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CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 28, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 28, 2012Popular ReleasesWPUtils: WPUtils 1.2: Just fixed an issue related to isolated storage path for ChoosePhotoBehavior. Specifically CreateDirectory method only accepts relative path, but was given a "/photos/" path which would result in exception. Please make sure you have this fix if you are using ChoosePhotoBehavior! NOTE: Windows Phone SDK 7.1 or higher is required.TFS Timesheets: TFS Timesheets 2.0: New features: Visual Studio 2012 support Bug fixes: Scaling mode inherited rather than font scalingCRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta What's New: Fixed scrolling issue in UnHide dialog Added support for connecting via ADFS / IFD Added support for more than one action for a button Added support for empty StringParameter for Javascript functions Fixed bug in rule CrmClientTypeRule when selecting Outlook option Extended Prefix field in New Button dialogFree Aspx Image Gallery: Free Aspx Image Gallery Release V1: This is first basic release of my free aspx image gallery project. It is free to use and modify by the user without any need of providing any credit to me.Simple Microsoft Excel Document Converter (Convert To XLS, XLSX, PDF, XPS): ExcelDocConverter 0.1 Beta: Initial Release Microsoft Excel Documents Converter. Microsoft Excel 1997-2003 (XLS) Microsoft Excel 2007/2010 (XLSX) Portable Document Format (PDF) Microsoft XPS Document (XPS) Difference between NET2.0 and NET3.5 This program uses .NET Framework runtime library to run. Basically, they are no differences. Only the runtime library version is different. For older computers, i.e. Windows XP, might not have .NET Framework 3.5 installed, then use NET2.0 in stead. But, some Windows XP SP2 mig...Office File Properties: Office File Properties 3.3.1: Bug fix. Convert file extension to lowercase before checking.LoBDb.NET: LoBDb.NET 1.0.9: Centido.Core library: 1) SQL Server script bug fix: an error when changing the MaxLength property of an indexed string column or when changing the Precision-Scale properties of a decimal column. LobDb.NET Manager: 1) Changing the Precision, Scale, Default Value, Minimum and Maximum properties of a decimal column now enables the Save button. 2) The MaxLength property of a string column and the Precision+Scale values of a decimal column are now displayed in the column list. 3) Changing the Min...Chaos games: Chaos games: Small app for generating fractals using chaos gamesVisual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.2: This version contains no new images from v1.5.1 Contains the following improvements: Better support for detecting the installed languages The extract & inject commands won’t run if Visual Studio is running You may now run in extract or inject mode The p/invoke code was cleaned up based on Code Analysis recommendations When a p/invoke method fails the Win32 error message is now displayed Error messages use red text Status messages use green textMCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.16: Changelog for 2.2.16 (32bit and 64bit) Now a standalone remote client also available to control the Engine remotely. 1. Added support for remote connections for status and configuration. MCEBuddy now uses port 23332. The remote server name, remote server port and local server port can be updated from the MCEBuddy.conf file BUT the Service or GUI needs to be restarted (i.e. reboot or restart service or restart program) for it to take effect. Refer to documentation for more details http://mce...ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.9.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved api better Unity support Windows RT binaries Windows CE binaries new Windows Service demo new WPF demo WindowsCE Hotfix: Fixes an error with ISO8859-1 encoding and scannning of QR-Codes. The hotfix is only needed for the WindowsCE platform.SSIS GoogleAnalyticsSource: Version 1.1 Alpha 2: The component uses now the Google API V2.4 including the management API.MVC Bootstrap: MVC Boostrap 0.5.1: A small demo site, based on the default ASP.NET MVC 3 project template, showing off some of the features of MVC Bootstrap. This release uses Entity Framework 5 for data access and Ninject 3 for dependency injection. If you download and use this project, please give some feedback, good or bad!menu4web: menu4web 1.0 - free javascript menu for web sites: menu4web 1.0 has been tested with all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. Minified m4w.js library is less than 9K. Includes 21 menu examples of different styles. Can be freely distributed under The MIT License (MIT).Rawr: Rawr 5.0.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.26: The zh-CN issue has been solved. We also add a project management module.VidCoder: 1.4.1 Beta: Updated to HandBrake 4971. This should fix some issues with stuck PGS subtitles. Fixed build break which prevented pre-compiled XML serializers from showing up. Fixed problem where a preset would get errantly marked as modified when re-opening the encode settings window or importing a new preset.JSLint for Visual Studio 2010: 1.4.0: VS2012 support is alphaBlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.2: 2012.09.23 Ver5.7.2 (1)InetTest?? (2)HTTP?????????????????100???????????Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 6): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 5 Added separate samples download with .vsix dependencies instead of source dependencies Support for FreeWheel SmartXML ad responses Support for Smooth Streaming SDK DownloaderPlugins Support for VMAP and TTML polling for live scenarios Support for custom smooth streaming byte stream and scheme handlers Support for new play time and position tracking plugin Added IsLiveChanged event Added AdaptivePlugin.MaxBitrate property Add...New ProjectsChaos games: Small app to generating fractals using chaos gamesDocument Digitalization System: This system will allow the users with on one or more PCs to digitalize pdf files and store it or export it to other file formats.ExternalTokenAnalysisOffline: SPUser?UserToken????????????????。FinalProjectSeniorProject: ***Unfinished*** Senior project build GL Ponpes Selamat Kendal: Aplikasi Akuntansi Sekolah Pondok Pesantren Modern Selamat KendalHealth Care Manager: One of keynote planned for the Brazzaville Microsoft event coming soon.Orchard Commerce History with PayPal: Project expands on Nwazet.Commerce module (and is required for this module to work). Adds a purchase history, product role associations, and PayPal.PDF.NET: PWMIS ?????? Ver 4.5 ???? SMS Egypt: This project is intended to make it easy for people to send SMS to their customers using SMS gateways inside and outside Egypt. Strong Caml: Use the familiar CAML syntax, but now do it in strongly-typed, dynamic code. Just follow Visual Studio's IntelliSense, and your CAML query can't go wrong!TrainingFrameWork: TrainingFrameWork

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When building a web application project, TFS 2008 builds two separate projects in _PublishedFolder.

- by Steve Johnson

I am trying to perform build automation on one of my web application projects built using VS 2008. The _PublishedWebSites contains two folders: Web and Deploy. I want TFS 2008 to generate only the deploy folder and not the web folder. Here is my TFSBuild.proj file: <Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Compile" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets" /> <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\WebDeployment\v9.0\Microsoft.WebDeployment.targets" /> <ItemGroup> <SolutionToBuild Include="$(BuildProjectFolderPath)/../../Development/Main/MySoftware.sln"> <Targets></Targets> <Properties></Properties> </SolutionToBuild> </ItemGroup> <ItemGroup> <ConfigurationToBuild Include="Release|AnyCPU"> <FlavorToBuild>Release</FlavorToBuild> <PlatformToBuild>Any CPU</PlatformToBuild> </ConfigurationToBuild> </ItemGroup>  <ItemGroup> <AdditionalReferencePath Include="C:\3PR" /> </ItemGroup> <Target Name="GetCopyToOutputDirectoryItems" Outputs="@(AllItemsFullPathWithTargetPath)" DependsOnTargets="AssignTargetPaths;_SplitProjectReferencesByFileExistence">  <MSBuild Projects="@(_MSBuildProjectReferenceExistent)" Targets="GetCopyToOutputDirectoryItems" Properties="%(_MSBuildProjectReferenceExistent.SetConfiguration); %(_MSBuildProjectReferenceExistent.SetPlatform)" Condition="'@(_MSBuildProjectReferenceExistent)'!=''"> <Output TaskParameter="TargetOutputs" ItemName="_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPathNotFiltered"/> </MSBuild>  <RemoveDuplicates Inputs="@(_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPathNotFiltered)"> <Output TaskParameter="Filtered" ItemName="_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPath"/> </RemoveDuplicates>  <CreateItem Include="@(_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPath->'%(FullPath)')" Exclude= "$(BuildProjectFolderPath)/../../Development/Main/Web/Bin*.pdb; *.refresh; *.vshost.exe; *.manifest; *.compiled; $(BuildProjectFolderPath)/../../Development/Main/Web/Auth/MySoftware.dll; $(BuildProjectFolderPath)/../../Development/Main/Web/BinApp_Web_*.dll;" Condition="'%(_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPath.CopyToOutputDirectory)'=='Always' or '%(_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPath.CopyToOutputDirectory)'=='PreserveNewest'" > <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="AllItemsFullPathWithTargetPath"/> <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="_SourceItemsToCopyToOutputDirectoryAlways" Condition="'%(_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPath.CopyToOutputDirectory)'=='Always'"/> <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="_SourceItemsToCopyToOutputDirectory" Condition="'%(_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPath.CopyToOutputDirectory)'=='PreserveNewest'"/> </CreateItem> </Target>  </Project> I want to build everything that the builtin Deploy project is doing for me. But I don't want the generated web project as it contains App_Web_xxxx.dll assemblies instead of a single compiled assembly. How can I do this?

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How To: Using SimpleMembserhipProvider with MySql Connector/Net.

- by Francisco Tirado

Now on Connector/Net 6.9 the users will have the ability to use SimpleMembership Provider on MVC4 templates. The configuration is very simple and also have compatibility with OAuth, in this post we'll explain step by step how to configure it in a MVC 4 Web Application. Requirements The requirements to use SimpleMembership with Connector/Net are: Install Connector/Net 6.9, or download the No Install version. Net Framework 4.0 or greater. MVC 4 Visual Studio 2012 or newer version Creating and configuring a new project In this example we'll use VS2012 to create the project basis on the Internet Aplication template and using Entity Framework to manage the User model. Open VS 2012 and create a new project, we'll create a new MVC 4 Web Application and configure the project to use Net Framework 4.5. Type a name for the project and then click “Ok”. In the next dialog we'll choose the “Internet Application” template and use Razor as engine without creating a test project. Click “Ok” to continue. Now we have a new project with the templates necessaries to run a Web Application with the default values. We'll use the current files to continue working. If you have installed Connector/Net you can skip this step, if you don't have installed but you're planning to do it, please install it and continue with the next step. If you're using the No Install version of Connector/Net we'll need to add the references to our project, the assemblies needed are: MySql.Data, MySql.Data.Entities and MySql.Web. Be sure that the assemblies chosen match the Net Framework version used in our project and the MySql.Data.Entities is compatible with EF5 (EF5 is the default added by the project). Now open the “web.config” file, and under the <connectionStrings> node add a connection string that points to a MySql instance. We'll use the following connection configuration: <add name="MyConnection" connectionString="server=localhost;UserId=root;password=pass;database=MySqlSimpleMembership;" providerName="MySql.Data.MySqlClient"/> Under the node <system.web> we'll add the following configuration: <membership defaultProvider="MySqlSimpleMembershipProvider"><providers><clear/><add name="MySqlSimpleMembershipProvider" type="MySql.Web.Security.MySqlSimpleMembershipProvider,MySql.Web,Version=6.9.3.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=c5687fc88969c44d" applicationName="MySqlSimpleMembershipTest" description="MySQLdefaultapplication" connectionStringName="MyConnection" userTableName="UserProfile" userIdColumn="UserId" userNameColumn="UserName" autoGenerateTables="True"/></providers></membership> In the previous configuration the mandatory properties are: connectionStringName, userTableName, userIdColumn, userNameColumn and autoGenerateTables. If the other properties are not provided a default value is set to it but if the mandatory properties are not set a ProviderException will be thrown. The valid properties for the MySqlSimpleMembership are the same used for MySqlMembership plus the mandatory fields. UserTableName: Name of the table where will be stored the user, this table is independent from the schema generated by the provider and can be edited later by the user. UserId: name of the column that will store the id for the records in the userTableName. UserName : name of the column that will store the name/user for the records in the userTableName. The connectionStringName property must match a connection string defined in web.config file. Once the configuration is done in web.config, we need to be sure that our database context for the Users Table point to the right connection string. In our case we just need to update the class UsersContext in the file AcountModel.cs in the Models folder. The file also contains the UserProfile class which match the configuration for our UserTable. Other class that needs to be updated is the SimpleMembershipInitializer in the file InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.cs in the Filters folder. In that class we'll see a call to the method “WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection”, in that call is where we need to update the parameters to match our configuration. If the database that you configure in your connection string doesn't exists, you need to create it empty. Now we're ready to run our web application, press F5 or the Run button in the tool bar. You'll see the following screen: If you go to your database used by the application you'll see some tables created, now we are using SimpleMembership. Now create a user, click on “Register” at the top-right in the web page. Type your user name and password, then click on “Register”. You'll be redirected to the home page and you'll see the name of your user at the top-right page. If you take a look on the tables just created in your database you will find the data about the user you just register. In our case the tables that contains the information are UserProfile and Webpages_Membership. Configuring OAuth Other option to access your website will be using OAuth, so you can validate an user using an external account like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. In this post we'll enable the authentication for Google account in our application. Go to the class AuthConfig.cs in the folder App_Start. In the method “RegisterAuth” uncomment the last line where is the call to the method “OauthWebSecurity.RegisterGoogleClient”. Run the application. Once the application is running click on “Login”. You will see at the right side the option to login using a Google account, click on “Google”. You will be asked for Google credentials. If your login is successful you'll see a message asking for your approval to give permission to your site to access your information. Click on “Accept”. Now a page to register your user will be shown, click on “Register”. Now your new user is logged in in your application. You can take a look of the user information created in the tables UserProfile and Webpages_OauthMembership. If you want to use another external option to authenticate users you must enable the client in the same class where we enable the Google authentication, but for others providers is mandatory to register your Application in their site. Once you have register your application they will give you a token/key and the id for your application, that information you're going to use it to register the client. Thanks for reading.

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Entity Framework 6: Alpha2 Now Available

- by ScottGu

The Entity Framework team recently announced the 2nd alpha release of EF6. The alpha 2 package is available for download from NuGet. Since this is a pre-release package make sure to select “Include Prereleases” in the NuGet package manager, or execute the following from the package manager console to install it: PM> Install-Package EntityFramework -Pre This week’s alpha release includes a bunch of great improvements in the following areas: Async language support is now available for queries and updates when running on .NET 4.5. Custom conventions now provide the ability to override the default conventions that Code First uses for mapping types, properties, etc. to your database. Multi-tenant migrations allow the same database to be used by multiple contexts with full Code First Migrations support for independently evolving the model backing each context. Using Enumerable.Contains in a LINQ query is now handled much more efficiently by EF and the SQL Server provider resulting greatly improved performance. All features of EF6 (except async) are available on both .NET 4 and .NET 4.5. This includes support for enums and spatial types and the performance improvements that were previously only available when using .NET 4.5. Start-up time for many large models has been dramatically improved thanks to improved view generation performance. Below are some additional details about a few of the improvements above: Async Support .NET 4.5 introduced the Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern that uses the async and await keywords to help make writing asynchronous code easier. EF 6 now supports this pattern. This is great for ASP.NET applications as database calls made through EF can now be processed asynchronously – avoiding any blocking of worker threads. This can increase scalability on the server by allowing more requests to be processed while waiting for the database to respond. The following code shows an MVC controller that is querying a database for a list of location entities: public class HomeController : Controller { LocationContext db = new LocationContext(); public async Task<ActionResult> Index() { var locations = await db.Locations.ToListAsync(); return View(locations); } } Notice above the call to the new ToListAsync method with the await keyword. When the web server reaches this code it initiates the database request, but rather than blocking while waiting for the results to come back, the thread that is processing the request returns to the thread pool, allowing ASP.NET to process another incoming request with the same thread. In other words, a thread is only consumed when there is actual processing work to do, allowing the web server to handle more concurrent requests with the same resources. A more detailed walkthrough covering async in EF is available with additional information and examples. Also a walkthrough is available showing how to use async in an ASP.NET MVC application. Custom Conventions When working with EF Code First, the default behavior is to map .NET classes to tables using a set of conventions baked into EF. For example, Code First will detect properties that end with “ID” and configure them automatically as primary keys. However, sometimes you cannot or do not want to follow those conventions and would rather provide your own. For example, maybe your primary key properties all end in “Key” instead of “Id”. Custom conventions allow the default conventions to be overridden or new conventions to be added so that Code First can map by convention using whatever rules make sense for your project. The following code demonstrates using custom conventions to set the precision of all decimals to 5. As with other Code First configuration, this code is placed in the OnModelCreating method which is overridden on your derived DbContext class: protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) { modelBuilder.Properties<decimal>() .Configure(x => x.HasPrecision(5)); } But what if there are a couple of places where a decimal property should have a different precision? Just as with all the existing Code First conventions, this new convention can be overridden for a particular property simply by explicitly configuring that property using either the fluent API or a data annotation. A more detailed description of custom code first conventions is available here. Community Involvement I blogged a while ago about EF being released under an open source license. Since then a number of community members have made contributions and these are included in EF6 alpha 2. Two examples of community contributions are: AlirezaHaghshenas contributed a change that increases the startup performance of EF for larger models by improving the performance of view generation. The change means that it is less often necessary to use of pre-generated views. UnaiZorrilla contributed the first community feature to EF: the ability to load all Code First configuration classes in an assembly with a single method call like the following: protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) { modelBuilder.Configurations .AddFromAssembly(typeof(LocationContext).Assembly); } This code will find and load all the classes that inherit from EntityTypeConfiguration<T> or ComplexTypeConfiguration<T> in the assembly where LocationContext is defined. This reduces the amount of coupling between the context and Code First configuration classes, and is also a very convenient shortcut for large models. Other upcoming features coming in EF 6 Lots of information about the development of EF6 can be found on the EF CodePlex site, including a roadmap showing the other features that are planned for EF6. One of of the nice upcoming features is connection resiliency, which will automate the process of retying database operations on transient failures common in cloud environments and with databases such as the Windows Azure SQL Database. Another often requested feature that will be included in EF6 is the ability to map stored procedures to query and update operations on entities when using Code First. Summary EF6 is the first open source release of Entity Framework being developed in CodePlex. The alpha 2 preview release of EF6 is now available on NuGet, and contains some really great features for you to try. The EF team are always looking for feedback from developers - especially on the new features such as custom Code First conventions and async support. To provide feedback you can post a comment on the EF6 alpha 2 announcement post, start a discussion or file a bug on the CodePlex site. 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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GPU Debugging with VS 11

- by Daniel Moth

With VS 11 Developer Preview we have invested tremendously in parallel debugging for both CPU (managed and native) and GPU debugging. I'll be doing a whole bunch of blog posts on those topics, and in this post I just wanted to get people started with GPU debugging, i.e. with debugging C++ AMP code. First I invite you to watch 6 minutes of a glimpse of the C++ AMP debugging experience though this video (ffw to minute 51:54, up until minute 59:16). Don't read the rest of this post, just go watch that video, ideally download the High Quality WMV. Summary GPU debugging essentially means debugging the lambda that you pass to the parallel_for_each call (plus any functions you call from the lambda, of course). CPU debugging means debugging all the code above and below the parallel_for_each call, i.e. all the code except the restrict(direct3d) lambda and the functions that it calls. With VS 11 you have to choose what debugger you want to use for a particular debugging session, CPU or GPU. So you can place breakpoints all over your code, then choose what debugger you want (CPU or GPU), and you'll only be able to hit breakpoints for the code type that the debugger engine understands – the remaining breakpoints will appear as unbound. If you want to hit the unbound breakpoints, you'd have to stop debugging, and start again with the other debugger. Sorry. We suck. We know. But once you are past that limitation, I think you'll find the experience truly rewarding – seriously! Switching debugger engines With the Developer Preview bits, one way to switch the debugger engine is through the project properties – see the screenshots that follow. This one is showing the CPU option selected, which is basically the default that you are all familiar with: This screenshot is showing the GPU option selected, by changing the debugger launcher (notice that this applies for both the local and remote case): You actually do not have to open the project properties just for switching the debugger engine, you can switch the selection from the toolbar in VS 11 Developer Preview too – see following screenshot (the effect is the same as if you opened the project properties and switched there) Breakpoint behavior Here are two screenshots, one showing a debugging session for CPU and the other a debugging session for GPU (notice the unbound breakpoints in each case) …and here is the GPU case (where we cannot bind the CPU breakpoints but can the GPU breakpoint, which is actually hit) Give C++ AMP debugging a try So to debug your C++ AMP code, pull down the drop down under the 'play' button to select the 'GPU C++ Direct3D Compute Debugger' menu option, then hit F5 (or the 'play' button itself). Then you can explore debugging by exploring the menus under the Debug and under the Debug->Windows menus. One way to do that exploration is through the C++ AMP debugging walkthrough on MSDN. Another way to explore the C++ AMP debugging experience, you can use the moth.cpp code file, which is what I used in my BUILD session debugger demo. Note that for my demo I was using the latest internal VS11 bits, so your experience with the Developer Preview bits won't be identical to what you saw me demonstrate, but it shouldn't be far off. Stay tuned for a lot more content on the parallel debugger in VS 11, both CPU and GPU, both managed and native. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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C# 4.0: COM Interop Improvements

- by Paulo Morgado

Dynamic resolution as well as named and optional arguments greatly improve the experience of interoperating with COM APIs such as Office Automation Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs). But, in order to alleviate even more COM Interop development, a few COM-specific features were also added to C# 4.0. Ommiting ref Because of a different programming model, many COM APIs contain a lot of reference parameters. These parameters are typically not meant to mutate a passed-in argument, but are simply another way of passing value parameters. Specifically for COM methods, the compiler allows to declare the method call passing the arguments by value and will automatically generate the necessary temporary variables to hold the values in order to pass them by reference and will discard their values after the call returns. From the point of view of the programmer, the arguments are being passed by value. This method call: object fileName = "Test.docx"; object missing = Missing.Value; document.SaveAs(ref fileName, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing); can now be written like this: document.SaveAs("Test.docx", Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value); And because all parameters that are receiving the Missing.Value value have that value as its default value, the declaration of the method call can even be reduced to this: document.SaveAs("Test.docx"); Dynamic Import Many COM methods accept and return variant types, which are represented in the PIAs as object. In the vast majority of cases, a programmer calling these methods already knows the static type of a returned object form the context of the call, but has to explicitly perform a cast on the returned values to make use of that knowledge. These casts are so common that they constitute a major nuisance. To make the developer’s life easier, it is now possible to import the COM APIs in such a way that variants are instead represented using the type dynamic which means that COM signatures have now occurrences of dynamic instead of object. This means that members of a returned object can now be easily accessed or assigned into a strongly typed variable without having to cast. Instead of this code: ((Excel.Range)(excel.Cells[1, 1])).Value2 = "Hello World!"; this code can now be used: excel.Cells[1, 1] = "Hello World!"; And instead of this: Excel.Range range = (Excel.Range)(excel.Cells[1, 1]); this can be used: Excel.Range range = excel.Cells[1, 1]; Indexed And Default Properties A few COM interface features are still not available in C#. On the top of the list are indexed properties and default properties. As mentioned above, these will be possible if the COM interface is accessed dynamically, but will not be recognized by statically typed C# code. No PIAs – Type Equivalence And Type Embedding For assemblies indentified with PrimaryInteropAssemblyAttribute, the compiler will create equivalent types (interfaces, structs, enumerations and delegates) and embed them in the generated assembly. To reduce the final size of the generated assembly, only the used types and their used members will be generated and embedded. Although this makes development and deployment of applications using the COM components easier because there’s no need to deploy the PIAs, COM component developers are still required to build the PIAs.

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Anatomy of a serialization killer

- by Brian Donahue

As I had mentioned last month, I have been working on a project to create an easy-to-use managed debugger. It's still an internal tool that we use at Red Gate as part of product support to analyze application errors on customer's computers, and as such, should be easy to use and not require installation. Since the project has got rather large and important, I had decided to use SmartAssembly to protect all of my hard work. This was trivial for the most part, but the loading and saving of results was broken by SA after using the obfuscation, rendering the loading and saving of XML results basically useless, although the merging and error reporting was an absolute godsend and definitely worth the price of admission. (Well, I get my Red Gate licenses for free, but you know what I mean!)My initial reaction was to simply exclude the serializable results class and all of its' members from obfuscation, and that was just dandy, but a few weeks on I decided to look into exactly why serialization had broken and change the code to work with SA so I could write any new code to be compatible with SmartAssembly and save me some additional testing and changes to the SA project.In simple terms, SA does all that it can to prevent serialization problems, for instance, it will not obfuscate public members of a DLL and it will exclude any types with the Serializable attribute from obfuscation. This prevents public members and properties from being made private and having the name changed. If the serialization is done inside the executable, however, public members have the access changed to private and are renamed. That was my first problem, because my types were in the executable assembly and implemented ISerializable, but did not have the Serializable attribute set on them!public class RedFlagResults : ISerializable { }The second problem caused by the pruning feature. Although RedFlagResults had public members, they were not truly properties, and used the GetObjectData() method of ISerializable to serialize the members. For that reason, SA could not exclude these members from pruning and further broke the serialization. public class RedFlagResults : ISerializable { public List<RedFlag.Exception> Exceptions; #region ISerializable Members public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) { info.AddValue("Exceptions", Exceptions); } #endregionSo to fix this, it was necessary to make Exceptions a proper property by implementing get and set on it. Also, I added the Serializable attribute so that I don't have to exclude the class from obfuscation in the SA project any more. The DoNotPrune attribute means I do not need to exclude the class from pruning.[Serializable, SmartAssembly.Attributes.DoNotPrune] public class RedFlagResults { public List<RedFlag.Exception> Exceptions {get;set;} }Similarly, the Exception class gets the Serializable and DoNotPrune attributes applied so all of its' properties are excluded from obfuscation.Now my project has some protection from prying eyes by scrambling up the code so it's harder to reverse-engineer, without breaking anything. SmartAssembly has also provided the benefit of merging so that the end-user doesn't need to extract all of the DLL files needed by RedFlag into a directory, and can be run directly from the .zip archive. When an error occurs (hey, I'm only human!), an exception report can be sent to me so I can see what went wrong without having to, er, debug the debugger.

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A Forming Repository of Script Samples for Automating Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8

- by Jialiang

Compared with Windows Server 2008/R2 that provides about 230 cmdlets, Windows Server 2012 beats that by a factor of over 10 shipping ~ 2,430 cmdlets. You can automate almost every aspect of the server. The new PowerShell 3.0, like Windows Server 2012, has a ton of new features. In this automation script-centric move, Microsoft All-In-One Script Framework (AIOSF) is ready to support IT Pros with many new services and offerings coming this year. We sincerely hope that the IT community will benefit from the effort. Here is the first one among our new services and offerings: The team is preparing a large set of Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 script samples based on frequently asked IT tasks that we collect in TechNet forums and support calls to Microsoft. Because the script topics come from frequently asked IT tasks, we hope that these script samples can be helpful to many IT Pros worldwide. With the General Availability of Windows Server 2012, we release the first three Windows Server 2012 / Windows 8 script samples today. Get Network Adapter Properties in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 (PowerShell) http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Get-Network-Adapter-37c5a913 Description: This script could be used to get network adapter properties and advanced properties in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. It combines the outputs of Get-NetAdapter and Get-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty. It can generate a report of network adapter configuration settings. Use Scenarios: In a real world, IT Administrators are required to check the configuration of network adapters after the deployment of new servers. One typical example is the duplex setting of network adapters. Also, IT administrators need to maintain a server list which contains network adapter configuration settings in a regular basis. Before Windows Server 2012, IT administrators often feel difficulties to handle these tasks. Acknowledgement: Thanks Greg Gu from AIOSF for collecting this script topic, and writing the script sample. Thanks James Adams (Microsoft Premier Field Engineer) for reviewing the script sample and ensuring its quality. How to batch create virtual machines in Windows Server 2012 (PowerShell) http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/How-to-batch-create-9efd1811 Description: This PowerShell Script illustrates how to batch create multiple virtual machines based on comma delimited file by using PowerShell 3.0 in Windows Server 2012. Use Scenarios: IT admin requires to batch creating virtual machines in Windows Server 2012, although they can use few commands due to the lack of programming knowledge. Although it’s a set of Hyper-V command-lets within Windows PowerShell, IT Admins are reluctant to use them except simple a command which is widely used. Acknowledgement: Thanks Anders Wang from AIOSF for collecting this script topic and writing the script sample. Thanks Christopher Norris for reviewing the script sample and ensuring its quality before publishing. Remove Windows Store Apps in Windows 8 (PowerShell) http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Remove-Windows-Store-Apps-a00ef4a4 Description: This script can be used to remove multiple Windows Store Apps from a user account in Windows 8. It provides a list of installed Windows Store applications. You can specify the application IDs, and remove them all at once. Use Scenarios: 1. In Windows 8, you can remove a single Windows Store App by right-clicking the tile in the Start menu and choosing the uninstall command. However, no command is provided for removing multiple Windows Store Apps all at once. If you want to do so, you can use this script sample. 2. Sometimes Windows Store Apps may crash in Windows 8. Even though you can successfully uninstall and reinstall the App, the application may still crash after the reinstallation. In this situation, you can use this example script to remove these Windows Store Apps cleanly. Acknowledgement: Thanks Edward Qi from AIOSF for collecting the script idea and composing the script sample. Thanks James Adams (Microsoft Premier Field Engineer) for reviewing the script sample and ensuring its quality. This is just the beginning, and more and more script samples are coming. You can follow our blog (http://blogs.technet.com/b/onescript) to get the latest customer-driven script samples for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.

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Using Managed Beans with your ADF Mobile Client Applications

- by [email protected]

Did you know it's easy to extend your ADF Mobile Client application with a Managed Bean just like it is with an ADF web application? Here's how: Using the New Gallery (File -> New), create a new Java class. This class should extend oracle.adfnmc.el.utils.BeanResolver. Add this java class as a managed bean: Go to your task flow, select the Overview tab at the bottom and go to the Managed Bean section. Add an entry and name your new Managed Bean and point to the java class you just created. Add your custom methods and properties to your java class Since reflection is not supported in the J2ME version on some platforms (BlackBerry), you need to provide dispatch code if you want to invoke/access any of your methods/properties from EL. Here's a sample: MyBeanClass.java Use Expression Language (EL) to access your properties and invoke your methods on your MCX pages. Here's an sample: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><amc:view xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:amc="http://xmlns.oracle.com/jdev/amc"> <amc:form id="form0"> <amc:menuControl refId="menu0"/> <amc:panelGroupLayout id="panelGroupLayout1" width="100%"> <amc:panelGroupLayout id="panelGroupLayout2" layout="horizontal" width="100%"> <amc:image id="image1" source="logo_sm.png"/> <amc:outputText value="Home" id="outputText1" verticalAlign="center" fontSize="20" fontWeight="bold" foregroundColor="#ff0000"/> </amc:panelGroupLayout> <amc:commandLink text="#{MyBean.property1}" id="commandLink1" actionListener="#{MyBean.doFoo}" foregroundColor="#0000ff" action="patientlist"/> </amc:panelGroupLayout> </amc:form> <amc:menu type="main" id="menu0"> <amc:menuGroup id="menuGroup1"> <amc:commandMenuItem id="commandMenuItem1" action="exit" label="Exit" index="1" weight="0"/> </amc:menuGroup> </amc:menu></amc:view>

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WebGrid Helper and Complex Types

- by imran_ku07

Introduction: WebGrid helper makes it very easy to show tabular data. It was originally designed for ASP.NET Web Pages(WebMatrix) to display, edit, page and sort tabular data but you can also use this helper in ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. When using this helper, sometimes you may run into a problem if you use complex types in this helper. In this article, I will show you how you can use complex types in WebGrid helper. Description: Let's say you need to show the employee data and you have the following classes, public class Employee { public string Name { get; set; } public Address Address { get; set; } public List<string> ContactNumbers { get; set; } } public class Address { public string City { get; set; } } The Employee class contain a Name, an Address and list of ContactNumbers. You may think that you can easily show City in WebGrid using Address.City, but no. The WebGrid helper will throw an exception at runtime if any Address property is null in the Employee list. Also, you cannot directly show ContactNumbers property. The easiest way to show these properties is to add some additional properties, public Address NotNullableAddress { get { return Address ?? new Address(); } } public string Contacts { get { return string.Join("; ",ContactNumbers); } } Now you can easily use these properties in WebGrid. Here is the complete code of this example, @functions{ public class Employee { public Employee(){ ContactNumbers = new List<string>(); } public string Name { get; set; } public Address Address { get; set; } public List<string> ContactNumbers { get; set; } public Address NotNullableAddress { get { return Address ?? new Address(); } } public string Contacts { get { return string.Join("; ",ContactNumbers); } } } public class Address { public string City { get; set; } } } @{ var myClasses = new List<Employee>{ new Employee { Name="A" , Address = new Address{ City="AA" }, ContactNumbers = new List<string>{"021-216452","9231425651"}}, new Employee { Name="C" , Address = new Address{ City="CC" }}, new Employee { Name="D" , ContactNumbers = new List<string>{"045-14512125","21531212121"}} }; var grid = new WebGrid(source: myClasses); } @grid.GetHtml(columns: grid.Columns( grid.Column("NotNullableAddress.City", header: "City"), grid.Column("Name"), grid.Column("Contacts"))) Summary: You can use WebGrid helper to show tabular data in ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET Web Pages. Using this helper, you can also show complex types in the grid. In this article, I showed you how you use complex types with WebGrid helper. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.

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SAB BizTalk Archiving Pipeline Component - Codeplex

- by Stuart Brierley

In an effort to give a little more to the BizTalk development community, I have created my first Codeplex project. The SAB BizTalk Archiving Pipeline Component was written using Visual Studio 2010 with BizTalk Server 2010 intended as the target platform. It is currently at version 0.1, meaning that I have not yet completed all the intended functionality and have so far carried out a limited number of tests. It does however archive files within the bounds of the functionailty so far implemented and seems to be stable in use. It is based on a recent evolution of a basic archiving component that I wrote in the past, and it is my hope that it will continue to evolve in the coming months. This work was inspired by some old posts by Gilles Zunino and Jeff Lynch. You can download the documentation, source code or component dll from Codeplex, but to give you a taste here is the first section of the documentation to whet your appetite: SAB BizTalk Archiving Pipeline Component The SAB BizTalk Archiving Pipeline Component has been developed to allow custom piplelines to be created that can archive messages at any stage of pipeline processing. It works in both receive and send pipelines and will archive messages to file based on the configuration applied to the component in the BizTalk Administration Console. The Archiving Pipeline Component has been coded for use with BizTalk Server 2010. Use with other versions of BizTalk has not been tested. The Archiving Pipeline component is supplied as a dll file that should be placed in the BizTalk Server Pipeline Components folder. It can then be used when developing custom pipelines to be deployed as a part of your BizTalk Server applications. This version of the component allows you to use a number of generic messaging macros and also a small number that are specific to the FILE adapter. It is intended to extend these macros to cover context properties from other adapters in future releases. Archive Pipeline Parameters As with all pipeline components, the following parameters can be set when creating your custom pipeline and at runtime via the administration console. Enabled: Enables and disables the archive process. True; messages will be archived. False; messages will be passed to the next stage in the pipeline without performing any processing. File Name: The file name of the archived message. Allows the component to build the archive filename at run-time; based on the values entered, the permitted macros and data extracted from the message context properties. e.g. %FileReceivedFileName%-%InterchangeSequenceNumber% File Mask: The extension to be added to the File Name following all Macro processing. e.g. .xml File Path: The path on which the archived message should be saved. Allows the component to build the archive directory at run-time; based on the values entered, permitted macros and data extracted from the message context properties. e.g. C:\Archive\%ReceivePortName%\%Year%\%Month%\%Day%\ \\ArchiveShare\%ReceivePortName%\%Date%\ Overwrite: Enables and disables existing file overwrites. True; any existing file with the same File Path/Name combination (following macro replacement) will be overwritten. False; any existing file with the same File Path/Name combination (following macro replacement) will not be overwritten. The current message will be archived with a GUID appended to the File Name.

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LINQ to Twitter Queries with LINQPad

- by Joe Mayo

LINQPad is a popular utility for .NET developers who use LINQ a lot. In addition to standard SQL queries, LINQPad also supports other types of LINQ providers, including LINQ to Twitter. The following sections explain how to set up LINQPad for making queries with LINQ to Twitter. LINQPad comes in a couple versions and this example uses LINQPad4, which runs on the .NET Framework 4.0. 1. The first thing you'll need to do is set up a reference to the LinqToTwitter.dll. From the Query menu, select query properties. Click the Browse button and find the LinqToTwitter.dll binary. You should see something similar to the Query Properties window below. 2. While you have the query properties window open, add the namespace for the LINQ to Twitter types. Click the Additional Namespace Imports tab and type in LinqToTwitter. The results are shown below: 3. The default query type, when you first start LINQPad, is C# Expression, but you'll need to change this to support multiple statements. Change the Language dropdown, on the Main window, to C# Statements. 4. To query LINQ to Twitter, instantiate a TwitterContext, by typing the following into the LINQPad Query window: var ctx = new TwitterContext(); Note: If you're getting syntax errors, go back and make sure you did steps #2 and #3 properly. 5. Next, add a query, but don't materialize it, like this: var tweets = from tweet in ctx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Public select new { tweet.Text, tweet.Geo, tweet.User }; 6. Next, you want the output to be displayed in the LINQPad grid, so do a Dump, like this: tweets.Dump(); The following image shows the final results: That was an unauthenticated query, but you can also perform authenticated queries with LINQ to Twitter's support of OAuth. Here's an example that uses the PinAuthorizer (type this into the LINQPad Query window): var auth = new PinAuthorizer { Credentials = new InMemoryCredentials { ConsumerKey = "", ConsumerSecret = "" }, UseCompression = true, GoToTwitterAuthorization = pageLink => Process.Start(pageLink), GetPin = () => { // this executes after user authorizes, which begins with the call to auth.Authorize() below. Console.WriteLine("\nAfter you authorize this application, Twitter will give you a 7-digit PIN Number.\n"); Console.Write("Enter the PIN number here: "); return Console.ReadLine(); } }; // start the authorization process (launches Twitter authorization page). auth.Authorize(); var ctx = new TwitterContext(auth, "https://api.twitter.com/1/", "https://search.twitter.com/"); var tweets = from tweet in ctx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Public select new { tweet.Text, tweet.Geo, tweet.User }; tweets.Dump(); This code is very similar to what you'll find in the LINQ to Twitter downloadable source code solution, in the LinqToTwitterDemo project. For obvious reasons, I changed the value assigned to ConsumerKey and ConsumerSecret, which you'll have to obtain by visiting http://dev.twitter.com and registering your application. One tip, you'll probably want to make this easier on yourself by creating your own DLL that encapsulates all of the OAuth logic and then call a method or property on you custom class that returns a fully functioning TwitterContext. This will help avoid adding all this code every time you want to make a query. Now, you know how to set up LINQPad for LINQ to Twitter, perform unauthenticated queries, and perform queries with OAuth. Joe

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Improvements to Joshua Bloch's Builder Design Pattern?

- by Jason Fotinatos

Back in 2007, I read an article about Joshua Blochs take on the "builder pattern" and how it could be modified to improve the overuse of constructors and setters, especially when an object has a large number of properties, most of which are optional. A brief summary of this design pattern is articled here [http://rwhansen.blogspot.com/2007/07/theres-builder-pattern-that-joshua.html]. I liked the idea, and have been using it since. The problem with it, while it is very clean and nice to use from the client perspective, implementing it can be a pain in the bum! There are so many different places in the object where a single property is reference, and thus creating the object, and adding a new property takes a lot of time. So...I had an idea. First, an example object in Joshua Bloch's style: Josh Bloch Style: public class OptionsJoshBlochStyle { private final String option1; private final int option2; // ...other options here <<<< public String getOption1() { return option1; } public int getOption2() { return option2; } public static class Builder { private String option1; private int option2; // other options here <<<<< public Builder option1(String option1) { this.option1 = option1; return this; } public Builder option2(int option2) { this.option2 = option2; return this; } public OptionsJoshBlochStyle build() { return new OptionsJoshBlochStyle(this); } } private OptionsJoshBlochStyle(Builder builder) { this.option1 = builder.option1; this.option2 = builder.option2; // other options here <<<<<< } public static void main(String[] args) { OptionsJoshBlochStyle optionsVariation1 = new OptionsJoshBlochStyle.Builder().option1("firefox").option2(1).build(); OptionsJoshBlochStyle optionsVariation2 = new OptionsJoshBlochStyle.Builder().option1("chrome").option2(2).build(); } } Now my "improved" version: public class Options { // note that these are not final private String option1; private int option2; // ...other options here public String getOption1() { return option1; } public int getOption2() { return option2; } public static class Builder { private final Options options = new Options(); public Builder option1(String option1) { this.options.option1 = option1; return this; } public Builder option2(int option2) { this.options.option2 = option2; return this; } public Options build() { return options; } } private Options() { } public static void main(String[] args) { Options optionsVariation1 = new Options.Builder().option1("firefox").option2(1).build(); Options optionsVariation2 = new Options.Builder().option1("chrome").option2(2).build(); } } As you can see in my "improved version", there are 2 less places in which we need to add code about any addition properties (or options, in this case)! The only negative that I can see is that the instance variables of the outer class are not able to be final. But, the class is still immutable without this. Is there really any downside to this improvement in maintainability? There has to be a reason which he repeated the properties within the nested class that I'm not seeing?

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Silverlight Cream for February 06, 2011 -- #1042

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Mike Taulty, Timmy Kokke, Laurent Bugnion, Arik Poznanski, Deyan Ginev, Deborah Kurata(-2-), Johnny Tordgeman, Roy Dallal, Jaime Rodriguez, Samuel Jack(-2-), James Ashley. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Customizing Silverlight properties for Visual Designers" Timmy Kokke WP7: "Back button press when using webbrowser control in WP7" Jaime Rodriguez Expression Blend: "Blend Bits 21–Importing from Photoshop & Illustrator…" Mike Taulty From SilverlightCream.com: Blend Bits 21–Importing from Photoshop & Illustrator… Mike Taulty is up to 21 episodes on his Blend Bits sequence now, and this one is about using Blend's import capability, such as a .psd file with all the layers intact. Customizing Silverlight properties for Visual Designers Timmy Kokke has part 1 of 2 parts on making your Silverlight control properties in design surfaces such as Visual Studio designer or Expression Blend. An error when installing MVVM Light templates for VS10 Express Laurent Bugnion has released a new version of MVVMLight that resolves a problem with VS2010 Express version of the templates... no problem with anything else. Reading RSS items on Windows Phone 7 Arik Poznanski has a post up about reading RSS on a WP7, but better yet, he also has code for a helper class that you can grab, plus explanation of wiring it up. Integrating your Windows Phone unit tests with MSBuild #4: The WP7 Unit Test Application Deyan Ginev has a post up about Telerik's WP7 test app that outputs test results in XML from the emulator so they can be integrated with the MSBuild log. Accessing Data in a Silverlight Application: EF I apprently missed this post by Deborah Kurata last week on bringing data into your Silverlight app via Entity Frameworks... good detailed tutorial in VB and C#. Updating Data in a Silverlight Application: EF In Deborah Kurata's latest post, she is continuing with Entity Frameworks by demonstrating updating to the database... full source code will be produced in a later post. Fun with Silverlight and SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Control - Part 2 - An In Depth Look At The Ribbon Control Johnny Tordgeman has Part 2 of his Silverlight and Sharepoint 2010 Ribbon up... taking a deep-dive into the ribbon... great explanation of the attributes, code included. Geographic Coordinates Systems Roy Dallal has some Geo code up that's not necessarily Silverlight, but very cool if you're doing any GIS programming... ya gotta know the coordinate systems! Back button press when using webbrowser control in WP7 Jaime Rodriguez has a post up discussing the much-lamented back-button action in the certification requirements and how to deal with that in a web browser app. Multiplayer-enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 1 Samuel Jack challenged himself to build a WP7 game in 3 days... now he's challenging himself to make it multiplayer in 3 days... this first hour-to-hour post is research of networking and an azure server-side solution. Multiplayer-enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 2–Building a UI with XPF Day 2 for Samuel Jack getting the multiplayer portion of his game working in 3 days.. this day involves getting up-to-speed with XPF. How to Hotwire your WP7 Phone Battery Did you realize if you run your WP7 battery completely down that you can't charge it? James Ashley reports that circumstance, and how he resolved it. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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What is the SharePoint Action Framework and Why do I need it ?

- by SAF

For those out there that are a little curious as to whether SAF is any use to your organisation, please read this FAQ. What is SAF ? SAF is free to use. SAF is the "SharePoint Action Framework", it was built by myself and Hugo (plus a few others along the way). SAF is written entirely in C# code available from : http://saf.codeplex.com. SAF is a way to automate SharePoint configuration changes. An Action is a command/class/task/script written in C# that performs a unit of execution against SharePoint such as "CreateWeb" or "AddLookupColumn". A SAF Macro is collection of one or more Actions. SAF Macro can be run from Msbuild, a Feature, StsAdm or common plain old .Net code. Parameters can be passed to a Macro at run-time from a variety of sources such as "Environment Variable", "*.config", "Msbuild Properties", Feature Properties, command line args, .net code. SAF emits lots of trace statements at run-time, these can be viewed using "DebugView". One Action can pass parameters to another Action. Parameters can be set using Expression Syntax such as "DateTime.Now". You should consider SAF is you suffer from one of the following symptoms... "Our developers write lots of code to deploy changes at release time - it's always rushed" "I don't want my developers shelling out to Powershell or Stsadm from a Feature". "We have loads of Console applications now, I have lost track of where they are, or what they do" "We seem to be writing similar scripts against SharePoint in lots of ways, testing is hard". "My scripts often have lots of errors - they are done at the last minute". "When something goes wrong - I have no idea what went wrong or how to solve it". "Our Features get stuck and bomb out half way through - there no way to roll them back". "We have tons of Features now - I can't keep track". "We deploy Features to run one-off tasks" "We have a library of reusable scripts, but, we can only run it in one way, sometimes we want to run it from MSbuild and a Feature". "I want to automate the deployment of changes to our development environment". "I would like to run a housekeeping task on a scheduled basis" So I like the sound of SAF - what's the problems ? Realistically, there are few things that need to be considered: Someone on your team will need to spend a day or 2 understanding SAF and deciding exactly how you want to use it. I would suggest a Tech Lead, SysAdm or SP Architect will need to download it, try out the examples, look through the unit tests. Ask us questions. Although, SAF can be downloaded and set to go in a few minutes, you will still need to address issues such as - "Do you want to execute your Macros in MsBuild or from a Feature ?" You will need to decide who is going to do your deployments - is it each developer to themself, or do you require a dedicated Build Manager ? As most environments (Dev, QA, Live etc) require different settings (e.g. Urls, Database names, accounts etc), you will more than likely want to define these and set a properties file up for each environment. (These can then be injected into Saf at run-time). There may be no Action to solve your particular problem. If this is the case, suggest it to us - we can try and write it, or write it yourself. It's very easy to write a new Action - we have an approach to easily unit test it, document it and author it. For example, I wrote one to deploy a WSP in 2 hours the other day. Alternatively, Saf can also call Stsadm commands and Powershell scripts. Anyway, I do hope this helps! If you still need help, or a quick start, we can also offer consultancy around SAF. If you want to know more give us a call or drop an email to [email protected]

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Using the Script Component as a Conditional Split

This is a quick walk through on how you can use the Script Component to perform Conditional Split like behaviour, splitting your data across multiple outputs. We will use C# code to decide what does flows to which output, rather than the expression syntax of the Conditional Split transformation. Start by setting up the source. For my example the source is a list of SQL objects from sys.objects, just a quick way to get some data: SELECT type, name FROM sys.objects type name S syssoftobjrefs F FK_Message_Page U Conference IT queue_messages_23007163 Shown above is a small sample of the data you could expect to see. Once you have setup your source, add the Script Component, selecting Transformation when prompted for the type, and connect it up to the source. Now open the component, but don’t dive into the script just yet. First we need to select some columns. Select the Input Columns page and then select the columns we want to uses as part of our filter logic. You don’t need to choose columns that you may want later, this is just the columns used in the script itself. Next we need to add our outputs. Select the Inputs and Outputs page.You get one by default, but we need to add some more, it wouldn’t be much of a split otherwise. For this example we’ll add just one more. Click the Add Output button, and you’ll see a new output is added. Now we need to set some properties, so make sure our new Output 1 is selected. In the properties grid change the SynchronousInputID property to be our input Input 0, and change the ExclusionGroup property to 1. Now select Ouput 0 and change the ExclusionGroup property to 2. This value itself isn’t important, provided each output has a different value other than zero. By setting this property on both outputs it allows us to split the data down one or the other, making each exclusive. If we left it to 0, that output would get all the rows. It can be a useful feature allowing you to copy selected rows to one output whilst retraining the full set of data in the other. Now we can go back to the Script page and start writing some code. For the example we will do a very simple test, if the value of the type column is U, for user table, then it goes down the first output, otherwise it ends up in the other. This mimics the exclusive behaviour of the conditional split transformation. public override void Input0_ProcessInputRow(Input0Buffer Row) { // Filter all user tables to the first output, // the remaining objects down the other if (Row.type.Trim() == "U") { Row.DirectRowToOutput0(); } else { Row.DirectRowToOutput1(); } } The code itself is very simple, a basic if clause that determines which of the DirectRowToOutput methods we call, there is one for each output. Of course you could write a lot more code to implement some very complex logic, but the final direction is still just a method call. If we now close the script component, we can hook up the outputs and test the package. Your numbers will vary depending on the sample database but as you can see we have clearly split out input data into two outputs. As a final tip, when adding the outputs I would normally rename them, changing the Name in the Properties grid. This means the generated methods follow the pattern as do the path label shown on the design surface, making everything that much easier to recognise.

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jtreg update, December 2012

- by jjg

There is a new version of jtreg available. The primary new feature is support for tests that have been written for use with TestNG, the popular open source testing framework. TestNG is supported by a variety of tools and plugins, which means that it is now possible to develop tests for OpenJDK using those tools, while still retaining the ability to have the tests be part of the OpenJDK test suite, and run with a single test harness, jtreg. jtreg can be downloaded from the OpenJDK jtreg page: http://openjdk.java.net/jtreg. TestNG support jtreg supports both single TestNG tests, which can be freely intermixed with other types of jtreg tests, and groups of TestNG tests. A single TestNG test class can be compiled and run by providing a test description using the new action tag: @run testng classname The test will be executed by using org.testng.TestNG. No main method is required. A group of TestNG tests organized in a standard package hierarchy can also be compiled and run by jtreg. Any such group must be identified by specifying the root directory of the package hierarchy. You can either do this in the top level TEST.ROOT file, or in a TEST.properties file in any subdirectory enclosing the group of tests. In either case, add a line to the file of the form: TestNG.dirs = dir ... Directories beginning with '/' are evaluated relative to the root directory of the test suite; otherwise they are evaluated relative to the directory containing the declaring file. In particular, note that you can simply use "TestNG.dirs = ." in a TEST.properties file in the root directory of the test group's package hierarchy. No additional test descriptions are necessary, but test descriptions containing information tags, such as @bug, @summary, etc are permitted. All the Java source files in the group will be compiled if necessary, before any of the tests in the group are run. The selected tests within the group will be run, one at a time, using org.testng.TestNG. Library classes The specification for the @library tag has been extended so that any paths beginning with '/' will be evaluated relative to the root directory of the test suite. In addition, some bugs have been fixed that prevented sharing the compiled versions of library classes between tests in different directories. Note: This has uncovered some issues in tests that use a combination of @build and @library tags, such that some tests may fail unexpectedly with ClassNotFoundException. The workaround for now is to ensure that library classes are listed before the test classes in any @build tags. To specify one or more library directories for a group of TestNG tests, add a line of the following form to the TEST.properties file in the root directory of the group's package hierarchy: lib.dirs = dir ... As before, directories beginning with '/' are evaluated relative to the root directory of the test suite; otherwise they are evaluated relative to the directory containing the declaring file. The libraries will be available to all classes in the group; you cannot specify different libraries for different tests within the group. Coming soon ... From this point on, jtreg development will be using the new jtreg repository in the OpenJDK code-tools project. There is a new email alias jtreg-dev at openjdk.java.net for discussions about jtreg development. The existing alias jtreg-use at openjdk.java.net will continue to be available for questions about using jtreg. For more information ... An updated version of the jtreg Tag Language Specification is being prepared, and will be made available when it is ready. In the meantime, you can find more information about the support for TestNG by executing the following command: $ jtreg -onlinehelp TestNG For more information on TestNG itself, visit testng.org.

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C++ property system interface for game editors (reflection system)

- by Cristopher Ismael Sosa Abarca

I have designed an reusable game engine for an project, and their functionality is like this: Is a completely scripted game engine instead of the usual scripting languages as Lua or Python, this uses Runtime-Compiled C++, and an modified version of Cistron (an component-based programming framework).to be compatible with Runtime-Compiled C++ and so on. Using the typical GameObject and Component classes of the Component-based design pattern, is serializable via JSON, BSON or Binary useful for selecting which objects will be loaded the next time. The main problem: We want to use our custom GameObjects and their components properties in our level editor, before used hardcoded functions to access GameObject base class virtual functions from the derived ones, if do you want to modify an property specifically from that class you need inside into the code, this situation happens too with the derived classes of Component class, in little projects there's no problem but for larger projects becomes tedious, lengthy and error-prone. I've researched a lot to find a solution without luck, i tried with the Ogitor's property system (since our engine is Ogre-based) but we find it inappropiate for the component-based design and it's limited only for the Ogre classes and can lead to performance overhead, and we tried some code we find in the Internet we tested it and worked a little but we considered the macro and lambda abuse too horrible take a look (some code omitted): IWE_IMPLEMENT_PROP_BEGIN(CBaseEntity) IWE_PROP_LEVEL_BEGIN("Editor"); IWE_PROP_INT_S("Id", "Internal id", m_nEntID, [](int n) {}, true); IWE_PROP_LEVEL_END(); IWE_PROP_LEVEL_BEGIN("Entity"); IWE_PROP_STRING_S("Mesh", "Mesh used for this entity", m_pModelName, [pInst](const std::string& sModelName) { pInst->m_stackMemUndoType.push(ENT_MEM_MESH); pInst->m_stackMemUndoStr.push(pInst->getModelName()); pInst->setModel(sModelName, false); pInst->saveState(); }, false); IWE_PROP_VECTOR3_S("Position", m_vecPosition, [pInst](float fX, float fY, float fZ) { pInst->m_stackMemUndoType.push(ENT_MEM_POSITION); pInst->m_stackMemUndoVec3.push(pInst->getPosition()); pInst->saveState(); pInst->m_vecPosition.Get()[0] = fX; pInst->m_vecPosition.Get()[1] = fY; pInst->m_vecPosition.Get()[2] = fZ; pInst->setPosition(pInst->m_vecPosition); }, false); IWE_PROP_QUATERNION_S("Orientation (Quat)", m_quatOrientation, [pInst](float fW, float fX, float fY, float fZ) { pInst->m_stackMemUndoType.push(ENT_MEM_ROTATE); pInst->m_stackMemUndoQuat.push(pInst->getOrientation()); pInst->saveState(); pInst->m_quatOrientation.Get()[0] = fW; pInst->m_quatOrientation.Get()[1] = fX; pInst->m_quatOrientation.Get()[2] = fY; pInst->m_quatOrientation.Get()[3] = fZ; pInst->setOrientation(pInst->m_quatOrientation); }, false); IWE_PROP_LEVEL_END(); IWE_IMPLEMENT_PROP_END() We are finding an simplified way to this, without leading confusing the programmers, (will be released to the public) i find ways to achieve this but they are only available for the common scripting as Lua or editors using C#. also too portable, we can write "wrappers" for different GUI toolkits as Qt or GTK, also i'm thinking to using Boost.Wave to get additional macro functionality without creating my own compiler. The properties designed to use in the editor they are removed in the game since the save file contains their data and loads it using an simple 'load' function to reduce unnecessary code bloat may will be useful if some GameObject property wants to be hidden instead. In summary, there's a way to implement an reflection(property) system for a level editor based in properties from derived classes? Also we can use C++11 and Boost (restricted only to Wave and PropertyTree)

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Future Of F# At Jazoon 2011

- by Alois Kraus

I was at the Jazoon 2011 in Zurich (Switzerland). It was a really cool event and it had many top notch speaker not only from the Microsoft universe. One of the most interesting talks was from Don Syme with the title: F# Today/F# Tomorrow. He did show how to use F# scripting to browse through open databases/, OData Web Services, Sharepoint, …interactively. It looked really easy with the help of F# Type Providers which is the next big language feature in a future F# version. The object returned by a Type Provider is used to access the data like in usual strongly typed object model. No guessing how the property of an object is called. Intellisense will show it just as you expect. There exists a range of Type Providers for various data sources where the schema of the stored data can somehow be dynamically extracted. Lets use e.g. a free database it would be then let data = DbProvider(http://.....); data the object which contains all data from e.g. a chemical database. It has an elements collection which contains an element which has the properties: Name, AtomicMass, Picture, …. You can browse the object returned by the Type Provider with full Intellisense because the returned object is strongly typed which makes this happen. The same can be achieved of course with code generators that use an input the schema of the input data (OData Web Service, database, Sharepoint, JSON serialized data, …) and spit out the necessary strongly typed objects as an assembly. This does work but has the downside that if the schema of your data source is huge you will quickly run against a wall with traditional code generators since the generated “deserialization” assembly could easily become several hundred MB. *** The following part contains guessing how this exactly work by asking Don two questions **** Q: Can I use Type Providers within C#? D: No. Q: F# is after all a library. I can reference the F# assemblies and use the contained Type Providers? D: F# does annotate the generated types in a special way at runtime which is not a static type that C# could use. The F# type providers seem to use a hybrid approach. At compilation time the Type Provider is instantiated with the url of your input data. The obtained schema information is used by the compiler to generate static types as usual but only for a small subset (the top level classes up to certain nesting level would make sense to me). To make this work you need to access the actual data source at compile time which could be a problem if you want to keep the actual url in a config file. Ok so this explains why it does work at all. But in the demo we did see full intellisense support down to the deepest object level. It looks like if you navigate deeper into the object hierarchy the type provider is instantiated in the background and attach to a true static type the properties determined at run time while you were typing. So this type is not really static at all. It is static if you define as a static type that its properties shows up in intellisense. But since this type information is determined while you are typing and it is not used to generate a true static type and you cannot use these “intellistatic” types from C#. Nonetheless this is a very cool language feature. With the plotting libraries you can generate expressive charts from any datasource within seconds to get quickly an overview of any structured data storage. My favorite programming language C# will not get such features in the near future there is hope. If you restrict yourself to OData sources you can use LINQPad to query any OData enabled data source with LINQ with ease. There you can query Stackoverflow with The output is also nicely rendered which makes it a very good tool to explore OData sources today.

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Utility to Script SQL Server Configuration

- by Bill Graziano

I wrote a small utility to script some key SQL Server configuration information. I had two goals for this utility: Assist with disaster recovery preparation Identify configuration changes I’ve released the application as open source through CodePlex. You can download it from CodePlex at the Script SQL Server Configuration project page. The application is a .NET 2.0 console application that uses SMO. It writes its output to a directory that you specify. Disaster Planning ScriptSqlConfig generates scripts for logins, jobs and linked servers. It writes the properties and configuration from the instance to text files. The scripts are designed so they can be run against a DR server in the case of a disaster. The properties and configuration will need to be manually compared. Each job is scripted to its own file. Each linked server is scripted to its own file. The linked servers don’t include the password if you use a SQL Server account to connect to the linked server. You’ll need to store those somewhere secure. All the logins are scripted to a single file. This file includes windows logins, SQL Server logins and any server role membership. The SQL Server logins are scripted with the correct SID and hashed passwords. This means that when you create the login it will automatically match up to the users in the database and have the correct password. This is the only script that I programmatically generate rather than using SMO. The SQL Server configuration and properties are scripted to text files. These will need to be manually reviewed in the event of a disaster. Or you could DIFF them with the configuration on the new server. Configuration Changes These scripts and files are all designed to be checked into a version control system. The scripts themselves don’t include any date specific information. In my environments I run this every night and check in the changes. I call the application once for each server and script each server to its own directory. The process will delete any existing files before writing new ones. This solved the problem I had where the scripts for deleted jobs and linked servers would continue to show up. To see any changes I just need to query the version control system to show many any changes to the files. Database Scripting Utilities that script database objects are plentiful. CodePlex has at least a dozen of them including one I wrote years ago. The code is so easy to write it’s hard not to include that functionality. This functionality wasn’t high on my list because it’s included in a database backup. Unless you specify the /nodb option, the utility will script out many user database objects. It will script one object per file. It will script tables, stored procedures, user-defined data types, views, triggers, table types and user-defined functions. I know there are more I need to add but haven’t gotten around it yet. If there’s something you need, please log an issue and get it added. Since it scripts one object per file these really aren’t appropriate to recreate an empty database. They are really good for checking into source control every night and then seeing what changed. I know everyone tells me all their database objects are in source control but a little extra insurance never hurts. Conclusion I hope this utility will help a few of you out there. My goal is to have it script all server objects that aren’t contained in user databases. This should help with configuration changes and especially disaster recovery.

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XNA Multiplayer Games and Networking

- by JoshReuben

· XNA communication must by default be lightweight – if you are syncing game state between players from the Game.Update method, you must minimize traffic. That game loop may be firing 60 times a second and player 5 needs to know if his tank has collided with any player 3 and the angle of that gun turret. There are no WCF ServiceContract / DataContract niceties here, but at the same time the XNA networking stack simplifies the details. The payload must be simplistic - just an ordered set of numbers that you would map to meaningful enum values upon deserialization. Overview · XNA allows you to create and join multiplayer game sessions, to manage game state across clients, and to interact with the friends list · Dependency on Gamer Services - to receive notifications such as sign-in status changes and game invitations · two types of online multiplayer games: system link game sessions (LAN) and LIVE sessions (WAN). · Minimum dev requirements: 1 Xbox 360 console + Creators Club membership to test network code - run 1 instance of game on Xbox 360, and 1 on a Windows-based computer Network Sessions · A network session is made up of players in a game + up to 8 arbitrary integer properties describing the session · create custom enums – (e.g. GameMode, SkillLevel) as keys in NetworkSessionProperties collection · Player state: lobby, in-play Session Types · local session - for split-screen gaming - requires no network traffic. · system link session - connects multiple gaming machines over a local subnet. · Xbox LIVE multiplayer session - occurs on the Internet. Ranked or unranked Session Updates · NetworkSession class Update method - must be called once per frame. · performs the following actions: o Sends the network packets. o Changes the session state. o Raises the managed events for any significant state changes. o Returns the incoming packet data. · synchronize the session à packet-received and state-change events à no threading issues Session Config · Session host - gaming machine that creates the session. XNA handles host migration · NetworkSession properties: AllowJoinInProgress , AllowHostMigration · NetworkSession groups: AllGamers, LocalGamers, RemoteGamers Subscribe to NetworkSession events · GamerJoined · GamerLeft · GameStarted · GameEnded – use to return to lobby · SessionEnded – use to return to title screen Create a Session session = NetworkSession.Create( NetworkSessionType.SystemLink, maximumLocalPlayers, maximumGamers, privateGamerSlots, sessionProperties ); Start a Session if (session.IsHost) { if (session.IsEveryoneReady) { session.StartGame(); foreach (var gamer in SignedInGamer.SignedInGamers) { gamer.Presence.PresenceMode = GamerPresenceMode.InCombat; Find a Network Session AvailableNetworkSessionCollection availableSessions = NetworkSession.Find( NetworkSessionType.SystemLink, maximumLocalPlayers, networkSessionProperties); availableSessions.AllowJoinInProgress = true; Join a Network Session NetworkSession session = NetworkSession.Join( availableSessions[selectedSessionIndex]); Sending Network Data var packetWriter = new PacketWriter(); foreach (LocalNetworkGamer gamer in session.LocalGamers) { // Get the tank associated with this player. Tank myTank = gamer.Tag as Tank; // Write the data. packetWriter.Write(myTank.Position); packetWriter.Write(myTank.TankRotation); packetWriter.Write(myTank.TurretRotation); packetWriter.Write(myTank.IsFiring); packetWriter.Write(myTank.Health); // Send it to everyone. gamer.SendData(packetWriter, SendDataOptions.None); } Receiving Network Data foreach (LocalNetworkGamer gamer in session.LocalGamers) { // Keep reading while packets are available. while (gamer.IsDataAvailable) { NetworkGamer sender; // Read a single packet. gamer.ReceiveData(packetReader, out sender); if (!sender.IsLocal) { // Get the tank associated with this packet. Tank remoteTank = sender.Tag as Tank; // Read the data and apply it to the tank. remoteTank.Position = packetReader.ReadVector2(); … End a Session if (session.AllGamers.Count == 1) { session.EndGame(); session.Update(); } Performance • Aim to minimize payload, reliable in order messages • Send Data Options: o Unreliable, out of order -(SendDataOptions.None) o Unreliable, in order (SendDataOptions.InOrder) o Reliable, out of order (SendDataOptions.Reliable) o Reliable, in order (SendDataOptions.ReliableInOrder) o Chat data (SendDataOptions.Chat) • Simulate: NetworkSession.SimulatedLatency , NetworkSession.SimulatedPacketLoss • Voice support – NetworkGamer properties: HasVoice ,IsTalking , IsMutedByLocalUser

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Deploying Oracle ADF Essentials Applications to Glassfish

- by Shay Shmeltzer

With the new Oracle ADF Essentials offering you can now deploy applications that leverage Oracle ADF on the open source Glassfish 3.1 server. Deployment is documented in the official JDeveloper and ADF documentation (here) but below is a summary of the steps and a video of the steps you'll need to take to get a basic Oracle ADF Essentials application to work on GlassFish. Note - to make starting/stopping GlassFish easier for my demo I used my GlassFish extension that you can get here. First we'll install some ADF Runtime libraries on GlassFish Download and install Glassfish (Note - if you also have an Oracle DB on the same machine, you'll want to switch GlassFish's HTTP port to something else instead of 8080). Download the Oracle ADF Essentials packaging - this will get you an adf_essentials.zip file. Copy the adf_essentials.zip to the lib directory of your Glassfish domain - on a default windows install this would be: C:\glassfish3\glassfish\domains\domain1\lib Go the the above lib directory and issue a unzip -j adf_essentials.zip This will extract the ADF libraries to the directory. Now you can start the Glassfish server. Now let's configure Glassfish to handle applications of the ADF type: Invoke the admin console of glassfish (http://localhost:4848) and log into your admin account. Go to Configurations->Server-config->JVM Settings and choose the JVM Options tab Add the following entries: -XX:MaxPermSize=512m (note this entry should already exist so just make sure it has a big enough value) -Doracle.mds.cache=simple While we are in the admin console, we can also define JDBC connections that will be used by our application. Go into Resources->JDBC->JDBC Connection Pools and click to create a New one Give it a name and choose the resource type to be javax.sql.XADataSource and choose Oracle as the Database Driver vendor. Click Next Scroll down to the Additional Properties section and start filling in the information for your database. The values for an Oracle XE will be (user=hr, databaseName = XE, Password=hr, ServerName=localhost, DriverType=thin, PortNumber=1521) Click Finish Click Ping to check your connection works. Now define a new JDBC Resource that will use the pool you just defined. In my example I called the resource jdbc/HRDS You will need this name to match the name in your Application Module connection configuraiton.Now you can re-start the Glassfish server for the changes to take effect. Get an ADF application going (you can use the regular Fusion Application template for this) Go into the project properties of your viewController project, under the deployment section click to edit the deployment profile that is defined there. Go to Platform and choose Glassfish 3.1 from the drop down list. Click ok to go back to your project. Go to Application -> Application Properties-> Deployment Go to Platform and choose Glassfish 3.1 from the drop down list. Click ok to go back to your project. This step will make sure that JDeveloper will autoamtically add the necessary ADF libraries to the EAR file that is being generated for deployment on Glassfish Go to your Application->Deploy and deploy either to an EAR file or directly to a Glassfish server connection that you created. Things should just work, but if they don't then look up the server.log in the log directory and check out what error is in there. Here is a video demo of the various steps: Note - right now the deployment of an ADF application takes about 2 minutes on my machine we are hoping to be able to improve this timing in the future. People who are more familiar with Glassfish might want to explore using exploded directory deployment and see if they can get it to work.

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Documentation and Test Assertions in Databases

- by Phil Factor

When I first worked with Sybase/SQL Server, we thought our databases were impressively large but they were, by today’s standards, pathetically small. We had one script to build the whole database. Every script I ever read was richly annotated; it was more like reading a document. Every table had a comment block, and every line would be commented too. At the end of each routine (e.g. procedure) was a quick integration test, or series of test assertions, to check that nothing in the build was broken. We simply ran the build script, stored in the Version Control System, and it pulled everything together in a logical sequence that not only created the database objects but pulled in the static data. This worked fine at the scale we had. The advantage was that one could, by reading the source code, reach a rapid understanding of how the database worked and how one could interface with it. The problem was that it was a system that meant that only one developer at the time could work on the database. It was very easy for a developer to execute accidentally the entire build script rather than the selected section on which he or she was working, thereby cleansing the database of everyone else’s work-in-progress and data. It soon became the fashion to work at the object level, so that programmers could check out individual views, tables, functions, constraints and rules and work on them independently. It was then that I noticed the trend to generate the source for the VCS retrospectively from the development server. Tables were worst affected. You can, of course, add or delete a table’s columns and constraints retrospectively, which means that the existing source no longer represents the current object. If, after your development work, you generate the source from the live table, then you get no block or line comments, and the source script is sprinkled with silly square-brackets and other confetti, thereby rendering it visually indigestible. Routines, too, were affected. In our system, every routine had a directly attached string of unit-tests. A retro-generated routine has no unit-tests or test assertions. Yes, one can still commit our test code to the VCS but it’s a separate module and teams end up running the whole suite of tests for every individual change, rather than just the tests for that routine, which doesn’t scale for database testing. With Extended properties, one can get the best of both worlds, and even use them to put blame, praise or annotations into your VCS. It requires a lot of work, though, particularly the script to generate the table. The problem is that there are no conventional names beyond ‘MS_Description’ for the special use of extended properties. This makes it difficult to do splendid things such ensuring the integrity of the build by running a suite of tests that are actually stored in extended properties within the database and therefore the VCS. We have lost the readability of database source code over the years, and largely jettisoned the use of test assertions as part of the database build. This is not unexpected in view of the increasing complexity of the structure of databases and number of programmers working on them. There must, surely, be a way of getting them back, but I sometimes wonder if I’m one of very few who miss them.

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PowerShell and SMO – be careful how you iterate

- by Fatherjack

I’ve yet to have a totally smooth experience with PowerShell and it was late on Friday when I crashed into this problem. I haven’t investigated if this is a generally well understood circumstance and if it is then I apologise for repeating everything. Scenario: I wanted to scan a number of server for many properties, including existing logins and to identify which accounts are bestowed with sysadmin privileges. A great task to pass to PowerShell, so with a heavy heart I started up PowerShellISE and started typing. The script doesn’t come easily to me but I follow the logic of SMO and the properties and methods available with the language so it seemed something I should be able to master. Version #1 of my script. And the results it returns when executed against my home laptop server. These results looked good and for a long time I was concerned with other parts of the script, for all intents and purposes quite happy that this was an accurate assessment of the server. Let’s just review my logic for each step of the code at the top. Lines 1 to 7 just set up our variables and write out the header message Line 8 our first loop, to go through each login on the server Line 10 an inner loop that will assess each role name that each login has been assigned Line 11 a test to see if each role has the name ‘sysadmin’ Line 13 write out the login name with a bright format as it is a sysadmin login Line 17 write out the login name with no formatting It is quite possible that here someone with more PowerShell experience than me will be shouting at their screen pointing at the error I made but to me this made total sense. Until I altered the code, I altered lines 6 and 7 of code above to be: $c = $Svr.Logins.Count write-host “There are $c Logins on the server” This changed my output to look like this: This started alarm bells ringing – there are clearly not 13 logins listed So, let’s see where things are going wrong, edit the script so it looks like this. I’ve highlighted the changes to make Running this code shows me these results Our $n variable should count up by one for each login returned and We are clearly missing some logins. I referenced this list back to Management Studio for my server and see the Logins as below, where there are clearly 13 logins. We see a Login called Annette in SSMS but not in the script results so I opened that up and looked at its properties and it’s server roles in particular. The account has only public access to the server. Inspection of the other logins that the PowerShell script misses out show they too are only members of the public role. Right now I can’t work out whether there is a good reason for this and if it should be expected behaviour or not. Please spend a few minutes to leave a comment if you have an opinion or theory for this. How to get the full list of logins. Clearly I needed to get a full list of the logins so set about reviewing my code to see if there was a better way to iterate through the roles for each login. This is the code that I came up with and I think it is doing everything that I need it to. It gives me the expected results like this: So it seems that the ListMembers() method is the trouble maker in my first versions of the code. I would have expected that ListMembers should return Logins that are only members of the public role, certainly Technet makes no reference to it being left out in it’s Login.ListMembers details. Suffice to say, it’s a lesson learned and I will approach using it with caution in future circumstances.

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Is this Hybrid of Interface / Composition kosher?

- by paul

I'm working on a project in which I'm considering using a hybrid of interfaces and composition as a single thing. What I mean by this is having a contain*ee* class be used as a front for functionality implemented in a contain*er* class, where the container exposes the containee as a public property. Example (pseudocode): class Visibility(lambda doShow, lambda doHide, lambda isVisible) public method Show() {...} public method Hide() {...} public property IsVisible public event Shown public event Hidden class SomeClassWithVisibility private member visibility = new Visibility(doShow, doHide, isVisible) public property Visibility with get() = visibility private method doShow() {...} private method doHide() {...} private method isVisible() {...} There are three reasons I'm considering this: The language in which I'm working (F#) has some annoyances w.r.t. implementing interfaces the way I need to (unless I'm missing something) and this will help avoid a lot of boilerplate code. The containee classes could really be considered properties of the container class(es); i.e. there seems to be a fairly strong has-a relationship. The containee classes will likely implement code which would have been pretty much the same when implemented in all the container classes, so why not do it once in one place? In the above example, this would include managing and emitting the Shown/Hidden events. Does anyone see any isseus with this Composiface/Intersition method, or know of a better way? EDIT 2012.07.26 - It seems a little background information is warranted: Where I work, we have a bunch of application front-ends that have limited access to system resources -- they need access to these resources to fully function. To remedy this we have a back-end application that can access the needed resources, with which the front-ends can communicate. (There is an API written for the front-ends for accessing back-end functionality as though it were part of the front-end.) The back-end program is out of date and its functionality is incomplete. It has made the transition from company to company a couple of times and we can't even compile it anymore. So I'm trying to rewrite it in my spare time. I'm trying to update things to make a nice(r) interface/API for the front-ends (while allowing for backwards compatibility with older front-ends), hopefully something full of OOPy goodness. The thing is, I don't want to write the front-end API after I've written pretty much the same code in F# for implementing the back-end; so, what I'm planning on doing is applying attributes to classes/methods/properties that I would like to have code for in the API then generate this code from the F# assembly using reflection. The method outlined in this question is a possible alternative I'm considering instead of implementing straight interfaces on the classes in F# because they're kind of a bear: In order to access something of an interface that has been implemented in a class, you have to explicitly cast an instance of that class to the interface type. This would make things painful when getting calls from the front-ends. If you don't want to have to do this, you have to call out all of the interface's methods/properties again in the class, outside of the interface implementation (which is separate from regular class members), and call the implementation's members. This is basically repeating the same code, which is what I'm trying to avoid!

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