paths below where webstore is the name of the virtual. Request Property Description and Value ApplicationPath Returns the web root-relative logical path to the virtual root of this app. /webstore/ PhysicalApplicationPath Returns local file system path of the virtual root for this app. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore PhysicalPath Returns the local file system path to the current script or path. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore\admin\paths.aspx Path FilePath CurrentExecutionFilePath All of these return the full root relative logical path to the script page including path and scriptname. CurrentExcecutionFilePath will return the ‘current’ request path after a Transfer/Execute call while FilePath will always return the original request’s path. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath Returns an ASP.NET root relative virtual path to the script or path for the current request. If in  a Transfer/Execute call the transferred Path is returned. ~/admin/paths.aspx PathInfo Returns any extra path following the script name. If no extra path is provided returns the root-relative path (returns text in red below). string.Empty if no PathInfo is available. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx/ExtraPathInfo RawUrl Returns the full root relative URL including querystring and extra path as a string. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 Url Returns a fully qualified URL including querystring and extra path. Note this is a Uri instance rather than string. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 UrlReferrer The fully qualified URL of the page that sent the request. This is also a Uri instance and this value is null if the page was directly accessed by typing into the address bar or using an HttpClient based Referrer client Http header. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/default.aspx?Info Control.TemplateSourceDirectory Returns the logical path to the folder of the page, master or user control on which it is called. This is useful if you need to know the path only to a Page or control from within the control. For non-file controls this returns the Page path. /webstore/admin/ As you can see there’s a ton of information available there for each of the three common path formats: Physical Path is an OS type path that points to a path or file on disk. Logical Path is a Web path that is relative to the Web server’s root. It includes the virtual plus the application relative path. ~/ (Root-relative) Path is an ASP.NET specific path that includes ~/ to indicate the virtual root Web path. ASP.NET can convert virtual paths into either logical paths using Control.ResolveUrl(), or physical paths using Server.MapPath(). Root relative paths are useful for specifying portable URLs that don’t rely on relative directory structures and very useful from within control or component code. You should be able to get any necessary format from ASP.NET from just about any path or script using these mechanisms. ~/ Root Relative Paths and ResolveUrl() and ResolveClientUrl() ASP.NET supports root-relative virtual path syntax in most of its URL properties in Web Forms. So you can easily specify a root relative path in a control rather than a location relative path: <asp:Image runat="server" ID="imgHelp" ImageUrl="~/images/help.gif" /> ASP.NET internally resolves this URL by using ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif") to arrive at the root-relative URL of /webstore/images/help.gif which uses the Request.ApplicationPath as the basepath to replace the ~. By convention any custom Web controls also should use ResolveUrl() on URL properties to provide the same functionality. In your own code you can use Page.ResolveUrl() or Control.ResolveUrl() to accomplish the same thing: string imgPath = this.ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif"); imgHelp.ImageUrl = imgPath; Unfortunately ResolveUrl() is limited to WebForm pages, so if you’re in an HttpHandler or Module it’s not available. ASP.NET Mvc also has it’s own more generic version of ResolveUrl in Url.Decode: <script src="<%= Url.Content("~/scripts/new.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script> which is part of the UrlHelper class. In ASP.NET MVC the above sort of syntax is actually even more crucial than in WebForms due to the fact that views are not referencing specific pages but rather are often path based which can lead to various variations on how a particular view is referenced. In a Module or Handler code Control.ResolveUrl() unfortunately is not available which in retrospect seems like an odd design choice – URL resolution really should happen on a Request basis not as part of the Page framework. Luckily you can also rely on the static VirtualPathUtility class: string path = VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/admin/paths.aspx"); VirtualPathUtility also many other quite useful methods for dealing with paths and converting between the various kinds of paths supported. One thing to watch out for is that ToAbsolute() will throw an exception if a query string is provided and doesn’t work on fully qualified URLs. I wrote about this topic with a custom solution that works fully qualified URLs and query strings here (check comments for some interesting discussions too). Similar to ResolveUrl() is ResolveClientUrl() which creates a fully qualified HTTP path that includes the protocol and domain name. It’s rare that this full resolution is needed but can be useful in some scenarios. Mapping Virtual Paths to Physical Paths with Server.MapPath() If you need to map root relative or current folder relative URLs to physical URLs or you can use HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(). Inside of a Page you can do the following: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("~/scripts/ww.jquery.js")); MapPath is pretty flexible and it understands both ASP.NET style virtual paths as well as plain relative paths, so the following also works. string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("scripts/silverlight.js"); as well as dot relative syntax: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("../scripts/jquery.js"); Once you have the physical path you can perform standard System.IO Path and File operations on the file. Remember with physical paths and IO or copy operations you need to make sure you have permissions to access files and folders based on the Web server user account that is active (NETWORK SERVICE, ASPNET typically). Note the Server.MapPath will not map up beyond the virtual root of the application for security reasons. Server and Host Information Between these settings you can get all the information you may need to figure out where you are at and to build new Url if necessary. If you need to build a URL completely from scratch you can get access to information about the server you are accessing: Server Variable Function and Example SERVER_NAME The of the domain or IP Address wwww.west-wind.com or 127.0.0.1 SERVER_PORT The port that the request runs under. 80 SERVER_PORT_SECURE Determines whether https: was used. 0 or 1 APPL_MD_PATH ADSI DirectoryServices path to the virtual root directory. Note that LM typically doesn’t work for ADSI access so you should replace that with LOCALHOST or the machine’s NetBios name. /LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT/webstore Request.Url and Uri Parsing If you still need more control over the current request URL or  you need to create new URLs from an existing one, the current Request.Url Uri property offers a lot of control. Using the Uri class and UriBuilder makes it easy to retrieve parts of a URL and create new URLs based on existing URL. The UriBuilder class is the preferred way to create URLs – much preferable over creating URIs via string concatenation. Uri Property Function Scheme The URL scheme or protocol prefix. http or https Port The port if specifically specified. DnsSafeHost The domain name or local host NetBios machine name www.west-wind.com or rasnote LocalPath The full path of the URL including script name and extra PathInfo. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx Query The query string if any ?id=1 The Uri class itself is great for retrieving Uri parts, but most of the properties are read only if you need to modify a URL in order to change it you can use the UriBuilder class to load up an existing URL and modify it to create a new one. Here are a few common operations I’ve needed to do to get specific URLs: Convert the Request URL to an SSL/HTTPS link For example to take the current request URL and converted  it to a secure URL can be done like this: UriBuilder build = new UriBuilder(Request.Url); build.Scheme = "https"; build.Port = -1; // don't inject portUri newUri = build.Uri; string newUrl = build.ToString(); Retrieve the fully qualified URL without a QueryString AFAIK, there’s no native routine to retrieve the current request URL without the query string. It’s easy to do with UriBuilder however: UriBuilder builder = newUriBuilder(Request.Url); builder.Query = ""; stringlogicalPathWithoutQuery = builder.ToString();

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 22, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 22, 2010New ProjectsDocument Toolkit Extensions: Document Toolkit Extensions provide a variety of samples, document converters and helpers for Document Toolkit, a fast, feature-rich and 100% clien...dream: dreamEnhanced Web Controls: The Enhanced Web Control Library Contains web controls that enhance the functionality of the microsoft input controls. New functionality includes l...Europe Engulfed: Europe Engulfed is a PC version of the classic GMT board war game of the same name simulating World War II in the European theater. It is develope...eXpress Persistent Objects (XPO) Toolkit: eXpress Persistent Objects (XPO) Toolkit provides extensions to the DevExpress Object-Relational Mapping Suite.FBGraph.NET: Write apps for Facebook's Graph API using .NET. Includes support for C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC.HugeFlow.OOB: Silverlight OOB Library It supports useful custom controls. WindowChrome, InstallScreen. LivePad: LivePad, It can be used to record your life journey. LivePad，可以用来记录您的人生历程。Management listings: The project is management adsMerthin: Merthin is an F# based Framework which boundaries are not defined yet. For now a bit of linear algebra.Mobile Exchange: Mobile Exchange is a .NET Compact Framework library and sample application for accessing the Stack Exchange API available on sites like Stack Overf...PC/SC Micro: PC/SC Micro is an API and a library. The API is a subset of the PC/SC Lite API and allows a .NET Micro Framework application to communicate with ...SerialPortLogger: SerialPortLogger is a simple monitoring application which montors the serial port and outputs to a database.SharePoint NNTP List Sync: Syncronizes NNTP groups with SharePoint lists and offers post/reply capability. Sets item date as post date and attempts to lookup user in local d...Simple Help System: Simple Help System (SHS) je jednoduchý nápovědný systém jak pro vývojáře tak pro obyčejné lidi. Vyvýjeno v C#.SoulHackers Demon Unite(Chinese version): SoulHackers Demon Unite calculate program, for Chinese version on PlayStationTPager: Mercurial pager with color support on WindowsWork Item Query Administration: Work Item Query Administration (wiqadmin) is command-line utility to manage work item queries in Team Foundation Server. For any TeamProject you ca...XPlatformCPP: A cross platform C++ rendering API, that uses either OpenGL 2.1 or Direct3D 9.0c as a backend. Works with Win32API (Windows), Xlib (Linux,etc...), ...Xshell: Xshell is a replacement for the Windows Explorer shell designed for Media Center/Home Theater PCs.عبر السـدم: عبر السدم هي لعبة ثلاثية الأبعاد من إنجاز أعضاء الشبكة العربية لمطوري الألعاب بالاعتماد على تقنية XNA. http://www.agdn-online.com http://www.ag...New ReleasesAzure Publish-Subscribe: Azure Pub-Sub Developer Manual v0.1: Very early alpha of the documentation. It's an early look at the architecture only.Chaow Framework: Chaow Framework V1.00: Project Description Chaow Framework is the set of class libraries designed for enhancing standard .NET framework. It allows you to write more simpl...Document Toolkit Extensions: Document Toolkit Extensions Beta 1: The first public beta release of Document Toolkit and Document Toolkit Extensions.DotNetNuke Russian Language packs: Core Russian Language Pack for DNN 05.04.02: Core Russian Language Pack for DNN 05.04.02 Добавлены несколько ресурсов из новой редакции... Исправлены ошибки и описки.DynamicJson: Release 1.2.0.0: Fix - Deserialize(cast) can't convert to dynamic[] Fix - Deserialize(cast) throw exception if has getonly propertyEnhanced Web Controls: Enhanced Web Controls: This download includes the Enhanced Web Control Library DLL. Also inlcuded is the most recently tested version of the Ajax Control Toolkit, you may...Europe Engulfed: Europe Engulfed: This is the first release for the Codeplex-based project. It includes all source code changes up to and including Change Set 50762. To use: copy ...Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.017: added a quiz for spiderweb recipeFree Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.1.0 Released: Hi, This release contains the following enhancements: Mouse events for TrendLine have been implemented. You can go through Visifire documentation...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.5.3 Released: Hi, This release contains the following enhancements: Mouse events for TrendLine have been implemented. You can go through Visifire documentation...GreedyRSS: GreedyRSS 2.1: SuchSofts GreedyRSS平台整体更新至2.1版，重写了大量代码，可见还不够成熟稳定。此外还有以下几点主要更新： 增加一个辅助类Settings，参见http://semify.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!7CB96C25969B3811!2345.entry...HugeFlow.OOB: HugeFlow.OOB 0.9 Beta for SL4: First release!NLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.05.21.001: Changes since the last build:2010-05-20 23:20:17 Jarek Kowalski added tests for CsvLayout, refactored TargetWithLayoutHeaderAndFooter 2010-05-20 2...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SPG 2010 Drop11: SharePoint Guidance Drop Notes Microsoft patterns and practices What's in this Drop: Docs/CHM ** *DropLocation\CHM\SharePointGuidance.chm ...Persian Date/Time support for MsSQL: Build 59 (STABLE): Removed CreateDateTimeWmS() ! Use public static PersianDateTime CreateDateTime(int year, int month, int day, int hour, int min, int sec) instead. ...PiPiBugNet: 增加了创建新Bug界面: 增加了创建新Bug界面，尚未编写代码Rule 18 - Love your clipboard: Rule 18 (Beta version): This is the beta of the next release for Rule 18. Use if you feel comfortable with software that has minimal real world testing applied. Current...Scrum Sprint Monitor: v1.0.0.48591: What is new in this release? #6132 - Bug with open work hours; Added support for MSF for Agile process template; Improved data reporting in the...sGSHOPedit: sGSHOPedit v1.0 (Alpha): -SharePoint NNTP List Sync: 1.0 Release: You may need to change the posting server within the layouts, it is hard coded A webpart wsp is not provided because you should customize the sou...Silverlight Report Library: Version 2.0: - Upgraded to Silverlight 4.0 RTW - ReportHeader control added which is templateable - PagePrinting and PagePrinted events added - PageBreak ad...Snoop, the WPF Spy Utility: Snoop 2.5.1: This is a minor bug fix release for Snoop. In particular, I have fixed the installers so that they create separately named shortcuts ... for each ...SoulHackers Demon Unite(Chinese version): WCFTestClient: This program is using WCF and .NET 4.0. This version is include unite 2 and unite 3 and check what can unite. Element unite is not included yet.SqlServerExtensions: V 0.1 beta: Version 0.1 BetaStackOverflow.Net: StackOverflow.Net for Silverlight public beta: The beta version of StackOverflow.Net for silverlight 4StackOverflow.Net: StackOverflow.Net for Windows Phone 7 public beta: The Windows Phone 7 version of StackOverflow.netStackOverflow.Net: StackOverflow.Net public beta: A public beta to go along with with the public beta of the Stack Exchange APIStyleCop+: StyleCop+ 0.8: Added new extended rule for SA1502. SP1502 has an option which allows constructors to be placed on a single line.SynthExport: SynthExport 1.1.0: Added support for extraction of camera parameters The number of images in coordinate systems is now shown Added status label Improved user ex...TPager: TPager-20100521: First releaseVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30521.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWcfDoc: 1.0.5: Targeting .NET 4.0.Work Item Query Administration: 1.0: This is the first release an contains the following commands: list import export rename deleteMost Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise Librarypatterns & practices: Windows Azure Security GuidanceCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightSQL Server PowerShell ExtensionsGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationBlogEngine.NETCodeReviewNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModulePHPExcel

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• T-SQL Tuesday #53-Matt's Making Me Do This!

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  Hello everyone! It's that time again, time for T-SQL Tuesday, the wonderful blog series started by Adam Machanic (b|t). This month we are hosted by Matt Velic (b|t) who asks the question, "Why So Serious?", in celebration of April Fool's Day. He asks the contributors for their dirty tricks. And for some reason that escapes me, he and Jeff Verheul (b|t) seem to think I might be able to write about those. Shocked, I am! Nah, not really. They're absolutely right, this one is gonna be fun! I took some inspiration from Matt's suggestions, namely Resource Governor and Login Triggers.  I've done some interesting login trigger stuff for a presentation, but nothing yet with Resource Governor. Best way to learn it! One of my oldest pet peeves is abuse of the sa login. Don't get me wrong, I use it too, but typically only as SQL Agent job owner. It's been a while since I've been stuck with it, but back when I started using SQL Server, EVERY application needed sa to function. It was hard-coded and couldn't be changed. (welllllll, that is if you didn't use a hex editor on the EXE file, but who would do such a thing?) My standard warning applies: don't run anything on this page in production. In fact, back up whatever server you're testing this on, including the master database. Snapshotting a VM is a good idea. Also make sure you have other sysadmin level logins on that server. So here's a standard template for a logon trigger to address those pesky sa users: CREATE TRIGGER SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY ON ALL SERVER WITH ENCRYPTION, EXECUTE AS N'sa' AFTER LOGON AS IF ORIGINAL_LOGIN()<>N'sa' OR APP_NAME() LIKE N'SQL Agent%' RETURN; -- interesting stuff goes here GO   What can you do for "interesting stuff"? Books Online limits itself to merely rolling back the logon, which will throw an error (and alert the person that the logon trigger fired).  That's a good use for logon triggers, but really not tricky enough for this blog.  Some of my suggestions are below: WAITFOR DELAY '23:59:59';   Or: EXEC sp_MSforeach_db 'EXEC sp_detach_db ''?'';'   Or: EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_job @job_name=N'`', @enabled=1, @start_step_id=1, @notify_level_eventlog=0, @delete_level=3; EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_jobserver @job_name=N'`', @server_name=@@SERVERNAME; EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_jobstep @job_name=N'`', @step_id=1, @step_name=N'`', @command=N'SHUTDOWN;'; EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_start_job @job_name=N'`';   Really, I don't want to spoil your own exploration, try it yourself!  The thing I really like about these is it lets me promote the idea that "sa is SLOW, sa is BUGGY, don't use sa!".  Before we get into Resource Governor, make sure to drop or disable that logon trigger. They don't work well in combination. (Had to redo all the following code when SSMS locked up) Resource Governor is a feature that lets you control how many resources a single session can consume. The main goal is to limit the damage from a runaway query. But we're not here to read about its main goal or normal usage! I'm trying to make people stop using sa BECAUSE IT'S SLOW! Here's how RG can do that: USE master; GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY() RETURNS sysname WITH SCHEMABINDING, ENCRYPTION AS BEGIN RETURN CASE WHEN ORIGINAL_LOGIN()=N'sa' AND APP_NAME() NOT LIKE N'SQL Agent%' THEN N'SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY' ELSE N'default' END END GO CREATE RESOURCE POOL SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY WITH ( MIN_CPU_PERCENT = 0 ,MAX_CPU_PERCENT = 1 ,CAP_CPU_PERCENT = 1 ,AFFINITY SCHEDULER = (0) ,MIN_MEMORY_PERCENT = 0 ,MAX_MEMORY_PERCENT = 1 -- ,MIN_IOPS_PER_VOLUME = 1 ,MAX_IOPS_PER_VOLUME = 1 -- uncomment for SQL Server 2014 ); CREATE WORKLOAD GROUP SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY WITH ( IMPORTANCE = LOW ,REQUEST_MAX_MEMORY_GRANT_PERCENT = 1 ,REQUEST_MAX_CPU_TIME_SEC = 1 ,REQUEST_MEMORY_GRANT_TIMEOUT_SEC = 1 ,MAX_DOP = 1 ,GROUP_MAX_REQUESTS = 1 ) USING SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY; ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR WITH (CLASSIFIER_FUNCTION=dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY); ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR RECONFIGURE;   From top to bottom: Create a classifier function to determine which pool the session should go to. More info on classifier functions. Create the pool and provide a generous helping of resources for the sa login. Create the workload group and further prioritize those resources for the sa login. Apply the classifier function and reconfigure RG to use it. I have to say this one is a bit sneakier than the logon trigger, least of all you don't get any error messages.  I heartily recommend testing it in Management Studio, and click around the UI a lot, there's some fun behavior there. And DEFINITELY try it on SQL 2014 with the IO settings included!  You'll notice I made allowances for SQL Agent jobs owned by sa, they'll go into the default workload group.  You can add your own overrides to the classifier function if needed. Some interesting ideas I didn't have time for but expect you to get to before me: Set up different pools/workgroups with different settings and randomize which one the classifier chooses Do the same but base it on time of day (Books Online example covers this)... Or, which workstation it connects from. This can be modified for certain special people in your office who either don't listen, or are attracted (and attractive) to you. And if things go wrong you can always use the following from another sysadmin or Dedicated Admin connection: ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR DISABLE;   That will let you go in and either fix (or drop) the pools, workgroups and classifier function. So now that you know these types of things are possible, and if you are tired of your team using sa when they shouldn't, I expect you'll enjoy playing with these quite a bit! Unfortunately, the aforementioned Dedicated Admin Connection kinda poops on the party here.  Books Online for both topics will tell you that the DAC will not fire either feature. So if you have a crafty user who does their research, they can still sneak in with sa and do their bidding without being hampered. Of course, you can still detect their login via various methods, like a server trace, SQL Server Audit, extended events, and enabling "Audit Successful Logins" on the server.  These all have their downsides: traces take resources, extended events and SQL Audit can't fire off actions, and enabling successful logins will bloat your error log very quickly.  SQL Audit is also limited unless you have Enterprise Edition, and Resource Governor is Enterprise-only.  And WORST OF ALL, these features are all available and visible through the SSMS UI, so even a doofus developer or manager could find them. Fortunately there are Event Notifications! Event notifications are becoming one of my favorite features of SQL Server (keep an eye out for more blogs from me about them). They are practically unknown and heinously underutilized.  They are also a great gateway drug to using Service Broker, another great but underutilized feature. Hopefully this will get you to start using them, or at least your enemies in the office will once they read this, and then you'll have to learn them in order to fix things. So here's the setup: USE msdb; GO CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_act WITH ENCRYPTION AS DECLARE @x XML, @message nvarchar(max); RECEIVE @x=CAST(message_body AS XML) FROM SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_q; IF @x.value('(//LoginName)[1]','sysname')=N'sa' AND @x.value('(//ApplicationName)[1]','sysname') NOT LIKE N'SQL Agent%' BEGIN -- interesting activation procedure stuff goes here END GO CREATE QUEUE SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_q WITH STATUS=ON, RETENTION=OFF, ACTIVATION (PROCEDURE_NAME=dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_act, MAX_QUEUE_READERS=1, EXECUTE AS OWNER); CREATE SERVICE SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_s ON QUEUE SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_q([http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostEventNotification]); CREATE EVENT NOTIFICATION SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_en ON SERVER WITH FAN_IN FOR AUDIT_LOGIN TO SERVICE N'SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_s', N'current database' GO   From top to bottom: Create activation procedure for event notification queue. Create queue to accept messages from event notification, and activate the procedure to process those messages when received. Create service to send messages to that queue. Create event notification on AUDIT_LOGIN events that fire the service. I placed this in msdb as it is an available system database and already has Service Broker enabled by default. You should change this to another database if you can guarantee it won't get dropped. So what to put in place for "interesting activation procedure code"?  Hmmm, so far I haven't addressed Matt's suggestion of writing a lengthy script to send an annoying message: SET @[email protected]('(//HostName)[1]','sysname') + N' tried to log in to server ' + @x.value('(//ServerName)[1]','sysname') + N' as SA at ' + @x.value('(//StartTime)[1]','sysname') + N' using the ' + @x.value('(//ApplicationName)[1]','sysname') + N' program. That''s why you''re getting this message and the attached pornography which' + N' is bloating your inbox and violating company policy, among other things. If you know' + N' this person you can go to their desk and hit them, or use the following SQL to end their session: KILL ' + @x.value('(//SPID)[1]','sysname') + N'; Hopefully they''re in the middle of a huge query that they need to finish right away.' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients=N'[email protected]', @subject=N'SA Login Alert', @query_result_width=32767, @body=@message, @query=N'EXEC sp_readerrorlog;', @attach_query_result_as_file=1, @query_attachment_filename=N'UtterlyGrossPorn_SeriouslyDontOpenIt.jpg' I'm not sure I'd call that a lengthy script, but the attachment should get pretty big, and I'm sure the email admins will love storing multiple copies of it.  The nice thing is that this also fires on Dedicated Admin connections! You can even identify DAC connections from the event data returned, I leave that as an exercise for you. You can use that info to change the action taken by the activation procedure, and since it's a stored procedure, it can pretty much do anything! Except KILL the SPID, or SHUTDOWN the server directly.  I'm still working on those.

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• Refactor This (Ugly Code)!

  - by Alois Kraus

  Ayende has put on his blog some ugly code to refactor. First and foremost it is nearly impossible to reason about other peoples code without knowing the driving forces behind the current code. It is certainly possible to make it much cleaner when potential sources of errors cannot happen in the first place due to good design. I can see what the intention of the code is but I do not know about every brittle detail if I am allowed to reorder things here and there to simplify things. So I decided to make it much simpler by identifying the different responsibilities of the methods and encapsulate it in different classes. The code we need to refactor seems to deal with a handler after a message has been sent to a message queue. The handler does complete the current transaction if there is any and does handle any errors happening there. If during the the completion of the transaction errors occur the transaction is at least disposed. We can enter the handler already in a faulty state where we try to deliver the complete event in any case and signal a failure event and try to resend the message again to the queue if it was not inside a transaction. All is decorated with many try/catch blocks, duplicated code and some state variables to route the program flow. It is hard to understand and difficult to reason about. In other words: This code is a mess and could be written by me if I was under pressure. Here comes to code we want to refactor:         private void HandleMessageCompletion(                                      Message message,                                      TransactionScope tx,                                      OpenedQueue messageQueue,                                      Exception exception,                                      Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> messageCompleted,                                      Action<CurrentMessageInformation> beforeTransactionCommit)         {             var txDisposed = false;             if (exception == null)             {                 try                 {                     if (tx != null)                     {                         if (beforeTransactionCommit != null)                             beforeTransactionCommit(currentMessageInformation);                         tx.Complete();                         tx.Dispose();                         txDisposed = true;                     }                     try                     {                         if (messageCompleted != null)                             messageCompleted(currentMessageInformation, exception);                     }                     catch (Exception e)                     {                         Trace.TraceError("An error occured when raising the MessageCompleted event, the error will NOT affect the message processing"+ e);                     }                     return;                 }                 catch (Exception e)                 {                     Trace.TraceWarning("Failed to complete transaction, moving to error mode"+ e);                     exception = e;                 }             }             try             {                 if (txDisposed == false && tx != null)                 {                     Trace.TraceWarning("Disposing transaction in error mode");                     tx.Dispose();                 }             }             catch (Exception e)             {                 Trace.TraceWarning("Failed to dispose of transaction in error mode."+ e);             }             if (message == null)                 return;                 try             {                 if (messageCompleted != null)                     messageCompleted(currentMessageInformation, exception);             }             catch (Exception e)             {                 Trace.TraceError("An error occured when raising the MessageCompleted event, the error will NOT affect the message processing"+ e);             }               try             {                 var copy = MessageProcessingFailure;                 if (copy != null)                     copy(currentMessageInformation, exception);             }             catch (Exception moduleException)             {                 Trace.TraceError("Module failed to process message failure: " + exception.Message+                                              moduleException);             }               if (messageQueue.IsTransactional == false)// put the item back in the queue             {                 messageQueue.Send(message);             }         }     You can see quite some processing and handling going on there. Yes this looks like real world code one did put together to make things work and he does not trust his callbacks. I guess these are event handlers which are optional and the delegates were extracted from an event to call them back later when necessary.  Lets see what the author of this code did intend:          private void HandleMessageCompletion(             TransactionHandler transactionHandler,             MessageCompletionHandler handler,             CurrentMessageInformation messageInfo,             ErrorCollector errors             )         {               // commit current pending transaction             transactionHandler.CallHandlerAndCommit(messageInfo, errors);               // We have an error for a null message do not send completion event             if (messageInfo.CurrentMessage == null)                 return;               // Send completion event in any case regardless of errors             handler.OnMessageCompleted(messageInfo, errors);               // put message back if queue is not transactional             transactionHandler.ResendMessageOnError(messageInfo.CurrentMessage, errors);         }   I did not bother to write the intention here again since the code should be pretty self explaining by now. I have used comments to explain the still nontrivial procedure step by step revealing the real intention about all this complex program flow. The original complexity of the problem domain does not go away but by applying the techniques of SRP (Single Responsibility Principle) and some functional style but we can abstract the necessary complexity away in useful abstractions which make it much easier to reason about it. Since most of the method seems to deal with errors I thought it was a good idea to encapsulate the error state of our current message in an ErrorCollector object which stores all exceptions in a list along with a description what the error all was about in the exception itself. We can log it later or not depending on the log level or whatever. It is really just a simple list that encapsulates the current error state.          class ErrorCollector          {              List<Exception> _Errors = new List<Exception>();                public void Add(Exception ex, string description)              {                  ex.Data["Description"] = description;                  _Errors.Add(ex);              }                public Exception Last              {                  get                  {                      return _Errors.LastOrDefault();                  }              }                public bool HasError              {                  get                  {                      return _Errors.Count > 0;                  }              }          }   Since the error state is global we have two choices to store a reference in the other helper objects (TransactionHandler and MessageCompletionHandler)or pass it to the method calls when necessary. I did chose the latter one because a second argument does not hurt and makes it easier to reason about the overall state while the helper objects remain stateless and immutable which makes the helper objects much easier to understand and as a bonus thread safe as well. This does not mean that the stored member variables are stateless or thread safe as well but at least our helper classes are it. Most of the complexity is located the transaction handling I consider as a separate responsibility that I delegate to the TransactionHandler which does nothing if there is no transaction or Call the Before Commit Handler Commit Transaction Dispose Transaction if commit did throw In fact it has a second responsibility to resend the message if the transaction did fail. I did see a good fit there since it deals with transaction failures.          class TransactionHandler          {              TransactionScope _Tx;              Action<CurrentMessageInformation> _BeforeCommit;              OpenedQueue _MessageQueue;                public TransactionHandler(TransactionScope tx, Action<CurrentMessageInformation> beforeCommit, OpenedQueue messageQueue)              {                  _Tx = tx;                  _BeforeCommit = beforeCommit;                  _MessageQueue = messageQueue;              }                public void CallHandlerAndCommit(CurrentMessageInformation currentMessageInfo, ErrorCollector errors)              {                  if (_Tx != null && !errors.HasError)                  {                      try                      {                          if (_BeforeCommit != null)                          {                              _BeforeCommit(currentMessageInfo);                          }                            _Tx.Complete();                          _Tx.Dispose();                      }                      catch (Exception ex)                      {                          errors.Add(ex, "Failed to complete transaction, moving to error mode");                          Trace.TraceWarning("Disposing transaction in error mode");                          try                          {                              _Tx.Dispose();                          }                          catch (Exception ex2)                          {                              errors.Add(ex2, "Failed to dispose of transaction in error mode.");                          }                      }                  }              }                public void ResendMessageOnError(Message message, ErrorCollector errors)              {                  if (errors.HasError && !_MessageQueue.IsTransactional)                  {                      _MessageQueue.Send(message);                  }              }          } If we need to change the handling in the future we have a much easier time to reason about our application flow than before. After we did complete our transaction and called our callback we can call the completion handler which is the main purpose of the HandleMessageCompletion method after all. The responsiblity o the MessageCompletionHandler is to call the completion callback and the failure callback when some error has occurred.            class MessageCompletionHandler          {              Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> _MessageCompletedHandler;              Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> _MessageProcessingFailure;                public MessageCompletionHandler(Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> messageCompletedHandler,                                              Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> messageProcessingFailure)              {                  _MessageCompletedHandler = messageCompletedHandler;                  _MessageProcessingFailure = messageProcessingFailure;              }                  public void OnMessageCompleted(CurrentMessageInformation currentMessageInfo, ErrorCollector errors)              {                  try                  {                      if (_MessageCompletedHandler != null)                      {                          _MessageCompletedHandler(currentMessageInfo, errors.Last);                      }                  }                  catch (Exception ex)                  {                      errors.Add(ex, "An error occured when raising the MessageCompleted event, the error will NOT affect the message processing");                  }                    if (errors.HasError)                  {                      SignalFailedMessage(currentMessageInfo, errors);                  }              }                void SignalFailedMessage(CurrentMessageInformation currentMessageInfo, ErrorCollector errors)              {                  try                  {                      if (_MessageProcessingFailure != null)                          _MessageProcessingFailure(currentMessageInfo, errors.Last);                  }                  catch (Exception moduleException)                  {                      errors.Add(moduleException, "Module failed to process message failure");                  }              }            }   If for some reason I did screw up the logic and we need to call the completion handler from our Transaction handler we can simple add to the CallHandlerAndCommit method a third argument to the MessageCompletionHandler and we are fine again. If the logic becomes even more complex and we need to ensure that the completed event is triggered only once we have now one place the completion handler to capture the state. During this refactoring I simple put things together that belong together and came up with useful abstractions. If you look at the original argument list of the HandleMessageCompletion method I have put many things together:   Original Arguments New Arguments Encapsulate Message message CurrentMessageInformation messageInfo         Message message TransactionScope tx Action<CurrentMessageInformation> beforeTransactionCommit OpenedQueue messageQueue TransactionHandler transactionHandler        TransactionScope tx        OpenedQueue messageQueue        Action<CurrentMessageInformation> beforeTransactionCommit Exception exception,             ErrorCollector errors Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> messageCompleted MessageCompletionHandler handler          Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> messageCompleted          Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> messageProcessingFailure The reason is simple: Put the things that have relationships together and you will find nearly automatically useful abstractions. I hope this makes sense to you. If you see a way to make it even more simple you can show Ayende your improved version as well.

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• How did I get here? My route to Android, iPhone, Windows Phone 7, and interest in Mobile Devices

  - by Wallym

  I get asked all the time how/why I got interested in mobile and jumped on this fairly early.  I tend to give half answers because it wasn't just one thing that took me to mobile, but a whole host of separate ivents culminating in a specific event where I wasdoing market research in May/June 2008.  Let me throw out the events and the facts about me: I tend to like new, different, cool stuff.  I jumped on .NET early on.  I jumped on Ajax early on.  I don't jump on every new technology that comes down the road, I'm probably the only person on the planet that doesn't "get" MVC, though I acknowledge that a lot of people do and it solves a number of problems in the default settings of ASP.NET WebForms. I remember buying an early Windows CE device. It was interesting, but dang, this stylus thing sucks. After I lost my third stylus, i just gave up.  I got my first mobile phone in early 1999.  Reception was crappy, but I could see the value in being mobile. In 1999, I worked on a manufacturing systems project.  One piece of the projects was a set of handheld devices on the shop floor.  While the UI was a crappy DOS based, yes I said DOS as in Disk Operating System Version 6.22, I could see that the wireless world was a direction I wanted to be in. In 2000, Microsoft released the first public alpha of .NET.  Very cool stuff indeed.  One piece of the puzzle was a set of mobile controls for ASP.NET.  I build numerous test apps as well as mobile version using these mobile controls.  Now, the mobile UIs of the time were based on WML, which was crap. I could real all the analysis of mobile and read all about growth rates.  Now, you have to realize that growth rates can be impressive when dealing with small numbers, but I knew it was a comer. In our first book, I got talked out of mobile because of the line from the publisher "Wally, mobile doesn't sell." Blackberry was the dominant device of the mid 2000s.  Its users were referred to as "Crackberry addicts."  Unfortunately, the mobile development experience for native apps was crap and the web experience was fairly rough as well, but if they could get the ecosystem started, other phones and better blackberryies would come out.  I finally jumped into using a blackberry. Sometime around 2006, I heard "Wally, mobile doesn't sell" again.  Now, anyone that knows me knows that someone saying something like this to me means I'll keep trying it. The phones of the mid 2000s were moving to be more graphical, but there were too many that had this idea that they had to use a stylus.  Stylus suck.  They get lost too easily. I worked on a project in 2007 and 2008 for a startup trying to answer the question of "What is there to do where I am at?"  For some reason, they wanted to be tied to PCs.  As it became obvious that they were having problems, their investor asked us to do some market research and to figure out what the marketplace did want.  One of the important things that I figured out was the we lived in a mobile world and if you had a mobile app, it need to be on a mobile device, not tied to a desktop/laptop/netbook device.  If there was any single event, this was it - I was doing some market research and sat and talked to people in a bar/restaurant in Atlanta called "The Grove" on Lavista.  The consensus of the people that I talked to was that they wanted their data where ever they were at, laptop, pc, mobile, whereever. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone.  Wow, what an impressive device, even with all the problems of a 1st generation device.  I bought an iPod Touch 1st generation to understand touch better, one of the best decisions I ever made. I decided in late 2008, to make a move into cloud, for a number of reasons.  I was working on an example app.  In April, 2009, one of my friends at Microsoft said "don't mention my name with this, but you need an iPhone front end for this app."  How do you get on the iPhone.  Well, there are a number of ways including: ObjectiveC.  Its hard to teach an old dog new tricks, and this dog knows .NET, not ObjectiveC. HTML, web, javascript optimized interface.  yeah, this is possible. PhoneGap.  Now, this is interesting, take an html interface and get it to run on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and other platforms.  I thought that this way made the most sense for me until......... MonoTouch.  In May/June 2009, Novell announced a way for .NET/c# developers to write apps for the iPhone.  This is the way that made the most sense to me. Titanium by Appcelerator.  This is similar in concept to PhoneGap.  I haven't played with this much but do want to learn more about it. In July, 2009, I emailed one of my contacts at Wrox to see if they would be interested in a short MonoTouch ebook in their Wrox Blox format.  I fully expected another  response along the lines of "Wally, mobile doesn't sell."  The response I got was "Wally, iPhone is H O T, get started immediately, can you have this to me before Labor Day."  Not quite the response I expected.  Thankfully, we didn't make the Labor Day, first draft date. I kept pushing back because I had a feeling that things were not going to be quite as polished and feature rich as necessary.  After all, Novell doesn't have the resouces of Microsoft's developer division. The ebook shipped on November 30, 2009. On about December, 15, 2009, my editor emailed and said "Your ebook is selling really well, lets do a full book and it by March 1 so get started."  Thankfully, guys like Craig Dunn and Chris Hardy were interested along with Martin and Ror joinged us later on. I bought my wife an iPhone 3Gs in early 2010 to go along with all my iPod Touch devices. I tried to pretend in 2010 that I wasn't that interested in mobile and still had interest in the desktop technologies.  I love the technologies and continue to use them today, but that isn't where my interest is right now.  I'm just about all mobile all the time with my energies.  Our book shipped in the beginning of July, 2010 right in the middle of the Apple FUD.I've been looking at Mobile Web as a way around the AppStores and Apple FUD problems of 2010. With all the Apple self FUD, we became interested in Android.I went up to Dino Esposito at DevConnections in Las Vegas at introduced myself. I've always tried to keep up with what Dino has been doing. I was shocked, he wanted to meet me.  We must have talked for 1.5 hours. It was way more time than I deserved. If you get a chance, go and introduce yourself to Dino. He's a great guy. Microsoft released Windows Phone 7 in the Fall of 2010.  I'm not doing development on that platform at this time.  I think they have a very interesting user interface.  The devices are being positively reviewed.  For my purposes, the devices are limited at this point in time.  We'll see what 2011 brings as far as updates to the operating system.  I need multitasking/background processing and html5 in the browser. Add that as well as acceptance in the marketplace and I'll be more interested in the device. Obviosuly, I'm now working on a MonoDroid book . I own Android and iPhone/iOS devices.  I am currently working on some startup ideas and am exploring as much in that area as I can. For 2011, I'm planning on speaking at Android Developer's Conference (AnDevCon) and Mobile Connections.  I'm really excited about this. I have a couple of magazine articles coming out in 2011 on Android and iPhone development with the Mono technologies.is Mono "The Answer"? What's "The Question?" I think it will work for me.  It might work for you, it might not.  it depends on your situation.  Its the current horse that I am riding. I might find a better horse tomorrow. So, that's how I got here.  I'm in love with mobile.  Mobile native apps on the device as well as mobile web.  I'm into all this cool stuff.  Where are you at?

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• VSNewFile: A Visual Studio Addin to More Easily Add New Items to a Project

  - by InfinitiesLoop

  My first Visual Studio Add-in! Creating add-ins is pretty simple, once you get used to the CommandBar model it is using, which is apparently a general Office suite extensibility mechanism. Anyway, let me first explain my motivation for this. It started out as an academic exercise, as I have always wanted to dip my feet in a little VS extensibility. But I thought of a legitimate need for an add-in, at least in my personal experience, so it took on new life. But I figured I can’t be the only one who has felt this way, so I decided to publish the add-in, and host it on GitHub (VSNewFile on GitHub) hoping to spur contributions. Adding Files the Built-in Way Here’s the problem I wanted to solve. You’re working on a project, and it’s time to add a new file to the project. Whatever it is – a class, script, html page, aspx page, or what-have-you, you go through a menu or keyboard shortcut to get to the “Add New Item” dialog. Typically, you do it by right-clicking the location where you want the file (the project or a folder of it): This brings up a dialog the contains, well, every conceivable type of item you might want to add. It’s all the available item templates, which can result in anywhere from a ton to a veritable sea of choices. To be fair, this dialog has been revamped in Visual Studio 2010, which organizes it a little better than Visual Studio 2008, and adds a search box. It also loads noticeably faster.   To me, this dialog is just getting in my way. If I want to add a JavaScript script to my project, I don’t want to have to hunt for the script template item in this dialog. Yes, it is categorized, and yes, it now has a search box. But still, all this UI to swim through when all I need is a new file in the project. I will name it. I will provide the content, I don’t even need a ‘template’. VS kind of realizes this. In the add menu in a class library project, for example, there is a “Add Class…” choice. But all this really does is select that project item from the dialog by default. You still must wait for the dialog, see it, and type in a name for the file. How is that really any different than hitting F2 on an existing item? It isn’t. Adding Files the Hack Way What I often find myself doing, just to avoid going through this dialog, is to copy and paste an existing file, rename it, then “CTRL-A, DEL” the content. In a few short keystrokes I’ve got my new file. Even if the original file wasn’t the right type, it doesn’t matter – I will rename it anyway, including the extension. It works well enough if the place I am adding the file to doesn’t have much in it already. But if there are a lot of files at that level, it sucks, because the new file will have the name “Copy of xyz”, causing it to be moved into the ‘C’ section of the alphabetically sorted items, which might be far, far away from the original file (and so I tend to try and copy a file that starts with ‘C’ *evil grin*). Using ‘Export Template’ To be completely fair I should at least mention this feature. I’m not even sure if this is new in VS 2010 or not (I think so). But it allows you to export a project item or items, including potential project references required by it. Then it becomes a new item in the available ‘installed templates’. No doubt this is useful to help bootstrap new projects. But that still requires you to go through the ‘New Item’ dialog. Adding Files with VSNewFile So hopefully I have sufficiently defined the problem and got a few of you to think, “Yeah, me too!”… What VSNewFile does is let you skip the dialog entirely by adding project items directly to the context menu. But it does a bit more than that, so do read on. For example, to add a new class, you can right-click the location and pick that option. A new .cs file is instantly added to the project, and the new item is selected and put into the ‘rename’ mode immediately. The default items available are shown here. But you can customize them. You can also customize the content of each template. To do so, you create a directory in your documents folder, ‘VSNewFile Templates’. In there, you drop the templates you want to use, but you name them in a particular way. For example, here’s a template that will add a new item named “Add TITLE”. It will add a project item named “SOMEFILE.foo” (or ‘SOMEFILE1.foo’ if that exists, etc). The format of the file name is: <ORDER>_<KEY>_<BASE FILENAME>_<ICON ID>_<TITLE>.<EXTENTION> Where: <ORDER> is a number that lets you determine the order of the items in the menu (relative to each other). <KEY> is a case sensitive identifier different for each template item. More on that later. <BASE FILENAME> is the default name of the file, which doesn’t matter that much, since they will be renaming it anyway. <ICON ID> is a number the dictates the icon used for the menu item. There are a huge number of built-in choices. More on that later. <TITLE> is the string that will appear in the menu. And, the contents of the file are the default content for the item (the ‘template’). The content of the file can contain anything you want, of course. But it also supports two tokens: %NAMESPACE% and %FILENAME%, which will be replaced with the corresponding values. Here is the content of this sample: testing Namespace = %NAMESPACE% Filename = %FILENAME% I kind went back and forth on this. I could have made it so there’d be an XML or JSON file that defines the templates, instead of cramming all this data into the filename itself. I like the simplicity of this better. It makes it easy to customize since you can literally just throw these files around, copy them from someone else, etc, without worrying about merge data into a central description file, in whatever format. Here’s our new item showing up: Practical Use One immediate thing I am using this for is to make it easier to add very commonly used scripts to my web projects. For example, uh, say, jQuery? :) All I need to do is drop jQuery-1.4.2.js and jQuery-1.4.2.min.js into the templates folder, provide the order, title, etc, and then instantly, I can now add jQuery to any project I have without even thinking about “where is jQuery? Can I copy it from that other project?”   Using the KEY There are two reasons for the ‘key’ portion of the item. First, it allows you to turn off the built-in, default templates, which are: FILE = Add File (generic, empty file) VB = Add VB Class CS = Add C# Class (includes some basic usings) HTML = Add HTML page (includes basic structure, doctype, etc) JS = Add Script (includes an immediately-invoking function closure) To turn one off, just include a file with the name “_<KEY>”. For example, to turn off all the items except our custom one, you do this: The other reason for the key is that there are new Visual Studio Commands created for each one. This makes it possible to bind a keyboard shortcut to one of them. So you could, for example, have a keyboard combination that adds a new web page to your website, or a new CS class to your class library, etc. Here is our sample item showing up in the keyboard bindings option. Even though the contents of the template directory may change from one launch of Visual Studio to the next, the bindings will remain attached to any item with a particular key, thanks to it taking care not to lose keyboard bindings even though the commands are completely recreated each time. The Icon Face ID Visual Studio uses a Microsoft Office style add-in mechanism, I gather. There are a predetermined set of built-in icons available. You can use your own icons when developing add-ins, of course, but I’m no designer. I just wanted to find appropriate-ish icons for the built-in templates, and allow you to choose from an existing built-in icon for your own. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot out there on the interwebs that helps you figure out what the built-in types are. There’s an MSDN article that describes at length a way to create a program that lists all the icons. But I don’t want to write a program to figure them out! Just show them to me! Sheesh :) Thankfully, someone out there felt the same way, and uses a novel hack to get the icons to show up in an outlook toolbar. He then painstakingly took screenshots of them, one group at a time. It isn’t complete though – there are tens of thousands of icons. But it’s good enough. If anyone has an exhaustive list, please let me, and the rest of the add-in community know. Icon Face ID Reference Installing the Add-in It will work with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010. Just unzip the release into your Documents\Visual Studio 20xx\Addins folder. It contains the binary and the Visual Studio “.addin” file. For example, the path to mine is: C:\Users\InfinitiesLoop\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Addins Conclusion So that’s it! I hope you find it as useful as I have. It’s on GitHub, so if you’re into this kind of thing, please do fork it and improve it! Reference: VSNewFile on GitHub VSNewFile release on GitHub Icon Face ID Reference

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