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• Timeout Considerations for Solicit Response

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Background One of the clients I work with had been experiencing some issues for a while surrounding web service timeouts.  It's been a little challenging to work through the problems due to limitations in the diagnostic information available from one of the applications, but I learned some interesting things while troubleshooting the problem which don't seem to have been discussed much in the community so I thought I'd share my findings. In the scenario we have BizTalk trying to make calls to a .net web service which was exposed as a WSE 2 endpoint.  In the process BizTalk will try to make a large number of concurrent web service calls to the application, and the backend application has more than enough infrastructure and capability to handle the load. We have configured the <ConnectionManagement> section of the BizTalk configuration file to support up to 100 concurrent connections from each of our 2 BizTalk send servers to the web servers of the application. The problem we were facing was that the BizTalk side was reporting a significant number of timeouts when calling the web service.   One of the biggest issues was the challenge of being able to correlate a message from BizTalk to the IIS log in the .net application and the custom logs in the application especially when there was a fairly large number of servers hosting the web services.  However the key moment came when we were able to identify a specific call which had taken 40 seconds to execute on the server (yes a long time I know but that's a different story!).  Anyway we were able to identify that this had timed out on the BizTalk side.  Based on the normal 2 minute timeout we knew something unexpected was going on. From here I decided to do some experimentation and I wanted to start outside of BizTalk because my hunch was this was not a BizTalk behaviour but something which was being highlighted by BizTalk because of our large load.     Server-side - Sample Web Service To begin with I created a sample web service.  Nothing special just a vanilla asmx web service hosted in IIS6 on Windows 2003 Standard Edition.  The web service is just a hello world style web service as shown in the below picture.  The only key feature is that the server side web method has a 30 second sleep in it and will trace out some information before and after the thread is set to sleep.      In the configuration for this web service there again is nothing special it's pretty much the most plain simple web service you could build. Client-Side To begin looking at what was happening with our example I created a number of different ways to consume the web service. SoapHttpClientProtocol Example I created a small application which would use a normal proxy generated to call the web service.  It would iterate around a loop and make calls using the begin/end methods so I can do this asynchronously.  I would do a loop of 20 calls with the ConnectionManager configuration section supporting only 5 concurrent connections to the server.     <connectionManagement> <remove address="*"/> <add address = "*" maxconnection = "12" /> <add address = "http://<ServerName>" maxconnection = "5" />                         </connectionManagement> </system.net>     The below picture shows an example of the service calling code, key points are: I have configured the timeout of 40 seconds for the proxy I am using the asynchronous methods on the proxy to call the web service         The Test I would run the client and execute 21 calls to the web service.   The Results  Below is the client side trace showing what's happening on the client. In the below diagram is the web service side trace showing what's happening on the server Some observations on the results are: All of the calls were successful from the clients perspective You could see the next call starting on the server as soon as the previous one had completed Calls took significantly longer than 40 seconds from the start of our call to the return. In fact call 20 took 2 minutes and 30 seconds from the perspective of my code to execute even though I had set the timeout to 40 seconds     WSE 2 Sample In the second example I used the exact same code to call the web service again with a single exception that I modified the web service proxy to derive from WebServiceClient protocol which is part of WSE 2 (using SP3).  The below picture shows the basic code and the key points are: I have configured the timeout of 40 seconds for the proxy I am using the asynchronous methods on the proxy to call the web service        The Test This test would execute 21 calls from the client to the web service.   The Results  The below trace is from the client side: The below trace is from the server side:   Some observations on the trace results for this scenario are: With call 4 if you look at the server side trace it did not start executing on the server for a number of seconds after the other 4 initial calls which were accepted by the server. I re-ran the test and this happened a couple of times and not on most others so at this point I'm just putting this down to something unexpected happening on the development machine and we will leave this observation out of scope of this article. You can see that the client side trace statement executed almost immediately in all cases All calls after the initial few calls would timeout On the client side the calls that did timeout; timed out in a longer duration than the 40 seconds we set as the timeout You can see that as calls were completing on the server the next calls were starting to come through The calls that timed out on the client did actually connect to the server and their server side execution completed successfully     Elaboration on the findings Based on the above observations I have drawn the below sequence diagram to illustrate conceptually what is happening.  Everything except the final web service object is on the client side of the call. In the diagram below I've put two notes on the Web Service Proxy to show the two different places where the different base classes seem to start their timeout counters. From the earlier samples we can work out that the timeout counter for the WSE web service proxy starts before the one for the SoapHttpClientProtocol proxy and the WSE one includes the time to get a connection from the pool; whereas the Soap proxy timeout just covers the method execution. One interesting observation is if we rerun the above sample and increase the number of calls from 21 to 100,000 then for the WSE sample we will see a similar pattern where everything after the first few calls will timeout on the client as soon as it makes a connection to the server whereas the soap proxy will happily plug away and process all of the calls without a single timeout. I have actually set the sample running overnight and this did happen. At this point you are probably thinking the same thoughts I was at the time about the differences in behaviour and which is right and why are they different? I'm not sure there is a definitive answer to this in the documentation, or at least not that I could find! I think you just have to consider that they are different and they could have different effects depending on your messaging solution. In lots of situations this is just not an issue as your concurrent requests doesn't get to the situation where you end up throttling the web service calls on the client side, however this is definitely more common with an integration broker such as BizTalk where you often have high throughput requirements.  Some of the considerations you should make Based on this behaviour you should be aware of the following: In a .net application if you are making lots of concurrent web service calls from an application in an asynchronous manner your user may thing they are experiencing poor performance but you think your web service is working well. The problem could be that the client will have a default of 2 connections to remote servers so you should bear this in mind When you are developing a BizTalk solution or a .net solution with the WSE 2 stack you may experience timeouts under load and throttling the number of connections using the max connections element in the configuration file will not help you For an application using WSE2 or SoapHttpClientProtocol an expired timeout will not throw an error until after a connection to the server has been made so you should consider this in your transaction and durability patterns     Our Work Around In the short term for our specific scenario we know that we can handle this by just increasing our timeout value.  There is only a specific small window when we get lots of concurrent traffic that causes this scenario so we should be able to increase the timeout to take into consideration the additional client side wait, and on the odd occasion where we do get a timeout the BizTalk send port retry will handle this. What was causing our original problem was that for that short window we were getting a lot of retries which significantly increased the load on our send servers and highlighted the issue.  Longer Term Solution As a longer term solution this really gives us more ammunition to argue a migration to WCF. The application we are calling has some factors which limit the protocols we can use but with WCF we would have more control on the various timeout options because in WCF you can configure specific parts of the timeout. Summary I've had this blog post on my to do list for ages but hopefully it will be useful to some people to just understand this behaviour and to possibly help you with some performance issues you may have. I do not believe there is too much in the way of documentation particularly around WSE2 and ASMX in this area so again another bit of ammunition for migrating to WCF. I'll try to do a follow up post with the sample for WCF to show how this changes things.

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Nullable static class

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Today we’re going to look at an interesting Little Wonder that can be used to mitigate what could be considered a Little Pitfall.  The Little Wonder we’ll be examining is the System.Nullable static class.  No, not the System.Nullable<T> class, but a static helper class that has one useful method in particular that we will examine… but first, let’s look at the Little Pitfall that makes this wonder so useful. Little Pitfall: Comparing nullable value types using <, >, <=, >= Examine this piece of code, without examining it too deeply, what’s your gut reaction as to the result? 1: int? x = null; 2:  3: if (x < 100) 4: { 5: Console.WriteLine("True, {0} is less than 100.", 6: x.HasValue ? x.ToString() : "null"); 7: } 8: else 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine("False, {0} is NOT less than 100.", 11: x.HasValue ? x.ToString() : "null"); 12: } Your gut would be to say true right?  It would seem to make sense that a null integer is less than the integer constant 100.  But the result is actually false!  The null value is not less than 100 according to the less-than operator. It looks even more outrageous when you consider this also evaluates to false: 1: int? x = null; 2:  3: if (x < int.MaxValue) 4: { 5: // ... 6: } So, are we saying that null is less than every valid int value?  If that were true, null should be less than int.MinValue, right?  Well… no: 1: int? x = null; 2:  3: // um... hold on here, x is NOT less than min value? 4: if (x < int.MinValue) 5: { 6: // ... 7: } So what’s going on here?  If we use greater than instead of less than, we see the same little dilemma: 1: int? x = null; 2:  3: // once again, null is not greater than anything either... 4: if (x > int.MinValue) 5: { 6: // ... 7: } It turns out that four of the comparison operators (<, <=, >, >=) are designed to return false anytime at least one of the arguments is null when comparing System.Nullable wrapped types that expose the comparison operators (short, int, float, double, DateTime, TimeSpan, etc.).  What’s even odder is that even though the two equality operators (== and !=) work correctly, >= and <= have the same issue as < and > and return false if both System.Nullable wrapped operator comparable types are null! 1: DateTime? x = null; 2: DateTime? y = null; 3:  4: if (x <= y) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("You'd think this is true, since both are null, but it's not."); 7: } 8: else 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine("It's false because <=, <, >, >= don't work on null."); 11: } To make matters even more confusing, take for example your usual check to see if something is less than, greater to, or equal: 1: int? x = null; 2: int? y = 100; 3:  4: if (x < y) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("X is less than Y"); 7: } 8: else if (x > y) 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine("X is greater than Y"); 11: } 12: else 13: { 14: // We fall into the "equals" assumption, but clearly null != 100! 15: Console.WriteLine("X is equal to Y"); 16: } Yes, this code outputs “X is equal to Y” because both the less-than and greater-than operators return false when a Nullable wrapped operator comparable type is null.  This violates a lot of our assumptions because we assume is something is not less than something, and it’s not greater than something, it must be equal.  So keep in mind, that the only two comparison operators that work on Nullable wrapped types where at least one is null are the equals (==) and not equals (!=) operators: 1: int? x = null; 2: int? y = 100; 3:  4: if (x == y) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("False, x is null, y is not."); 7: } 8:  9: if (x != y) 10: { 11: Console.WriteLine("True, x is null, y is not."); 12: } Solution: The Nullable static class So we’ve seen that <, <=, >, and >= have some interesting and perhaps unexpected behaviors that can trip up a novice developer who isn’t expecting the kinks that System.Nullable<T> types with comparison operators can throw.  How can we easily mitigate this? Well, obviously, you could do null checks before each check, but that starts to get ugly: 1: if (x.HasValue) 2: { 3: if (y.HasValue) 4: { 5: if (x < y) 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine("x < y"); 8: } 9: else if (x > y) 10: { 11: Console.WriteLine("x > y"); 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine("x == y"); 16: } 17: } 18: else 19: { 20: Console.WriteLine("x > y because y is null and x isn't"); 21: } 22: } 23: else if (y.HasValue) 24: { 25: Console.WriteLine("x < y because x is null and y isn't"); 26: } 27: else 28: { 29: Console.WriteLine("x == y because both are null"); 30: } Yes, we could probably simplify this logic a bit, but it’s still horrendous!  So what do we do if we want to consider null less than everything and be able to properly compare Nullable<T> wrapped value types? The key is the System.Nullable static class.  This class is a companion class to the System.Nullable<T> class and allows you to use a few helper methods for Nullable<T> wrapped types, including a static Compare<T>() method of the. What’s so big about the static Compare<T>() method?  It implements an IComparer compatible comparison on Nullable<T> types.  Why do we care?  Well, if you look at the MSDN description for how IComparer works, you’ll read: Comparing null with any type is allowed and does not generate an exception when using IComparable. When sorting, null is considered to be less than any other object. This is what we probably want!  We want null to be less than everything!  So now we can change our logic to use the Nullable.Compare<T>() static method: 1: int? x = null; 2: int? y = 100; 3:  4: if (Nullable.Compare(x, y) < 0) 5: { 6: // Yes! x is null, y is not, so x is less than y according to Compare(). 7: Console.WriteLine("x < y"); 8: } 9: else if (Nullable.Compare(x, y) > 0) 10: { 11: Console.WriteLine("x > y"); 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine("x == y"); 16: } Summary So, when doing math comparisons between two numeric values where one of them may be a null Nullable<T>, consider using the System.Nullable.Compare<T>() method instead of the comparison operators.  It will treat null less than any value, and will avoid logic consistency problems when relying on < returning false to indicate >= is true and so on. Tweet   Technorati Tags: C#,C-Sharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Little Pitfalls,Nulalble

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• The Return Of __FILE__ And __LINE__ In .NET 4.5

  - by Alois Kraus

  Good things are hard to kill. One of the most useful predefined compiler macros in C/C++ were __FILE__ and __LINE__ which do expand to the compilation units file name and line number where this value is encountered by the compiler. After 4.5 versions of .NET we are on par with C/C++ again. It is of course not a simple compiler expandable macro it is an attribute but it does serve exactly the same purpose. Now we do get CallerLineNumberAttribute  == __LINE__ CallerFilePathAttribute        == __FILE__ CallerMemberNameAttribute  == __FUNCTION__ (MSVC Extension)   The most important one is CallerMemberNameAttribute which is very useful to implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface without the need to hard code the name of the property anymore. Now you can simply decorate your change method with the new CallerMemberName attribute and you get the property name as string directly inserted by the C# compiler at compile time.   public string UserName { get { return _userName; } set { _userName=value; RaisePropertyChanged(); // no more RaisePropertyChanged(“UserName”)! } } protected void RaisePropertyChanged([CallerMemberName] string member = "") { var copy = PropertyChanged; if(copy != null) { copy(new PropertyChangedEventArgs(this, member)); } } Nice and handy. This was obviously the prime reason to implement this feature in the C# 5.0 compiler. You can repurpose this feature for tracing to get your hands on the method name of your caller along other stuff very fast now. All infos are added during compile time which is much faster than other approaches like walking the stack. The example on MSDN shows the usage of this attribute with an example public static void TraceMessage(string message, [CallerMemberName] string memberName = "", [CallerFilePath] string sourceFilePath = "", [CallerLineNumber] int sourceLineNumber = 0) { Console.WriteLine("Hi {0} {1} {2}({3})", message, memberName, sourceFilePath, sourceLineNumber); }   When I do think of tracing I do usually want to have a API which allows me to Trace method enter and leave Trace messages with a severity like Info, Warning, Error When I do print a trace message it is very useful to print out method and type name as well. So your API must either be able to pass the method and type name as strings or extract it automatically via walking back one Stackframe and fetch the infos from there. The first glaring deficiency is that there is no CallerTypeAttribute yet because the C# compiler team was not satisfied with its performance.   A usable Trace Api might therefore look like   enum TraceTypes { None = 0, EnterLeave = 1 << 0, Info = 1 << 1, Warn = 1 << 2, Error = 1 << 3 } class Tracer : IDisposable { string Type; string Method; public Tracer(string type, string method) { Type = type; Method = method; if (IsEnabled(TraceTypes.EnterLeave,Type, Method)) { } } private bool IsEnabled(TraceTypes traceTypes, string Type, string Method) { // Do checking here if tracing is enabled return false; } public void Info(string fmt, params object[] args) { } public void Warn(string fmt, params object[] args) { } public void Error(string fmt, params object[] args) { } public static void Info(string type, string method, string fmt, params object[] args) { } public static void Warn(string type, string method, string fmt, params object[] args) { } public static void Error(string type, string method, string fmt, params object[] args) { } public void Dispose() { // trace method leave } } This minimal trace API is very fast but hard to maintain since you need to pass in the type and method name as hard coded strings which can change from time to time. But now we have at least CallerMemberName to rid of the explicit method parameter right? Not really. Since any acceptable usable trace Api should have a method signature like Tracexxx(… string fmt, params [] object args) we not able to add additional optional parameters after the args array. If we would put it before the format string we would need to make it optional as well which would mean the compiler would need to figure out what our trace message and arguments are (not likely) or we would need to specify everything explicitly just like before . There are ways around this by providing a myriad of overloads which in the end are routed to the very same method but that is ugly. I am not sure if nobody inside MS agrees that the above API is reasonable to have or (more likely) that the whole talk about you can use this feature for diagnostic purposes was not a core feature at all but a simple byproduct of making the life of INotifyPropertyChanged implementers easier. A way around this would be to allow for variable argument arrays after the params keyword another set of optional arguments which are always filled by the compiler but I do not know if this is an easy one. The thing I am missing much more is the not provided CallerType attribute. But not in the way you would think of. In the API above I did add some filtering based on method and type to stay as fast as possible for types where tracing is not enabled at all. It should be no more expensive than an additional method call and a bool variable check if tracing for this type is enabled at all. The data is tightly bound to the calling type and method and should therefore become part of the static type instance. Since extending the CLR type system for tracing is not something I do expect to happen I have come up with an alternative approach which allows me basically to attach run time data to any existing type object in super fast way. The key to success is the usage of generics.   class Tracer<T> : IDisposable { string Method; public Tracer(string method) { if (TraceData<T>.Instance.Enabled.HasFlag(TraceTypes.EnterLeave)) { } } public void Dispose() { if (TraceData<T>.Instance.Enabled.HasFlag(TraceTypes.EnterLeave)) { } } public static void Info(string fmt, params object[] args) { } /// <summary> /// Every type gets its own instance with a fresh set of variables to describe the /// current filter status. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam> internal class TraceData<UsingType> { internal static TraceData<UsingType> Instance = new TraceData<UsingType>(); public bool IsInitialized = false; // flag if we need to reinit the trace data in case of reconfigured trace settings at runtime public TraceTypes Enabled = TraceTypes.None; // Enabled trace levels for this type } } We do not need to pass the type as string or Type object to the trace Api. Instead we define a generic Api that accepts the using type as generic parameter. Then we can create a TraceData static instance which is due to the nature of generics a fresh instance for every new type parameter. My tests on my home machine have shown that this approach is as fast as a simple bool flag check. If you have an application with many types using tracing you do not want to bring the app down by simply enabling tracing for one special rarely used type. The trace filter performance for the types which are not enabled must be therefore the fasted code path. This approach has the nice side effect that if you store the TraceData instances in one global list you can reconfigure tracing at runtime safely by simply setting the IsInitialized flag to false. A similar effect can be achieved with a global static Dictionary<Type,TraceData> object but big hash tables have random memory access semantics which is bad for cache locality and you always need to pay for the lookup which involves hash code generation, equality check and an indexed array access. The generic version is wicked fast and allows you to add more features to your tracing Api with minimal perf overhead. But it is cumbersome to write the generic type argument always explicitly and worse if you do refactor code and move parts of it to other classes it might be that you cannot configure tracing correctly. I would like therefore to decorate my type with an attribute [CallerType] class Tracer<T> : IDisposable to tell the compiler to fill in the generic type argument automatically. class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { using (var t = new Tracer()) // equivalent to new Tracer<Program>() { That would be really useful and super fast since you do not need to pass any type object around but you do have full type infos at hand. This change would be breaking if another non generic type exists in the same namespace where now the generic counterpart would be preferred. But this is an acceptable risk in my opinion since you can today already get conflicts if two generic types of the same name are defined in different namespaces. This would be only a variation of this issue. When you do think about this further you can add more features like to trace the exception in your Dispose method if the method is left with an exception with that little trick I did write some time ago. You can think of tracing as a super fast and configurable switch to write data to an output destination or to execute alternative actions. With such an infrastructure you can e.g. Reconfigure tracing at run time. Take a memory dump when a specific method is left with a specific exception. Throw an exception when a specific trace statement is hit (useful for testing error conditions). Execute a passed delegate which e.g. dumps additional state when enabled. Write data to an in memory ring buffer and dump it when specific events do occur (e.g. method is left with an exception, triggered from outside). Write data to an output device. …. This stuff is really useful to have when your code is in production on a mission critical server and you need to find the root cause of sporadic crashes of your application. It could be a buggy graphics card driver which throws access violations into your application (ok with .NET 4 not anymore except if you enable a compatibility flag) where you would like to have a minidump or you have reached after two weeks of operation a state where you need a full memory dump at a specific point in time in the middle of an transaction. At my older machine I do get with this super fast approach 50 million traces/s when tracing is disabled. When I do know that tracing is enabled for this type I can walk the stack by using StackFrameHelper.GetStackFramesInternal to check further if a specific action or output device is configured for this method which is about 2-3 times faster than the regular StackTrace class. Even with one String.Format I am down to 3 million traces/s so performance is not so important anymore since I do want to do something now. The CallerMemberName feature of the C# 5 compiler is nice but I would have preferred to get direct access to the MethodHandle and not to the stringified version of it. But I really would like to see a CallerType attribute implemented to fill in the generic type argument of the call site to augment the static CLR type data with run time data.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, July 05, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, July 05, 2012Popular ReleasesTaskScheduler ASP.NET: Release 2 - 1.1.0.0: Release 2 - Version 1.1.0.0 In this version the following features were added to the library: Event fired on all tasks end The ASP.NET project takes a example of management of scheduled tasks.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.8.0 Beta: Whats newuComponents in the core Multi-Node Tree Picker, Multiple Textstring, Slider and XPath Lists Easier Lucene searching built in IFile providers for easier file handling Updated 3rd party libraries Applications / Trees moved out of the database SQL Azure support added Various bug fixes Getting Started A great place to start is with our Getting Started Guide: Getting Started Guide: http://umbraco.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=197051 Make sure to...CODE Framework: 4.0.20704.0: See CODE Framework (.NET) Change Log for changes in this version.?????????? - ????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2012-07-04: http://download.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1codechs&DownloadId=216140 ???OneCode??????，??????????10????Microsoft OneCode Sample，????4?Windows Base Sample，2?XML Sample?4?ASP.NET Sample。???????????。 ????，?????。http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 Windows Base Sample CSCheckOSBitness VBCheckOSBitness CSCheckOSVersion VBCheckOSVersion XML Sample CSXPath VBXPath ASP.NET Sample CSASPNETDataPager VBASPNET...sheetengine - Isometric HTML5 JavaScript Display Engine: sheetengine v1.0: The first release of sheetengine. See sheetengine.codeplex.com for a list of features and examples.AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.1 Intrepid Fixed: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, download the Linux package. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) If you use the default maprot or any maprot, you need to fix it Well, 2.5 was...xUnit.net - Unit testing framework for C# and .NET (a successor to NUnit): xUnit.net 1.9.1: xUnit.net release 1.9.1Build #1600 Important note for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. Important note for VS2012 users: The VS2012 runner is in the Visual Studio Gallery now, and should be installed via Tools | Extension Manager from insi...NETDeob0: NETDeob 0.2.0: - Big structural changes - Safer signature identification - More accurate signatures - Minor bugs fixed - Minor compability issues fixedMVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 2.2.0: Added Modified all Mv4 related features to conform with the Mvc4 RC Now all items controls accept any IEnumerable<T>(before just List<T> were accepted by most of controls) retrievalManager class that retrieves automatically data from a data source whenever it catchs events triggered by filtering, sorting, and paging controls move method to the updatesManager to move one child objects from a father to another. The move operation can be undone like the insert, update and delete operatio...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.6: 2012.07.03 Ver5.6.6 (1) ???????????ftp://?????????、????LIST?????Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query (v1.0.68.441): Just a bug fix release for when the connections try to refresh after an edit. Make sure you read the Quickstart for an introduction.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.58: Fix for Issue #18296: provide "ALL" value to the -ignore switch to ignore all error and warning messages. Fix for issue #18293: if encountering EOF before a function declaration or expression is properly closed, throw an appropriate error and don't crash. Adjust the variable-renaming algorithm so it's very specific when renaming variables with the same number of references so a single source file ends up with the same minified names on different platforms. add the ability to specify kno...LogExpert: 1.4 build 4566: This release for the 1.4 version line contains various fixes which have been made some times ago. Until now these fixes were only available in the 1.5 alpha versions. It also contains a fix for: 710. Column finder (press F8 to show) Terminal server issues: Multiple sessions with same user should work now Settings Export/Import available via Settings Dialog still incomple (e.g. tab colors are not saved) maybe I change the file format one day no command line support yet (for importin...View Layout Replicator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: View Layout Replicator (1.0.1802.65): Add support for OSDP authenticationCommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8.5 - Final Release: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. FluentscriptCommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 contains a scripting language called FluentScript. Releases notes for FluentScript located at http://fluentscript.codeplex.com/wikipage?action=Edit&title=Release%20Notes&referringTitle=Documentation Fluentscript - 0.9.8.5 - Final ReleaseApplication: FluentScript Versio...SharePoint 2010 Metro UI: SharePoint 2010 Metro UI8: Please review the documentation link for how to install. Installation takes some basic knowledge of how to upload and edit SharePoint Artifact files. Please view the discussions tab for ongoing FAQsnopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.60: Highlight features & improvements: • Significant performance optimization. • Use AJAX for adding products to the cart. • New flyout mini-shopping cart. • Auto complete suggestions for product searching. • Full-Text support. • EU cookie law support. To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).THE NVL Maker: The NVL Maker Ver 3.51: http://download.codeplex.com/Download?ProjectName=nvlmaker&DownloadId=371510 ????：http://115.com/file/beoef05k#THE-NVL-Maker-ver3.51-sim.7z ????：http://www.mediafire.com/file/6tqdwj9jr6eb9qj/THENVLMakerver3.51tra.7z ======================================== ???? ======================================== 3.51 beta ???： ·?????????????????????? ·?????????，?????????0，?????????????????????? ·??????????????????????????? ·?????????????TJS????（EXP??） ·??4:3???，???????????????，??????????? ·?????????...????: ????2.0.3: 1、???????????。 2、????????。 3、????????????。 4、bug??，????。Magelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 2.0: User Right Licensing ContentType version 2.0.267.1New Projects$ME: a new kind of javascript library.NET Micro Framework Driver Library: .NET Micro Framework Driver Library This is just a library of classes that I have created that can be used by Micro Framework Devices. aishe: ?????????BoogieTools: The goal of this project is to provide editors and additional tools to improve working with the Microsoft Boogie language and tools.BWAPI-CLI: .NET wrapper for the Broodwar API (BWAPI) and Broodwar Terrain Analyzer (BWTA) written in C++/CLICoffee Survey Framework: Coffee Survey Framework is an extensible, XML-based ASP.NET 4.0 framework for building and maintaining tabular survey pages. Dauphine SmartControls for K2 blackpearl: SmartControls for K2 blackpearl simplifies the integration of K2 blackpearl processes with ASP.NET web forms. It is a collection of ASP.NET web controls with both design-time and run-time capabilities for code-less integration to K2 blackpearl processes. The underlying framework of SmartControls for K2 blackpearl can also be used to extend existing ASP.NET web controls with the same K2 blackpearl integration capabilities that it offers.Easy Full-Text Search Queries: Very lightweight class to convert user-friendly search queries into Microsoft SQL Server Full-Text Search queries. Gracefully handles errors in input query.EnvironmentCheck: A Windows Forms application which will read from an XML config a number of checks which need to be performed to verify that a server meets pre-reqs.Lindeberg edge detector: Just a simple program I wrote for 'Image processing fundamentals' course MesanAnsatte: Prosjekt for utforskning av .net. Multi-Touch Scrum tool: This is a application use to support Scrum software development, based on Microsoft Surface SDK 2.0.MyWCFService: This project is a simple explanation for WCF service, that can help you understand how the WCF works!!race4fun engine: Open source driving simulator. Modable engine for easy use. SchoolManagerMVC: School Management System, written in MVC3 with unity framework, DI unity and unit testsSharePoint Managed Metadata Claims Provider: Custom Claims Provider implementation for SharePoint. Claims Playground.SQL data access: .NET library for accessing a Microsoft SQL Server database.sqlscriptmover: Exports stored procedures, function, views, tables and triggers to individual files or imports same and attempts to create in designated database.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, August 12, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, August 12, 2012Popular ReleasesThisismyusername's codeplex page.: Run! Thunderstorm! Classic Multiplatform: The classic edition now on any device, you don't have to get the touch edition for touch screens!SharePoint Developers & Admins: SPTaxCleaner Tool - Cleaner Taxonomy Data: For more information on the tool and how to use it: SPTaxCleaner Run the tool at your own risk!BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 1.1: This release includes bug fixes from the 1.0 release for email notifications, RSS feeds, and several other issues. Please see the change log for a full list of changes. http://support.bugnetproject.com/Projects/ReleaseNotes.aspx?pid=1&m=76 Upgrade Notes The following changes to the web.config in the profile section have occurred: Removed <add name="NotificationTypes" type="String" defaultValue="Email" customProviderData="NotificationTypes;nvarchar;255" />Added <add name="ReceiveEmailNotifi...Virtual Keyboard: Virtual Keyboard v2.0 Source Code: This release has a few added keys that were missing in the earlier versions.????: ????2.0.5: 1、?????????????。RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.01: changes NEW: Added Support for Clipboard Function in Mono Version NEW: Added Support for "ImgBox.com" links FIXED: "PixHub.eu" links FIXED: "ImgChili.com" links FIXED: Kitty-Kats Forum loginPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 5): Support for Smooth Streaming SDK beta 2 Support for live playback New bitrate meter and SD/HD indicators Auto smooth streaming track restriction for snapped mode to conserve bandwidth New "Go Live" button and SeekToLive API Support for offset start times Support for Live position unique from end time Support for multiple audio streams (smooth and progressive content) Improved intellisense in JS version Support for Windows 8 RTM ADDITIONAL DOWNLOADSSmooth Streaming Client SD...Media Companion: Media Companion 3.506b: This release includes an update to the XBMC scrapers, for those who prefer to use this method. There were a number of behind-the-scene tweaks to make Media Companion compatible with the new TMDb-V3 API, so it was considered important to get it out to the users to try it out. Please report back any important issues you might find. For this reason, unless you use the XBMC scrapers, there probably isn't any real necessity to download this one! The only other minor change was one to allow the mc...Avian Mortality Detection Entry Application: Detection Entry: The most recent and up-to-date version of the Detection Entry application. Please click on the CLICKONCE link above to install.NVorbis: NVorbis v0.3: Fix Ogg page reader to correctly handle "split" packets Fix "zero-energy" packet handling Fix packet reader to always merge packets when needed Add statistics properties to VorbisReader.Stats Add multi-stream API (for Ogg files containing multiple Vorbis streams)The Ftp Library - Most simple, full-featured .NET Ftp Library: TheFtpLibrary v1.0: First version. Please report any bug and discuss how to improve this library in 'Discussion' section.VisioAutomation: Visio Power Tools 2010 (Beta): Visio Power Tools 2010 An Add-in for Visio 2010. In Beta but should be very stable. Some Cool Features Import Colors - From Kuler, ColourLovers, or manually enter RGB values Create a Document containing images of all masters in multiple stencils Toggle text case Copy All text from all shapes Export document to XHTML (with embedded SVG) Export document to XAML Updates2012-08-10 - Fixed path handling when generating the HTML stencil catalogXBMC for LCDSmartie: v 0.7.1: Changes: Version 0.7.1 - Removed unused configuration options: You can remove the user and pass section from your LCDSmartie.exe.config Version 0.7.0 - Changed JSON-Protocol to TCP: This means the plugin will run much faster and chances that LCDSmartie will stutter are minimized Note: You will have to change some settings in your LCDSmartie.exe.config, as TCP uses a different port than HTTP (9090 is default in XBMC)WPF RSS Feed Reader: WPF RSS Feed Reader 4.1: WPF RSS Feed Reader 4.1.x This application has been developed using Visual Studio 2010 with .NET 4.0 and Microsoft Expression Blend. It makes use of the MVVM Light Toolkit, more information can be found here Fixed bug when first installed - handle null reference on _proxySetting Fixed bug if trying to open error log but error log doesn't exist yet Added strings to resources Moved AsssemblyInfo centrally and linked to other projectsScutex: Scutex 4th Preview Release 0.4: This is the fourth preview release for the new Scutex 0.4 Beta. This preview release is unstable and contains some UI issues that are being worked on due to an installation of a brand new GUI. The stable version of the 0.4 Beta will be out shortly as soon as this release passes QA. The following were fixed in this release *Fixed an issue with the Upload Product dialog that would cause it to throw an exception. Known Issues *The download service logs grid does not display properlySystem.Net.FtpClient: System.Net.FtpClient 2012.08.08: 2012.08.08 Release. Several changes, see commit notes in source code section. CHM help as well as source for this release are included in the download. Remember that Windows 7 by default (and possibly older versions) will block you from opening the CHM by default due to trust settings. To get around the problem, right click on the CHM, choose properties and click the Un-block button. Please note that this will be the last release tested to compile with the .net 2.0 framework. I will be remov...Isis2 Cloud Computing Library: Isis2 Alpha V1.1.967: This is an alpha pre-release of the August 2012 version of the system. I've been testing and fixing many problems and have also added a new group "lock" API (g.Lock("lock name")/g.Unlock/g.Holder/g.SetLockPolicy); with this, Isis2 can mimic Chubby, Google's locking service. I wouldn't say that the system is entirely stable yet, and I haven't rechecked every single problem I had seen in May/June, but I think it might be good to get some additional use of this release. By now it does seem to...JSON C# Class Generator: JSON CSharp Class Generator 1.3: Support for native JSON.net serializer/deserializer (POCO) New classes layout option: nested classes Better handling of secondary classesAxiom 3D Rendering Engine: v0.8.3376.12322: Changes Since v0.8.3102.12095 ===================================================================== Updated ndoc3 binaries to fix bug Added uninstall.ps1 to nuspec packages fixed revision component in version numbering Fixed sln referencing VS 11 Updated OpenTK Assemblies Added CultureInvarient to numeric parsing Added First Visual Studio 2010 Project Template (DirectX9) Updated SharpInputSystem Assemblies Backported fix for OpenGL Auto-created window not responding to input Fixed freeInterna...DotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.3: This is a Minor Release. See the changes in the issue tracker. Minimal -- includes DotSpatial core and essential extensions Extended -- includes debugging symbols and additional extensions Tutorials are available. Just want to run the software? End user (non-programmer) version available branded as MapWindow Want to add your own feature? Develop a plugin, using the template and contribute to the extension feed (you can also write extensions that you distribute in other ways). Components ...New ProjectsAppFabric Cache Admin Tool: Appfabric Admin tool is a GUI tool provided for Cache Administration. This tool can be used for both Appfabric 1.0 and 1.1 versions.Bootstrap XML Navigation: Bootstrap XML Navigation is an ASP.NET Server Control which provide the ability to off-load your Bootstrap navigation structure to external XML files.Classic MVC: Classic MVC is an MVC framework written entirely in JScript for Microsoft's Classic ASP. Separation of concerns, controllers, partial views and more.Component Spectrum: Component Spectrum is an E-Commerce Application project.Developments in Java: Free Develop JavaDongGPrj: DongGPrjEsShop: ???????，????。。。F# Indent Visual Studio addon: The addon to show how to use SmartIndent and change the indent behavior in F# content.FizzBuzzAssignment: This is HeadSpring assignment.hotfighter: a act game!!!iSoilHotel: It is a hotel management system that using Microsoft N-Layer Architecture as the primary thoughts.KVBL (K's VB6 library) VB6????,????????.: KVBL??VB6??????、???????，????????，??????，????VB????，??????????。????：??????、???、??、????、??、????、??、??、?????、?????、???????，???????……Meteorite: c# game 3d wp7 space ship meteoriteMetro App Helpers: Helper classes for building Metro style app on Windows 8.MobileShop: Mobile shop for Iphone & AndroidMomentum: this is q project pqrticipqtion between meir and david concerning student university project on physics.OneLine: dfgfdgPreflight: Summary HereResilient FileSystemWatcher for monitoring network folders: Drop in replacement for FileSystemWatcher that works for network folders and compensate for network outages, server restarts ect.SkyPoint: A Windows Phone 7 app aimed at novice astronomers.test20120811: summary of this projectVS Unbind Source Control: Remove Source Control bindings from Visual Studio Solution and Project FilesWcf SWA (SFTI) implementation: First releasewebstart: new web tech testwinform_framework: winform_frameworkwtopenapi: wtopen sina weibo sdk txweibosdk qzone sdk

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 11, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 11, 2012Popular ReleasesSubExtractor: Release 1026: Fix: multi-colored bluray subs will no longer result in black blob for OCR Fix: dvds with no language specified will not cause exception in name creation of subtitle files Fix: Root directory Dvds will use volume label as their directory nameExtensions for Reactive Extensions (Rxx): Rxx 1.3: Please read the latest release notes for details about what's new. Related Work Items Content SummaryRxx provides the following features. See the Documentation for details. Many IObservable<T> extension methods and IEnumerable<T> extension methods. Many wrappers that convert asynchronous Framework Class Library APIs into observables. Many useful types such as ListSubject<T>, DictionarySubject<T>, CommandSubject, ViewModel, ObservableDynamicObject, Either<TLeft, TRight>, Maybe<T>, Scala...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.47: Properly output escaped characters in CSS identifiers throw an EOF error when parsing a CSS selector that doesn't end in a declaration block chased down a stack-overflow issue with really large JS sources. Needed to flatten out the AST tree for adjacent expression statements that the application merges into a single expression statement, or that already contain large, comma-separated expressions in the original source. fix issue #17569: tie together the -debug switch with the DEBUG defi...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 Metro (BETA): Player Framework for HTML/JavaScript and XAML/C# Metro Style Applications.WPF Application Framework (WAF): WAF for .NET 4.5 (Experimental): Version: 2.5.0.440 (Experimental): This is an experimental release! It can be used to investigate the new .NET Framework 4.5 features. The ideas shown in this release might come in a future release (after 2.5) of the WPF Application Framework (WAF). More information can be found in this dicussion post. Requirements .NET Framework 4.5 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 11) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 11 Professional Changelog All: Upgrade all proje...SSH.NET Library: 2012.3.9: There are still few outstanding issues I wanted to include in this release but since its been a while and there are few new features already I decided to create a new release now. New Features Add SOCKS4, SOCKS5 and HTTP Proxy support when connecting to remote server. For silverlight only IP address can be used for server address when using proxy. Add dynamic port forwarding support using ForwardedPortDynamic class. Add new ShellStream class to work with SSH Shell. Add supports for mu...EntitiesToDTOs - Entity Framework DTO Generator: EntitiesToDTOs.v2.1: Changelog Fixed template file access issue on Win7. Fix on configuration load when target project was not found and "Use project default namespace" was checked. Minor fix on loading latest configuration at startup. Minor fix in VisualStudioHelper class. DTO's properties accessors are now in one line. Improvements in PropertyHelper to get a cleaner and more performant code. Added Website project type as a not supported project type. Using Error List pane from VS IDE to show Enti...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.01.04: Major Highlights Fixed issue with loading the splash page skin in the login, privacy and terms of use pages Fixed issue when searching for words with special characters in them Fixed redirection issue when the user does not have permissions to access a resource Fixed issue when clearing the cache using the ClearHostCache() function Fixed issue when displaying the site structure in the link to page feature Fixed issue when inline editing the title of modules Fixed issue with ...Mayhem: Mayhem Developer Preview: This is the developer preview of Mayhem. Enjoy!Magelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 1.2: Medium trust compliant lot of small change for medium trust compliance full refactoring of user management refactoring of Client Refactoring of user management Magelia.WebStore.Client no longer reference Magelia.WebStore.Services.Contract Refactoring page category multi parent category added copy category feature added Refactoring page catalog copy catalog feature added variant management improvement ability to define a default variant for a variable product ability to ord...PDFsharp - A .NET library for processing PDF: PDFsharp and MigraDoc Foundation 1.32: PDFsharp and MigraDoc Foundation 1.32 is a stable version that fixes a few bugs that were found with version 1.31. Version 1.32 includes solutions for Visual Studio 2010 only (but it should be possible to add the project files to existing solutions for VS 2005 or VS 2008). Users of VS 2005 or VS 2008 can still download version 1.31 with the solutions for those versions that allow them to easily try the samples that are included. While it may create smaller PDF files than version 1.30 because...Mag-tools, Asherons Call Decal Plugin: Mag-SuitBuilder 1.0.0.1: This is a standalone windows application that can help you put together a suit of armor.Ruminate XNA 4.0 GUI: Release 1.0.7: Fixed multiple issues with the layout and input system. Fixed Scrollbars. Introduced new layout system that will be further utilized in future updates.FaST-LMM: FActored Spectrally Transformed Linear Mixed Models: FaSTLMM v1.07 Binaries for Windows and Linux: These files contain the files necessary to run FaSTLMM on Windows or Linux along with the license and users manual. To download FaSTLMM source code, please follow the changeset link located above to the Source Code tab. The FaSTLMM.Win.zip download contains both C++ and CSharp executable versions of FaSTLMM. No installer is required, just UnZip the file into a directory and run from there. Or put the installation directory on your path and run it from anywhere. The C++ version included r...Terminals: Version 2.0 - Release: Changes since version 1.9a:New art works New usability in Organize favorites window Improved usability of imports/exports and scans Large number of fixes Improvements in single instance mode Comparing November beta 4, this corrects: New application icons Doesn't show Logon error codes Fixed command line arguments exception for single instance mode Fixed detaching of tabs improved usability in detached window Fixed option settings for Capture manager Fixed system tray noti...MFCMAPI: March 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1032 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeTortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 2.3.1: bugfix releaseSense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.0.8 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.8 Community EditionMain new features:send emails to lists and libraries localize the UI with WYSIWYG string resource editor define allowed child types on content types. Our new release brings the most new features and optimizations in the history of Sense/Net Community Edition. Alongside the biggest features detailed below in this release you will find features like uploading or copy-pasting images, security enhancements, customizable login processes, customizable notificati...CommonLibrary: Code: CodePowerGUI Visual Studio Extension: PowerGUI VSX 1.5.2: Added support for PowerGUI 3.2.New ProjectsCRFSharp: CRFSharp is Conditional Random Fields implemented by .NET(C#), a machine learning algorithm for learning from labeled sequences of examples. It is widely used in Natural Language Process (NLP) tasks, for example: word breaker, postaging, named entity recognized and so on.Custom MsBuild Tasks: An attempt to write a custom task for MsBuild. Needed a task to remove comments from web.config. Downr: Downr is a super simple UI which forces the computer to shutdown after a certain time of the day. Included is a .ADMX and a .ADML file for controlling Downr through group policies.Excel Report: Easiest way to create reports in Microsoft Excel XML format using XML data and XSLThcr38550: hcr3850 TESTModular MediaStreamSource: Modular MediaStreamSource project. paidmailclicker: .Pivottable web part: Provide a highly configurable AJAX PivotTable for Display purposes across webs or across sites. SharePoint YouTube Video Web Part Suite: The available Web Parts helps you to integarte Videos from YouTube into your SharePoint site. In contrast to the out of the box Media Web part, the new Web Parts are designed especial for YouTube videos. Connect your YouTube channel and choose the videos you want to see.ShareTest: This C# project offers a small lightweight framework (and also guidance) on how it's possible to test SharePoint using selenium in a reusable and clean way. The project follows the "Page Object" design pattern, so that instead of having to parse css, ids, xpath etc, directly in your test cases, you can now deal with c# page objects to make testing more readable and reusable. Note! This project is only one week old and I am actively using it to test DocRead, so I will refine and improve as ...Simeranya Project: Simeranya ProjectSlime Keeper: A game where you buy and sell slimes. They tend to multiply on their own using simple genetics!SunamoBlogConverter: The program for converting export formats between Wordpress and Blogger with further work with them. The program converts yet only posts without comments and pages. The program was tested on parse my blog with 1,450 posts. Essential parts of the program is in EN,remaining in CS.webpart: Free webparts for Sharepoint 2007 and 2010WPF Shapes: A library of ready to use WPF shapes, such as hexagons, speech bubbles, triangles etc.YoutubeExtractor: YoutubeExtractor is a library for .NET, written in C#, to extract the download link from YouTube videos, download them, and/or extract their audio track. It is based on the youtubeFisher project (http://youtubefisher.codeplex.com/) and aims to create an API instead of a GUI application.??? "??????": ?????? ??? ???????????????? ??????: ??????????? ???????? ?????? ???????????? ??????

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• A Look Inside JSR 360 - CLDC 8

  - by Roger Brinkley

  If you didn't notice during JavaOne the Java Micro Edition took a major step forward in its consolidation with Java Standard Edition when JSR 360 was proposed to the JCP community. Over the last couple of years there has been a focus to move Java ME back in line with it's big brother Java SE. We see evidence of this in JCP itself which just recently merged the ME and SE/EE Executive Committees into a single Java Executive Committee. But just before that occurred JSR 360 was proposed and approved for development on October 29. So let's take a look at what changes are now being proposed. In a way JSR 360 is returning back to the original roots of Java ME when it was first introduced. It was indeed a subset of the JDK 4 language, but as Java progressed many of the language changes were not implemented in the Java ME. Back then the tradeoff was still a functionality, footprint trade off but the major market was feature phones. Today the market has changed and CLDC, while it will still target feature phones, will have it primary emphasis on embedded devices like wireless modules, smart meters, health care monitoring and other M2M devices. The major changes will come in three areas: language feature changes, library changes, and consolidating the Generic Connection Framework.  There have been three Java SE versions that have been implemented since JavaME was first developed so the language feature changes can be divided into changes that came in JDK 5 and those in JDK 7, which mostly consist of the project Coin changes. There were no language changes in JDK 6 but the changes from JDK 5 are: Assertions - Assertions enable you to test your assumptions about your program. For example, if you write a method that calculates the speed of a particle, you might assert that the calculated speed is less than the speed of light. In the example code below if the interval isn't between 0 and and 1,00 the an error of "Invalid value?" would be thrown. private void setInterval(int interval) { assert interval > 0 && interval <= 1000 : "Invalid value?" } Generics - Generics add stability to your code by making more of your bugs detectable at compile time. Code that uses generics has many benefits over non-generic code with: Stronger type checks at compile time. Elimination of casts. Enabling programming to implement generic algorithms. Enhanced for Loop - the enhanced for loop allows you to iterate through a collection without having to create an Iterator or without having to calculate beginning and end conditions for a counter variable. The enhanced for loop is the easiest of the new features to immediately incorporate in your code. In this tip you will see how the enhanced for loop replaces more traditional ways of sequentially accessing elements in a collection. void processList(Vector<string> list) { for (String item : list) { ... Autoboxing/Unboxing - This facility eliminates the drudgery of manual conversion between primitive types, such as int and wrapper types, such as Integer.  Hashtable<Integer, string=""> data = new Hashtable<>(); void add(int id, String value) { data.put(id, value); } Enumeration - Prior to JDK 5 enumerations were not typesafe, had no namespace, were brittle because they were compile time constants, and provided no informative print values. JDK 5 added support for enumerated types as a full-fledged class (dubbed an enum type). In addition to solving all the problems mentioned above, it allows you to add arbitrary methods and fields to an enum type, to implement arbitrary interfaces, and more. Enum types provide high-quality implementations of all the Object methods. They are Comparable and Serializable, and the serial form is designed to withstand arbitrary changes in the enum type. enum Season {WINTER, SPRING, SUMMER, FALL}; } private Season season; void setSeason(Season newSeason) { season = newSeason; } Varargs - Varargs eliminates the need for manually boxing up argument lists into an array when invoking methods that accept variable-length argument lists. The three periods after the final parameter's type indicate that the final argument may be passed as an array or as a sequence of arguments. Varargs can be used only in the final argument position. void warning(String format, String... parameters) { .. for(String p : parameters) { ...process(p);... } ... } Static Imports -The static import construct allows unqualified access to static members without inheriting from the type containing the static members. Instead, the program imports the members either individually or en masse. Once the static members have been imported, they may be used without qualification. The static import declaration is analogous to the normal import declaration. Where the normal import declaration imports classes from packages, allowing them to be used without package qualification, the static import declaration imports static members from classes, allowing them to be used without class qualification. import static data.Constants.RATIO; ... double r = Math.cos(RATIO * theta); Annotations - Annotations provide data about a program that is not part of the program itself. They have no direct effect on the operation of the code they annotate. There are a number of uses for annotations including information for the compiler, compiler-time and deployment-time processing, and run-time processing. They can be applied to a program's declarations of classes, fields, methods, and other program elements. @Deprecated public void clear(); The language changes from JDK 7 are little more familiar as they are mostly the changes from Project Coin: String in switch - Hey it only took us 18 years but the String class can be used in the expression of a switch statement. Fortunately for us it won't take that long for JavaME to adopt it. switch (arg) { case "-data": ... case "-out": ... Binary integral literals and underscores in numeric literals - Largely for readability, the integral types (byte, short, int, and long) can also be expressed using the binary number system. and any number of underscore characters (_) can appear anywhere between digits in a numerical literal. byte flags = 0b01001111; long mask = 0xfff0_ff08_4fff_0fffl; Multi-catch and more precise rethrow - A single catch block can handle more than one type of exception. In addition, the compiler performs more precise analysis of rethrown exceptions than earlier releases of Java SE. This enables you to specify more specific exception types in the throws clause of a method declaration. catch (IOException | InterruptedException ex) { logger.log(ex); throw ex; } Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation - Otherwise known as the diamond operator, the type arguments required to invoke the constructor of a generic class can be replaced with an empty set of type parameters (<>) as long as the compiler can infer the type arguments from the context.  map = new Hashtable<>(); Try-with-resource statement - The try-with-resources statement is a try statement that declares one or more resources. A resource is an object that must be closed after the program is finished with it. The try-with-resources statement ensures that each resource is closed at the end of the statement.  try (DataInputStream is = new DataInputStream(...)) { return is.readDouble(); } Simplified varargs method invocation - The Java compiler generates a warning at the declaration site of a varargs method or constructor with a non-reifiable varargs formal parameter. Java SE 7 introduced a compiler option -Xlint:varargs and the annotations @SafeVarargs and @SuppressWarnings({"unchecked", "varargs"}) to supress these warnings. On the library side there are new features that will be added to satisfy the language requirements above and some to improve the currently available set of APIs.  The library changes include: Collections update - New Collection, List, Set and Map, Iterable and Iteratator as well as implementations including Hashtable and Vector. Most of the work is too support generics String - New StringBuilder and CharSequence as well as a Stirng formatter. The javac compiler  now uses the the StringBuilder instead of String Buffer. Since StringBuilder is synchronized there is a performance increase which has necessitated the wahat String constructor works. Comparable interface - The comparable interface works with Collections, making it easier to reuse. Try with resources - Closeable and AutoCloseable Annotations - While support for Annotations is provided it will only be a compile time support. SuppressWarnings, Deprecated, Override NIO - There is a subset of NIO Buffer that have been in use on the of the graphics packages and needs to be pulled in and also support for NIO File IO subset. Platform extensibility via Service Providers (ServiceLoader) - ServiceLoader interface dos late bindings of interface to existing implementations. It helpe to package an interface and behavior of the implementation at a later point in time.Provider classes must have a zero-argument constructor so that they can be instantiated during loading. They are located and instantiated on demand and are identified via a provider-configuration file in the METAINF/services resource directory. This is a mechansim from Java SE. import com.XYZ.ServiceA; ServiceLoader<ServiceA> sl1= new ServiceLoader(ServiceA.class); Resources: META-INF/services/com.XYZ.ServiceA: ServiceAProvider1 ServiceAProvider2 ServiceAProvider3 META-INF/services/ServiceB: ServiceBProvider1 ServiceBProvider2 From JSR - I would rather use this list I think The Generic Connection Framework (GCF) was previously specified in a number of different JSRs including CLDC, MIDP, CDC 1.2, and JSR 197. JSR 360 represents a rare opportunity to consolidated and reintegrate parts that were duplicated in other specifications into a single specification, upgrade the APIs as well provide new functionality. The proposal is to specify a combined GCF specification that can be used with Java ME or Java SE and be backwards compatible with previous implementations. Because of size limitations as well as the complexity of the some features like InvokeDynamic and Unicode 6 will not be included. Additionally, any language or library changes in JDK 8 will be not be included. On the upside, with all the changes being made, backwards compatibility will still be maintained. JSR 360 is a major step forward for Java ME in terms of platform modernization, language alignment, and embedded support. If you're interested in following the progress of this JSR see the JSR's java.net project for details of the email lists, discussions groups.

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• PostgreSQL, Ubuntu, NetBeans IDE (Part 3)

  - by Geertjan

  To complete the picture, let's use the traditional (that is, old) Hibernate mechanism, i.e., via XML files, rather than via the annotations shown yesterday. It's definitely trickier, with many more places where typos can occur, but that's why it's the old mechanism. I do not recommend this approach. I recommend the approach shown yesterday. The other players in this scenario include PostgreSQL, as outlined in the previous blog entries in this series. Here's the structure of the module, replacing the code shown yesterday: Here's the Employee class, notice that it has no annotations: import java.io.Serializable; import java.util.Date; public class Employees implements Serializable {         private int employeeId;     private String firstName;     private String lastName;     private Date dateOfBirth;     private String phoneNumber;     private String junk;     public int getEmployeeId() {         return employeeId;     }     public void setEmployeeId(int employeeId) {         this.employeeId = employeeId;     }     public String getFirstName() {         return firstName;     }     public void setFirstName(String firstName) {         this.firstName = firstName;     }     public String getLastName() {         return lastName;     }     public void setLastName(String lastName) {         this.lastName = lastName;     }     public Date getDateOfBirth() {         return dateOfBirth;     }     public void setDateOfBirth(Date dateOfBirth) {         this.dateOfBirth = dateOfBirth;     }     public String getPhoneNumber() {         return phoneNumber;     }     public void setPhoneNumber(String phoneNumber) {         this.phoneNumber = phoneNumber;     }     public String getJunk() {         return junk;     }     public void setJunk(String junk) {         this.junk = junk;     } } And here's the Hibernate configuration file: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE hibernate-configuration PUBLIC       "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Configuration DTD 3.0//EN"     "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-configuration-3.0.dtd"> <hibernate-configuration>     <session-factory>         <property name="hibernate.connection.driver_class">org.postgresql.Driver</property>         <property name="hibernate.connection.url">jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/smithdb</property>         <property name="hibernate.connection.username">smith</property>         <property name="hibernate.connection.password">smith</property>         <property name="hibernate.connection.pool_size">1</property>         <property name="hibernate.default_schema">public"</property>         <property name="hibernate.transaction.factory_class">org.hibernate.transaction.JDBCTransactionFactory</property>         <property name="hibernate.current_session_context_class">thread</property>         <property name="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect</property>         <property name="hibernate.show_sql">true</property>         <mapping resource="org/db/viewer/employees.hbm.xml"/>     </session-factory> </hibernate-configuration> Next, the Hibernate mapping file: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE hibernate-mapping PUBLIC       "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Mapping DTD 3.0//EN"       "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-mapping-3.0.dtd"> <hibernate-mapping>     <class name="org.db.viewer.Employees"            table="employees"            schema="public"            catalog="smithdb">         <id name="employeeId" column="employee_id" type="int">             <generator class="increment"/>         </id>         <property name="firstName" column="first_name" type="string" />         <property name="lastName" column="last_name" type="string" />         <property name="dateOfBirth" column="date_of_birth" type="date" />         <property name="phoneNumber" column="phone_number" type="string" />         <property name="junk" column="junk" type="string" />             </class>     </hibernate-mapping> Then, the HibernateUtil file, for providing access to the Hibernate SessionFactory: import java.net.URL; import org.hibernate.cfg.AnnotationConfiguration; import org.hibernate.SessionFactory; public class HibernateUtil {     private static final SessionFactory sessionFactory;         static {         try {             // Create the SessionFactory from standard (hibernate.cfg.xml)             // config file.             String res = "org/db/viewer/employees.cfg.xml";             URL myURL = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResource(res);             sessionFactory = new AnnotationConfiguration().configure(myURL).buildSessionFactory();         } catch (Throwable ex) {             // Log the exception.             System.err.println("Initial SessionFactory creation failed." + ex);             throw new ExceptionInInitializerError(ex);         }     }         public static SessionFactory getSessionFactory() {         return sessionFactory;     }     } Finally, the "createKeys" in the ChildFactory: @Override protected boolean createKeys(List list) {     Session session = HibernateUtil.getSessionFactory().getCurrentSession();     Transaction transac = null;     try {         transac = session.beginTransaction();         Query query = session.createQuery("from Employees");         list.addAll(query.list());     } catch (HibernateException he) {         Exceptions.printStackTrace(he);         if (transac != null){             transac.rollback();         }     } finally {         session.close();     }     return true; } Note that Constantine Drabo has a similar article here. Run the application and the result should be the same as yesterday.

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• Why unhandled exceptions are useful

  - by Simon Cooper

  It’s the bane of most programmers’ lives – an unhandled exception causes your application or webapp to crash, an ugly dialog gets displayed to the user, and they come complaining to you. Then, somehow, you need to figure out what went wrong. Hopefully, you’ve got a log file, or some other way of reporting unhandled exceptions (obligatory employer plug: SmartAssembly reports an application’s unhandled exceptions straight to you, along with the entire state of the stack and variables at that point). If not, you have to try and replicate it yourself, or do some psychic debugging to try and figure out what’s wrong. However, it’s good that the program crashed. Or, more precisely, it is correct behaviour. An unhandled exception in your application means that, somewhere in your code, there is an assumption that you made that is actually invalid. Coding assumptions Let me explain a bit more. Every method, every line of code you write, depends on implicit assumptions that you have made. Take this following simple method, that copies a collection to an array and includes an item if it isn’t in the collection already, using a supplied IEqualityComparer: public static T[] ToArrayWithItem( ICollection<T> coll, T obj, IEqualityComparer<T> comparer) { // check if the object is in collection already // using the supplied comparer foreach (var item in coll) { if (comparer.Equals(item, obj)) { // it's in the collection already // simply copy the collection to an array // and return it T[] array = new T[coll.Count]; coll.CopyTo(array, 0); return array; } } // not in the collection // copy coll to an array, and add obj to it // then return it T[] array = new T[coll.Count+1]; coll.CopyTo(array, 0); array[array.Length-1] = obj; return array; } What’s all the assumptions made by this fairly simple bit of code? coll is never null comparer is never null coll.CopyTo(array, 0) will copy all the items in the collection into the array, in the order defined for the collection, starting at the first item in the array. The enumerator for coll returns all the items in the collection, in the order defined for the collection comparer.Equals returns true if the items are equal (for whatever definition of ‘equal’ the comparer uses), false otherwise comparer.Equals, coll.CopyTo, and the coll enumerator will never throw an exception or hang for any possible input and any possible values of T coll will have less than 4 billion items in it (this is a built-in limit of the CLR) array won’t be more than 2GB, both on 32 and 64-bit systems, for any possible values of T (again, a limit of the CLR) There are no threads that will modify coll while this method is running and, more esoterically: The C# compiler will compile this code to IL according to the C# specification The CLR and JIT compiler will produce machine code to execute the IL on the user’s computer The computer will execute the machine code correctly That’s a lot of assumptions. Now, it could be that all these assumptions are valid for the situations this method is called. But if this does crash out with an exception, or crash later on, then that shows one of the assumptions has been invalidated somehow. An unhandled exception shows that your code is running in a situation which you did not anticipate, and there is something about how your code runs that you do not understand. Debugging the problem is the process of learning more about the new situation and how your code interacts with it. When you understand the problem, the solution is (usually) obvious. The solution may be a one-line fix, the rewrite of a method or class, or a large-scale refactoring of the codebase, but whatever it is, the fix for the crash will incorporate the new information you’ve gained about your own code, along with the modified assumptions. When code is running with an assumption or invariant it depended on broken, then the result is ‘undefined behaviour’. Anything can happen, up to and including formatting the entire disk or making the user’s computer sentient and start doing a good impression of Skynet. You might think that those can’t happen, but at Halting problem levels of generality, as soon as an assumption the code depended on is broken, the program can do anything. That is why it’s important to fail-fast and stop the program as soon as an invariant is broken, to minimise the damage that is done. What does this mean in practice? To start with, document and check your assumptions. As with most things, there is a level of judgement required. How you check and document your assumptions depends on how the code is used (that’s some more assumptions you’ve made), how likely it is a method will be passed invalid arguments or called in an invalid state, how likely it is the assumptions will be broken, how expensive it is to check the assumptions, and how bad things are likely to get if the assumptions are broken. Now, some assumptions you can assume unless proven otherwise. You can safely assume the C# compiler, CLR, and computer all run the method correctly, unless you have evidence of a compiler, CLR or processor bug. You can also assume that interface implementations work the way you expect them to; implementing an interface is more than simply declaring methods with certain signatures in your type. The behaviour of those methods, and how they work, is part of the interface contract as well. For example, for members of a public API, it is very important to document your assumptions and check your state before running the bulk of the method, throwing ArgumentException, ArgumentNullException, InvalidOperationException, or another exception type as appropriate if the input or state is wrong. For internal and private methods, it is less important. If a private method expects collection items in a certain order, then you don’t necessarily need to explicitly check it in code, but you can add comments or documentation specifying what state you expect the collection to be in at a certain point. That way, anyone debugging your code can immediately see what’s wrong if this does ever become an issue. You can also use DEBUG preprocessor blocks and Debug.Assert to document and check your assumptions without incurring a performance hit in release builds. On my coding soapbox… A few pet peeves of mine around assumptions. Firstly, catch-all try blocks: try { ... } catch { } A catch-all hides exceptions generated by broken assumptions, and lets the program carry on in an unknown state. Later, an exception is likely to be generated due to further broken assumptions due to the unknown state, causing difficulties when debugging as the catch-all has hidden the original problem. It’s much better to let the program crash straight away, so you know where the problem is. You should only use a catch-all if you are sure that any exception generated in the try block is safe to ignore. That’s a pretty big ask! Secondly, using as when you should be casting. Doing this: (obj as IFoo).Method(); or this: IFoo foo = obj as IFoo; ... foo.Method(); when you should be doing this: ((IFoo)obj).Method(); or this: IFoo foo = (IFoo)obj; ... foo.Method(); There’s an assumption here that obj will always implement IFoo. If it doesn’t, then by using as instead of a cast you’ve turned an obvious InvalidCastException at the point of the cast that will probably tell you what type obj actually is, into a non-obvious NullReferenceException at some later point that gives you no information at all. If you believe obj is always an IFoo, then say so in code! Let it fail-fast if not, then it’s far easier to figure out what’s wrong. Thirdly, document your assumptions. If an algorithm depends on a non-trivial relationship between several objects or variables, then say so. A single-line comment will do. Don’t leave it up to whoever’s debugging your code after you to figure it out. Conclusion It’s better to crash out and fail-fast when an assumption is broken. If it doesn’t, then there’s likely to be further crashes along the way that hide the original problem. Or, even worse, your program will be running in an undefined state, where anything can happen. Unhandled exceptions aren’t good per-se, but they give you some very useful information about your code that you didn’t know before. And that can only be a good thing.

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• Code Behaviour via Unit Tests

  - by Dewald Galjaard

  Normal 0 false false false EN-ZA X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Some four months ago my car started acting up. Symptoms included a sputtering as my car’s computer switched between gears intermittently. Imagine building up speed, then when you reach 80km/h the car magically and mysteriously decide to switch back to third or even second gear. Clearly it was confused! I managed to track down a technician, an expert in his field to help me out. As he fitted his handheld computer to some hidden port under the dash, he started to explain “These cars are quite intelligent, you know. When they sense something is wrong they run in a restrictive program which probably account for how you managed to drive here in the first place...”  I was surprised and thought this was certainly going to be an interesting test drive. The car ran smoothly down the first couple of stretches as the technician ran through routine checks. Then he said “Ok, all looking good. We need to start testing aspects of the gearbox. Inside the gearbox there are a couple of sensors. One of them is a speed sensor which talks to the computer, which in turn will decide which gear to switch to. The restrictive program avoid these sensors altogether and allow the computer to obtain its input from other [non-affected] sources”. Then, as soon as he forced the speed sensor to come back online the symptoms and ill behaviour re-emerged... What an incredible analogy for getting into a discussion on unit testing software? Besides I should probably put my ill fortune to some good use, right? This example provide a lot of insight into how and why we should conduct unit tests when writing code. More importantly, it captures what is easily and unfortunately often the most overlooked goal of writing unit tests by those new to the art and those who oppose it alike - The goal of writing unit tests is to test the behaviour of our code under predefined conditions. Although it is very possible to test the intrinsic workings of each and every component in your code, writing several tests for each method in practise will soon prove to be an exhausting and ultimately fruitless exercise given the certain and ever changing nature of business requirements. Consequently it is true and quite possible whilst conducting proper unit tests, to call any single method several times as you examine and contemplate different scenarios. Let’s write some code to demonstrate what I mean. In my example I make use of the Moq framework and NUnit to create my tests. Truly you can use whatever you’re comfortable with. First we’ll create an ISpeedSensor interface. This is to represent the speed sensor located in the gearbox.  Then we’ll create a Gearbox class which we’ll pass to a constructor when we instantiate an object of type Computer. All three are described below.   ISpeedSensor.cs namespace AutomaticVehicle {     public interface ISpeedSensor     {         int ReportCurrentSpeed();     } }   Gearbox.cs namespace AutomaticVehicle {      public class Gearbox     {         private ISpeedSensor _speedSensor;           public Gearbox( ISpeedSensor gearboxSpeedSensor )         {             _speedSensor = gearboxSpeedSensor;         }         /// <summary>         /// This method obtain it's reading from the speed sensor.         /// </summary>         /// <returns></returns>         public int ReportCurrentSpeed()         {             return _speedSensor.ReportCurrentSpeed();         }     } } Computer.cs namespace AutomaticVehicle {     public class Computer     {         private Gearbox _gearbox;         public Computer( Gearbox gearbox )         {                     }          public int GetCurrentSpeed()         {             return _gearbox.ReportCurrentSpeed( );         }     } } Since this post is about Unit testing, that is exactly what we’ll create next. Create a second project in your solution. I called mine AutomaticVehicleTests and I immediately referenced the respective nunit, moq and AutomaticVehicle dll’s. We’re going to write a test to examine what happens inside the Computer class. ComputerTests.cs namespace AutomaticVehicleTests {     [TestFixture]     public class ComputerTests     {         [Test]         public void Computer_Gearbox_SpeedSensor_DoesThrow()         {             // Mock ISpeedSensor in gearbox             Mock< ISpeedSensor > speedSensor = new Mock< ISpeedSensor >( );             speedSensor.Setup( n => n.ReportCurrentSpeed() ).Throws<Exception>();             Gearbox gearbox = new Gearbox( speedSensor.Object );               // Create Computer instance to test it's behaviour  towards an exception in gearbox             Computer carComputer = new Computer( gearbox );             // For simplicity let’s assume for now the car only travels at 60 km/h.             Assert.AreEqual( 60, carComputer.GetCurrentSpeed( ) );          }     } }   What is happening in this test? We have created a mocked object using the ISpeedsensor interface which we've passed to our Gearbox object. Notice that I created the mocked object using an interface, not the implementation. I’ll talk more about this in future posts but in short I do this to accentuate the fact that I'm not not really concerned with how SpeedSensor work internally at this particular point in time. Next I’ve gone ahead and created a scenario where I’ve declared the speed sensor in Gearbox to be faulty by forcing it to throw an exception should we ask Gearbox to report on its current speed. Sneaky, sneaky. This test is a simulation of how things may behave in the real world. Inevitability things break, whether it’s caused by mechanical failure, some logical error on your part or a fellow developer which didn’t consult the documentation (or the lack thereof ) - whether you’re calling a speed sensor, making a call to a database, calling a web service or just trying to write a file to disk. It’s a scenario I’ve created and this test is about how the code within the Computer instance will behave towards any such error as I’ve depicted. Now, if you’ve followed closely in my final assert method you would have noticed I did something quite unexpected. I might be getting ahead of myself now but I’m testing to see if the value returned is equal to what I expect it to be under perfect conditions – I’m not testing to see if an error has been thrown! Why is that? Well, in short this is TDD. Test Driven Development is about first writing your test to define the result we want, then to go back and change the implementation within your class to obtain the desired output (I need to make sure I can drive back to the repair shop. Remember? ) So let’s go ahead and run our test as is. It’s fails miserably... Good! Let’s go back to our Computer class and make a small change to the GetCurrentSpeed method.   Computer.cs public int GetCurrentSpeed() {   try   {     return _gearbox.ReportCurrentSpeed( );   }   catch   {     RunRestrictiveProgram( );   } }     This is a simple solution, I know, but it does provide a way to allow for different behaviour. You’re more than welcome to provide an implementation for RunRestrictiveProgram should you feel the need to. It's not within the scope of this post or related to the point I'm trying to make. What is important is to notice how the focus has shifted in our approach from how things can break - to how things behave when broken.   Happy coding!

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• Contract Work - Lessons Learned

  - by samerpaul

  I thought I would write a post of a different nature today, but still relevant to the tech world. I do a lot of contract jobs myself and really enjoy it. It's nice to keep jumping from project to project, and not having to go to an office or keep regular hours, etc. I really enjoy it. I have learned a lot in the past few years of doing it (both from experience and from help given to me from others, and the internet) so I thought I'd share some of that knowledge/experience today.So here's my own personal "lesson's learned" that hopefully will help you if you find yourself doing contract work:Should I take the job?Ok, so this is the first step. Assuming you were given sufficient information about what they want, then you should really think about what you're capable of doing and whether or not you should take this job. Personally, my rule is, if I know it's possible, I'll say yes, even if I don't yet know how to do it. That's because the internet is such a great help, it would be rare to run into an issue that you can't figure out with some help. So if your clients are asking for something that you don't yet know how to program, but you know you can do it on the platform then go for it. How else are you going to learn?Use this rule with some limitation, however. If you're really lacking the expertise or foundation in something, then unless you have tons of time to complete the project, then I wouldn't say yes. For example, I haven't personally done any 3d/openGL programming yet so I wouldn't say yes to a project that extensively uses it. OK, so I want the job, but how much do I charge?This part can be tricky. There is no set formula really, but I have some tips for pricing that will hopefully give you a better idea on how to confidently ask your price and have them accept. Here are some personal guidelinesHow much time do you have to complete the project? If it's shorter than average, then charge more. You can even make a subtle note about this (or not so subtle if they still don't get it.) If it seems too short of a time (i.e. near impossible to complete), be sure to say that. It looks bad to promise a time that you can't keep--and it makes it less likely for them to return to you for work.Your Hourly rate: How long have you been working in that language? Do you have existing projects to back you up? Or previous contacts that can vouch for your work? Are there very few people with your particular skill set? All of these things will lend themselves to setting an hourly rate. I'd also try out a quick google search of what your line of work is, to see what the industry standard is at that point in time.I wouldn't price too low, because you want to make your time worth it. You also want them to feel like they're paying for quality work (assuming you can deliver it :) ). Finally, think about your client. If it's a small business, then don't price it too high if you want the job. If it's an enterprise (like a Fortune company), then don't be afraid to price higher. They have the budget for it.Fixed price: If they want a fixed price project, then you need to think about how many hours it will take you to complete it and multiply it by the hourly rate you set for yourself. Then, honestly, I would add 10-20% on top of that. Why? Because nothing ever works exactly how you want it to. There are lots of times that something "trivial" is way harder than it should be, or something that "should work" doesn't for hours and it eats away at your hourly rate. I can't count the number of times I encountered a logical bug that took away an entire's day work because debuggers don't help in those cases. By adding that padding in, it's still OK to have those days where you don't get as much done as you want. And another useful tip: Depending on your client, and the scope, you most likely want to set that you both sign off on a specification sheet before doing any work, and that any changes will result in a re-evaulation of the price. This is to help protect you from being handed a huge new addition to the project half-way in, without any extra payment.Scope of project: Finally, is it a huge project? Is it really small/fast? This affects how much your client will be willing to pay. If it sounds big, they will be willing to pay more for it. If it seems really small, then you won't be able to get away with a large asking price (as easily).Ok, I priced it, now what?So now that you have the price, you want to make sure it feels justified to your client. I never set a price before I can really think about everything. For example, if you're still in your introduction phase, and they want a price, don't give one! Just comment that you will send them a proposal sheet with all the features outlined, and a price for everything. You don't want to shout out a low number and then deliver something that is way higher. You also don't want to shock them with a big number before they feel like they are getting a great product.Make up a proposal document in a word editor. Personally, I leave the price till the very end. Why? Because by the time they reach the end, you've already discussed all the great features you plan to implement, and how it's the best product they'll ever use, etc etc...so your price comes off as a steal! If you hit them up front with a price, they will read through the document with a negative bias. Think about those commercials on TV. They always go on about their product, then at the end, ask "What would you pay for something like this? $100? $50? How about $20!!". This is not by accident.Scenario: I finished the job way earlier than expectedYou have two options then. You can either polish the hell out of the application, and even throw in a few bonus features (assuming they are in-line with the customer's needs) or you can sit and wait on it until you near your deadline. Why don't you want to turn it in too early? Because you should treat that extra time as a surplus. If you said it is going to take you 3 weeks, and it took you only 1, you have a surplus of 2 weeks. I personally don't want to let them know that I can do a 3 week project in 1 week. Why not? Because that may not always be the case! I may later have a 3 week project that takes all 3 weeks, but if I set a precedent of delivering super early, then the pressure is on for that longer project. It also makes it harder to quote longer times if you keep delivering too early.Feel free to deliver early, but again, don't do it too early. They may also wonder why they paid you for 3 weeks of work if you're done in 1. They may further wonder if the product sucks, or what is wrong with it, if it's done so early, etc.I would just polish the application. Everyone loves polish in their applications. The smallest details are what make an application go from "functional" to "fantastic". And since you are still delivering on time, then they are still going to be very happy with you.Scenario: It's taking way too long to finish this, and the deadline is nearing/here!So this is not a fun scenario to be in, but it'll happen. Sometimes the scope of the project gets out of hand. The best policy here is OPENNESS/HONESTY. Tell them that the project is taking longer than expected, and give a reasonable time for when you think you'll have it done. I typically explain it in a way that makes it sound like it isn't something that I did wrong, but it's just something about the nature of the project. This really goes for any scenario, to be honest. Just continue to stay open and communicative about your progress. This doesn't mean that you should email them every five minutes (unless they want you to), but it does mean that maybe every few days or once a week, give them an update on where you're at, and what's next. They'll be happy to know they are paying for progress, and it'll make it easier to ask for an extension when something goes wrong, because they know that you've been working on it all along.Final tips and thoughts:In general, contract work is really fun and rewarding. It's nice to learn new things all the time, as mandated by the project ,and to challenge yourself to do things you may not have done before. The key is to build a great relationship with your clients for future work, and for recommendations. I am always very honest with them and I never promise something I can't deliver. Again, under promise, over deliver!I hope this has proved helpful!Cheers,samerpaul

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• When someone deletes a shared data source in SSRS

  - by Rob Farley

  SQL Server Reporting Services plays nicely. You can have things in the catalogue that get shared. You can have Reports that have Links, Datasets that can be used across different reports, and Data Sources that can be used in a variety of ways too. So if you find that someone has deleted a shared data source, you potentially have a bit of a horror story going on. And this works for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday theme, hosted by Nick Haslam, who wants to hear about horror stories. I don’t write about LobsterPot client horror stories, so I’m writing about a situation that a fellow MVP friend asked me about recently instead. The best thing to do is to grab a recent backup of the ReportServer database, restore it somewhere, and figure out what’s changed. But of course, this isn’t always possible. And it’s much nicer to help someone with this kind of thing, rather than to be trying to fix it yourself when you’ve just deleted the wrong data source. Unfortunately, it lets you delete data sources, without trying to scream that the data source is shared across over 400 reports in over 100 folders, as was the case for my friend’s colleague. So, suddenly there’s a big problem – lots of reports are failing, and the time to turn it around is small. You probably know which data source has been deleted, but getting the shared data source back isn’t the hard part (that’s just a connection string really). The nasty bit is all the re-mapping, to get those 400 reports working again. I know from exploring this kind of stuff in the past that the ReportServer database (using its default name) has a table called dbo.Catalog to represent the catalogue, and that Reports are stored here. However, the information about what data sources these deployed reports are configured to use is stored in a different table, dbo.DataSource. You could be forgiven for thinking that shared data sources would live in this table, but they don’t – they’re catalogue items just like the reports. Let’s have a look at the structure of these two tables (although if you’re reading this because you have a disaster, feel free to skim past). Frustratingly, there doesn’t seem to be a Books Online page for this information, sorry about that. I’m also not going to look at all the columns, just ones that I find interesting enough to mention, and that are related to the problem at hand. These fields are consistent all the way through to SQL Server 2012 – there doesn’t seem to have been any changes here for quite a while. dbo.Catalog The Primary Key is ItemID. It’s a uniqueidentifier. I’m not going to comment any more on that. A minor nice point about using GUIDs in unfamiliar databases is that you can more easily figure out what’s what. But foreign keys are for that too… Path, Name and ParentID tell you where in the folder structure the item lives. Path isn’t actually required – you could’ve done recursive queries to get there. But as that would be quite painful, I’m more than happy for the Path column to be there. Path contains the Name as well, incidentally. Type tells you what kind of item it is. Some examples are 1 for a folder and 2 a report. 4 is linked reports, 5 is a data source, 6 is a report model. I forget the others for now (but feel free to put a comment giving the full list if you know it). Content is an image field, remembering that image doesn’t necessarily store images – these days we’d rather use varbinary(max), but even in SQL Server 2012, this field is still image. It stores the actual item definition in binary form, whether it’s actually an image, a report, whatever. LinkSourceID is used for Linked Reports, and has a self-referencing foreign key (allowing NULL, of course) back to ItemID. Parameter is an ntext field containing XML for the parameters of the report. Not sure why this couldn’t be a separate table, but I guess that’s just the way it goes. This field gets changed when the default parameters get changed in Report Manager. There is nothing in dbo.Catalog that describes the actual data sources that the report uses. The default data sources would be part of the Content field, as they are defined in the RDL, but when you deploy reports, you typically choose to NOT replace the data sources. Anyway, they’re not in this table. Maybe it was already considered a bit wide to throw in another ntext field, I’m not sure. They’re in dbo.DataSource instead. dbo.DataSource The Primary key is DSID. Yes it’s a uniqueidentifier... ItemID is a foreign key reference back to dbo.Catalog Fields such as ConnectionString, Prompt, UserName and Password do what they say on the tin, storing information about how to connect to the particular source in question. Link is a uniqueidentifier, which refers back to dbo.Catalog. This is used when a data source within a report refers back to a shared data source, rather than embedding the connection information itself. You’d think this should be enforced by foreign key, but it’s not. It does allow NULLs though. Flags this is an int, and I’ll come back to this. When a Data Source gets deleted out of dbo.Catalog, you might assume that it would be disallowed if there are references to it from dbo.DataSource. Well, you’d be wrong. And not because of the lack of a foreign key either. Deleting anything from the catalogue is done by calling a stored procedure called dbo.DeleteObject. You can look at the definition in there – it feels very much like the kind of Delete stored procedures that many people write, the kind of thing that means they don’t need to worry about allowing cascading deletes with foreign keys – because the stored procedure does the lot. Except that it doesn’t quite do that. If it deleted everything on a cascading delete, we’d’ve lost all the data sources as configured in dbo.DataSource, and that would be bad. This is fine if the ItemID from dbo.DataSource hooks in – if the report is being deleted. But if a shared data source is being deleted, you don’t want to lose the existence of the data source from the report. So it sets it to NULL, and it marks it as invalid. We see this code in that stored procedure. UPDATE [DataSource]    SET       [Flags] = [Flags] & 0x7FFFFFFD, -- broken link       [Link] = NULL FROM    [Catalog] AS C    INNER JOIN [DataSource] AS DS ON C.[ItemID] = DS.[Link] WHERE    (C.Path = @Path OR C.Path LIKE @Prefix ESCAPE '*') Unfortunately there’s no semi-colon on the end (but I’d rather they fix the ntext and image types first), and don’t get me started about using the table name in the UPDATE clause (it should use the alias DS). But there is a nice comment about what’s going on with the Flags field. What I’d LIKE it to do would be to set the connection information to a report-embedded copy of the connection information that’s in the shared data source, the one that’s about to be deleted. I understand that this would cause someone to lose the benefit of having the data sources configured in a central point, but I’d say that’s probably still slightly better than LOSING THE INFORMATION COMPLETELY. Sorry, rant over. I should log a Connect item – I’ll put that on my todo list. So it sets the Link field to NULL, and marks the Flags to tell you they’re broken. So this is your clue to fixing it. A bitwise AND with 0x7FFFFFFD is basically stripping out the ‘2’ bit from a number. So numbers like 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, etc, whose binary representation ends in either 11 or 10 get turned into 0, 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, etc. We can test for it using a WHERE clause that matches the SET clause we’ve just used. I’d also recommend checking for Link being NULL and also having no ConnectionString. And join back to dbo.Catalog to get the path (including the name) of broken reports are – in case you get a surprise from a different data source being broken in the past. SELECT c.Path, ds.Name FROM dbo.[DataSource] AS ds JOIN dbo.[Catalog] AS c ON c.ItemID = ds.ItemID WHERE ds.[Flags] = ds.[Flags] & 0x7FFFFFFD AND ds.[Link] IS NULL AND ds.[ConnectionString] IS NULL; When I just ran this on my own machine, having deleted a data source to check my code, I noticed a Report Model in the list as well – so if you had thought it was just going to be reports that were broken, you’d be forgetting something. So to fix those reports, get your new data source created in the catalogue, and then find its ItemID by querying Catalog, using Path and Name to find it. And then use this value to fix them up. To fix the Flags field, just add 2. I prefer to use bitwise OR which should do the same. Use the OUTPUT clause to get a copy of the DSIDs of the ones you’re changing, just in case you need to revert something later after testing (doing it all in a transaction won’t help, because you’ll just lock out the table, stopping you from testing anything). UPDATE ds SET [Flags] = [Flags] | 2, [Link] = '3AE31CBA-BDB4-4FD1-94F4-580B7FAB939D' /*Insert your own GUID*/ OUTPUT deleted.Name, deleted.DSID, deleted.ItemID, deleted.Flags FROM dbo.[DataSource] AS ds JOIN dbo.[Catalog] AS c ON c.ItemID = ds.ItemID WHERE ds.[Flags] = ds.[Flags] & 0x7FFFFFFD AND ds.[Link] IS NULL AND ds.[ConnectionString] IS NULL; But please be careful. Your mileage may vary. And there’s no reason why 400-odd broken reports needs to be quite the nightmare that it could be. Really, it should be less than five minutes. @rob_farley

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• How do I implement SkyBox in xna 4.0 Reach Profile (for Windows Phone 7)?

  - by Biny

  I'm trying to Implement SkyBox in my phone game. Most of the samples in the web are for HiDef profile, and they are using custom effects (that not supported on Windows Phone). I've tried to follow this guide. But for some reason my SkyBox is not rendered. This is my SkyBox class: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Rocuna.Core; using Rocuna.GameEngine.Graphics; using Rocuna.GameEngine.Graphics.Components; namespace Rocuna.GameEngine.Extension.WP7.Graphics { /// <summary> /// Sky box element for phone games. /// </summary> public class SkyBox : SkyBoxBase { /// <summary> /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="SkyBoxBase"/> class. /// </summary> /// <param name="game">The Game that the game component should be attached to.</param> public SkyBox(TextureCube cube, Game game) : base(game) { Cube = cube; CubeFaces = new Texture2D[6]; PositionOffset = new Vector3(20, 20, 20); CreateGraphic(512); StripTexturesFromCube(); InitializeData(Game.GraphicsDevice); } #region Properties /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the position offset. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The position offset. /// </value> public Vector3 PositionOffset { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the position. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The position. /// </value> public Vector3 Position { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the cube. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The cube. /// </value> public TextureCube Cube { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the pixel array. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The pixel array. /// </value> public Color[] PixelArray { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the cube faces. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The cube faces. /// </value> public Texture2D[] CubeFaces { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the vertex buffer. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The vertex buffer. /// </value> public VertexBuffer VertexBuffer { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the index buffer. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The index buffer. /// </value> public IndexBuffer IndexBuffer { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the effect. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The effect. /// </value> public BasicEffect Effect { get; set; } #endregion protected override void LoadContent() { } public override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { var camera = Game.GetService<GraphicManager>().CurrentCamera; this.Position = camera.Position + PositionOffset; base.Update(gameTime); } public override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { DrawOrder = int.MaxValue; var graphics = Effect.GraphicsDevice; graphics.DepthStencilState = new DepthStencilState() { DepthBufferEnable = false }; graphics.RasterizerState = new RasterizerState() { CullMode = CullMode.None }; graphics.BlendState = new BlendState(); graphics.SamplerStates[0] = SamplerState.AnisotropicClamp; graphics.SetVertexBuffer(VertexBuffer); graphics.Indices = IndexBuffer; Effect.Texture = CubeFaces[0]; Effect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); graphics.DrawIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, 0, _vertices.Count, 0, 2); Effect.Texture = CubeFaces[1]; Effect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); graphics.DrawIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, 0, _vertices.Count, 6, 2); Effect.Texture = CubeFaces[2]; Effect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); graphics.DrawIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, 0, _vertices.Count, 12, 2); Effect.Texture = CubeFaces[3]; Effect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); graphics.DrawIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, 0, _vertices.Count, 18, 2); Effect.Texture = CubeFaces[4]; Effect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); graphics.DrawIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, 0, _vertices.Count, 24, 2); Effect.Texture = CubeFaces[5]; Effect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); graphics.DrawIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, 0, _vertices.Count, 30, 2); base.Draw(gameTime); } #region Fields private List<VertexPositionNormalTexture> _vertices = new List<VertexPositionNormalTexture>(); private List<ushort> _indices = new List<ushort>(); #endregion #region Private methods private void InitializeData(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { VertexBuffer = new VertexBuffer(graphicsDevice, typeof(VertexPositionNormalTexture), _vertices.Count, BufferUsage.None); VertexBuffer.SetData<VertexPositionNormalTexture>(_vertices.ToArray()); // Create an index buffer, and copy our index data into it. IndexBuffer = new IndexBuffer(graphicsDevice, typeof(ushort), _indices.Count, BufferUsage.None); IndexBuffer.SetData<ushort>(_indices.ToArray()); // Create a BasicEffect, which will be used to render the primitive. Effect = new BasicEffect(graphicsDevice); Effect.TextureEnabled = true; Effect.EnableDefaultLighting(); } private void CreateGraphic(float size) { Vector3[] normals = { Vector3.Right, Vector3.Left, Vector3.Up, Vector3.Down, Vector3.Backward, Vector3.Forward, }; Vector2[] textureCoordinates = { Vector2.One, Vector2.UnitY, Vector2.Zero, Vector2.UnitX, Vector2.Zero, Vector2.UnitX, Vector2.One, Vector2.UnitY, Vector2.Zero, Vector2.UnitX, Vector2.One, Vector2.UnitY, Vector2.Zero, Vector2.UnitX, Vector2.One, Vector2.UnitY, Vector2.UnitY, Vector2.Zero, Vector2.UnitX, Vector2.One, Vector2.UnitY, Vector2.Zero, Vector2.UnitX, Vector2.One, }; var index = 0; foreach (var normal in normals) { var side1 = new Vector3(normal.Z, normal.X, normal.Y); var side2 = Vector3.Cross(normal, side1); AddIndex(CurrentVertex + 0); AddIndex(CurrentVertex + 1); AddIndex(CurrentVertex + 2); AddIndex(CurrentVertex + 0); AddIndex(CurrentVertex + 2); AddIndex(CurrentVertex + 3); AddVertex((normal - side1 - side2) * size / 2, normal, textureCoordinates[index++]); AddVertex((normal - side1 + side2) * size / 2, normal, textureCoordinates[index++]); AddVertex((normal + side1 + side2) * size / 2, normal, textureCoordinates[index++]); AddVertex((normal + side1 - side2) * size / 2, normal, textureCoordinates[index++]); } } protected void StripTexturesFromCube() { PixelArray = new Color[Cube.Size * Cube.Size]; for (int s = 0; s < CubeFaces.Length; s++) { CubeFaces[s] = new Texture2D(Game.GraphicsDevice, Cube.Size, Cube.Size, false, SurfaceFormat.Color); switch (s) { case 0: Cube.GetData<Color>(CubeMapFace.PositiveX, PixelArray); CubeFaces[s].SetData<Color>(PixelArray); break; case 1: Cube.GetData(CubeMapFace.NegativeX, PixelArray); CubeFaces[s].SetData(PixelArray); break; case 2: Cube.GetData(CubeMapFace.PositiveY, PixelArray); CubeFaces[s].SetData(PixelArray); break; case 3: Cube.GetData(CubeMapFace.NegativeY, PixelArray); CubeFaces[s].SetData(PixelArray); break; case 4: Cube.GetData(CubeMapFace.PositiveZ, PixelArray); CubeFaces[s].SetData(PixelArray); break; case 5: Cube.GetData(CubeMapFace.NegativeZ, PixelArray); CubeFaces[s].SetData(PixelArray); break; } } } protected void AddVertex(Vector3 position, Vector3 normal, Vector2 textureCoordinates) { _vertices.Add(new VertexPositionNormalTexture(position, normal, textureCoordinates)); } protected void AddIndex(int index) { if (index > ushort.MaxValue) throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("index"); _indices.Add((ushort)index); } protected int CurrentVertex { get { return _vertices.Count; } } #endregion } }

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• Reading OpenDocument spreadsheets using C#

  - by DigiMortal

  Excel with its file formats is not the only spreadsheet application that is widely used. There are also users on Linux and Macs and often they are using OpenOffice and other open-source office packages that use ODF instead of OpenXML. In this post I will show you how to read Open Document spreadsheet in C#. Importer as example My previous post about importers showed you how to build flexible importers support to your web application. This post introduces you practical example of one of my importers. Of course, sensitive code is omitted. We start with ODS importer class and we add new methods as we go. public class OdsImporter : ImporterBase {     public OdsImporter()     {     }       public override string[] SupportedFileExtensions     {         get { return new[] { "ods" }; }     }       public override ImportResult Import(Stream fileStream, long companyId, short year)     {         string contentXml = GetContentXml(fileStream);           var result = new ImportResult();         var doc = XDocument.Parse(contentXml);           var rows = doc.Descendants("{urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:table:1.0}table-row").Skip(1);           foreach (var row in rows)         {             ImportRow(row, companyId, year, result);         }           return result;     } } The class given here just extends base class for importers (previous post uses interface but as I already told there you move to abstract base class when writing code for real projects). Import method reads data from *.ods file, parses it (it is XML), finds all data rows and imports data. As you may see then first row is skipped. This is because the first row on my sheet is always headers row. Reading ODS file Our import method starts with getting XML from *.ods file. ODS files like OpenXml files are zipped containers that contain different files. We need content.xml as all data is kept there. To get the contents of file we use SharpZipLib library to read uploaded file as *.zip file. private static string GetContentXml(Stream fileStream) {     var contentXml = "";       using (var zipInputStream = new ZipInputStream(fileStream))     {         ZipEntry contentEntry = null;         while ((contentEntry = zipInputStream.GetNextEntry()) != null)         {             if (!contentEntry.IsFile)                 continue;             if (contentEntry.Name.ToLower() == "content.xml")                 break;         }           if (contentEntry.Name.ToLower() != "content.xml")         {             throw new Exception("Cannot find content.xml");         }           var bytesResult = new byte[] { };         var bytes = new byte[2000];         var i = 0;           while ((i = zipInputStream.Read(bytes, 0, bytes.Length)) != 0)         {             var arrayLength = bytesResult.Length;             Array.Resize<byte>(ref bytesResult, arrayLength + i);             Array.Copy(bytes, 0, bytesResult, arrayLength, i);         }         contentXml = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(bytesResult);     }     return contentXml; } If here is content.xml file then we stop browsing the file. We read this file to memory and return it as UTF-8 format string. Importing rows Our last task is to import rows. We use special method for this as we have to handle some tricks here. To keep files smaller the cell count on row is not always the same. If we have more than one empty cell one after another then ODS keeps only one cell for sequential empty cells. This cell has attribute called number-columns-repeated and it’s value is set to the number of sequential empty cells. This is why we use two indexers for cells collection. private void ImportRow(XElement row, ImportResult result) {     var cells = (from c in row.Descendants()                 where c.Name == "{urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:table:1.0}table-cell"                 select c).ToList();       var dto = new DataDto();       var count = cells.Count;     var j = -1;       for (var i = 0; i < count; i++)     {         j++;         var cell = cells[i];         var attr = cell.Attribute("{urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:table:1.0}number-columns-repeated");         if (attr != null)         {             var numToSkip = 0;             if (int.TryParse(attr.Value, out numToSkip))             {                 j += numToSkip - 1;             }         }           if (i > 30) break;         if (j == 0)         {             dto.SomeProperty = cells[i].Value;         }         if (j == 1)         {             dto.SomeOtherProperty = cells[i].Value;         }         // some more data reading     }       // save data } You can define your own class for import results and add there all problems found during data import. Your application gets the results and shows them to user. Conclusion Reading ODS files may seem to complex task but actually it is very easy if we need only data from those documents. We can use some zip-library to get the content file and then parse it to XML. It is not hard to go through the XML but there are some optimization tricks we have to know. The code here is safe to use in web applications as it is not using any API-s that may have special needs to server and infrastructure.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, August 26, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, August 26, 2012Popular ReleasesPhysics Helper XAML: Physics Helper XAML 1.1.0.0: This release supports creation of 2D Physics apps for Windows 8 RTM, Windows Phone 7.1 development, and Silverlight 5. It includes source code and samples in three separate solutions.TouchInjector: TouchInjector 1.0: Version 1.0BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.1: 2012.08.25 Ver5.7.1 (1)?????·?????LING?????????????? (2)SMTP???（????）????、?????\?????????????????????Peulot Heshbon: Peulot Heshbon version 3.0.0: Available quizzes:Plus for Natural, Real and fragments Minus for Natural, Real and fragments Multiplication for Natural, Real and fragments Divide for Natural, Real and fragments Random for Natural, Real and fragments Compare 2 percentages Compare 2 fragments (Just for easy difficulty) Check if a number can be divided with another number exactly. Available Languages:Hebrew English Russian What's NewAdded new quiz: Compare 2 fragments. It is available only if you are in Eas...Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching and Merging Guide: v2 - Visual Studio 2012: Welcome to the Branching and Merging Guide Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review Documentation has been reviewed by the quality and recording team All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issues / Bugs Spelling, grammar and content revisions are in progress. Hotfix will be published.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.62: Fix for issue #18525 - escaped characters in CSS identifiers get double-escaped if the character immediately after the backslash is not normally allowed in an identifier. fixed symbol problem with nuget package. 4.62 should have nuget symbols available again.nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.65: As some of you may know we were planning to release version 2.70 much later (the end of September). But today we have to release this intermediate version (2.65). It fixes a critical issue caused by a third-party assembly when running nopCommerce on a server with .NET 4.5 installed. No major features have been introduced with this release as our development efforts were focused on further enhancements and fixing bugs. To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes p...MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.2.9: . Fix: Some missing changes for fixing the window subclassing crash. · Fix: fixed bug when Run MyRouter at the first Time. · Fix: Log File · Fix: improve performance speed application · fix: solve some Exception.eel Browser: eel 1.1.0.41 beta: Improved UI New features Bug fixesDynamics CRM 2011 Dummy Entity: First Release: This has been tested on CRM 2011 RU8 On-Premise IFD. Known Issue: The Test Dummy CRM page load event may throw an exception loading the first time as the iframe may not have finished loading. I have not been able to get the iframe OnReadyStateChange event to fire. But it is only a sample anyway. The zip file contains: Dummy Entity Visual studio solution. Test Dummy Visual Studio solution. Dummy Entity CRM Solution Test Dummy CRM Solution Installation: Unzip and import the CRM Solutions...Private cloud DMS: Essential server-client full package: Requirements: - SQL server >= 2008 (minimal Express - for Essential recommended) - .NET 4.0 (Server) - .NET 4.0 Client profile (Client) This version allow: - full file system functionality Restrictions: - Maximum 2 parallel users - No share spaces - No hosted business groups - No digital sign functionality - No ActiveDirectory connector - No Performance cache - No workflow - No messagingJavaScript Prototype Extensions: Release 1.1.0.0: Release 1.1.0.0 Add prototype extension for object. Add prototype extension for array.Glyphx: Version 1.2: This release includes the SdlDotNet.dll dependency in the setup, which you will need.TFS Project Test Migrator: TestPlanMigration v1.0.0: Release 1.0.0 This first version do not create the test cases in the target project because the goal was to restore a Test Plan + Test Suite hierarchy after a manual user deletion without restoring all the Project Collection Database. As I discovered, deleting a Test Plan will do the following : - Delete all TestSuiteEntry (the link between a Test Suite node and a Test Case) - Delete all TestSuite (the nodes in the test hierarchy), including root TestSuite - Delete the TestPlan Test c...ERPStore eCommerce FrontOffice: ERPStore.Core V4.0.0.2 MVC4 RTM: ERPStore.Core V4.0.0.2 MVC4 RTM (Code Source)ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.8.0.0: sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved API, direct support for multiple barcode decoding, wrapper for barcode generating many other improvements and fixes encoder and decoder command line clients demo client for emguCV dev documentation startedScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5.1: This release has been built from the 2.5 branch. Issues closed: Issue # Title 32524 32524 32550 32550 32552 32552 25148 25148 32449 32449 32551 32551 32711 32711 MFCMAPI: August 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1035 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeDocument.Editor: 2013.2: Whats new for Document.Editor 2013.2: New save as Html document Improved Traslate support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsPulse: Pulse Beta 5: Whats new in this release? Well to start with we now have Wallbase.cc Authentication! so you can access favorites or NSFW. This version requires .NET 4.0, you probably already have it, but if you don't it's a free and easy download from Microsoft. Pulse can bet set to start on Windows startup now too. The Wallpaper setter has settings now, so you can change the background color of the desktop and the Picture Position (Tile/Center/Fill/etc...) I've switched to Windows Forms instead of WPF...New Projects508 Compliance Validator: This tool checks aspx and ascx pages against 508 Accessibilty guidelines and also allows you to add your own rules.BF for WP: BF for WP is a visual Brainfuck interpter for Windows Phone.Climate Control: App lets you vote on whether you're too hot or too cold so the dummy next to the air con controls can adjust the thermostat.Custom Captcha Plugin for Kooboo CMS for adding content or sending feedback: Custom Captcha Plugin for Kooboo CMS for adding content or sending feedbackGalleryDownloader: This project takes aim on downloading free photogalleries through the Internet. Highly Maintainable Web Services: The Highly Maintainable Web Services project is a reference architecture application for .NET that demonstrates how to build highly maintainable web services.Its.Validation: A C# DSL for writing rules in a composable, functional style.Kaku by wifi: The projects purpose: Make your phone a part of your house hold by being able to control certail elektric devices with your phone such as, light, electric curtaLogin with Google in ASP.Net MVC3 & Get data from Google User: ASP.Net developer can use this code: asp.net mvc3 web project which contains login with google and pull data from user's google accountMabiCommerce: MabiCommerce is an advanced Commerce Calculator for the MMORPG Mabinogi.Mapture the FLAG: A location based game for wp7mn: sumSharePoint 2010: SharePoint 2010 utilitiesSHIORI.NET: ???SHIORI????????????????????Temp and Stress: Tieni sotto controllo le temperature della tua CPU e effettua Stress Test e Benchmark!VisiblityControl – An Alternative to Converters: A templated content control hosting to remove the pain of using the BooleanToVisibilityConverter. The property IsTrue determines what is shown.Whatsnexx Integration for Orchard CMS: Orchard Whatsnexx makes it easier for Orchard users to send an event to the Whatsnexx Ticket Bus service API, of the Whatsnexx GatewayWINRT \ Metro Store \ open marketing solution: This project is aimed at creating a public shopping cart, that is available to all windows 8 users free. products are screened added by administrators

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• My application had a WindowsIdentity crisis

  - by Brian Donahue

  The project I have been working on this week to test computer environments needs to do various actions as a user other than the one running the application. For instance, it looks up an installed Windows Service, finds out who the startup user is, and tries to connect to a database as that Windows user. Later on, it will need to access a file in the context of the currently logged-in user. With ASP .NET, this is super-easy: just go into Web.Config and set up the "identity impersonate" node, which can either impersonate a named user or the one who had logged into the website if authentication was enabled. With Windows applications, this is not so straightforward. There may be something I am overlooking, but the limitation seems to be that you can only change the security context on the current thread: any threads spawned by the impersonated thread also inherit the impersonated credentials. Impersonation is easy enough to do, once you figure out how. Here is my code for impersonating a user on the current thread:         using System;         using System.ComponentModel;         using System.Runtime.InteropServices;         using System.Security.Principal;         public class ImpersonateUser         {                 IntPtr userHandle;   [DllImport("advapi32.dll", SetLastError = true)]                 static extern bool LogonUser(                         string lpszUsername,                         string lpszDomain,                         string lpszPassword,                         LogonType dwLogonType,                         LogonProvider dwLogonProvider,                         out IntPtr phToken                         );                     [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]                 static extern bool CloseHandle(IntPtr hHandle);                     enum LogonType : int                 {                         Interactive = 2,                         Network = 3,                         Batch = 4,                         Service = 5,                         NetworkCleartext = 8,                         NewCredentials = 9,                 }                     enum LogonProvider : int                 {                         Default = 0,                 }                 public static WindowsImpersonationContext Impersonate(string user, string domain, string password)                 {   IntPtr userHandle = IntPtr.Zero;                         bool loggedOn = LogonUser(                                 user,                                 domain,                                 password,                                 LogonType.Interactive,                                 LogonProvider.Default,                                 out userHandle);                               if (!loggedOn)                         throw new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error());                           WindowsIdentity identity = new WindowsIdentity(userHandle);                         WindowsPrincipal principal = new WindowsPrincipal(identity);                         System.Threading.Thread.CurrentPrincipal = principal;                         return identity.Impersonate();   }         }   /* Call impersonation */ ImpersonateUser.Impersonate("UserName","DomainName","Password"); /* When you want to go back to the original user */ WindowsIdentity.Impersonate(IntPtr.Zero); When you want to stop impersonating, you can call Impersonate() again with a null pointer. This will allow you to simulate a variety of different Windows users from the same applicaiton.

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• Java Program help [migrated]

  - by georgetheevilman

  Okay I have a really annoying error. Its coming from my retainAll method. The problem is that I am outputting 1,3,5 in ints at the end, but I need 1,3,5,7,9. Here is the code below for the MySet and driver classes public class MySetTester { public static void main(String[]args) { MySet<String> strings = new MySet<String>(); strings.add("Hey!"); strings.add("Hey!"); strings.add("Hey!"); strings.add("Hey!"); strings.add("Hey!"); strings.add("Listen!"); strings.add("Listen!"); strings.add("Sorry, I couldn't resist."); strings.add("Sorry, I couldn't resist."); strings.add("(you know you would if you could)"); System.out.println("Testing add:\n"); System.out.println("Your size: " + strings.size() + ", contains(Sorry): " + strings.contains("Sorry, I couldn't resist.")); System.out.println("Exp. size: 4, contains(Sorry): true\n"); MySet<String> moreStrings = new MySet<String>(); moreStrings.add("Sorry, I couldn't resist."); moreStrings.add("(you know you would if you could)"); strings.removeAll(moreStrings); System.out.println("Testing remove and removeAll:\n"); System.out.println("Your size: " + strings.size() + ", contains(Sorry): " + strings.contains("Sorry, I couldn't resist.")); System.out.println("Exp. size: 2, contains(Sorry): false\n"); MySet<Integer> ints = new MySet<Integer>(); for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { ints.add(i); } System.out.println("Your size: " + ints.size()); System.out.println("Exp. size: 100\n"); for (int i = 0; i < 100; i += 2) { ints.remove(i); } System.out.println("Your size: " + ints.size()); System.out.println("Exp. size: 50\n"); MySet<Integer> zeroThroughNine = new MySet<Integer>(); for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { zeroThroughNine.add(i); } ints.retainAll(zeroThroughNine); System.out.println("ints should now only retain odd numbers" + " 0 through 10\n"); System.out.println("Testing your iterator:\n"); for (Integer i : ints) { System.out.println(i); } System.out.println("\nExpected: \n\n1 \n3 \n5 \n7 \n9\n"); System.out.println("Yours:"); for (String s : strings) { System.out.println(s); } System.out.println("\nExpected: \nHey! \nListen!"); strings.clear(); System.out.println("\nClearing your set...\n"); System.out.println("Your set is empty: " + strings.isEmpty()); System.out.println("Exp. set is empty: true"); } } And here is the main code. But still read the top part because that's where my examples are. import java.util.Set; import java.util.Collection; import java.lang.Iterable; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.Arrays; import java.lang.reflect.Array; public class MySet implements Set, Iterable { // instance variables - replace the example below with your own private E[] backingArray; private int numElements; /** * Constructor for objects of class MySet */ public MySet() { backingArray=(E[]) new Object[5]; numElements=0; } public boolean add(E e){ for(Object elem:backingArray){ if (elem==null ? e==null : elem.equals(e)){ return false; } } if(numElements==backingArray.length){ E[] newArray=Arrays.copyOf(backingArray,backingArray.length*2); newArray[numElements]=e; numElements=numElements+1; backingArray=newArray; return true; } else{ backingArray[numElements]=e; numElements=numElements+1; return true; } } public boolean addAll(Collection<? extends E> c){ for(E elem:c){ this.add(elem); } return true; } public void clear(){ E[] newArray=(E[])new Object[backingArray.length]; numElements=0; backingArray=newArray; } public boolean equals(Object o){ if(o instanceof Set &&(((Set)o).size()==numElements)){ for(E elem:(Set<E>)o){ if (this.contains(o)==false){ return false; } return true; } } return false; } public boolean contains(Object o){ for(E backingElem:backingArray){ if (o!=null && o.equals(backingElem)){ return true; } } return false; } public boolean containsAll(Collection<?> c){ for(E elem:(Set<E>)c){ if(!(this.contains(elem))){ return false; } } return true; } public int hashCode(){ int sum=0; for(E elem:backingArray){ if(elem!=null){ sum=sum+elem.hashCode(); } } return sum; } public boolean isEmpty(){ if(numElements==0){ return true; } else{ return false; } } public boolean remove(Object o){ int i=0; for(Object elem:backingArray){ if(o!=null && o.equals(elem)){ backingArray[i]=null; numElements=numElements-1; E[] newArray=Arrays.copyOf(backingArray,backingArray.length-1); return true; } i=i+1; } return false; } public boolean removeAll(Collection<?> c){ for(Object elem:c){ this.remove(elem); } return true; } public boolean retainAll(Collection<?> c){ MySet<E> removalArray=new MySet<E>(); for(E arrayElem:backingArray){ if(arrayElem!= null && !(c.contains(arrayElem))){ this.remove(arrayElem); } } return false; } public int size(){ return numElements; } public <T> T[] toArray(T[] a) throws ArrayStoreException,NullPointerException{ for(int i=0;i<numElements;i++){ a[i]=(T)backingArray[i]; } for(int j=numElements;j<a.length;j++){ a[j]=null; } return a; } public Object[] toArray(){ Object[] newArray=new Object[numElements]; for(int i=0;i<numElements;i++){ newArray[i]=backingArray[i]; } return newArray; } public Iterator<E> iterator(){ setIterator iterator=new setIterator(); return iterator; } private class setIterator implements Iterator<E>{ private int currIndex; private E lastElement; public setIterator(){ currIndex=0; lastElement=null; } public boolean hasNext(){ while(currIndex<=numElements && backingArray[currIndex]==null){ currIndex=currIndex+1; } if (currIndex<=numElements){ return true; } return false; } public E next(){ E element=backingArray[currIndex]; currIndex=currIndex+1; lastElement=element; return element; } public void remove() throws UnsupportedOperationException,IllegalStateException{ if(lastElement!=null){ MySet.this.remove((Object)lastElement); numElements=numElements-1; } else{ throw new IllegalStateException(); } } } } I've been able to reduce the problems, but otherwise this thing is still causing problems.

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• Using an alternate JSON Serializer in ASP.NET Web API

  - by Rick Strahl

  The new ASP.NET Web API that Microsoft released alongside MVC 4.0 Beta last week is a great framework for building REST and AJAX APIs. I've been working with it for quite a while now and I really like the way it works and the complete set of features it provides 'in the box'. It's about time that Microsoft gets a decent API for building generic HTTP endpoints into the framework. DataContractJsonSerializer sucks As nice as Web API's overall design is one thing still sucks: The built-in JSON Serialization uses the DataContractJsonSerializer which is just too limiting for many scenarios. The biggest issues I have with it are: No support for untyped values (object, dynamic, Anonymous Types) MS AJAX style Date Formatting Ugly serialization formats for types like Dictionaries To me the most serious issue is dealing with serialization of untyped objects. I have number of applications with AJAX front ends that dynamically reformat data from business objects to fit a specific message format that certain UI components require. The most common scenario I have there are IEnumerable query results from a database with fields from the result set rearranged to fit the sometimes unconventional formats required for the UI components (like jqGrid for example). Creating custom types to fit these messages seems like overkill and projections using Linq makes this much easier to code up. Alas DataContractJsonSerializer doesn't support it. Neither does DataContractSerializer for XML output for that matter. What this means is that you can't do stuff like this in Web API out of the box:public object GetAnonymousType() { return new { name = "Rick", company = "West Wind", entered= DateTime.Now }; } Basically anything that doesn't have an explicit type DataContractJsonSerializer will not let you return. FWIW, the same is true for XmlSerializer which also doesn't work with non-typed values for serialization. The example above is obviously contrived with a hardcoded object graph, but it's not uncommon to get dynamic values returned from queries that have anonymous types for their result projections. Apparently there's a good possibility that Microsoft will ship Json.NET as part of Web API RTM release.  Scott Hanselman confirmed this as a footnote in his JSON Dates post a few days ago. I've heard several other people from Microsoft confirm that Json.NET will be included and be the default JSON serializer, but no details yet in what capacity it will show up. Let's hope it ends up as the default in the box. Meanwhile this post will show you how you can use it today with the beta and get JSON that matches what you should see in the RTM version. What about JsonValue? To be fair Web API DOES include a new JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray type that allow you to address some of these scenarios. JsonValue is a new type in the System.Json assembly that can be used to build up an object graph based on a dictionary. It's actually a really cool implementation of a dynamic type that allows you to create an object graph and spit it out to JSON without having to create .NET type first. JsonValue can also receive a JSON string and parse it without having to actually load it into a .NET type (which is something that's been missing in the core framework). This is really useful if you get a JSON result from an arbitrary service and you don't want to explicitly create a mapping type for the data returned. For serialization you can create an object structure on the fly and pass it back as part of an Web API action method like this:public JsonValue GetJsonValue() { dynamic json = new JsonObject(); json.name = "Rick"; json.company = "West Wind"; json.entered = DateTime.Now; dynamic address = new JsonObject(); address.street = "32 Kaiea"; address.zip = "96779"; json.address = address; dynamic phones = new JsonArray(); json.phoneNumbers = phones; dynamic phone = new JsonObject(); phone.type = "Home"; phone.number = "808 123-1233"; phones.Add(phone); phone = new JsonObject(); phone.type = "Home"; phone.number = "808 123-1233"; phones.Add(phone); //var jsonString = json.ToString(); return json; } which produces the following output (formatted here for easier reading):{ name: "rick", company: "West Wind", entered: "2012-03-08T15:33:19.673-10:00", address: { street: "32 Kaiea", zip: "96779" }, phoneNumbers: [ { type: "Home", number: "808 123-1233" }, { type: "Mobile", number: "808 123-1234" }] } If you need to build a simple JSON type on the fly these types work great. But if you have an existing type - or worse a query result/list that's already formatted JsonValue et al. become a pain to work with. As far as I can see there's no way to just throw an object instance at JsonValue and have it convert into JsonValue dictionary. It's a manual process. Using alternate Serializers in Web API So, currently the default serializer in WebAPI is DataContractJsonSeriaizer and I don't like it. You may not either, but luckily you can swap the serializer fairly easily. If you'd rather use the JavaScriptSerializer built into System.Web.Extensions or Json.NET today, it's not too difficult to create a custom MediaTypeFormatter that uses these serializers and can replace or partially replace the native serializer. Here's a MediaTypeFormatter implementation using the ASP.NET JavaScriptSerializer:using System; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; using System.Json; using System.IO; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { public class JavaScriptSerializerFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter { public JavaScriptSerializerFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); } protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { // don't serialize JsonValue structure use default for that if (type == typeof(JsonValue) || type == typeof(JsonObject) || type== typeof(JsonArray) ) return false; return true; } protected override bool CanReadType(Type type) { if (type == typeof(IKeyValueModel)) return false; return true; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Taskobject OnReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext) { var task = Taskobject.Factory.StartNew(() = { var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); string json; using (var sr = new StreamReader(stream)) { json = sr.ReadToEnd(); sr.Close(); } object val = ser.Deserialize(json,type); return val; }); return task; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Task OnWriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext, System.Net.TransportContext transportContext) { var task = Task.Factory.StartNew( () = { var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); var json = ser.Serialize(value); byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json); stream.Write(buf,0,buf.Length); stream.Flush(); }); return task; } } } Formatter implementation is pretty simple: You override 4 methods to tell which types you can handle and then handle the input or output streams to create/parse the JSON data. Note that when creating output you want to take care to still allow JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray types to be handled by the default serializer so those objects serialize properly - if you let either JavaScriptSerializer or JSON.NET handle them they'd try to render the dictionaries which is very undesirable. If you'd rather use Json.NET here's the JSON.NET version of the formatter:// this code requires a reference to JSON.NET in your project #if true using System; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; using System.Json; using Newtonsoft.Json; using System.IO; using Newtonsoft.Json.Converters; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { public class JsonNetFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter { public JsonNetFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); } protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { // don't serialize JsonValue structure use default for that if (type == typeof(JsonValue) || type == typeof(JsonObject) || type == typeof(JsonArray)) return false; return true; } protected override bool CanReadType(Type type) { if (type == typeof(IKeyValueModel)) return false; return true; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Taskobject OnReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext) { var task = Taskobject.Factory.StartNew(() = { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore, }; var sr = new StreamReader(stream); var jreader = new JsonTextReader(sr); var ser = new JsonSerializer(); ser.Converters.Add(new IsoDateTimeConverter()); object val = ser.Deserialize(jreader, type); return val; }); return task; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Task OnWriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext, System.Net.TransportContext transportContext) { var task = Task.Factory.StartNew( () = { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore, }; string json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(value, Formatting.Indented, new JsonConverter[1] { new IsoDateTimeConverter() } ); byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json); stream.Write(buf,0,buf.Length); stream.Flush(); }); return task; } } } #endif   One advantage of the Json.NET serializer is that you can specify a few options on how things are formatted and handled. You get null value handling and you can plug in the IsoDateTimeConverter which is nice to product proper ISO dates that I would expect any Json serializer to output these days. Hooking up the Formatters Once you've created the custom formatters you need to enable them for your Web API application. To do this use the GlobalConfiguration.Configuration object and add the formatter to the Formatters collection. Here's what this looks like hooked up from Application_Start in a Web project:protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Action based routing (used for RPC calls) RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "StockApi", routeTemplate: "stocks/{action}/{symbol}", defaults: new { symbol = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "StockApi" } ); // WebApi Configuration to hook up formatters and message handlers // optional RegisterApis(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration); } public static void RegisterApis(HttpConfiguration config) { // Add JavaScriptSerializer formatter instead - add at top to make default //config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JavaScriptSerializerFormatter()); // Add Json.net formatter - add at the top so it fires first! // This leaves the old one in place so JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray still are handled config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JsonNetFormatter()); } One thing to remember here is the GlobalConfiguration object which is Web API's static configuration instance. I think this thing is seriously misnamed given that GlobalConfiguration could stand for anything and so is hard to discover if you don't know what you're looking for. How about WebApiConfiguration or something more descriptive? Anyway, once you know what it is you can use the Formatters collection to insert your custom formatter. Note that I insert my formatter at the top of the list so it takes precedence over the default formatter. I also am not removing the old formatter because I still want JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray to be handled by the default serialization mechanism. Since they process in sequence and I exclude processing for these types JsonValue et al. still get properly serialized/deserialized. Summary Currently DataContractJsonSerializer in Web API is a pain, but at least we have the ability with relatively limited effort to replace the MediaTypeFormatter and plug in our own JSON serializer. This is useful for many scenarios - if you have existing client applications that used MVC JsonResult or ASP.NET AJAX results from ASMX AJAX services you can plug in the JavaScript serializer and get exactly the same serializer you used in the past so your results will be the same and don't potentially break clients. JSON serializers do vary a bit in how they serialize some of the more complex types (like Dictionaries and dates for example) and so if you're migrating it might be helpful to ensure your client code doesn't break when you switch to ASP.NET Web API. Going forward it looks like Microsoft is planning on plugging in Json.Net into Web API and make that the default. I think that's an awesome choice since Json.net has been around forever, is fast and easy to use and provides a ton of functionality as part of this great library. I just wish Microsoft would have figured this out sooner instead of now at the last minute integrating with it especially given that Json.Net has a similar set of lower level JSON objects JsonValue/JsonObject etc. which now will end up being duplicated by the native System.Json stuff. It's not like we don't already have enough confusion regarding which JSON serializer to use (JavaScriptSerializer, DataContractJsonSerializer, JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray and now Json.net). For years I've been using my own JSON serializer because the built in choices are both limited. However, with an official encorsement of Json.Net I'm happily moving on to use that in my applications. Let's see and hope Microsoft gets this right before ASP.NET Web API goes gold.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api  AJAX  ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Configuring SSL

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index So far in this guide we have an IRM Server up and running, however I skipped over SSL configuration in the previous article because I wanted to focus in more detail now. You can, if you wish, not bother with setting up SSL, but considering this is a security technology it is worthwhile doing. Contents Setting up a one way, self signed SSL certificate in WebLogic Setting up an official SSL certificate in Apache 2.x Configuring Apache to proxy traffic to the IRM server There are two common scenarios in which an Oracle IRM server is configured. For a development or evaluation system, people usually communicate directly to the WebLogic Server running the IRM service. However in a production environment and for some proof of concept evaluations that require a setup reflecting a production system, the traffic to the IRM server travels via a web server proxy, commonly Apache. In this guide we are building an Oracle Enterprise Linux based IRM service and this article will go over the configuration of SSL in WebLogic and also in Apache. Like in the past articles, we are going to use two host names in the configuration below,irm.company.com will refer to the public Apache server irm.company.internal will refer to the internal WebLogic IRM server Setting up a one way, self signed SSL certificate in WebLogic First lets look at creating just a simple self signed SSL certificate to be used in WebLogic. This is a quick and easy way to get SSL working in your environment, however the downside is that no browsers are going to trust this certificate you create and you'll need to manually install the certificate onto any machine's communicating with the server. This is fine for development or when you have only a few users evaluating the system, but for any significant use it's usually better to have a fully trusted certificate in use and I explain that in the next section. But for now lets go through creating, installing and testing a self signed certificate. We use a library in Java to create the certificates, open a console and running the following commands. Note you should choose your own secure passwords whenever you see password below. [oracle@irm /] source /oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin/setWLSEnv.sh [oracle@irm /] cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/ [oracle@irm /] java utils.CertGen -selfsigned -certfile MyOwnSelfCA.cer -keyfile MyOwnSelfKey.key -keyfilepass password -cn "irm.oracle.demo" [oracle@irm /] java utils.ImportPrivateKey -keystore MyOwnIdentityStore.jks -storepass password -keypass password -alias trustself -certfile MyOwnSelfCA.cer.pem -keyfile MyOwnSelfKey.key.pem -keyfilepass password [oracle@irm /] keytool -import -trustcacerts -alias trustself -keystore TrustMyOwnSelf.jks -file MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der -keyalg RSA We now have two Java Key Stores, MyOwnIdentityStore.jks and TrustMyOwnSelf.jks. These contain keys and certificates which we will use in WebLogic Server. Now we need to tell the IRM server to use these stores when setting up SSL connections for incoming requests. Make sure the Admin server is running and login into the WebLogic Console at http://irm.company.intranet:7001/console and do the following; In the menu on the left, select the + next to Environment to expose the submenu, then click on Servers. You will see two servers in the list, AdminServer(admin) and IRM_server1. If the IRM server is running, shut it down either by hitting CONTROL + C in the console window it was started from, or you can switch to the CONTROL tab, select IRM_server1 and then select the Shutdown menu and then Force Shutdown Now. In the Configuration tab select IRM_server1 and switch to the Keystores tab. By default WebLogic Server uses it's own demo identity and trust. We are now going to switch to the self signed one's we've just created. So select the Change button and switch to Custom Identity and Custom Trust and hit save. Now we have to complete the resulting fields, the setting's i've used in my evaluation server are below. IdentityCustom Identity Keystore: /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/MyOwnIdentityStore.jks Custom Identity Keystore Type: JKS Custom Identity Keystore Passphrase: password Confirm Custom Identity Keystore Passphrase: password TrustCustom Trust Keystore: /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/TrustMyOwnSelf.jks Custom Trust Keystore Type: JKS Custom Trust Keystore Passphrase: password Confirm Custom Trust Keystore Passphrase: password Now click on the SSL tab for the IRM_server1 and enter in the alias and passphrase, in my demo here the details are; IdentityPrivate Key Alias: trustself Private Key Passphrase: password Confirm Private Key Passphrase: password And hit save. Now lets test a connection to the IRM server over HTTPS using SSL. Go back to a console window and start the IRM server, a quick reminder on how to do this is... [oracle@irm /] cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/bin [oracle@irm /] ./startManagedWeblogic IRM_server1 Once running, open a browser and head to the SSL port of the server. By default the IRM server will be listening on the URL https://irm.company.intranet:16101/irm_rights. Note in the example image on the right the port is 7002 because it's a system that has the IRM services installed on the Admin server, this isn't typical (or advisable). Your system is going to have a separate managed server which will be listening on port 16101. Once you open this address you will notice that your browser is going to complain that the server certificate is untrusted. The images on the right show how Firefox displays this error. You are going to be prompted every time you create a new SSL session with the server, both from the browser and more annoyingly from the IRM Desktop. If you plan on always using a self signed certificate, it is worth adding it to the Windows certificate store so that when you are accessing sealed content you do not keep being informed this certificate is not trusted. Follow these instructions (which are for Internet Explorer 8, they may vary for your version of IE.) Start Internet Explorer and open the URL to your IRM server over SSL, e.g. https://irm.company.intranet:16101/irm_rights. IE will complain that about the certificate, click on Continue to this website (not recommended). From the IE Tools menu select Internet Options and from the resulting dialog select Security and then click on Trusted Sites and then the Sites button. Add to the list of trusted sites a URL which mates the server you are accessing, e.g. https://irm.company.intranet/ and select OK. Now refresh the page you were accessing and next to the URL you should see a red cross and the words Certificate Error. Click on this button and select View Certificates. You will now see a dialog with the details of the self signed certificate and the Install Certificate... button should be enabled. Click on this to start the wizard. Click next and you'll be asked where you should install the certificate. Change the option to Place all certificates in the following store. Select browse and choose the Trusted Root Certification Authorities location and hit OK. You'll then be prompted to install the certificate and answer yes. You also need to import the root signed certificate into the same location, so once again select the red Certificate Error option and this time when viewing the certificate, switch to the Certification Path tab and you should see a CertGenCAB certificate. Select this and then click on View Certificate and go through the same process as above to import the certificate into the store. Finally close all instances of the IE browser and re-access the IRM server URL again, this time you should not receive any errors. Setting up an official SSL certificate in Apache 2.x At this point we now have an IRM server that you can communicate with over SSL. However this certificate isn't trusted by any browser because it's path of trust doesn't end in a recognized certificate authority (CA). Also you are communicating directly to the WebLogic Server over a non standard SSL port, 16101. In a production environment it is common to have another device handle the initial public internet traffic and then proxy this to the WebLogic server. The diagram below shows a very simplified view of this type of deployment. What i'm going to walk through next is configuring Apache to proxy traffic to a WebLogic server and also to use a real SSL certificate from an official CA. First step is to configure Apache to handle incoming requests over SSL. In this guide I am configuring the IRM service in Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 update 3 and Apache 2.2.3 which came with OpenSSL and mod_ssl components. Before I purchase an SSL certificate, I need to generate a certificate request from the server. Oracle.com uses Verisign and for my own personal needs I use cheaper certificates from GoDaddy. The following instructions are specific to Apache, but there are many references out there for other web servers. For Apache I have OpenSSL and the commands are; [oracle@irm /] cd /usr/bin [oracle@irm bin] openssl genrsa -des3 -out irm-apache-server.key 2048 Generating RSA private key, 2048 bit long modulus ............................+++ .........+++ e is 65537 (0x10001) Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: Verifying - Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: [oracle@irm bin] openssl req -new -key irm-apache-server.key -out irm-apache-server.csr Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:US State or Province Name (full name) [Berkshire]:CA Locality Name (eg, city) [Newbury]:San Francisco Organization Name (eg, company) [My Company Ltd]:Oracle Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Security Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:irm.company.com Email Address []:[email protected] Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []:testing An optional company name []: You must make sure to remember the pass phrase you used in the initial key generation, you will need this when later configuring Apache. In the /usr/bin directory there are now two new files. The irm-apache-server.csr contains our certificate request and is what you cut and paste, or upload, to your certificate authority when you purchase and validate your SSL certificate. In response you will typically get two files. Your server certificate and another certificate file that will likely contain a set of certificates from your CA which validate your certificate's trust. Next we need to configure Apache to use these files. Typically there is an ssl.conf file which is where all the SSL configuration is done. On my Oracle Enterprise Linux server this file is located in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf and i've added the following lines. <VirtualHost irm.company.com> # Setup SSL for irm.company.com ServerName irm.company.com SSLEngine On SSLCertificateFile /oracle/secure/irm.company.com.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /oracle/secure/irm.company.com.key SSLCertificateChainFile /oracle/secure/gd_bundle.crt </VirtualHost> Restarting Apache (apachectl restart) and I can now attempt to connect to the Apache server in a web browser, https://irm.company.com/. If all is configured correctly I should now see an Apache test page delivered to me over HTTPS. Configuring Apache to proxy traffic to the IRM server Final piece in setting up SSL is to have Apache proxy requests for the IRM server but do so securely. So the requests to Apache will be over HTTPS using a legitimate certificate, but we can also configure Apache to proxy these requests internally across to the IRM server using SSL with the self signed certificate we generated at the start of this article. To do this proxying we use the WebLogic Web Server plugin for Apache which you can download here from Oracle. Download the zip file and extract onto the server. The file extraction reveals a set of zip files, each one specific to a supported web server. In my instance I am using Apache 2.2 32bit on an Oracle Enterprise Linux, 64 bit server. If you are not sure what version your Apache server is, run the command /usr/sbin/httpd -V and you'll see version and it its 32 or 64 bit. Mine is a 32bit server so I need to extract the file WLSPlugin1.1-Apache2.2-linux32-x86.zip. The from the resulting lib folder copy the file mod_wl.so into /usr/lib/httpd/modules/. First we want to test that the plug in will work for regular HTTP traffic. Edit the httpd.conf for Apache and add the following section at the bottom. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl.so <IfModule mod_weblogic.c>    WebLogicHost irm.company.internal    WebLogicPort 16100    WLLogFile /tmp/wl-proxy.log </IfModule> <Location /irm_rights>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_desktop>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_sealing>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_services>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> Now restart Apache again (apachectl restart) and now open a browser to http://irm.company.com/irm_rights. Apache will proxy the HTTP traffic from the port 80 of your Apache server to the IRM service listening on port 16100 of the WebLogic Managed server. Note above I have included all four of the Locations you might wish to proxy. http://irm.company.internalirm_rights is the URL to the management website, /irm_desktop is the URL used for the IRM Desktop to communicate. irm_sealing is for web services based document sealing and irm_services is for IRM server web services. The last two are typically only used when you have the IRM server integrated with another application and it is unlikely you'd be accessing these resources from the public facing Apache server. However, just in case, i've mentioned them above. Now let's enable SSL communication from Apache to WebLogic. In the ZIP file we extracted were some more modules we need to copy into the Apache folder. Looking back in the lib that we extracted, there are some more files. Copy the following into the /usr/lib/httpd/modules/ folder. libwlssl.so libnnz11.so libclntsh.so.11.1 Now the documentation states that should only need to do this, but I found that I also needed to create an environment variable called LD_LIBRARY_PATH and point this to the folder /usr/lib/httpd/modules/. If I didn't do this, starting Apache with the WebLogic module configured to SSL would throw the error. [crit] (20014)Internal error: WL SSL Init failed for server: (null) on 0 So I had to edit the file /etc/profile and add the following lines at the bottom. You may already have the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable defined, therefore simply add this path to it. LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/httpd/modules/ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH Now the WebLogic plug in uses an Oracle Wallet to store the required certificates.You'll need to copy the self signed certificate from the IRM server over to the Apache server. Copy over the MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der into the same folder where you are storing your public certificates, in my example this is /oracle/secure. It's worth mentioning these files should ONLY be readable by root (the user Apache runs as). Now lets create an Oracle Wallet and import the self signed certificate from the IRM server. The file orapki was included in the bin folder of the Apache 1.1 plugin zip you extracted. orapki wallet create -wallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet -auto_login_only orapki wallet add -wallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet -trusted_cert -cert MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der -auto_login_only Finally change the httpd.conf to reflect that we want the WebLogic Apache plug-in to use HTTPS/SSL and not just plain HTTP. <IfModule mod_weblogic.c>    WebLogicHost irm.company.internal    WebLogicPort 16101    SecureProxy ON    WLSSLWallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet    WLLogFile /tmp/wl-proxy.log </IfModule> Then restart Apache once more and you can go back to the browser to test the communication. Opening the URL https://irm.company.com/irm_rights will proxy your request to the WebLogic server at https://irm.company.internal:16101/irm_rights. At this point you have a fully functional Oracle IRM service, the next step is to create a sealed document and test the entire system.

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• Getting Started Building Windows 8 Store Apps with XAML/C#

  - by dwahlin

  Technology is fun isn’t it? As soon as you think you’ve figured out where things are heading a new technology comes onto the scene, changes things up, and offers new opportunities. One of the new technologies I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with lately is Windows 8 store applications. I posted my thoughts about Windows 8 during the BUILD conference in 2011 and still feel excited about the opportunity there. Time will tell how well it ends up being accepted by consumers but I’m hopeful that it’ll take off. I currently have two Windows 8 store application concepts I’m working on with one being built in XAML/C# and another in HTML/JavaScript. I really like that Microsoft supports both options since it caters to a variety of developers and makes it easy to get started regardless if you’re a desktop developer or Web developer. Here’s a quick look at how the technologies are organized in Windows 8: In this post I’ll focus on the basics of Windows 8 store XAML/C# apps by looking at features, files, and code provided by Visual Studio projects. To get started building these types of apps you’ll definitely need to have some knowledge of XAML and C#. Let’s get started by looking at the Windows 8 store project types available in Visual Studio 2012.   Windows 8 Store XAML/C# Project Types When you open Visual Studio 2012 you’ll see a new entry under C# named Windows Store. It includes 6 different project types as shown next.   The Blank App project provides initial starter code and a single page whereas the Grid App and Split App templates provide quite a bit more code as well as multiple pages for your application. The other projects available can be be used to create a class library project that runs in Windows 8 store apps, a WinRT component such as a custom control, and a unit test library project respectively. If you’re building an application that displays data in groups using the “tile” concept then the Grid App or Split App project templates are a good place to start. An example of the initial screens generated by each project is shown next: Grid App Split View App   When a user clicks a tile in a Grid App they can view details about the tile data. With a Split View app groups/categories are shown and when the user clicks on a group they can see a list of all the different items and then drill-down into them:   For the remainder of this post I’ll focus on functionality provided by the Blank App project since it provides a simple way to get started learning the fundamentals of building Windows 8 store apps.   Blank App Project Walkthrough The Blank App project is a great place to start since it’s simple and lets you focus on the basics. In this post I’ll focus on what it provides you out of the box and cover additional details in future posts. Once you have the basics down you can move to the other project types if you need the functionality they provide. The Blank App project template does exactly what it says – you get an empty project with a few starter files added to help get you going. This is a good option if you’ll be building an app that doesn’t fit into the grid layout view that you see a lot of Windows 8 store apps following (such as on the Windows 8 start screen). I ended up starting with the Blank App project template for the app I’m currently working on since I’m not displaying data/image tiles (something the Grid App project does well) or drilling down into lists of data (functionality that the Split App project provides). The Blank App project provides images for the tiles and splash screen (you’ll definitely want to change these), a StandardStyles.xaml resource dictionary that includes a lot of helpful styles such as buttons for the AppBar (a special type of menu in Windows 8 store apps), an App.xaml file, and the app’s main page which is named MainPage.xaml. It also adds a Package.appxmanifest that is used to define functionality that your app requires, app information used in the store, plus more. The App.xaml, App.xaml.cs and StandardStyles.xaml Files The App.xaml file handles loading a resource dictionary named StandardStyles.xaml which has several key styles used throughout the application: <Application x:Class="BlankApp.App" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:local="using:BlankApp"> <Application.Resources> <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> <!-- Styles that define common aspects of the platform look and feel Required by Visual Studio project and item templates --> <ResourceDictionary Source="Common/StandardStyles.xaml"/> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> </ResourceDictionary> </Application.Resources> </Application>   StandardStyles.xaml has style definitions for different text styles and AppBar buttons. If you scroll down toward the middle of the file you’ll see that many AppBar button styles are included such as one for an edit icon. Button styles like this can be used to quickly and easily add icons/buttons into your application without having to be an expert in design. <Style x:Key="EditAppBarButtonStyle" TargetType="ButtonBase" BasedOn="{StaticResource AppBarButtonStyle}"> <Setter Property="AutomationProperties.AutomationId" Value="EditAppBarButton"/> <Setter Property="AutomationProperties.Name" Value="Edit"/> <Setter Property="Content" Value="&#xE104;"/> </Style> Switching over to App.xaml.cs, it includes some code to help get you started. An OnLaunched() method is added to handle creating a Frame that child pages such as MainPage.xaml can be loaded into. The Frame has the same overall purpose as the one found in WPF and Silverlight applications - it’s used to navigate between pages in an application. /// <summary> /// Invoked when the application is launched normally by the end user. Other entry points /// will be used when the application is launched to open a specific file, to display /// search results, and so forth. /// </summary> /// <param name="args">Details about the launch request and process.</param> protected override void OnLaunched(LaunchActivatedEventArgs args) { Frame rootFrame = Window.Current.Content as Frame; // Do not repeat app initialization when the Window already has content, // just ensure that the window is active if (rootFrame == null) { // Create a Frame to act as the navigation context and navigate to the first page rootFrame = new Frame(); if (args.PreviousExecutionState == ApplicationExecutionState.Terminated) { //TODO: Load state from previously suspended application } // Place the frame in the current Window Window.Current.Content = rootFrame; } if (rootFrame.Content == null) { // When the navigation stack isn't restored navigate to the first page, // configuring the new page by passing required information as a navigation // parameter if (!rootFrame.Navigate(typeof(MainPage), args.Arguments)) { throw new Exception("Failed to create initial page"); } } // Ensure the current window is active Window.Current.Activate(); }   Notice that in addition to creating a Frame the code also checks to see if the app was previously terminated so that you can load any state/data that the user may need when the app is launched again. If you’re new to the lifecycle of Windows 8 store apps the following image shows how an app can be running, suspended, and terminated.   If the user switches from an app they’re running the app will be suspended in memory. The app may stay suspended or may be terminated depending on how much memory the OS thinks it needs so it’s important to save state in case the application is ultimately terminated and has to be started fresh. Although I won’t cover saving application state here, additional information can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh465099.aspx. Another method in App.xaml.cs named OnSuspending() is also included in App.xaml.cs that can be used to store state as the user switches to another application:   /// <summary> /// Invoked when application execution is being suspended. Application state is saved /// without knowing whether the application will be terminated or resumed with the contents /// of memory still intact. /// </summary> /// <param name="sender">The source of the suspend request.</param> /// <param name="e">Details about the suspend request.</param> private void OnSuspending(object sender, SuspendingEventArgs e) { var deferral = e.SuspendingOperation.GetDeferral(); //TODO: Save application state and stop any background activity deferral.Complete(); } The MainPage.xaml and MainPage.xaml.cs Files The Blank App project adds a file named MainPage.xaml that acts as the initial screen for the application. It doesn’t include anything aside from an empty <Grid> XAML element in it. The code-behind class named MainPage.xaml.cs includes a constructor as well as a method named OnNavigatedTo() that is called once the page is displayed in the frame.   /// <summary> /// An empty page that can be used on its own or navigated to within a Frame. /// </summary> public sealed partial class MainPage : Page { public MainPage() { this.InitializeComponent(); } /// <summary> /// Invoked when this page is about to be displayed in a Frame. /// </summary> /// <param name="e">Event data that describes how this page was reached. The Parameter /// property is typically used to configure the page.</param> protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e) { } }   If you’re experienced with XAML you can switch to Design mode and start dragging and dropping XAML controls from the ToolBox in Visual Studio. If you prefer to type XAML you can do that as well in the XAML editor or while in split mode. Many of the controls available in WPF and Silverlight are included such as Canvas, Grid, StackPanel, and Border for layout. Standard input controls are also included such as TextBox, CheckBox, PasswordBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, ListBox, and more. MediaElement is available for rendering video or playing audio files. Some of the “common” XAML controls included out of the box are shown next:   Although XAML/C# Windows 8 store apps don’t include all of the functionality available in Silverlight 5, the core functionality required to build store apps is there with additional functionality available in open source projects such as Callisto (started by Microsoft’s Tim Heuer), Q42.WinRT, and others. Standard XAML data binding can be used to bind C# objects to controls, converters can be used to manipulate data during the data binding process, and custom styles and templates can be applied to controls to modify them. Although Visual Studio 2012 doesn’t support visually creating styles or templates, Expression Blend 5 handles that very well. To get started building the initial screen of a Windows 8 app you can start adding controls as mentioned earlier. Simply place them inside of the <Grid> element that’s included. You can arrange controls in a stacked manner using the StackPanel control, add a border around controls using the Border control, arrange controls in columns and rows using the Grid control, or absolutely position controls using the Canvas control. One of the controls that may be new to you is the AppBar. It can be used to add menu/toolbar functionality into a store app and keep the app clean and focused. You can place an AppBar at the top or bottom of the screen. A user on a touch device can swipe up to display the bottom AppBar or right-click when using a mouse. An example of defining an AppBar that contains an Edit button is shown next. The EditAppBarButtonStyle is available in the StandardStyles.xaml file mentioned earlier. <Page.BottomAppBar> <AppBar x:Name="ApplicationAppBar" Padding="10,0,10,0" AutomationProperties.Name="Bottom App Bar"> <Grid> <StackPanel x:Name="RightPanel" Orientation="Horizontal" Grid.Column="1" HorizontalAlignment="Right"> <Button x:Name="Edit" Style="{StaticResource EditAppBarButtonStyle}" Tag="Edit" /> </StackPanel> </Grid> </AppBar> </Page.BottomAppBar> Like standard XAML controls, the <Button> control in the AppBar can be wired to an event handler method in the MainPage.Xaml.cs file or even bound to a ViewModel object using “commanding” if your app follows the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern (check out the MVVM Light package available through NuGet if you’re using MVVM with Windows 8 store apps). The AppBar can be used to navigate to different screens, show and hide controls, display dialogs, show settings screens, and more.   The Package.appxmanifest File The Package.appxmanifest file contains configuration details about your Windows 8 store app. By double-clicking it in Visual Studio you can define the splash screen image, small and wide logo images used for tiles on the start screen, orientation information, and more. You can also define what capabilities the app has such as if it uses the Internet, supports geolocation functionality, requires a microphone or webcam, etc. App declarations such as background processes, file picker functionality, and sharing can also be defined Finally, information about how the app is packaged for deployment to the store can also be defined. Summary If you already have some experience working with XAML technologies you’ll find that getting started building Windows 8 applications is pretty straightforward. Many of the controls available in Silverlight and WPF are available making it easy to get started without having to relearn a lot of new technologies. In the next post in this series I’ll discuss additional features that can be used in your Windows 8 store apps.

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• jQuery and Windows Azure

  - by Stephen Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can host a simple Ajax application created with jQuery in the Windows Azure cloud. In this blog entry, I make no assumptions. I assume that you have never used Windows Azure and I am going to walk through the steps required to host the application in the cloud in agonizing detail. Our application will consist of a single HTML page and a single service. The HTML page will contain jQuery code that invokes the service to retrieve and display set of records. There are five steps that you must complete to host the jQuery application: Sign up for Windows Azure Create a Hosted Service Install the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio Create a Windows Azure Cloud Service Deploy the Cloud Service Sign Up for Windows Azure Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ and click the Sign up Now button. Select one of the offers. I selected the Introductory Special offer because it is free and I just wanted to experiment with Windows Azure for the purposes of this blog entry.     To sign up, you will need a Windows Live ID and you will need to enter a credit card number. After you finish the sign up process, you will receive an email that explains how to activate your account. Accessing the Developer Portal After you create your account and your account is activated, you can access the Windows Azure developer portal by visiting the following URL: http://windows.azure.com/ When you first visit the developer portal, you will see the one project that you created when you set up your Windows Azure account (In a fit of creativity, I named my project StephenWalther).     Creating a New Windows Azure Hosted Service Before you can host an application in the cloud, you must first add a hosted service to your project. Click your project on the summary page and click the New Service link. You are presented with the option of creating either a new Storage Account or a new Hosted Services.     Because we have code that we want to run in the cloud – the WCF Service -- we want to select the Hosted Services option. After you select this option, you must provide a name and description for your service. This information is used on the developer portal so you can distinguish your services.     When you create a new hosted service, you must enter a unique name for your service (I selected jQueryApp) and you must select a region for this service (I selected Anywhere US). Click the Create button to create the new hosted service.   Install the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio We’ll use Visual Studio to create our jQuery project. Before you can use Visual Studio with Windows Azure, you must first install the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ and click the Get Tools and SDK button. The Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio works with both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010.   Installation of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio is painless. You just need to check some agreement checkboxes and click the Next button a few times and installation will begin:   Creating a Windows Azure Application After you install the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio, you can choose to create a Windows Azure Cloud Service by selecting the menu option File, New Project and selecting the Windows Azure Cloud Service project template. I named my new Cloud Service with the name jQueryApp.     Next, you need to select the type of Cloud Service project that you want to create from the New Cloud Service Project dialog.   I selected the C# ASP.NET Web Role option. Alternatively, I could have picked the ASP.NET MVC 2 Web Role option if I wanted to use jQuery with ASP.NET MVC or even the CGI Web Role option if I wanted to use jQuery with PHP. After you complete these steps, you end up with two projects in your Visual Studio solution. The project named WebRole1 represents your ASP.NET application and we will use this project to create our jQuery application. Creating the jQuery Application in the Cloud We are now ready to create the jQuery application. We’ll create a super simple application that displays a list of records retrieved from a WCF service (hosted in the cloud). Create a new page in the WebRole1 project named Default.htm and add the following code: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Products</title> <style type="text/css"> #productContainer div { border:solid 1px black; padding:5px; margin:5px; } </style> </head> <body> <h1>Product Catalog</h1> <div id="productContainer"></div> <script id="productTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> Name: {{= name }} <br /> Price: {{= price }} </div> </script> <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var products = [ {name:"Milk", price:4.55}, {name:"Yogurt", price:2.99}, {name:"Steak", price:23.44} ]; $("#productTemplate").render(products).appendTo("#productContainer"); </script> </body> </html> The jQuery code in this page simply displays a list of products by using a template. I am using a jQuery template to format each product. You can learn more about using jQuery templates by reading the following blog entry by Scott Guthrie: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/05/07/jquery-templates-and-data-linking-and-microsoft-contributing-to-jquery.aspx You can test whether the Default.htm page is working correctly by running your application (hit the F5 key). The first time that you run your application, a database is set up on your local machine to simulate cloud storage. You will see the following dialog: If the Default.htm page works as expected, you should see the list of three products: Adding an Ajax-Enabled WCF Service In the previous section, we created a simple jQuery application that displays an array by using a template. The application is a little too simple because the data is static. In this section, we’ll modify the page so that the data is retrieved from a WCF service instead of an array. First, we need to add a new Ajax-enabled WCF Service to the WebRole1 project. Select the menu option Project, Add New Item and select the Ajax-enabled WCF Service project item. Name the new service ProductService.svc. Modify the service so that it returns a static collection of products. The final code for the ProductService.svc should look like this: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; namespace WebRole1 { public class Product { public string name { get; set; } public decimal price { get; set; } } [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class ProductService { [OperationContract] public IList<Product> SelectProducts() { var products = new List<Product>(); products.Add(new Product {name="Milk", price=4.55m} ); products.Add(new Product { name = "Yogurt", price = 2.99m }); products.Add(new Product { name = "Steak", price = 23.44m }); return products; } } }   In real life, you would want to retrieve the list of products from storage instead of a static array. We are being lazy here. Next you need to modify the Default.htm page to use the ProductService.svc. The jQuery script in the following updated Default.htm page makes an Ajax call to the WCF service. The data retrieved from the ProductService.svc is displayed in the client template. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Products</title> <style type="text/css"> #productContainer div { border:solid 1px black; padding:5px; margin:5px; } </style> </head> <body> <h1>Product Catalog</h1> <div id="productContainer"></div> <script id="productTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> Name: {{= name }} <br /> Price: {{= price }} </div> </script> <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $.post("ProductService.svc/SelectProducts", function (results) { var products = results["d"]; $("#productTemplate").render(products).appendTo("#productContainer"); }); </script> </body> </html>   Deploying the jQuery Application to the Cloud Now that we have created our jQuery application, we are ready to deploy our application to the cloud so that the whole world can use it. Right-click your jQueryApp project in the Solution Explorer window and select the Publish menu option. When you select publish, your application and your application configuration information is packaged up into two files named jQueryApp.cspkg and ServiceConfiguration.cscfg. Visual Studio opens the directory that contains the two files. In order to deploy these files to the Windows Azure cloud, you must upload these files yourself. Return to the Windows Azure Developers Portal at the following address: http://windows.azure.com/ Select your project and select the jQueryApp service. You will see a mysterious cube. Click the Deploy button to upload your application.   Next, you need to browse to the location on your hard drive where the jQueryApp project was published and select both the packaged application and the packaged application configuration file. Supply the deployment with a name and click the Deploy button.     While your application is in the process of being deployed, you can view a progress bar.     Running the jQuery Application in the Cloud Finally, you can run your jQuery application in the cloud by clicking the Run button.   It might take several minutes for your application to initialize (go grab a coffee). After WebRole1 finishes initializing, you can navigate to the following URL to view your live jQuery application in the cloud: http://jqueryapp.cloudapp.net/default.htm The page is hosted on the Windows Azure cloud and the WCF service executes every time that you request the page to retrieve the list of products. Summary Because we started from scratch, we needed to complete several steps to create and deploy our jQuery application to the Windows Azure cloud. We needed to create a Windows Azure account, create a hosted service, install the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio, create the jQuery application, and deploy it to the cloud. Now that we have finished this process once, modifying our existing cloud application or creating a new cloud application is easy. jQuery and Windows Azure work nicely together. We can take advantage of jQuery to build applications that run in the browser and we can take advantage of Windows Azure to host the backend services required by our jQuery application. The big benefit of Windows Azure is that it enables us to scale. If, all of the sudden, our jQuery application explodes in popularity, Windows Azure enables us to easily scale up to meet the demand. We can handle anything that the Internet might throw at us.

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• Announcing Entity Framework Code-First (CTP5 release)

  - by ScottGu

  This week the data team released the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code-First library.  EF Code-First enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data.  It enables you to: Develop without ever having to open a designer or define an XML mapping file Define model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping I’m a big fan of the EF Code-First approach, and wrote several blog posts about it this summer: Code-First Development with Entity Framework 4 (July 16th) EF Code-First: Custom Database Schema Mapping (July 23rd) Using EF Code-First with an Existing Database (August 3rd) Today’s new CTP5 release delivers several nice improvements over the CTP4 build, and will be the last preview build of Code First before the final release of it.  We will ship the final EF Code First release in the first quarter of next year (Q1 of 2011).  It works with all .NET application types (including both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects). Installing EF Code First You can install and use EF Code First CTP5 using one of two ways: Approach 1) By downloading and running a setup program.  Once installed you can reference the EntityFramework.dll assembly it provides within your projects.      or: Approach 2) By using the NuGet Package Manager within Visual Studio to download and install EF Code First within a project.  To do this, simply bring up the NuGet Package Manager Console within Visual Studio (View->Other Windows->Package Manager Console) and type “Install-Package EFCodeFirst”: Typing “Install-Package EFCodeFirst” within the Package Manager Console will cause NuGet to download the EF Code First package, and add it to your current project: Doing this will automatically add a reference to the EntityFramework.dll assembly to your project:   NuGet enables you to have EF Code First setup and ready to use within seconds.  When the final release of EF Code First ships you’ll also be able to just type “Update-Package EFCodeFirst” to update your existing projects to use the final release. EF Code First Assembly and Namespace The CTP5 release of EF Code First has an updated assembly name, and new .NET namespace: Assembly Name: EntityFramework.dll Namespace: System.Data.Entity These names match what we plan to use for the final release of the library. Nice New CTP5 Improvements The new CTP5 release of EF Code First contains a bunch of nice improvements and refinements. Some of the highlights include: Better support for Existing Databases Built-in Model-Level Validation and DataAnnotation Support Fluent API Improvements Pluggable Conventions Support New Change Tracking API Improved Concurrency Conflict Resolution Raw SQL Query/Command Support The rest of this blog post contains some more details about a few of the above changes. Better Support for Existing Databases EF Code First makes it really easy to create model layers that work against existing databases.  CTP5 includes some refinements that further streamline the developer workflow for this scenario. Below are the steps to use EF Code First to create a model layer for the Northwind sample database: Step 1: Create Model Classes and a DbContext class Below is all of the code necessary to implement a simple model layer using EF Code First that goes against the Northwind database: EF Code First enables you to use “POCO” – Plain Old CLR Objects – to represent entities within a database.  This means that you do not need to derive model classes from a base class, nor implement any interfaces or data persistence attributes on them.  This enables the model classes to be kept clean, easily testable, and “persistence ignorant”.  The Product and Category classes above are examples of POCO model classes. EF Code First enables you to easily connect your POCO model classes to a database by creating a “DbContext” class that exposes public properties that map to the tables within a database.  The Northwind class above illustrates how this can be done.  It is mapping our Product and Category classes to the “Products” and “Categories” tables within the database.  The properties within the Product and Category classes in turn map to the columns within the Products and Categories tables – and each instance of a Product/Category object maps to a row within the tables. The above code is all of the code required to create our model and data access layer!  Previous CTPs of EF Code First required an additional step to work against existing databases (a call to Database.Initializer<Northwind>(null) to tell EF Code First to not create the database) – this step is no longer required with the CTP5 release.  Step 2: Configure the Database Connection String We’ve written all of the code we need to write to define our model layer.  Our last step before we use it will be to setup a connection-string that connects it with our database.  To do this we’ll add a “Northwind” connection-string to our web.config file (or App.Config for client apps) like so:   <connectionStrings>          <add name="Northwind"          connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|\northwind.mdf;User Instance=true"          providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />   </connectionStrings> EF “code first” uses a convention where DbContext classes by default look for a connection-string that has the same name as the context class.  Because our DbContext class is called “Northwind” it by default looks for a “Northwind” connection-string to use.  Above our Northwind connection-string is configured to use a local SQL Express database (stored within the \App_Data directory of our project).  You can alternatively point it at a remote SQL Server. Step 3: Using our Northwind Model Layer We can now easily query and update our database using the strongly-typed model layer we just built with EF Code First. The code example below demonstrates how to use LINQ to query for products within a specific product category.  This query returns back a sequence of strongly-typed Product objects that match the search criteria: The code example below demonstrates how we can retrieve a specific Product object, update two of its properties, and then save the changes back to the database: EF Code First handles all of the change-tracking and data persistence work for us, and allows us to focus on our application and business logic as opposed to having to worry about data access plumbing. Built-in Model Validation EF Code First allows you to use any validation approach you want when implementing business rules with your model layer.  This enables a great deal of flexibility and power. Starting with this week’s CTP5 release, EF Code First also now includes built-in support for both the DataAnnotation and IValidatorObject validation support built-into .NET 4.  This enables you to easily implement validation rules on your models, and have these rules automatically be enforced by EF Code First whenever you save your model layer.  It provides a very convenient “out of the box” way to enable validation within your applications. Applying DataAnnotations to our Northwind Model The code example below demonstrates how we could add some declarative validation rules to two of the properties of our “Product” model: We are using the [Required] and [Range] attributes above.  These validation attributes live within the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace that is built-into .NET 4, and can be used independently of EF.  The error messages specified on them can either be explicitly defined (like above) – or retrieved from resource files (which makes localizing applications easy). Validation Enforcement on SaveChanges() EF Code-First (starting with CTP5) now automatically applies and enforces DataAnnotation rules when a model object is updated or saved.  You do not need to write any code to enforce this – this support is now enabled by default.  This new support means that the below code – which violates our above rules – will automatically throw an exception when we call the “SaveChanges()” method on our Northwind DbContext: The DbEntityValidationException that is raised when the SaveChanges() method is invoked contains a “EntityValidationErrors” property that you can use to retrieve the list of all validation errors that occurred when the model was trying to save.  This enables you to easily guide the user on how to fix them.  Note that EF Code-First will abort the entire transaction of changes if a validation rule is violated – ensuring that our database is always kept in a valid, consistent state. EF Code First’s validation enforcement works both for the built-in .NET DataAnnotation attributes (like Required, Range, RegularExpression, StringLength, etc), as well as for any custom validation rule you create by sub-classing the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.ValidationAttribute base class. UI Validation Support A lot of our UI frameworks in .NET also provide support for DataAnnotation-based validation rules. For example, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, and Silverlight (via WCF RIA Services) all provide support for displaying client-side validation UI that honor the DataAnnotation rules applied to model objects. The screen-shot below demonstrates how using the default “Add-View” scaffold template within an ASP.NET MVC 3 application will cause appropriate validation error messages to be displayed if appropriate values are not provided: ASP.NET MVC 3 supports both client-side and server-side enforcement of these validation rules.  The error messages displayed are automatically picked up from the declarative validation attributes – eliminating the need for you to write any custom code to display them. Keeping things DRY The “DRY Principle” stands for “Do Not Repeat Yourself”, and is a best practice that recommends that you avoid duplicating logic/configuration/code in multiple places across your application, and instead specify it only once and have it apply everywhere. EF Code First CTP5 now enables you to apply declarative DataAnnotation validations on your model classes (and specify them only once) and then have the validation logic be enforced (and corresponding error messages displayed) across all applications scenarios – including within controllers, views, client-side scripts, and for any custom code that updates and manipulates model classes. This makes it much easier to build good applications with clean code, and to build applications that can rapidly iterate and evolve. Other EF Code First Improvements New to CTP5 EF Code First CTP5 includes a bunch of other improvements as well.  Below are a few short descriptions of some of them: Fluent API Improvements EF Code First allows you to override an “OnModelCreating()” method on the DbContext class to further refine/override the schema mapping rules used to map model classes to underlying database schema.  CTP5 includes some refinements to the ModelBuilder class that is passed to this method which can make defining mapping rules cleaner and more concise.  The ADO.NET Team blogged some samples of how to do this here. Pluggable Conventions Support EF Code First CTP5 provides new support that allows you to override the “default conventions” that EF Code First honors, and optionally replace them with your own set of conventions. New Change Tracking API EF Code First CTP5 exposes a new set of change tracking information that enables you to access Original, Current & Stored values, and State (e.g. Added, Unchanged, Modified, Deleted).  This support is useful in a variety of scenarios. Improved Concurrency Conflict Resolution EF Code First CTP5 provides better exception messages that allow access to the affected object instance and the ability to resolve conflicts using current, original and database values.  Raw SQL Query/Command Support EF Code First CTP5 now allows raw SQL queries and commands (including SPROCs) to be executed via the SqlQuery and SqlCommand methods exposed off of the DbContext.Database property.  The results of these method calls can be materialized into object instances that can be optionally change-tracked by the DbContext.  This is useful for a variety of advanced scenarios. Full Data Annotations Support EF Code First CTP5 now supports all standard DataAnnotations within .NET, and can use them both to perform validation as well as to automatically create the appropriate database schema when EF Code First is used in a database creation scenario.  Summary EF Code First provides an elegant and powerful way to work with data.  I really like it because it is extremely clean and supports best practices, while also enabling solutions to be implemented very, very rapidly.  The code-only approach of the library means that model layers end up being flexible and easy to customize. This week’s CTP5 release further refines EF Code First and helps ensure that it will be really sweet when it ships early next year.  I recommend using NuGet to install and give it a try today.  I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how awesome it is. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Metro, Authentication, and the ASP.NET Web API

  - by Stephen.Walther

  Imagine that you want to create a Metro style app written with JavaScript and you want to communicate with a remote web service. For example, you are creating a movie app which retrieves a list of movies from a movies service. In this situation, how do you authenticate your Metro app and the Metro user so not just anyone can call the movies service? How can you identify the user making the request so you can return user specific data from the service? The Windows Live SDK supports a feature named Single Sign-On. When a user logs into a Windows 8 machine using their Live ID, you can authenticate the user’s identity automatically. Even better, when the Metro app performs a call to a remote web service, you can pass an authentication token to the remote service and prevent unauthorized access to the service. The documentation for Single Sign-On is located here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826544.aspx In this blog entry, I describe the steps that you need to follow to use Single Sign-On with a (very) simple movie app. We build a Metro app which communicates with a web service created using the ASP.NET Web API. Creating the Visual Studio Solution Let’s start by creating a Visual Studio solution which contains two projects: a Windows Metro style Blank App project and an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application project. Name the Metro app MovieApp and the ASP.NET MVC application MovieApp.Services. When you create the ASP.NET MVC application, select the Web API template: After you create the two projects, your Visual Studio Solution Explorer window should look like this: Configuring the Live SDK You need to get your hands on the Live SDK and register your Metro app. You can download the latest version of the SDK (version 5.2) from the following address: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29938 After you download the Live SDK, you need to visit the following website to register your Metro app: https://manage.dev.live.com/build Don’t let the title of the website — Windows Push Notifications & Live Connect – confuse you, this is the right place. Follow the instructions at the website to register your Metro app. Don’t forget to follow the instructions in Step 3 for updating the information in your Metro app’s manifest. After you register, your client secret is displayed. Record this client secret because you will need it later (we use it with the web service): You need to configure one more thing. You must enter your Redirect Domain by visiting the following website: https://manage.dev.live.com/Applications/Index Click on your application name, click Edit Settings, click the API Settings tab, and enter a value for the Redirect Domain field. You can enter any domain that you please just as long as the domain has not already been taken: For the Redirect Domain, I entered http://superexpertmovieapp.com. Create the Metro MovieApp Next, we need to create the MovieApp. The MovieApp will: 1. Use Single Sign-On to log the current user into Live 2. Call the MoviesService web service 3. Display the results in a ListView control Because we use the Live SDK in the MovieApp, we need to add a reference to it. Right-click your References folder in the Solution Explorer window and add the reference: Here’s the HTML page for the Metro App: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>MovieApp</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- Live SDK --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/LiveSDKHTML/js/wl.js"></script> <!-- WebServices references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> </head> <body> <div id="tmplMovie" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="movieItem"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> <br /><span data-win-bind="innerText:director"></span> </div> </div> <div id="lvMovies" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemTemplate: select('#tmplMovie') }"> </div> </body> </html> The HTML page above contains a Template and ListView control. These controls are used to display the movies when the movies are returned from the movies service. Notice that the page includes a reference to the Live script that we registered earlier: <!-- Live SDK --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/LiveSDKHTML/js/wl.js"></script> The JavaScript code looks like this: (function () { "use strict"; var REDIRECT_DOMAIN = "http://superexpertmovieapp.com"; var WEBSERVICE_URL = "http://localhost:49743/api/movies"; function init() { WinJS.UI.processAll().done(function () { // Get element and control references var lvMovies = document.getElementById("lvMovies").winControl; // Login to Windows Live var scopes = ["wl.signin"]; WL.init({ scope: scopes, redirect_uri: REDIRECT_DOMAIN }); WL.login().then( function(response) { // Get the authentication token var authenticationToken = response.session.authentication_token; // Call the web service var options = { url: WEBSERVICE_URL, headers: { authenticationToken: authenticationToken } }; WinJS.xhr(options).done( function (xhr) { var movies = JSON.parse(xhr.response); var listMovies = new WinJS.Binding.List(movies); lvMovies.itemDataSource = listMovies.dataSource; }, function (xhr) { console.log(xhr.statusText); } ); }, function(response) { throw WinJS.ErrorFromName("Failed to login!"); } ); }); } document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", init); })(); There are two constants which you need to set to get the code above to work: REDIRECT_DOMAIN and WEBSERVICE_URL. The REDIRECT_DOMAIN is the domain that you entered when registering your app with Live. The WEBSERVICE_URL is the path to your web service. You can get the correct value for WEBSERVICE_URL by opening the Project Properties for the MovieApp.Services project, clicking the Web tab, and getting the correct URL. The port number is randomly generated. In my code, I used the URL  “http://localhost:49743/api/movies”. Assuming that the user is logged into Windows 8 with a Live account, when the user runs the MovieApp, the user is logged into Live automatically. The user is logged in with the following code: // Login to Windows Live var scopes = ["wl.signin"]; WL.init({ scope: scopes, redirect_uri: REDIRECT_DOMAIN }); WL.login().then(function(response) { // Do something }); The scopes setting determines what the user has permission to do. For example, access the user’s SkyDrive or access the user’s calendar or contacts. The available scopes are listed here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh243646.aspx In our case, we only need the wl.signin scope which enables Single Sign-On. After the user signs in, you can retrieve the user’s Live authentication token. The authentication token is passed to the movies service to authenticate the user. Creating the Movies Service The Movies Service is implemented as an API controller in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web API project. Here’s what the MoviesController looks like: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Net; using System.Net.Http; using System.Web.Http; using JWTSample; using MovieApp.Services.Models; namespace MovieApp.Services.Controllers { public class MoviesController : ApiController { const string CLIENT_SECRET = "NtxjF2wu7JeY1unvVN-lb0hoeWOMUFoR"; // GET api/values public HttpResponseMessage Get() { // Authenticate // Get authenticationToken var authenticationToken = Request.Headers.GetValues("authenticationToken").FirstOrDefault(); if (authenticationToken == null) { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized); } // Validate token var d = new Dictionary<int, string>(); d.Add(0, CLIENT_SECRET); try { var myJWT = new JsonWebToken(authenticationToken, d); } catch { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized); } // Return results return Request.CreateResponse( HttpStatusCode.OK, new List<Movie> { new Movie {Title="Star Wars", Director="Lucas"}, new Movie {Title="King Kong", Director="Jackson"}, new Movie {Title="Memento", Director="Nolan"} } ); } } } Because the Metro app performs an HTTP GET request, the MovieController Get() action is invoked. This action returns a set of three movies when, and only when, the authentication token is validated. The Movie class looks like this: using Newtonsoft.Json; namespace MovieApp.Services.Models { public class Movie { [JsonProperty(PropertyName="title")] public string Title { get; set; } [JsonProperty(PropertyName="director")] public string Director { get; set; } } } Notice that the Movie class uses the JsonProperty attribute to change Title to title and Director to director to make JavaScript developers happy. The Get() method validates the authentication token before returning the movies to the Metro app. To get authentication to work, you need to provide the client secret which you created at the Live management site. If you forgot to write down the secret, you can get it again here: https://manage.dev.live.com/Applications/Index The client secret is assigned to a constant at the top of the MoviesController class. The MoviesController class uses a helper class named JsonWebToken to validate the authentication token. This class was created by the Windows Live team. You can get the source code for the JsonWebToken class from the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/liveservices/LiveSDK/blob/master/Samples/Asp.net/AuthenticationTokenSample/JsonWebToken.cs You need to add an additional reference to your MVC project to use the JsonWebToken class: System.Runtime.Serialization. You can use the JsonWebToken class to get a unique and validated user ID like this: var user = myJWT.Claims.UserId; If you need to store user specific information then you can use the UserId property to uniquely identify the user making the web service call. Running the MovieApp When you first run the Metro MovieApp, you get a screen which asks whether the app should have permission to use Single Sign-On. This screen never appears again after you give permission once. Actually, when I first ran the app, I get the following error: According to the error, the app is blocked because “We detected some suspicious activity with your Online Id account. To help protect you, we’ve temporarily blocked your account.” This appears to be a bug in the current preview release of the Live SDK and there is more information about this bug here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/messengerconnect/thread/866c495f-2127-429d-ab07-842ef84f16ae/ If you click continue, and continue running the app, the error message does not appear again.  Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe how you can validate Metro apps and Metro users when performing a call to a remote web service. First, I explained how you can create a Metro app which takes advantage of Single Sign-On to authenticate the current user against Live automatically. You learned how to register your Metro app with Live and how to include an authentication token in an Ajax call. Next, I explained how you can validate the authentication token – retrieved from the request header – in a web service. I discussed how you can use the JsonWebToken class to validate the authentication token and retrieve the unique user ID.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3: Layouts and Sections with Razor

  - by ScottGu

  This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features: Introducing Razor (July 2nd) New @model keyword in Razor (Oct 19th) Layouts with Razor (Oct 22nd) Server-Side Comments with Razor (Nov 12th) Razor’s @: and <text> syntax (Dec 15th) Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor (Dec 16th) Layouts and Sections with Razor (Today) In today’s post I’m going to go into more details about how Layout pages work with Razor.  In particular, I’m going to cover how you can have multiple, non-contiguous, replaceable “sections” within a layout file – and enable views based on layouts to optionally “fill in” these different sections at runtime.  The Razor syntax for doing this is clean and concise. I’ll also show how you can dynamically check at runtime whether a particular layout section has been defined, and how you can provide alternate content (or even an alternate layout) in the event that a section isn’t specified within a view template.  This provides a powerful and easy way to customize the UI of your site and make it clean and DRY from an implementation perspective. What are Layouts? You typically want to maintain a consistent look and feel across all of the pages within your web-site/application.  ASP.NET 2.0 introduced the concept of “master pages” which helps enable this when using .aspx based pages or templates.  Razor also supports this concept with a feature called “layouts” – which allow you to define a common site template, and then inherit its look and feel across all the views/pages on your site. I previously discussed the basics of how layout files work with Razor in my ASP.NET MVC 3: Layouts with Razor blog post.  Today’s post will go deeper and discuss how you can define multiple, non-contiguous, replaceable regions within a layout file that you can then optionally “fill in” at runtime. Site Layout Scenario Let’s look at how we can implement a common site layout scenario with ASP.NET MVC 3 and Razor.  Specifically, we’ll implement some site UI where we have a common header and footer on all of our pages.  We’ll also add a “sidebar” section to the right of our common site layout.  On some pages we’ll customize the SideBar to contain content specific to the page it is included on: And on other pages (that do not have custom sidebar content) we will fall back and provide some “default content” to the sidebar: We’ll use ASP.NET MVC 3 and Razor to enable this customization in a nice, clean way.  Below are some step-by-step tutorial instructions on how to build the above site with ASP.NET MVC 3 and Razor. Part 1: Create a New Project with a Layout for the “Body” section We’ll begin by using the “File->New Project” menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 Project.  We’ll create the new project using the “Empty” template option: This will create a new project that has no default controllers in it: Creating a HomeController We will then right-click on the “Controllers” folder of our newly created project and choose the “Add->Controller” context menu command.  This will bring up the “Add Controller” dialog: We’ll name the new controller we create “HomeController”.  When we click the “Add” button Visual Studio will add a HomeController class to our project with a default “Index” action method that returns a view: We won’t need to write any Controller logic to implement this sample – so we’ll leave the default code as-is.  Creating a View Template Our next step will be to implement the view template associated with the HomeController’s Index action method.  To implement the view template, we will right-click within the “HomeController.Index()” method and select the “Add View” command to create a view template for our home page: This will bring up the “Add View” dialog within Visual Studio.  We do not need to change any of the default settings within the above dialog (the name of the template was auto-populated to Index because we invoked the “Add View” context menu command within the Index method).  When we click the “Add” Button within the dialog, a Razor-based “Index.cshtml” view template will be added to the \Views\Home\ folder within our project.  Let’s add some simple default static content to it: Notice above how we don’t have an <html> or <body> section defined within our view template.  This is because we are going to rely on a layout template to supply these elements and use it to define the common site layout and structure for our site (ensuring that it is consistent across all pages and URLs within the site).  Customizing our Layout File Let’s open and customize the default “_Layout.cshtml” file that was automatically added to the \Views\Shared folder when we created our new project: The default layout file (shown above) is pretty basic and simply outputs a title (if specified in either the Controller or the View template) and adds links to a stylesheet and jQuery.  The call to “RenderBody()” indicates where the main body content of our Index.cshtml file will merged into the output sent back to the browser. Let’s modify the Layout template to add a common header, footer and sidebar to the site: We’ll then edit the “Site.css” file within the \Content folder of our project and add 4 CSS rules to it: And now when we run the project and browse to the home “/” URL of our project we’ll see a page like below: Notice how the content of the HomeController’s Index view template and the site’s Shared Layout template have been merged together into a single HTML response.  Below is what the HTML sent back from the server looks like: Part 2: Adding a “SideBar” Section Our site so far has a layout template that has only one “section” in it – what we call the main “body” section of the response.  Razor also supports the ability to add additional "named sections” to layout templates as well.  These sections can be defined anywhere in the layout file (including within the <head> section of the HTML), and allow you to output dynamic content to multiple, non-contiguous, regions of the final response. Defining the “SideBar” section in our Layout Let’s update our Layout template to define an additional “SideBar” section of content that will be rendered within the <div id=”sidebar”> region of our HTML.  We can do this by calling the RenderSection(string sectionName, bool required) helper method within our Layout.cshtml file like below:   The first parameter to the “RenderSection()” helper method specifies the name of the section we want to render at that location in the layout template.  The second parameter is optional, and allows us to define whether the section we are rendering is required or not.  If a section is “required”, then Razor will throw an error at runtime if that section is not implemented within a view template that is based on the layout file (which can make it easier to track down content errors).  If a section is not required, then its presence within a view template is optional, and the above RenderSection() code will render nothing at runtime if it isn’t defined. Now that we’ve made the above change to our layout file, let’s hit refresh in our browser and see what our Home page now looks like: Notice how we currently have no content within our SideBar <div> – that is because the Index.cshtml view template doesn’t implement our new “SideBar” section yet. Implementing the “SideBar” Section in our View Template Let’s change our home-page so that it has a SideBar section that outputs some custom content.  We can do that by opening up the Index.cshtml view template, and by adding a new “SiderBar” section to it.  We’ll do this using Razor’s @section SectionName { } syntax: We could have put our SideBar @section declaration anywhere within the view template.  I think it looks cleaner when defined at the top or bottom of the file – but that is simply personal preference.  You can include any content or code you want within @section declarations.  Notice above how I have a C# code nugget that outputs the current time at the bottom of the SideBar section.  I could have also written code that used ASP.NET MVC’s HTML/AJAX helper methods and/or accessed any strongly-typed model objects passed to the Index.cshtml view template. Now that we’ve made the above template changes, when we hit refresh in our browser again we’ll see that our SideBar content – that is specific to the Home Page of our site – is now included in the page response sent back from the server: The SideBar section content has been merged into the proper location of the HTML response : Part 3: Conditionally Detecting if a Layout Section Has Been Implemented Razor provides the ability for you to conditionally check (from within a layout file) whether a section has been defined within a view template, and enables you to output an alternative response in the event that the section has not been defined.  This provides a convenient way to specify default UI for optional layout sections.  Let’s modify our Layout file to take advantage of this capability.  Below we are conditionally checking whether the “SideBar” section has been defined without the view template being rendered (using the IsSectionDefined() method), and if so we render the section.  If the section has not been defined, then we now instead render some default content for the SideBar:  Note: You want to make sure you prefix calls to the RenderSection() helper method with a @ character – which will tell Razor to execute the HelperResult it returns and merge in the section content in the appropriate place of the output.  Notice how we wrote @RenderSection(“SideBar”) above instead of just RenderSection(“SideBar”).  Otherwise you’ll get an error. Above we are simply rendering an inline static string (<p>Default SideBar Content</p>) if the section is not defined.  A real-world site would more likely refactor this default content to be stored within a separate partial template (which we’d render using the Html.RenderPartial() helper method within the else block) or alternatively use the Html.Action() helper method within the else block to encapsulate both the logic and rendering of the default sidebar. When we hit refresh on our home-page, we will still see the same custom SideBar content we had before.  This is because we implemented the SideBar section within our Index.cshtml view template (and so our Layout rendered it): Let’s now implement a “/Home/About” URL for our site by adding a new “About” action method to our HomeController: The About() action method above simply renders a view back to the client when invoked.  We can implement the corresponding view template for this action by right-clicking within the “About()” method and using the “Add View” menu command (like before) to create a new About.cshtml view template.  We’ll implement the About.cshtml view template like below. Notice that we are not defining a “SideBar” section within it: When we browse the /Home/About URL we’ll see the content we supplied above in the main body section of our response, and the default SideBar content will rendered: The layout file determined at runtime that a custom SideBar section wasn’t present in the About.cshtml view template, and instead rendered the default sidebar content. One Last Tweak… Let’s suppose that at a later point we decide that instead of rendering default side-bar content, we just want to hide the side-bar entirely from pages that don’t have any custom sidebar content defined.  We could implement this change simply by making a small modification to our layout so that the sidebar content (and its surrounding HTML chrome) is only rendered if the SideBar section is defined.  The code to do this is below: Razor is flexible enough so that we can make changes like this and not have to modify any of our view templates (nor make change any Controller logic changes) to accommodate this.  We can instead make just this one modification to our Layout file and the rest happens cleanly.  This type of flexibility makes Razor incredibly powerful and productive. Summary Razor’s layout capability enables you to define a common site template, and then inherit its look and feel across all the views/pages on your site. Razor enables you to define multiple, non-contiguous, “sections” within layout templates that can be “filled-in” by view templates.  The @section {} syntax for doing this is clean and concise.  Razor also supports the ability to dynamically check at runtime whether a particular section has been defined, and to provide alternate content (or even an alternate layout) in the event that it isn’t specified.  This provides a powerful and easy way to customize the UI of your site - and make it clean and DRY from an implementation perspective. 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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• ASP.NET and HTML5 Local Storage

  - by Stephen Walther

  My favorite feature of HTML5, hands-down, is HTML5 local storage (aka DOM storage). By taking advantage of HTML5 local storage, you can dramatically improve the performance of your data-driven ASP.NET applications by caching data in the browser persistently. Think of HTML5 local storage like browser cookies, but much better. Like cookies, local storage is persistent. When you add something to browser local storage, it remains there when the user returns to the website (possibly days or months later). Importantly, unlike the cookie storage limitation of 4KB, you can store up to 10 megabytes in HTML5 local storage. Because HTML5 local storage works with the latest versions of all modern browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari), you can start taking advantage of this HTML5 feature in your applications right now. Why use HTML5 Local Storage? I use HTML5 Local Storage in the JavaScript Reference application: http://Superexpert.com/JavaScriptReference The JavaScript Reference application is an HTML5 app that provides an interactive reference for all of the syntax elements of JavaScript (You can read more about the application and download the source code for the application here). When you open the application for the first time, all of the entries are transferred from the server to the browser (all 300+ entries). All of the entries are stored in local storage. When you open the application in the future, only changes are transferred from the server to the browser. The benefit of this approach is that the application performs extremely fast. When you click the details link to view details on a particular entry, the entry details appear instantly because all of the entries are stored on the client machine. When you perform key-up searches, by typing in the filter textbox, matching entries are displayed very quickly because the entries are being filtered on the local machine. This approach can have a dramatic effect on the performance of any interactive data-driven web application. Interacting with data on the client is almost always faster than interacting with the same data on the server. Retrieving Data from the Server In the JavaScript Reference application, I use Microsoft WCF Data Services to expose data to the browser. WCF Data Services generates a REST interface for your data automatically. Here are the steps: Create your database tables in Microsoft SQL Server. For example, I created a database named ReferenceDB and a database table named Entities. Use the Entity Framework to generate your data model. For example, I used the Entity Framework to generate a class named ReferenceDBEntities and a class named Entities. Expose your data through WCF Data Services. I added a WCF Data Service to my project and modified the data service class to look like this:   using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; using System.Web; using JavaScriptReference.Models; namespace JavaScriptReference.Services { [System.ServiceModel.ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true)] public class EntryService : DataService<ReferenceDBEntities> { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.UseVerboseErrors = true; config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } // Define a change interceptor for the Products entity set. [ChangeInterceptor("Entries")] public void OnChangeEntries(Entry entry, UpdateOperations operations) { if (!HttpContext.Current.Request.IsAuthenticated) { throw new DataServiceException("Cannot update reference unless authenticated."); } } } }     The WCF data service is named EntryService. Notice that it derives from DataService<ReferenceEntitites>. Because it derives from DataService<ReferenceEntities>, the data service exposes the contents of the ReferenceEntitiesDB database. In the code above, I defined a ChangeInterceptor to prevent un-authenticated users from making changes to the database. Anyone can retrieve data through the service, but only authenticated users are allowed to make changes. After you expose data through a WCF Data Service, you can use jQuery to retrieve the data by performing an Ajax call. For example, I am using an Ajax call that looks something like this to retrieve the JavaScript entries from the EntryService.svc data service: $.ajax({ dataType: "json", url: “/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries”, success: function (result) { var data = callback(result["d"]); } });     Notice that you must unwrap the data using result[“d”]. After you unwrap the data, you have a JavaScript array of the entries. I’m transferring all 300+ entries from the server to the client when the application is opened for the first time. In other words, I transfer the entire database from the server to the client, once and only once, when the application is opened for the first time. The data is transferred using JSON. Here is a fragment: { "d" : [ { "__metadata": { "uri": "http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries(1)", "type": "ReferenceDBModel.Entry" }, "Id": 1, "Name": "Global", "Browsers": "ff3_6,ie8,ie9,c8,sf5,es3,es5", "Syntax": "object", "ShortDescription": "Contains global variables and functions", "FullDescription": "<p>\nThe Global object is determined by the host environment. In web browsers, the Global object is the same as the windows object.\n</p>\n<p>\nYou can use the keyword <code>this</code> to refer to the Global object when in the global context (outside of any function).\n</p>\n<p>\nThe Global object holds all global variables and functions. For example, the following code demonstrates that the global <code>movieTitle</code> variable refers to the same thing as <code>window.movieTitle</code> and <code>this.movieTitle</code>.\n</p>\n<pre>\nvar movieTitle = \"Star Wars\";\nconsole.log(movieTitle === this.movieTitle); // true\nconsole.log(movieTitle === window.movieTitle); // true\n</pre>\n", "LastUpdated": "634298578273756641", "IsDeleted": false, "OwnerId": null }, { "__metadata": { "uri": "http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries(2)", "type": "ReferenceDBModel.Entry" }, "Id": 2, "Name": "eval(string)", "Browsers": "ff3_6,ie8,ie9,c8,sf5,es3,es5", "Syntax": "function", "ShortDescription": "Evaluates and executes JavaScript code dynamically", "FullDescription": "<p>\nThe following code evaluates and executes the string \"3+5\" at runtime.\n</p>\n<pre>\nvar result = eval(\"3+5\");\nconsole.log(result); // returns 8\n</pre>\n<p>\nYou can rewrite the code above like this:\n</p>\n<pre>\nvar result;\neval(\"result = 3+5\");\nconsole.log(result);\n</pre>", "LastUpdated": "634298580913817644", "IsDeleted": false, "OwnerId": 1 } … ]} I worried about the amount of time that it would take to transfer the records. According to Google Chome, it takes about 5 seconds to retrieve all 300+ records on a broadband connection over the Internet. 5 seconds is a small price to pay to avoid performing any server fetches of the data in the future. And here are the estimated times using different types of connections using Fiddler: Notice that using a modem, it takes 33 seconds to download the database. 33 seconds is a significant chunk of time. So, I would not use the approach of transferring the entire database up front if you expect a significant portion of your website audience to connect to your website with a modem. Adding Data to HTML5 Local Storage After the JavaScript entries are retrieved from the server, the entries are stored in HTML5 local storage. Here’s the reference documentation for HTML5 storage for Internet Explorer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc197062(VS.85).aspx You access local storage by accessing the windows.localStorage object in JavaScript. This object contains key/value pairs. For example, you can use the following JavaScript code to add a new item to local storage: <script type="text/javascript"> window.localStorage.setItem("message", "Hello World!"); </script>   You can use the Google Chrome Storage tab in the Developer Tools (hit CTRL-SHIFT I in Chrome) to view items added to local storage: After you add an item to local storage, you can read it at any time in the future by using the window.localStorage.getItem() method: <script type="text/javascript"> window.localStorage.setItem("message", "Hello World!"); </script>   You only can add strings to local storage and not JavaScript objects such as arrays. Therefore, before adding a JavaScript object to local storage, you need to convert it into a JSON string. In the JavaScript Reference application, I use a wrapper around local storage that looks something like this: function Storage() { this.get = function (name) { return JSON.parse(window.localStorage.getItem(name)); }; this.set = function (name, value) { window.localStorage.setItem(name, JSON.stringify(value)); }; this.clear = function () { window.localStorage.clear(); }; }   If you use the wrapper above, then you can add arbitrary JavaScript objects to local storage like this: var store = new Storage(); // Add array to storage var products = [ {name:"Fish", price:2.33}, {name:"Bacon", price:1.33} ]; store.set("products", products); // Retrieve items from storage var products = store.get("products");   Modern browsers support the JSON object natively. If you need the script above to work with older browsers then you should download the JSON2.js library from: https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js The JSON2 library will use the native JSON object if a browser already supports JSON. Merging Server Changes with Browser Local Storage When you first open the JavaScript Reference application, the entire database of JavaScript entries is transferred from the server to the browser. Two items are added to local storage: entries and entriesLastUpdated. The first item contains the entire entries database (a big JSON string of entries). The second item, a timestamp, represents the version of the entries. Whenever you open the JavaScript Reference in the future, the entriesLastUpdated timestamp is passed to the server. Only records that have been deleted, updated, or added since entriesLastUpdated are transferred to the browser. The OData query to get the latest updates looks like this: http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries?$filter=(LastUpdated%20gt%20634301199890494792L) If you remove URL encoding, the query looks like this: http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries?$filter=(LastUpdated gt 634301199890494792L) This query returns only those entries where the value of LastUpdated > 634301199890494792 (the version timestamp). The changes – new JavaScript entries, deleted entries, and updated entries – are merged with the existing entries in local storage. The JavaScript code for performing the merge is contained in the EntriesHelper.js file. The merge() method looks like this:   merge: function (oldEntries, newEntries) { // concat (this performs the add) oldEntries = oldEntries || []; var mergedEntries = oldEntries.concat(newEntries); // sort this.sortByIdThenLastUpdated(mergedEntries); // prune duplicates (this performs the update) mergedEntries = this.pruneDuplicates(mergedEntries); // delete mergedEntries = this.removeIsDeleted(mergedEntries); // Sort this.sortByName(mergedEntries); return mergedEntries; },   The contents of local storage are then updated with the merged entries. I spent several hours writing the merge() method (much longer than I expected). I found two resources to be extremely useful. First, I wrote extensive unit tests for the merge() method. I wrote the unit tests using server-side JavaScript. I describe this approach to writing unit tests in this blog entry. The unit tests are included in the JavaScript Reference source code. Second, I found the following blog entry to be super useful (thanks Nick!): http://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/post/2010/08/03/OData-Synchronization-with-WCF-Data-Services.aspx One big challenge that I encountered involved timestamps. I originally tried to store an actual UTC time as the value of the entriesLastUpdated item. I quickly discovered that trying to work with dates in JSON turned out to be a big can of worms that I did not want to open. Next, I tried to use a SQL timestamp column. However, I learned that OData cannot handle the timestamp data type when doing a filter query. Therefore, I ended up using a bigint column in SQL and manually creating the value when a record is updated. I overrode the SaveChanges() method to look something like this: public override int SaveChanges(SaveOptions options) { var changes = this.ObjectStateManager.GetObjectStateEntries( EntityState.Modified | EntityState.Added | EntityState.Deleted); foreach (var change in changes) { var entity = change.Entity as IEntityTracking; if (entity != null) { entity.LastUpdated = DateTime.Now.Ticks; } } return base.SaveChanges(options); }   Notice that I assign Date.Now.Ticks to the entity.LastUpdated property whenever an entry is modified, added, or deleted. Summary After building the JavaScript Reference application, I am convinced that HTML5 local storage can have a dramatic impact on the performance of any data-driven web application. If you are building a web application that involves extensive interaction with data then I recommend that you take advantage of this new feature included in the HTML5 standard.

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